Biden's climate credentials challenged by oil pipeline brawls
Pipelines have become a flashpoint between climate activists and the oil and natural gas industry. The former argue new projects encourage greater production of fossil fuels for decades to come at a time when the world should be shifting to cleaner energy sources. The latter maintains these projects remain essential for the steady supply of affordable fuel. US oil demand averages 20m barrels a day.
The success of the campaign against TC Energy’s Keystone XL pipeline has spurred many more against other projects across the US.
“The idea was: you can’t organize people around hundreds of coal plants, but you could pick one really high-ticket thing that you could try to kill,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, managing director of the Climate Policy Lab at Tufts University’s Fletcher School.