--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform. Didn't know that. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most. I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram from One of the first things President Biden did when he got into office was he canceled the Keystone XL pipeline permit. We talked about it briefly on the show. But today, we're going to talk about it a lot more because this isn't just some pipeline. This is two countries, three presidents, 12 years, and an entire environmental movement.
--:-- Pali Masha: This has been a soap opera. Soap opera.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's hard to count how many different factions have been fighting over this thing for the last 12 years. And throughout that controversy, Keystone XL kind of birthed the modern environmental movement.
--:-- Pali Masha: Yeah. I mean, to give you a sense of just how pivotal this was, we have to go back in time a little bit. We're going back to the 2000s. The Black Eyed Peas were at the top of the charts. Kanye West had beef with Republicans after Hurricane Katrina. George Bush doesn't care about Black people. And velour tracksuits were on display at the mall.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The juicy velour tracksuit became a wardrobe staple in the early 2000s, thanks to Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and Kim Kardashian. Also, a movie called The Day After Tomorrow scared the living daylights out of Americans. For the first time, Americans, at a mass scale, got exposed to a film that was about climate change. It took a lot of artistic license with the science, no question about it. But on the other hand, it did convey to Americans that this was a real problem, and moreover, it introduced people to the idea that there are tipping points.
--:-- Anthony Leiserwitz: So we study how do mass societies around the world respond to the issue of climate change. He says the U.S. started talking about climate change in a way that it hadn't before. especially in previous decades when scientists started agreeing it was a problem. The other thing that also happens in that critical time period is that the science gets ever stronger. And so you get a series of intergovernmental panel on climate change reports. They were saying, yes, climate change is absolutely real. We're now very certain that it is. And in fact, not only is it human caused, but it's already having negative consequences on the planet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: By the 2008 election, even Republicans were worried. The nominee for President of the United States by the Republican Party was a conservative Republican named John McCain, who for years had been one of the primary champions of climate action in Congress. And I am convinced, but there's not a doubt in my mind, that climate change is real. And we have neglected our obligation again. And in fact, climate change didn't come up much on the campaign trail between he and Barack Obama because they basically agreed. Now is the time to develop every form of alternative energy, solar, wind, and biofuels.
--:-- Bill McKibben: We thought that we were having an argument about climate change and that by piling up all the evidence, eventually, you know, our leaders would do the rational and obvious thing and start to take action. Bill says 2009 was a wake-up call for the environmental movement. The fight wasn't about data. The fight was about what fights are always about, money and power. So we needed to assemble some power of our own.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Just as Bill was having this realization that environmentalists needed to take on the fossil fuel industry themselves, a massive border-crossing oil pipeline was proposed. Enter Keystone XL. It was a pipeline proposed by a company called TransCanada. It now goes by TC Energy. It lives up to its name 1 miles and over 800 barrels of oil a day moving from Alberta Canada cutting through Montana and making its way to the Gulf Coast
--:-- Melina Miawapin Labucon Massimo: The pipeline timing was perfect for the fossil fuel industry Oil prices were high, Canada was hungry for the revenue, and the U.S. wanted to be less dependent on oil from the Middle East. But there was a problem. Unlike oil from the Middle East, the Canadian stuff is the dirtiest oil on the market. The oil basically has to be cooked out of tar sands in Alberta. And indigenous people have lived in those tar sands for generations.
--:-- Chief Alvin Francis: My economy, I have very little. I have a correctional facility, but my unemployment rate is probably around 60 to 70 percent, depending on the time of the year. Chief Francis represents one of five Indigenous groups on the pipeline's path who were actually investing in the project. They were planning on owning a $1 billion stake in it. Oh, it would have been an enormous value. Because really, when you talk about a job on a pipeline, which is a union job, or there's also non-union jobs there too. But you're talking a minimum of probably $50 an hour. And that is a lot of money for us here.
--:-- Jim Hansen: The great NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen published a paper about how much carbon was up in those tar sands in Canada and said that if they could get all the economically recoverable oil out of those tar sands, that would be game over for the climate, he said. And this is why Keystone XL has such a big impact on the environmental movement in North America.
--:-- Anthony Leiserwitz: Much of the conversation up to that point had been about end use, cars, or changing your light bulbs. In other words, to decrease consumption at the end. But they were saying, let's push the conversation upstream to the production and the distribution and the movement of these fossil fuels.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which brings us to Washington, D.C., 2011. In the summer of 2011, everybody working together, we organized direct action, nonviolent civil disobedience in front of the White House. This is a movement. We are here on November 6th, one year from the election. You know, the very first day, 75 or 80 of us or so got arrested and they kept us in central cell block in D.C., which is as much fun as it sounds like it might be, for three days, I guess.
--:-- Melina: Obama, we don't want no pipeline drama. Obama, we don't want no pipeline drama.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The sort of news of our incarceration had spread around and attracted far more people than would ever have come in the first place. I think it was 11 or 12 days of just, like, people getting arrested day after day. Melina came down from Canada, too. Turned out there were a lot of people that were willing to come get arrested. By the time two weeks were out, 1,200 and some people had gone to jail, which was the biggest civil disobedience action in a long time in this country.
--:-- Ted Cruz: Straight out of the gate, President Biden announced that he was canceling the Keystone Pipeline. That is a major infrastructure project. That is a project that right now today has 1,200 good-paying union jobs. And in 2021, the Keystone Pipeline was scheduled to have more than 11,000 jobs, including 8,000 union jobs.
--:-- Sarah Hastings-Simon: The Washington Post said that the almost 11,000 jobs that Senator Cruz mentioned would largely be temporary construction jobs. The permanent jobs cut by revoking the Keystone XL's permit would be closer to 50.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: President Biden wants to create jobs, but different kinds of energy jobs. Green energy jobs. The issue there, of course, is getting the votes. He needs to win the support of key moderates like West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, who represents a lot of coal workers.
--:-- Halima Shah: The rest of the team includes Will Reed, Muj Zady, Cecilia Lay, Noam Hassenfeld, and our engineer, Afim Shapiro. Facts checked by Lulu Orozco-Perez. music by Breakmasters Cylinder and Hassenfeld. Amina Al-Sadi is our supervising producer. Jillian Weinberger is the deputy. And Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's editorial director of podcasts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can get in touch with us on Twitter. We are at today underscore explained. I am at Ramas Firm. Or you can send an email to todayexplained at vox.com. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
