It’s November 2015 and I’m sitting in my car in a parking lot in the Denver Tech Center. I’m late for a meeting but I’m glued to the radio, listening to President Obama deliver one hell of a speech after rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline project:
After the broadcast, I took my time going into the office. I was elated. Finally, things were starting to change. This administration actually understood science and was willing to stand up to big oil. The future was bright.
So it was extremely depressing to hear President Trump, less than two years later, green-lighting this “incredible pipeline with the greatest technology known to man (or woman)”:
Thus began my disillusionment with American politics. If the next guy in office can just undo whatever the last guy did, what’s the point?
I stopped paying attention to the news during the pandemic. Every time I tuned into the local news station, I immediately turned it off in disgust. So I missed it when Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline again on his first day in office, as well as the whole Willow oil project controversy.
But you know who didn’t miss a beat? Bill McKibben. He’s been a stalwart in the fight for the environment since publishing his first book, The End of Nature, in 1989. It was McKibben who led the campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline. And it’s through him that I recently learned about the latest (and possibly greatest yet) win for environmentalists.
LNG exports flew well under my radar until this earlier year* when McKibben declared victory:
I wrote you two days ago with provisional good news—it looked as if the long and deep fight to rein in runaway LNG export growth had scored a huge victory. The succeeding 48 hours have been full of joy, because that news turned out to be entirely true… This is the biggest check any president has ever applied to the fossil fuel industry, and the strongest move against dirty energy in American history.
Why is it such a big deal? McKibben explained it this way a couple days earlier, when it was still “provisional good news”:
This decision is brave, because Donald Trump (the man who pulled us out of the Paris climate accords on the grounds that climate change is a hoax) will attack it mercilessly. But it’s also very very savvy: Biden wants young people, who care about climate above all, in his corner. They were angry about his dumb approval of the Willow oil project in Alaska. CP2 alone would produce 20 times the greenhouse gas emissions of Willow. And of course everyone understands that if Biden is not reelected this win means nothing—it will disappear on day one when the ‘dictator’ begins his relentless campaign to ‘drill drill drill.’
I’m glad he emphasized that last point, because I was still wondering if the next person in office could revive the zombie Keystone XL pipeline.
McKibben posted yet another update on this story just last week, warning us again:
But of course all of this will be instantly upended if Biden loses the presidential election–Donald Trump (and for that matter Nikki Haley) have both promised to end the pause and resume permitting any project anyone proposes.
It sounds like this roller coaster ride is far from over. I’m glad people like Bill and the members of Third Act have been out there all this time, defending the environment, while people like me retreated from the news. But maybe it’s time we all started paying more attention. It’s scary to think what might happen if we don’t.
* In fact I only learned about it when Merle posted the link on the Resources page.
