Green groups warn Obama he’ll pay price for approving pipeline

{mosads}Her comments come days after Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said that approval would hurt the group’s ability to mobilize members on Obama’s behalf.

The Sierra Club and LCV have the environmental movement’s largest political campaign operations.

Sittenfeld and officials with other green groups spoke at a press conference ahead of Sunday’s demonstration at the White House Sunday that will call on Obama to reject TransCanada Corp.’s application to build the proposed $7 billion pipeline.

The groups are expecting thousands of demonstrators at the event. Protesters plan to form a human ring around the White House.

While environmental groups and voters that prioritize the issue won’t back Obama’s GOP opponent, Brune said that approval of the pipeline would have a “big impact” on his group’s allocation of campaign resources between congressional races and the White House contest.

Environmentalists also argue that rejection of the project would help Obama politically.

“If President Obama denies the permit to build this pipeline, it will unleash a wave of enthusiasm from people and organizations across the country who feel so passionate about this issue,” Sittenfeld said.

The administration hopes to make a final decision on the proposed project by year’s end, although the State Department — which is leading the review — said this week that the timeline might slip.

The project puts Obama in a tough spot politically at a time when the economy and jobs are shaping up as the dominant issues in next year’s election.

Business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute are lobbying in favor of the project, arguing it would create scores of jobs while improving energy security by expanding imports from a friendly neighbor.

TransCanada claims the pipeline would create 20,000 direct jobs and many more spinoff jobs (although environmentalists call the estimates inflated), and is emphasizing that it would operate under strict safety standards.

Several unions are backing the project, including the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the International Union of Operating Engineers, and the Laborers’ International Union, and the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO.

But labor is not united on the project. The Amalgamated Transit Union and the Transport Workers Union both oppose Keystone XL.

Opposition to the pipeline has become a top priority for green groups.

Organizers of Sunday’s demonstration are encouraging Obama to scuttle the project due to greenhouse gas emissions from energy-intensive oil sands projects, damage to Alberta’s boreal forests and other impacts.

They also note emissions from refining and using the fuel, potential spills along the pipeline route and other concerns.

The event’s organizers say they will call on Obama to act on his commitment to battle global warming and end the “tyranny” of oil by blocking the project.

“I suppose you could look at our circle around the president as a kind of … symbolic house arrest,” said Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and a key organizer of the anti-Keystone XL movement. Or, he said, it could be seen as a “big O-shaped hug.”

“We are very hopeful, indeed confident, that the president will do the right thing here,” McKibben said.

Sittenfeld, for her part, balanced her warnings with praise for other aspects of Obama’s environmental record, including the major increase in auto mileage standards.

“To approve this pipeline would fly in the face of these accomplishments and take our country in exactly the wrong direction as we approach the 2012 elections,” she said.

{mossecondads}McKibben and other environmentalists made their case against the project at Friday’s press conference, arguing the pipeline is a key enabler of increased extraction of oil sands, a massive resource that gives Canada the world’s third largest oil reserves.

“Burning the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, more than anything else, is what has raised the temperature of the planet a degree already. We didn’t know about climate change when … people found oil in Saudi Arabia, so it was natural to go burn it,” McKibben said.

“Now that we do, if we find a second Saudi Arabia and just do the same thing, then we are idiots,” he said.