If you follow the news in the U.S., by now you have most likely heard of the Keystone XL pipeline. You may have read news of the spirited protests against it last summer and fall at the White House. Or you may have heard the Republican Presidential candidates denouncing President Obama for “caving in” to those protests. Either way, Keystone XL has now become both the leading environmental campaigning cause in the country and a major issue in the 2012 campaign.

How did this happen and where is all this likely to go? Today the Democracy Center offers a pair of special features on the battle against Keystone XL. The first is an inside look at the campaign, interviews with its most visible leaders and with some of the young people who have given the effort its fire. You can read that report here. And below, in this issue of the Democracy Center Newsletter, we offer an analysis of the campaign: The Tricky Activist Politics of the Keystone Pipeline.

Today also marks an important moment to take action yourself. We urge all our friends to join the Democracy Center and dozens of other organizations in flooding the U.S. Senate with a 24–hour barrage of 500,000 messages calling for rejection of legislation that would force immediate pipeline approval. You can add your voice to the fight here. As always, thank you for your interest and please pass this along to others who might wish to read it as well.

Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center

Credit: Emma Cassidy for tarsandsaction

The Tricky Activism Politics of the Keystone Pipeline

Phase out of emissions from coal is itself an enormous challenge. However, if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over. – NASA Climate Scientist, Dr. James Hansen

“People are looking for ways to express their sense of urgency about this crisis. People want to take action to show that the Earth is in the balance.” – Author and activist, Naomi Klein

He [President Obama] seems to have confused the national interest with his own interest in pleasing the environmentalists in his political base.” – Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney

“The decision by the Obama Administration is another capitulation to the radical environmental fringe – and in turn puts our national security and economy at risk.” – Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum

Last September more than 1,200 environmental activists were arrested at the gates of the White House. The arrests were part of a weeks-long protest aimed at persuading President Obama to block authorization of the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry crude oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. In November those numbers swelled by thousands, as activists returned to Washington to form a human chain around the White House, complete with a black inflatable replica of the pipeline. On January 18 the President handed them a victory, a temporary one at least, announcing that the administration was denying the permits required for Keystone’s construction.

How did citizens turn a proposed 1,700-mile steel tube into a national cause? How did it suddenly take center stage in the U.S. Presidential campaign? And what is ahead in the tricky politics of Keystone XL?

Targeting the Tar Sands

The ‘tar sands’ of western Canada are a complex underground stew where sand, clay and water mix with a form of thick black oil – enough to produce more than a million barrels a day of sought-after petroleum. When global oil companies and the Canadian government look at Alberta’s dark soil they see a fortune. U.S. boosters of the tar sands project see a new source of needed energy from a friendly government just across the border. But climate scientists see something else – a carbon time bomb.

Dr. James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who sounded some of the first climate change warnings in the early 1980s began sounding a new alarm about the Canadian tar sands project early last year. He warned that if the massive and dirty petroleum supplies buried in the tar sands are fully released into the atmosphere it would in essence be “game over” for carbon reduction, and in turn the effort to slow the lethal path of global climate change. Climate activists, dedicated to lessening the world’s addiction to oil, saw in the tar sands the petroleum equivalent of an alcoholic finding a refrigerator full of six packs in the basement. [Read more about the tar sands.]

Native American groups in Canada (First Nations) have been fighting tar sands excavation for years. The strip mining operations involved leave behind ruthless contamination of the water and land and lasting damage to fragile ecosystems. But their battle is a hard one. “You have twenty of the world’s biggest oil companies operating in the tar sands, just about every single major banking institution on the planet invested,” says Clayton Thomas-Muller of the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation.

In 2011, First Nations groups found a new set of allies among U.S. environmentalists and others who set upon a new strategy for slowing the project – turning off its main southbound tap.

The Keystone XL Leveraging Strategy

Central to the Canadian government’s tar sands development strategy is the Keystone XL pipeline, a proposed 1,700-mile, 36-inch-in-diameter steel tube that would take the rough crude mined in Alberta southward through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma to Texas for refining and then sale to global markets. That’s 1,700 miles worth of communities that might have enough power to say no. Opponents understand that cutting off the project’s key Texas-bound tap won’t stop tar sands development, but it could slow it and buy some time.

Nebraskans have been leading the charge against the pipeline for years. BoldNebraska, a coalition of farmers, ranchers, labor unions, environmentalists and other communities, has hammered on state officials to refuse the pipeline the required state permits. Ben Gotschall, a cattle rancher and BoldNebraska leader explained to us, “For what looks to be maybe 100 or 200 jobs for Nebraskans for maybe 18 months, we’re going to endanger the Ogallala aquifer and tear up a portion of the Sand Hills, which has taken 10,000 years to become the way it is? When you weigh those two things together Nebraskans – in typical conservative, common sense logic – just say ‘well that’s not worth it.’”

In the summer of 2011 Bill McKibben, the founder of the climate action group 350.org, thought he found another leveraging point to block Keystone XL – the White House. In order for Keystone XL to be built the administration had to grant its blessing, a move it could refuse without any authorization from Republicans in Congress. Environmental groups decided that the time was ripe to make Keystone XL a green political test for the President on the eve of his re-election campaign.

