On Monday, twenty-two people peacefully obstructed the entrance to the building that houses the State Department’s offices in downtown Chicago. They were then arrested without incident.

Last week in London, several protesters were arrested inside the Parliament building after attempting to disrupt a speech by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Hundreds were arrested in 2011 for trespassing on Parliament Hill in Ottowa.

In February, former NASA climate scientists James Hansen and dozens of leaders of the environmental movement like Michael Brune of the Sierra Club were arrested in front of the White House. Some 1,252 people were arrested in front of the White House in 2011 over 15 days.

All of these people have one thing in common — they are willing to risk arrest in an attempt to stop the U.S. and Canada from building the northern leg of the tar sands-pumping Keystone XL pipeline.

Monday’s protest was particularly significant since most of the activists who walked to the State Department’s Chicago office and got arrested were former Obama campaign staff, donors, and volunteers.

Organized by CREDO Action, Rainforest Action Network, and The Other 98%, the protesters went to State Department offices because that is where the decision process currently rests as the department drafts a Final Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. The protest took place in Chicago because that is President Obama’s hometown and where he chose to locate the organization built upon his successful presidential campaign: Organizing for Action (OFA). Many of the 22 that walked to the State Department’s Chicago office and got arrested were former Obama campaign staff, donors, and volunteers.

Elijah Zarlin worked as a Senior National Email Writer on the 2008 Obama campaign for almost a year (it his t-shirt featured above, worn by many protesters on Monday, displaying President Obama’s words on his commitment to climate action) . Following the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Zarlin told Climate Progress he remembered then-Senator Obama telling campaign staff that if they wanted to do something about climate change, they had to win the general election. “I took that to heart,” he said.

“I never thought I’d be back in Chicago to risk arrest in order to get President Obama to do the right thing on climate change,” said Zarlin, who now works for CREDO. He said he participated in the sit-in because “we haven’t seen leadership and policies to truly make an impact,” despite the president’s “commitment he made to his staff and supporters to fight climate change.” In 2011 he was part of the 1,252 people who were arrested at the White House protesting Keystone.

Becky Bond, CREDO Action’s political director, said that the protest that happened Monday was “a preview of what’s to come if [President Obama's] State Department recommends approval of the pipeline.” More than 62,000 people signed the Pledge of Resistance, which is a commitment to risking arrest “to send a message to the president that he must reject Keystone XL.”

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As the Obama administration’s decision regarding whether to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline draws nearer, the latest disaster is raising serious concerns about the safety of Canada’s rapidly expanding pipeline network.

A massive toxic waste spill from an oil and gas operation in northern Alberta is being called one of the largest recent environmental disasters in North America. First reported on June 1, the Texas-based Apache Corp. didn’t reveal the size of the spill until June 12, which is said to cover more than 1,000 acres.

Members of the Dene Tha First Nation tribe are outraged that it took several days before they were informed that 9.5 million liters of salt and heavy-metal-laced wastewater had leaked onto wetlands they use for hunting and trapping.

“Every plant and tree died” in the area touched by the spill, said James Ahnassay, chief of the Dene Tha.

As the Globe and Mail reports, the Apache disaster is not an anomaly:

The leak follows a pair of other major spills in the region, including 800,000 litres of an oil-water mixture from Pace Oil and Gas Ltd., and nearly 3.5 million litres of oil from a pipeline run by Plains Midstream Canada.

After those accidents, the Dene Tha had asked the Energy Resources Conservation Board, Alberta’s energy regulator, to require installation of pressure and volume monitors, as well as emergency shutoff devices, on aging oil and gas infrastructure. The Apache spill has renewed calls for change.

Following initial speculation that the leak stemmed from aging infrastructure, officials from Apache Corp. revealed that the pipeline was only five years old and had been designed to last for 30.

The incident comes on the heels of accusations from the provincial New Democratic Party that Alberta Energy Minister Ken Hughes is withholding the results of an internal pipeline safety report pending the U.S. government’s decision regarding Keystone XL. The report was commissioned last summer by Alberta Energy following a series of toxic spills — including the Plains Midstream Canada spill that leached 475,000 liters of oil into the Red Deer River, a major source of drinking water for central Alberta.

According to Winnipeg Free Press, “an engineering firm completed the technical report last fall and presented the findings to the government, which sent the findings to the Energy Resources Conservation Board for a review that was to be completed by March 31.”

