Environmentalists making pipelines their top targets
In a remote part of western Minnesota, Emily Johnston and Annette Klapstein calmly approached a small enclosure, readied their bolt cutters, and sliced through the fencing and chains protecting the emergency shutoff valves on two oil pipelines. Just as calmly, they turned the valves, helping to stop the flow of heavy Canadian crude, and waited to be arrested by local police.
The women were among 10 people arrested last week during coordinated actions to shut down five pipelines in four states, including two operated by Houston companies. The activists succeeded as the companies temporarily halted flows temporarily for safety reasons, underscoring the shifting battleground in the fight to slow climate change.
After years of focus-
ing on the now fading coal industry, environmentalists are targeting pipelines as the new public enemy number one — a strategy that has implications for Houston, home to several major pipeline companies employing some 10,000 people. With the “keep it then ground” movement gaining support, the focus of efforts to slow the extraction of oil and gas has increasingly become pipelines that move the fuels to processing plants and consumers.
Protests, demonstrations and civil disobedience aimed at pipelines have spread from New England to Texas to California. In the Midwest, protesters from across the country have joined the Standing Rock Sioux to block the Dakota Access pipeline that would carry crude from North Dakota shale fields to Illinois. From there, the oil can be piped to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast.
Richard Kinder, the cofounder and chairman of the Houston pipeline company Kinder Morgan, acknowledged the growing protests, but said that pipelines and the natural gas they carry will play a major role in reducing carbon dioxide emissions blamed for accelerating climate change. Natural gas has quickly replaced coal as the fuel of choice for generating electricity, he said, and that switch, according to the U.S. Energy Department, has cut greenhouse emissions in U.S. power sector in recent years.
“While the protesters get the headlines,” Kinder said, “it is still possible to build new infrastructure.”
Kinder Morgan, however, scrapped a pipeline earlier this year that would have carried natural gas from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale to the Boston area as the project faced strong local and environmental opposition. Last year, after a half-decade of protests, the Obama administration blocked the expansion of the Keystone pipeline, which would have transported crude more easily from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada to U.S. refineries.
Johnston, Klapstein and their compatriots targeted pipelines in Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana and Washington state to slow the flow of fossil fuels, on which the overwhelming scientific consensus blames global warming. Johnston, in an interview after she was released on bail last week, said pipelines have become a particular target of climate change activists because they are ubiquitous, stretching in all directions and touching communities everywhere.
“We want to make sure it’s not cheap or easy or even possible for them to come through,” said Johnston, 50, of Seattle. “We have to do something to shake up the system and inspire people to action. We all have to understand how dire the situation really is.”
Reality check
Pipeline opponents have proven effective in slowing some projects and, in perhaps their biggest victory, stopping TransCanada’s Keystone XL. But the equivalent of 12 Keystone XL projects were built during the five-year debate over pipeline, according to the Association of Oil Pipe Lines industry group.
Environmentalists contend the continued growth of pipelines will make it impossible for the U.S. — and the world — to meet the goals of the Paris climate accords reached last year to prevent the world’s average temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius. Burning fossil fuels produce large amounts of carbon dioxide, which traps heat in the Earth’s atmosphere.
This year is projected to surpass 2015 as the hottest on record. Fourteen of the hottest 15 years have occurred since 2001.
Former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to slow climate change, sees no room for compromise on pipelines because of the long-term ramifications
“If we construct a major extension of pipelines, they’ll be in use for 50 years,” Gore said in a recent interview with the Houston Chronicle. “If they are, there would be no possible way for the U.S. to achieve its goals of CO2 reduction — no possible way.”
The activists, however, aren’t facing reality because the global economy will depend on fossil fuels far into the future, said Charles McConnell, a former assistant secretary of energy under President Barack Obama and now executive director of Rice University’s Energy and Environment Initiative.
Pipelines are cheaper, faster and safer than shipping crude via railroad or trucks, which are more at risk of accidents and spills, he said. Policies and practice should focus on using fossil fuels as cleanly and efficiently as possible while developing new technologies that could eventually replace them.
“I embrace environmentalism,” McConnell said, “but I also live in the real world.”
The business view
Brandon Blossman, an analyst at Houston energy investment bank Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co., said pipelines are the next phase for environmentalists after decades of fighting power plants that burn coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels. Ironically, Blossman said, it is cleaner-burning natural gas carried by pipelines that has played the biggest role in the decline of coal and greenhouse gases in recent years.
“Coal did just fine until competing gas got cheap and plentiful,” Blossman said.
The latest wave of protests are particularly worrisome, raising concerns that tampering with valves and other controls — or something worse — could lead to an environmental disaster, said Andy Black, president and chief executive of the Association of Oil Pipe Lines, an industry group.
If the Dakota Access pipeline, which received regulatory approval, is halted, it could create a dangerous precedent that would discourage investment in pipelines needed to provide the energy that heats homes, powers businesses, and fuels automobiles, he said. The owner of Dakota Access, Energy Transfer Partners of Dallas, has already invested billions in the project.
“When a business is trying to expand, they need to know they’ll be able to finish building the pipeline to serve the customers,” Black said.
A federal court ruled this week that construction can move forward, but the federal government is still holding up on granting a final easement for construction of the last small chunk of the pipeline near North Dakota’s Lake Oahe, where the Standing Rock Sioux contend sacred and environmental sites are threatened.
Energy Transfer said in a statement that it expects the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to soon issue the easement. “We reiterate our commitment to protect cultural resources, the environment and public safety,” the company said.
Some Texas activists hope opponents of the Dakota Access succeed in blocking the pipeline midconstruction so they can use that momentum and precedent to halt Energy Transfer projects in West Texas that have overcome community opposition at every turn.
Energy Transfer is building two gas pipelines from outside of Fort Stockton to Mexico at access points by El Paso — the Comanche Trail Pipeline — and farther south by Presidio — the Trans-Pecos Pipeline. They’re slated for completion next year after Energy Transfer invested $1.3 billion for both.
The latter project runs right by Lori Glover’s community in Alpine, Texas. She’s a volunteer working with the Sierra Club, a national environmental advocacy group, and she salutes the efforts of Johnston and her cohorts.
Glover said she and her neighbors opposed the projects throughout the regulatory process to no avail.
‘Keep it in the ground’
“Civil disobedience is all we have left,” she said. “We’re just small communities and the corporations are putting us at risk. They’re just doing what they want without even trying to work with the American people.”
Pipeline Safety Trust, a watchdog organization in Washington state, has fought for safer pipelines for more than a decade, rather than opposing pipelines entirely.
The fight used to be about preventing leaks and explosions and protecting local property rights, said Executive Director Carl Weimer. Now, nuts-andbolts safety issues are being overshadowed by the “keep it in the ground” movement and debate over climate change.
What the country really needs is for the federal government to create a clear energy plan that indicates where pipelines are or are not needed, Weimer said. Instead, corporations lead the way and build competing projects, Weimer said, regardless of the public’s energy demand and conservation preferences.
“We’re letting industry decide how many pipelines and where,” Weimer bemoaned, “and then we’ll fight after the fact.”