In September they brought their anti–Keystone XL demand to the President’s front door. “We used our bodies as a form of currency,” McKibben told us. “We anted up, as it were, to get us into the game. By the time two weeks were over we’d taken a regional issue and made it a national and even global one.” On November 6th, a symbolic year–to–the–day before the day the President would be seeking their votes, concerned citizens returned to the White House and surrounded it with an enormous human chain.

Four days later President Obama announced he was delaying a decision on the Keystone XL permit until after the 2012 vote. Congressional Republicans, eager to force Mr. Obama to choose to between the environmentalists on one side and labor backers of Keystone XL on the other, piggybacked a 60-day decision deadline onto a December stopgap bill on the payroll tax. The President responded in January by denying the Keystone XL permit, blaming the Republicans for rushing the decision.

McKibben and others were jubilant. “The victory is of course a tribute to people who set aside their natural cynicism about the possibility of change and instead went to jail in record numbers, wrote public comments in record numbers, surrounded the White House shoulder to shoulder five deep.”

The Republican Empire Strikes Back

Keystone XL opponents were not the only ones jubilant over the President’s decision. Republican political consultants saw immediately in the pipeline decision the chance for an election year blast at the White House that tied together almost every issue they dreamed of – Iran, China, energy prices, jobs, and the President’s loyalties to “the radical environmental fringe.”

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich launched the new Republican narrative in a Presidential debate less than a week later. Noting that the Iranians were threatening a cutoff of U.S. oil supplies in the Middle East, he declared:

This idea of vetoing the Keystone pipeline is wrong on every possible grounds. It would have led to 20,000 to 50,000 construction jobs while it was being built. We would have made money for 30 to 50 years processing Canadian oil. Then the ports of Galveston and Houston would have made money actually shipping the oil. Instead because Obama wanted to have a handful of San Francisco extremists happy, he vetoed it, which means that Prime Minister Harper, who’s a conservative and pro-American, is now talking about working out an agreement with the Chinese to build the pipeline due west across the Rockies to Vancouver, more expensive but doable.

Soon the other GOP candidates were piling on as well, signaling to a nervous president that the Keystone issue is going to hang around his neck to defend all the way through the fall.

Public Opinion Bats Last

Why is the battle against the Keystone pipeline so urgent? If there is one thing we have learned from the fight against coal (by far the single largest U.S. contributor to climate change) it is that once corporations have made big investments in infrastructure, they will fight tooth and nail for decades to squeeze the last return possible out of that investment, environmental concerns be damned. Another 50-year infrastructure investment in petroleum in the U.S. means another 50 years of political battle to wean our economy off oil.

Converting Keystone XL from being an invisible issue to being a global cause is a major achievement, as was convincing President Obama to reject permits for the pipeline. But in politics, on issues this big, leveraging can work in the short-term – but in the end public opinion bats last. Now that actions at the White House have made Keystone a major national issue, we are going to have to win not just the protest game but public opinion as well. That won’t be easy. Keystone backers have a far bigger megaphone and have already spent millions in donations to Congress to buttress their case.

It is in the nature of strong advocacy to expect a backlash. Ultimately winning depends on your ability to meet that backlash head on and defeat it. To ultimately win, opponents of Keystone XL need to make the case on the merits to the public, not just on the politics to the President. We need to make clear that the jobs estimates are wildly overblown; that the winners from all that environmentally reckless oil transport will not be families and communities but corporations; and that those who oppose the pipeline are all kinds of Americans not just one kind. Finally, we are going to have to make and win the most fundamental case of all on climate – that the environment we will bequeath to our children and their children matters so deeply that this time we need to leave the oil right in the ground where we found it, even if someone has to sacrifice a hefty profit in order to do so.

Join the effort to stop Keystone XL today by signing the petition to the U.S. Senate here..

Jim Shultz
Executive Director, the Democracy Center

The coalition that called on Obama to refuse the Keystone XL pipeline permit included Nebraskan landowners, First Nations communities, and environmental campaigners of all ages and backgrounds. We interviewed many of those involved – from the leaders to the grassroots – on why they were participating and how they were winning the battle. First published on our blog, Getting Action, these interviews have now been compiled into a downloadable document that forms a case summary of the actors, messages and strategies used to win this important battle in the fight against climate change.

Read more and download the Keystone XL strategy briefing.

Citizen oversight and advocacy of public budgets has been an important part of the Democracy Center’s work since our establishment 20 years ago.  We founded a progressive analysis organization on budget issues in California, the California Budget Project.  We have also worked closely for more than a decade, across the world, with the International Budget Partnership, a global leader in open and participatory budgeting.  You can read more about the Democracy Center’s work on budget issues here.