Hughes denied delaying the report but declined to give a release date, saying only that it would come “fairly soon.”

A recent Global News investigation found that over the past 37 years, Alberta’s extensive network of pipelines has experienced 28,666 crude oil spills in total, plus another 31,453 spills of a variety of other liquids used in oil and gas production — from salt water to liquid petroleum. That averages out to two crude oil spills a day, every day.

As concerns mount over Apache’s delay in detecting and reporting its extensive toxic waste spill, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that TransCanada is not planning to use the external leak detection tools recommended by the Environmental Protection Agency for its proposed Keystone XL pipeline. As a result, the State Department concludes “Keystone XL would have to be spilling more than 12,000 barrels a day — or 1.5 percent of its 830,000 barrel capacity — before its currently planned internal spill-detection systems would trigger an alarm.”

Cohasset, MA — In Tuesday evening’s U.S. Senate debate in Springfield, Massachusetts between Rep. Ed Markey (D) and venture capitalist Gabriel Gomez, the Republican nominee uttered a sentence rarely heard from the mouth of a conservative politician.

“I’m a green Republican,” he said. “I believe in climate change, and I believe that humans have had something to do with climate change.”

But that is about as far as Gomez seems willing to go when discussing environmental policy.

While Gomez and his staff are quick to note that he trusts the scientific community and acknowledges that humans are at least partially to blame for the planet’s warming, he is light on any specifics about what he would do to mitigate the worsening effects of worldwide climate change.

On his campaign website, Gomez outlines his desire for “rational” solutions to climate change, and hits “politicians in Washington” for their support of solutions that are, in his estimation, “not rational.” Nowhere is a list of the legislation that he would pursue as a Senator to combat climate change, or even an outline of broader policy recommendations.

Instead, in almost every instance in which Gomez discusses the environment, it is immediately followed by an equally unwavering endorsement of the Keystone XL pipeline as a job creator, a pathway to lower energy costs, and, alarmingly, environmentally friendly.

In reality, it is none of those things. As few as 35 permanent jobs will be created by the KXL pipeline, recent reports suggest it could actually increase U.S. fuel costs, and the detrimental environmental impacts of its construction have been well-documented.

In a follow-up response, Gomez went on to suggest that if the pipeline was not completed, connecting the Canadian tar sands with ports in eastern Texas, the unrefined oil would instead somehow find its way to China. Opponents of KXL are quick to note, however, that there is nothing to stop TransCanada, the company behind the pipeline, from selling their oil overseas even after transporting it across the length of the United States. Even the consortium of companies investing in the pipeline admit that much of the oil will find its way to the gulf coast’s export markets.

Beyond that, and broad proclamations of support for alternative energy, Gomez has refused to take a position on any substantial climate legislation.

ThinkProgress spent three days following the Gomez campaign last month, and at half a dozen different campaign stops refused to answer a single question on his environmental policy, or anything else.

Will Ritter, the campaign’s communications director, did take a few minutes to discuss Gomez’s environmental policies during a campaign stop in Cohasset, MA, but was equally noncommittal. When asked if the campaign could provide any specific policy positions related to climate change, he responded by asking us to list specific proposals.

Cap and trade? “We can take a look at that, sure.”

A carbon tax? “We don’t currently don’t have a policy on the matter, not that I’m aware of.”

Higher fuel emissions standards? “It honestly has not been asked yet. It’s not an issue we’ve come across in any interview.”

“You can email me, and we’ll sit down with him when we do our policy to find out where he is and we can get you some answers back,” he said.

ThinkProgress reached out to Ritter via email multiple times with the same requests for Gomez’s positions on any number of climate-related issues, and despite the promise to provide some answers on Gomez’s climate policy, we have yet to receive any response.

Gomez’s reluctance to embrace any substantive environmental policies is perhaps explained by his own financial interests. As ThinkProgress reported last month, Gomez has thousands of dollars invested in nearly a dozen different energy companies.

TransCanada is going on the offensive now by attacking those pointing out the consequences of burning tons of fossil fuels transported by an unsafe pipeline that will only create 35 permanent jobs. [National Journal]

Faced with formidable opposition from environmentalists, TransCanada is redoubling its efforts to rebut claims made against its flagship project, the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline that the Canadian company is seeking President Obama’s permission to build from Alberta’s oil sands to the Gulf Coast.

