Image credit: Giniw Collective.
This week, TC Energy (formerly TransCanada) announced that they were finally terminating the Keystone XL Pipeline (KXL) project after over a decade resistance from the Alberta tar sands to Wall Street to the White House to the Gulf Coast.
It stirs a lot of feelings and memories for me. I’ve devoted myself to climate direct action for over two decades. Half of it, I spent fighting the Keystone XL pipeline. Through my KXL journey, I was arrested sitting-in the White House, recruited tens of thousands to pledge to take action, trained thousands in direct action to disrupt Obama’s approval of the pipeline (hell, I even trained the trainers), supported the environmentalists and landowners that disrupted the construction of the southern leg of the pipeline in Texas (which got built anyway) and generally made elite politicos and Wall Street bankers miserable over it. In 2013, I discovered that TransCanada had compiled a file on me and my friends and traveled to law enforcement along the pipeline route with a PowerPoint telling them that we were terrorists. We also declared victory on KXL more than once.
