WASHINGTON – Jane Kleeb was about as blunt as you can get.
“TransCanada fumbled things from the beginning,” the Nebraskan activist said. “If they would have listened to the majority of Nebraskans they would have had that pipeline in the ground. Now no route is a good route for us.”
Sept. 17, 2008, when TransCanada filed its first application for a presidential permit for the 1,900-kilometre Keystone XL pipeline, it looked like a no-brainer. In a country obsessed with energy security, Keystone offered a dependable supply of Canadian heavy oil for decades to come. Keystone One had been approved without a glitch. So why not Keystone XL?
Six years later that pipeline remains a dream and the words of Jane Kleeb echo through the hallways of Washington power brokers. Conventional wisdom says TransCanada botched the deal by failing to respond quickly to a fast-changing political environment while at the same time refusing to make any concessions to Nebraska, Montana and Dakota landowners and officials.
“If you’re going to bring Canadian oil through the backyards of American farmers you better be able to give something in return,” said one energy lobbyist, who didn’t want to be named. “They said, ‘We have buy-in from everybody we need and we’re not going to change.’ They have just been hammered ever since. So they sowed the seeds of this whole problem long ago.”
Washington insiders claim both TransCanada and the Canadian government have essentially displayed a shocking ignorance of and insensitivity to U.S. governance and politics. Then, as the company bulldozed its way through America’s heartland, it gifted a flagging environmental movement with a new climate change icon upon which they could fatten their treasuries and raise public outrage.
TransCanada rejects that narrative. It blames the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the Michigan pipeline spill, both happening within a month of each other in 2010, for changing the dynamics of the game.
“Keystone XL’s first presidential permit application had almost completed the process when those two events happened,” TransCanada spokesperson Shawn Howard said. “That was the point when these professional multimillion-dollar campaigns and these organizations began to organize against our project. An ad ran in DC right after that … where they showed a picture of an oil spill and they said ‘Mr. President you couldn’t stop this one, but you can stop the next one. Stop Keystone XL.’ That was the start point of the last three-plus years of campaigns against our project.”
Washington experts, however, claim opposition in the heartland states had galvanized long before the major oil spills occurred. They say TransCanada lost its first attempt at a presidential permit when it refused to agree to demands from the governors of Montana and the Dakotas to commit to a connector pipeline to the Bakken oil fields. It then compounded the problem when it ignored pleas from Nebraska politicians to change its original route, which ran directly over the Ogallala Aquifer upon which high plains ranchers and farmers depend for their water.
That eventually forced U.S. President Barack Obama to deny the company a permit in 2011.
TransCanada quickly re-filed with a new route that more or less avoided the aquifer. The company also promised to build the Bakken link. “If they were willing to change the route after the fact then why didn’t they think of doing that earlier,” said David Biette, director of the Canada Institute at the Wilson Center.
Climate change had already become a major issue for the Obama administration. The presidential permit awarded in 2009 to the cross-border Alberta Clipper Project, which pipes heavy oil from Alberta to Wisconsin, required that “Canada take ambitious action to address climate change.” One year later, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol.
The withdrawal angered environmentalists and many Democrats, who had lived through eight years of inaction on climate change during the George W. Bush presidency. They also had watched as a major climate change bill died on the senate floor. Infuriated environmentalists were casting about for a new issue. They found it in Keystone where many ranchers and politicians had coalesced in opposition. And unlike, say, the coal industry, the target was foreign. They could punish Canada without affecting their home base.
“If you can point to a pipeline and say this is bad and it’s Canadian and its bringing down dirty filthy oil from Canada, you’ve got an issue,” Biette said. “You can point to a blown-up mountain in Kentucky but it’s coal politics and no one wants to go there. It’s a third rail.”
With Keystone XL teetering, the government of Canada joined the fray.
Canada launched a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign that for months has papered the walls and floors of Washington subway stations used by capitol aides and officials from the Environment Protection Agency and the State Department, which oversees the assessment of the Keystone project.
Bizarrely, the ads emphasized “Canada-U.S. friendship” without actually mentioning Keystone. That left Washingtonians puzzled.
Canada’s natural resources minister Joe Oliver, right, and Alberta’s energy minister Diana McQueen tour TransCanada’s pipe yard for the Houston Lateral Project Wednesday, March 5, 2014, in Mont Belvieu, Texas. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan)
“I’m not sure who said, ‘If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog,’ ” the lobbyist said. “Canadians still think you can have friends in Washington. You can’t. They are allies. They are people who share your interests, may share your objectives, but they are not your friends. It’s mistake number one. It shows you’re naïve.”
The parade of visiting western premiers and federal cabinet ministers urging a decision and making idle threats about “we won’t accept no for an answer” also didn’t help.
When Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird came to Washington and demanded the administration just make a decision, yes or no, he sounded like a whinnying teenager, Biette said.
When former Alberta energy minister Ron Liepert told a reporter in New York that Obama was out of touch with the American people over Keystone and then claimed that Obama’s cabinet could quickly settle the issue, he not only showed ignorance of the assessment process he also displayed contempt for the president. It didn’t go unnoticed.
“By the time he got to Washington the people he was supposed to see were suddenly busy,” the lobbyist said.
Polls show up to 70 per cent of Americans support Keystone XL. But national confirmation is not the point. It’s lobbying, local action, political alliances and court battles that ultimately tie up projects such as Keystone XL.
Activists have so far bested TransCanada on all fronts. Lost in much of this debate is the fact that pipelines really have nothing to do with climate change. In the end, climate change is all about America’s excessive burning of fossil fuels. Where the fuel comes from and how they get there is not the point.
If anything can be learned from Keystone it’s that there is no such thing as a no-brainer in Washington, Energy consultant Paul Fraser said, adding: “You are applying a certain logic to a system where there is no logic.”
Looking back, could TransCanada have done anything different?
“We have asked that question a lot internally and the hard part is, again, nobody has dealt with an issue like this,” Howard said, referring to the activist gang-up on Keystone.