This month, the company hired Matthew John as an “external communications specialist” to help feed its blog. On Monday, John wrote a particularly critical 1,400-word post responding to claims made by Tom Steyer, a billionaire venture capitalist who has become especially active opposing the pipeline in the past several months.

“Mr. Steyer continues to peddle the false dichotomy between fossil fuels and renewable energy in an attempt to stifle a pragmatic, fact-based debate,” John wrote in one of his first posts on the company’s website.

Since the company’s blog was launched last fall, about 60 entries have been posted, and almost all of them — save for a very small handful, including Monday’s entry — are positive in nature. Monday’s comments are a sign that TransCanada is ready to do some criticizing of its own.

A new study says Europe’s coal pollution costs businesses and governments billions, along with 22,300 premature deaths a year. [Guardian]

President Obama’s top climate adviser Heather Zichal said that following the agreement with China about HFCs, “we’re ripe for a few more deliverables” on the international climate agenda. [The Hill]

Chevron’s CEO said that fracking raises “legitimate concerns” over safety and environmental impacts. [LA Times]

Robert Redford urges President Obama to have the “courage of his convictions” on climate change in a new ad from the NRDC. [Washington Post]

A new bill by the House GOP would take money out of climate research funding in order to shore up spending on weather forecasting. [The Hill]

The coal lobby admitted that the “War on Coal” strategy for the 2012 election did not resonate with voters. [Huffington Post]

Interior’s Inspector General thinks the department may have underpriced priced leases for coal mining on federal lands. [Reuters]

Flooding in Germany will cost the insurance industry 3 billion Euros, and could go up to 12 billion, according to Fitch Ratings. [The Guardian]

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Here’s a great idea from Van Jones. If the President decides the Keystone XL pipeline is a good thing, let’s rename it “The Obama Tar Sands Pipeline.”

Help this video go viral:

TransCanada has lobbied the U.S. government to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, hoping to transport the heavy, bitumen-laden tar sands crude oil to coastal refineries in Texas. The corporation’s Chief Executive Officer Russ Girling said in an interview scheduled to air this weekend on Bloomberg Television that rejecting the pipeline would increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Girling said that currently, the U.S. imports more crude in tankers that run on oil — so approving the pipeline would allow the U.S. to use more oil from Canada, transported by pipeline and not by tanker. Girling said:

“If you deny the pipeline it’s a lose-lose. We lose jobs. We lose economic development and we lose energy security. And it likely leads to greater emissions in GHG.”

The problem is, this is not really what would happen if the pipeline is constructed. The State Department’s draft environmental assessment report said:

There is existing demand for crude oil, particularly heavy crude oil at refiners in the Gulf Coast area, but the ultimate disposition of crude oil transported by the proposed Project, and any refined products produced from that crude oil, would be determined by future market forces.

Which of course means that there is no assurance that the oil transported by the pipeline would not be refined and exported on tankers of their own, destined for other countries. The global oil market does not operate in nearly so zero-sum of a game. Morover, gas prices for U.S. consumers would increase, not decrease, according to recent reports.

Additionally, as the EPA made clear in its public comment submitted to the State Department’s draft report, the pipeline itself will emit greenhouse gases as tar sands crude is not going to pump itself down the length of the pipeline: power is required. EPA recommended using renewable resources, something TransCanada has not said it would do.

Furthermore, the emissions that would be released by the extraction, transportation, and burning of the tar sands oil in Alberta are not inevitable: Reuters found that the alternatives to the Keystone pipeline (like using trains) are so difficult and untenable that the pipeline is essentially the only feasible way those emissions would occur.

To be fair to TransCanada, it is easy to think a pipeline would be a more direct and safe method of getting a fluid from Point A to Point B. Yet the northern leg of the pipeline only exists in the hopes and dreams of TransCanada executives and lobbyists who think the project would be a huge boon — it is easy to think American citizens would have to wait until it is built to see who is right.

Fortunately, the United States already has a sort of test case: the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline is more than 75 percent complete across stretches of Texas and Oklahoma, which developers expect to complete by the end of 2013. The project that has not been approved by the State Department and White House is the as-yet-unbuilt northern leg. How is the southern portion doing?

