Your article says it all:

"Six years. ...roughly 200 Seattle protesters...But even blue chip environmentalists are tiring of the Keystone XL refrain."

Whether for good or bad, very few care much.

It is going to be very difficult to stop the pipeline now. Conservatives are going to use our current low gas prices as a "think of how much better it could be!" talking point, and like it or not, people will respond to that on both sides of the spectrum.

That, and honestly, it was just a matter of time. The pipeline just makes too much sense from a financial standpoint, and the environment employs terrible lobbyists.

@2, "The pipeline just makes too much sense from a financial standpoint..."

I don't agree with that notion. It makes financial sense for a small handful of people directly profiting from it. Oil execs and a few dock workers at the end of the line. For everyone else, not so much. It would provide temporary employment during the construction, but that would end as soon as it is finished. Then what? Then for the next 50 years, we'd all be paying the cost of environmental damage from any leaks or ruptures, greater pollution, and greater climate change.

It wouldn't reduce the price of gas. The pipeline would move tar sands oil. Tar sand oil is more expensive to produce than pumping it out of the ground (and creates more pollutants to produce). So it is only financially viable when crude oil prices are high. When crude falls to lower prices (like we're seeing now), it actually costs more to produce than it can sell for, and they cut way back on production until prices go back up again. So it really only provides a good supply of oil when prices are high, and it is a disincentive for lower prices.

And oil prices are not going to be high for the foreseeable future.

@2 is jus' promoting their own agenda.

I wish people would stop relating Keystone XL with climate change. If that was the big issue, then they would also be flipping their shit about the oil sands in general. If they don't build the pipeline, oil will simply be moved by train. Canada is going to sell that oil one way or another. Whether the pipeline is built or not, the effect on climate change will be pretty much the same. If you want more super-safe oil trains, go ahead and block the pipeline.

Seriously, fucking "climate justice"?

I don't want to see the stupid pipeline built either but at this point I just don't think it's worth the fight. If a bunch of red-staters want to take on the risk of devastating oil spills in their own red states then go for it. The oil sands will be exploited one way or another and imo at some point the political calculus swings in favor of just saying 'Ok' so that the 'pubs have one less talking point.

Now that is a constructive, lawful, 1st Amendment exercise. They assembled and spoke, without trampling on the 1st Amendment rights of others to assemble and speak about topics of their choosing.

They did not stop children from assembling and singing for a Christmas tree lighting ceremony. They did not forcibly commandeer a microphone from the MC's of that event. They did not use force and coercion to stop all others in Westlake Mall and Pacific Place from moving to assemble with who they chose and to speak on whatever topic they chose. They did not stop others from moving to assemble with whom they chose and where they chose by unlawfully blocking intersections. They did not force others out of the public square or impede others 1st Amendment rights, in the name of "non-violence". They did not speak out against police violence and intimidation by engaging in mob-violence and intimidation. They did not disrupt a City Council meeting where others wanted to assemble and here about other topics, not just theirs.

The 1st Amendment protects everyone's speech and assembly rights or nobody's is safe. If the only speakers in the square are those that are the loudest and most intimidating, and all others should just stay home, then we don't have freedom of speech and assembly, we have mob rule.

Well executed protest, Keystone opponents. Likely also more effective in winning friends and influencing people to support your point of view. A class act!

1) To avoid climageddon and mass extinctions of 50% of all

species on earth, most of the fossil fuels that's still in the ground and shale rocks MUST REMAIN IN THE EARTH.

2) There is NO HOPE of this if pipelines are built to facilitate exports of oil & gas to China and India, given the idiocy of rich people & their bottomless greed (they are planning to move to Mars, remember?).

3) Thus Pipeline issue IS Fracking Issue AND Conservation Issue AND Sea Level Rise Issue AND Public Health Issue AND Survival Issue (yo, get ready for tropical disease-vectors' range expansion to temperate areas where they have NO predators!).

4) Allow the pipelines to be built and start making room in your homes for ALL THE PEOPLE who live along the coasts. Also say goodbye to Marshall Islands, Magdagascar, Maldives, Seychelles, Amsterdam, San Juan, Trinidad, Haiti etc. etc.

5) Get ready for yearly Sandy & Katrina level storms.

6) Be prepared to go to WAR for WATER

7) Better sell your insurance companies stocks.

8) G'bye fish, birds, whales & pollinators. Hello cancer and starvation.