We are honored to publish this article below by a friend who has been an essential patron and champion of citizen budget work for decades, Michael Lipsky.  As a program officer at the Ford Foundation in the 1990s Michael seeded not only our first work in California, but other projects across the U.S. and across continents.  In this article, originally published by the Huffington Post, Michael looks at the key role that citizen budget activism plays today in the twin fights against poverty and public corruption.  We know you will find it a valuable read.

Jim Shultz

The Democracy Center

Improving Governance Through Budget Transparency

by Michael Lipsky

A secondary result of the fiscal crises now spooling out in the United States and Europe will be greater scrutiny of the efficacy of public expenditures. Nowhere is this likely to have greater impact than in foreign aid and development assistance, as countries demand greater accountability for each dollar or euro spent. At the same time, citizens in many countries receiving assistance are also pressuring their governments for accountability.

Critical to both of these developments is the focus on public budgets. Whatever elected leaders say, when the last votes are cast and counted the critical question is how governments actually manage their funds to address problems of poverty, provide essential services such as education and health care, and make public investments to secure their future. The flip side of the question is how and in whose interest countries raise funds to fulfill their commitments. Do they use revenues raised from oil, gas, mining and other natural resource extractions for high national priorities? Or are these funds siphoned off for private enrichment? Do they make prudent use of development assistance from abroad?

Historically the purview of accountants and numbers-crunchers, public officials in the past showed little interest in making budgets more accessible. Nonetheless, citizen groups around the world have increasingly demanded access to budget information.

In a report issued on January 5, the U.K. House of Commons’ International Development Select Committee called for making aid to conflict ridden countries dependent on improved governance. The report highlighted the need to tie increased British aid to real commitments from recipients to greater transparency and accountability.

This is just the latest in a wave of government-led initiatives and people-led activism that is shifting the discussion about the openness and accountability of decisions that determine a country’s social and economic trajectory. The Arab Spring, the Occupy protests, and calls like that in the House of Commons to use foreign aid to increase the openness of other governments all point to a seismic shift in the democracy and governance paradigm.

The commitments and aspirations of many of these groups were on display in November when representatives of 58 countries came together in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to affirm the importance of opening budgets to public scrutiny. Their Declaration on Budget Transparency, Accountability and Participation holds that “participation in the decisions related to public budgets is a fundamental right… of all citizens.” The Dar Declaration calls on all governments to recognize the rights of citizens to know their governments’ spending and revenue-raising policies, and to have regular opportunities to comment on the priorities reflected in them.

But the Dar Declaration is not so much the start of a movement as a milestone. In the last 15 or 20 years, in country after country civil society groups have been organizing to hold their governments to account.

In India, the MKSS uses local knowledge and government budget commitments to take advantage of the country’s 2005 Right to Information law. The organization’s “social audit” enables villagers to verify official claims and hold government to account. Official budget reports may indicate that a school or a road was built, but local residents may have information, literally “before their eyes,” that such projects were never undertaken.

Similarly, the Uganda Debt Network has trained local monitors to insure that inputs in construction and other projects, as promised in budget documents, are actually delivered.

In over 40 U.S. states, groups like the California Budget Project and the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Texas regularly scrutinize budget and tax policies for their impact on low- and moderate-income people.

Twenty years ago hardly any organizations focused on budget transparency as a key to improving democratic accountability and improving outcomes for poor. Now, over 200 groups in at least 119 countries engage in such work, according to the International Budget Partnership, a global research and advocacy organization that collaborates with budget groups around the world.

The interest of civic organizations in public budgeting at national and subnational levels has been matched in recent years by “top down” efforts of international organizations and foundations. Every two years, the IBP’s Open Budget Index (OBI) evaluates countries’ budget processes by engaging independent local researchers to assess whether their country makes timely and useful budget information available to the public and provides opportunities for participation. Over the three rounds of the OBI, a dozen or so countries have made real strides toward greater openness — perhaps because their leaders now know that their budget practices are being scrutinized by leaders in other countries.

What about funds that don’t always show up in budgets — like those from natural resources? Revenue Watch, an international organization started in 2002 as a project of the Open Society Institute, seeks good governance by working with industry and civil society groups in countries rich in oil, gas and mineral reserves to ensure that funds from these resources are monitored and used productively.

For civic organizations and governments seeking to reform other governments, it seems that fiscal transparency’s time has come. The open budget movement and the energy behind it promise to shift, if ever so slightly at first, the grounds on which the nations interact with their citizens and their civic organizations, and with each other.

Michael Lipsky, a former professor of political science at M.I.T., is a distinguished senior fellow at Demos, the American think tank based in New York.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this piece in our comments section below. Our comments policy.

Published in October 2011, ‘Beating Goliath’ gathers case studies from previous successful campaigns against corporations, looking at how they won and what we can learn from them. It provides links to many useful resources for activists, and highlights current campaigns engaged in the fight against climate change through targeting corporations.

Read more and get hold of a copy here

Based on original research and interviews, ‘Off the Market’ breaks down the complex arguments over ‘REDD’, international negotiations on forest preservation, and global forest carbon markets – and it looks at the complex situation inside Bolivia, where forest use is a crucial economic, political and social issue.

Read more and download the report.