Not so well, it turns out. Public Citizen reports that in just one 60-mile stretch north of the Sabine River in Texas, landowners have observed TransCanada and its vendor Michaels digging up buried sections of the pipeline, reportedly to address “dozens of anomalies, including dents and welds.”

Per Public Citizen’s release:

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Elizabeth Kolbert is one of the most thoughtful climate journalists. Her terrific 2006 book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, famously ends, “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

Seven years later, we’re still doing it (see “Into The Valley Of 400 PPM Rode The 7 Billion“). Kolbert has a great New Yorker piece this week, “Lines in The Sand,” on crossing the 400 parts per million threshold of CO2, as measured at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa observatory.

She quotes one marine geologist who said that hitting 400 ppm, “feels like the inevitable march toward disaster.” Of course, it isn’t inevitable, which was the point of Kolbert’s quote above — it is a choice.

That said, most people do feel powerless to change direction, since the choice to avert disaster isn’t directly in our hands. It is in the hands of the most powerful opinion makers and political leaders, like President Obama.

Kolbert concludes her piece:

Were we to burn through all known fossil-fuel reserves, the results would be unimaginably bleak: major cities would be flooded out, a large portion of the world’s arable land would be transformed into deserts, and the oceans would be turned into liquid dead zones. If we take the future at all seriously, which is to say as a time period that someone is going to have to live in, then we need to leave a big percentage of the planet’s coal and oil and natural gas in the ground. These basic facts have been established for decades, and every President since George Bush senior has vowed to do something to avert catastrophe. The numbers from Mauna Loa show that they have failed.

In rejecting Keystone, President Obama would not solve the underlying problem, which, as pipeline proponents correctly point out, is consumption. Nor would he halt exploitation of the tar sands. But he would put a brake on the process. After all, if getting tar-sands oil to China were easy, the Canadians wouldn’t be applying so much pressure on the White House. Once Keystone is built, there will be no putting the tar back in the sands. The pipeline isn’t inevitable, and it shouldn’t be treated as such. It’s just another step on the march to disaster.

Hear! Hear!

In what will likely prove as meaningless a vote as the 37th repeal vote of Obamacare, on Wednesday night 241 members of the House of Representatives voted to approve the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. H.R. 3 would give Congress the power to approve the pipeline and allow TransCanada to build the northern leg without a cross-border permit.

These legislators support the oil industry’s push for the pipeline, even though it would create far fewer jobs than its supporters claim, would do nothing to make the country more energy independent, and would facilitate a dramatic increase in the production of high carbon polluting tar sands oil.

The 241 members who voted for the bill have taken a collective $39,150,812 in career contributions from the oil and gas industry, compared to $5,094,217 for those who voted no. Even more starkly, in the last election cycle, that split widens to $11,529,335 versus $742,125.

Only 19 Democrats voted for the bill, less than a third of the number (69) who supported a similar bill in April 2012. Even some supporters of the pipeline couldn’t vote for tonight’s bill, such as Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV):

“Last Congress, I voted for every piece of pro-Keystone pipeline legislation that was brought before this body…. Something’s happened along the way between then and now. And that something is called a hijacking of this bill by the right wing.”

This is the eighth time Republicans pushed a bill promoting Keystone, and the fifth time it voted to speed up the approval process. A White House statement made clear that President Obama would veto the bill because it “conflicts with long-standing Executive branch procedures.”

While some conservatives may claim the pipeline would create tens of thousands of jobs, the most recent State Department draft environmental impact statement found that the pipeline would directly create only “3,900″ temporary construction jobs. After construction is complete, the operation of the pipeline would only support 35 permanent and 15 temporary jobs, with “negligible socioeconomic impacts.” Moreover, only 10 percent of the total workforce would be hired locally. For perspective, the U.S. had 3.4 million green energy jobs in 2011 and it was the fastest-growing industry in the country.

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Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the new chair of the House Science and Technology Committee, wrote an op-ed in Monday’s Washington Post that contains several misrepresentations of fact. He argued for increased fossil fuel production, against the scientific consensus that humans cause climate change, and for a “wait-and-see” approach to cutting carbon emissions.

Two years ago, the Washington Post’s Editorial Page Editor wrote that “The GOPs climate-change denial may be its most harmful delusion.” Apparently it is a delusion the Post is happy to spread. Below is a fact check of the seven worst parts of Smith’s piece:

Integrity of Climate Science

Smith opened with a general appeal for a clear discussion of the facts: “Climate change is an issue that needs to be discussed thoughtfully and objectively. Unfortunately, claims that distort the facts hinder the legitimate evaluation of policy options.”