So perhaps do a little research before writing a really IGNORANT article?

BTW, it is about Climate Justice because the bulk of suffering will be borne by the POOR and Future Generations, who aren't the ones causing our headlong rush to Armageddon because of greed and stupidity.

@4: I never said it would usher in an age of economic prosperity, but to the people who will profit from it, they will finance the push to get it through, and it is going to effect a lot more people than you think, though. It makes financial sense because it lowers the cost of moving the oil, which will be moved somehow. That's all.

@5: I seriously laughed out loud when I saw that. You busted me, I have been commenting here as a mole for the oil companies for years just waiting for this perfect moment to strike! The funniest part is that I actually have been investing in midway transport companies for a while now because they have been making money hands over fist due to no pipeline. I would LOVE for the pipeline to never be built.

Two more First Nations tribes just sued the oil and gas corporations in Canada for violating their rights over pipelines.

Suncor just announced 3,000 layoffs.

Fossil fuel disinvestment is here.

A correction to the above piece. It was not Bill McKibben's 350.org that organized the Seattle demonstration but 350 Seattle, which is an independent affiliate of the national 350.org group, along with Rising Tide Seattle.

http://350seattle.org
https://www.facebook.com/RisingTideSeatt…

I think current low gas prices make a more effective argument against the pipeline than for it: Without actually constructing any new pipelines to the tar sands, without drilling in the arctic, without enough rail capacity to completely replace the pipeline, oil prices still went down. And that's because of OPEC, who in turn acted because they don't want the US to challenge their market share as producers, which all just means that oil is too unreliable and geopolitically-contentious for us to continue to base our whole society off of it.

And then there's the small matter of too much carbon in the atmosphere, which in all factuality is a larger issue than Fukushima, Ebola in the US, and ISIS combined. Only one of the issues in this paragraph has the potential to seriously undermine civilization.

Right now, energy corporations own both most of our government, and most of the public opinion advocating for Keystone XL. They have us wrapped around their fingers thinking fossil fuels are the answer, even while they run out, disrupt the climate and contaminate all the other forgotten resources that we need. Oil is not a convenience if we end up not having enough water or being able to grow enough food... all before we run out of carbon fuels like we are going to anyways.

@10. The U.S. is actually reducing carbon output at the moment in total terms. On a per capita and per unit of economic output we are reducing it. Europe is also flat-lined. Both are expected to remain so through 2040. Nearly all of the additional carbon emissions will come from countries like India, and the continents of S. America and Africa trying to lift people out of poverty so hundreds of millions don't die today. How do you ethically weigh no damage and death to billions of impoverished people alive, suffering, and dying today from lack of cheap, abundant, reliable energy against people as yet unborn and against damages that are hypothesized but not yet known? Climate change is real, but its effects and impacts are not yet known in terms of timing, specificity, and magnitude. The models that predicted warming in the last 15-years have not been proven out, much to the puzzlement of climate scientists.

So you have known harm today from curtailing the development of third-world countries against the needs of people not yet born, that may never be born, and against harms that are hard to quantify with any specificity or certainty. That is real moral conundrum.

@6, my comment's a little late, but the argument that the oil will get sold one way or the other is losing credibility. A survey carried out for trade publication Oilsands Review showed that the biggest threat to future oil sands development is the constraint to market access. All transportation routes for moving tar sands oil are maxed out and though Keystone XL is only one of the proposed new routes to get the tar sands out of Alberta, getting it denied would be a significant victory. This is especially true when one considers that shipping oil by rail, the likeliest solution if the pipeline gets denied, can be twice as expensive as shipping it via pipeline, making it even more prohibitively expensive to proceed with extraction.

Source: http://priceofoil.org/2015/01/16/industr…

@6, my comment's a little late, but the argument that the oil will get sold one way or the other is losing credibility. A survey carried out for trade publication Oilsands Review showed that the biggest threat to future oil sands development is the constraint to market access. All transportation routes for moving tar sands oil are maxed out and though Keystone XL is only one of the proposed new routes to get the tar sands out of Alberta, getting it denied would be a significant victory. This is especially true when one considers that shipping oil by rail, the likeliest solution if the pipeline gets denied, can be twice as expensive as shipping it via pipeline, making it even more prohibitively expensive to proceed with extraction.

Source: http://priceofoil.org/2015/01/16/industr…