Bill McKibben Would Go to Jail to Halt the Building of the Keystone XL Pipeline

Environmental activist Bill McKibben is like Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln if Honest Abe shaved. A tall man with a soft voice, Bill knows how to incite passion in a crowd. In the last three and a half years, Bill has used these crowd-rousing skills to engage President Barack Obama in a game of chicken over the Keystone XL pipeline.

Proposed by TransCanada Corporation and requiring the president's approval, the Keystone XL would carry high-pollutant tar-sands oil from Alberta to refineries along the US Gulf Coast. It would add an estimated 168 million tons of CO2e to the atmosphere while the world experiences the effects of global warming, such as last year’s Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.

Bill's 1989 book The End of Nature was one of the first books to sound the alarms over climate change. Over the years he has moved from his writing desk in Vermont to streets across the country, protesting the burning of fossil fuels.

In the summer of 2011, when more than 1,000 people were arrested for chaining themselves to the White House during a sit-in protest against the Keystone XL, Bill was led away in handcuffs. His arrest has launched a movement that has only snowballed since then.

Last February, Bill returned to the White House gates, with approximately 50,000 demonstrators. Barack Obama was reportedly golfing with oil executives when the activists arrived, but their displays have still proved a hefty political counterweight to the lobbying power of the pipeline's corporate and union supporters, who have put pressure on the president to hasten approval of the Keystone XL.

It’s unclear if Obama would rather approve the pipeline, possibly losing the majority of his base, or deny the permit and piss off the oil industry. Right now, the scales are starting to tilt against the activists. The Keystone XL has to go through some intricate bureaucratic steps before TransCanada's permit application arrives on the president's desk, but on January 31, the State Department released a long-awaited environmental impact statement on the pipeline that observers say pushed the pipeline closer to approval.

This week, I spoke with Bill after he finished addressing a candlelit crowd in Manhattan's Union Square, at a vigil protesting the Keystone XL, and asked him about the report’s findings.

VICE: Is it true the State Department's most recent report differs from the draft released this spring?
Bill McKibben: The main difference is that there's so much attention on them now that they can't get away with lying quite so easily. Unlike the one before it, this latest report doesn't claim that there's no environmental impact. In fact, if you read it, it admits that in a world where you are trying to do something about climate change, the Keystone XL pipeline would be a big problem.

But the report says the oil will be extracted anyway.
It's actually not going to be extracted anyway—it's expensive oil. It's hard to get out of the ground. It'll only be extracted if there are cheap ways to get it to market. Some of it will come out. But the head of Total, a big French oil company, and the head of TransCanada have said within the last two weeks that if they don't get this pipeline built, further expansion of the tar sands is probably not going to happen.

Do you think continued pressure from this movement will have an impact on whether the Keystone XL is built?
We'll find out. We're getting closer to the point of decision all the time. But now it's in the hands of Barack Obama and [Secretary of State] John Kerry. We'll find out what they're made of.

I've detected an increasing frustration toward Obama in some of your recent articles.
Yes, I think that's fair. He said when he was running for president that in his administration the rise of the oceans would begin to slow, and he said he would stand up to the oil industry and end the tyranny of oil.

In fact, it looks like, during his term in office, the amount of oil produced in the United States will about double. He's been fracking the hell out of the Appalachians. America is setting records for coal exports. His record on climate change is mixed at best. With the Keystone XL, we'll find out if he is actually ever willing to stand up to the oil industry.

Some people think you're exaggerating about climate change.
All one can do is refer them to the scientists. We've gotten some warning. The world's scientific community has come together on a complicated problem of physics and chemistry and given us real answers. Now we've got to pay attention to those.

Is there one example that will illustrate to climate change deniers the impact climate change will have on their lives?
A good place to look right now is the state of California—reservoirs with no water in them and forest fires on an epic scale. It's getting hard to grow the food that we all depend on. Climatologists are very clear that this is exactly what happens when you raise the temperature.

What are environmentalists going to do if Obama approves this pipeline?
We're in the snows of New York right now. We may have to be in the snows of Nebraska, trying to keep them from actually building the thing.

For someone who has had climate change on his radar for more than two decades now, how has it felt seeing this issue catch on?
I'm glad more people are beginning to pay attention, but the truth is, we shouldn't have to be protesting. In any rational world we would have quickly gotten to work. But since our leaders didn't get quickly to work, we have to do stuff like this. We have to go to jail. We have to protest and rally. We'll do it, but personally, I'd rather be home writing.

@JohnReedsTomb