However, with a look at his record, Rep. Smith did not have such a clear discussion in mind. After he became chair of the science committee, his first move was to schedule a hearing that aimed to take issue with the science of climate change. He has criticized “the idea of human-made global warming.” More dangerously, he has made headlines for authoring legislation that would politicize research conducted by the National Science Foundation. Of course, there is strong, 97%-grade consensus on human-caused climate change in the scientific literature, as a recent study confirmed.

Keystone Claims

With the House set to vote on Wednesday to force the approval of the Keystone tar sands pipeline, Rep. Smith argued that opposition to the Keystone tar sands pipeline hurts the economy and would not decrease carbon emissions. He said the “State Department has found that the pipeline will have minimal impact on the surrounding environment and no significant effect on the climate,” and would create “more than 40,000 U.S. jobs.”

This just isn’t true. The Environmental Protection Agency submitted a public comment on the State Department’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement, finding that, among other things, State needs to make revisions on the true impact of the project’s carbon emissions and about how dirty tar sands oil truly is. Additionally, tar sands oil extraction is not inevitable because transporting it by rail is not feasible — the pipeline is really their only option. Smith’s claims about 40,000 jobs are also quite inflated. The project would create just 35 permanent jobs, along with 51 coal plants’ worth of carbon dioxide each year.

U.S. Emissions

Smith went on to argue “that U.S. emissions contribute very little to global concentrations of greenhouse gas.”

In fact, annual U.S. carbon emissions rank just behind China’s, despite having only a quarter of China’s population. The U.S. is by far the world’s biggest contributor to global concentrations of CO2, the main greenhouse gas, since that depends on cumulative emissions.

Despite advances in energy efficiency and renewable energy, the United States remains a significant part of overall global carbon emissions. Domestic coal use is on the rise again in the U.S., and coal exports reached a record high last year, beating the record set in 1981. America is also the world’s number one fossil fuel subsidizer.

Recent Warming

Rep. Smith made the case that “global temperatures have held steady over the past 15 years, despite rising greenhouse gas emissions.”

This is simply not the case. The overall trend line shows continued warming. 2010 was the hottest year on record. Every year of the decades of the 2000′s was warmer than the average temperature in the ’90s.

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The Canadian government has nearly doubled its spending to promote the Keystone XL pipeline to $16.5 million, up from $9 million a year ago.

This dramatic spending increase is a result of an increased lobbying effort the government is planning, which includes high-profile ad buys and dispatching a series of officials to reiterate talking points that the pipeline will increase U.S. energy security and provide us with thousands of home-grown jobs.

Their expanded lobbying efforts include Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper traveling to New York City to speak with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and participate in roundtables with American business leaders. During his Q&A session with the CFR, Mr. Harper advocated for approval of the pipeline, insisting it would add “almost nothing globally” to carbon emissions.

Harper’s claim just isn’t true — extracting crude from the oil sands is an incredibly energy intensive process that emits 3 to 4 times more greenhouse gases than producing conventional crude oil, making it one of the world’s dirtiest forms of fuels. Approving Keystone would more than double the production of carbon-intensive tar sands by 2024, leading to an increase in greenhouse gases equivalent to adding 8 million cars on the road every year. Without the pipeline, tar sands production is expected to fall flat by 2020.

Harper also said the US should not “turn up” its nose at the potential of 40,000 construction jobs nor the prospect of being able to reduce its dependence on oil shipped in from overseas.

Again, Harper is just avoiding the facts — the State Department released a draft environmental impact statement earlier this year that found the pipeline would directly only create “3,900″ temporary construction jobs. After construction is complete, the operation of the pipeline would support 35 permanent and 15 temporary jobs, with “negligible socioeconomic impacts.” The State Department’s report, which was written by a private consulting firm with links to the pipeline’s owner, also made clear that at least some of Keystone’s oil will be refined and exported in response to “lower domestic gasoline demand and continued higher demand and prices in overseas markets.” The pipeline will add nothing to U.S. energy security and is simply a way for the oil industry to sell refined fuel at higher prices available overseas.

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Tiffany Germain is a Senior Climate/Energy Researcher in the Think Progress War Room.