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Keystone XL Pipeline

CREDO was among the first organizations to answer the call of Bill McKibben to escalate the fight against Canadian tar sands by using civil disobedience to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline. The perils of the pipeline were clear from the outset: It would transport crude oil—900,000 barrels a day—from the dirty tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to Texas, posing a massive spill risk in the six states along its route.

The extraction and transportation itself would produce up to three times the carbon emissions of traditional oil. According to NASA’s chief scientist, Dr. James Hansen, this would mean "game over" in our fight to slow and then reverse global warming. What’s more, the pipeline would require a “presidential permit” before it could be built, so neither Congress nor Big Oil could fix this fight as long as we could convince the President to hold true to his campaign promises to fight climate change.

We opposed Keystone XL since early 2010, but starting in late spring last year, we escalated our campaign dramatically, mobilized our network of activists and relentlessly pushed the EPA, the State Department and the White House to reject the pipeline permit. CREDO members played a huge role in this fight. More than 1.1 million signed online petitions, 34,360 of them made phone calls, 126,615 submitted public comments, and 350 of them attended public hearings. As many as 250 CREDO members joined our CEO Michael Kieschnick and five other CREDO staffers—along with 1,200 others—in getting arrested outside the White House in August. In the largest protest ever at an Obama campaign event, more than 1,000 people turned out at a rally organized by CREDO outside the president’s fundraiser in San Francisco. And they were in Washington, D.C. in November and encircled the White House with 12,000 others.

It was an unprecedented mobilization by CREDO, along with our allies at 350.org, Friends of the Earth, Rainforest Action Network, Bold Nebraska, Plains Justice, Western Organization of Resource Councils, Sierra Club and many other groups. And it paid off in November when President Obama delayed the pipeline, ordering a re-review of the environmental impact assessment with an emphasis on its effects on global warming.

2011 Activism home