We’re broadcasting from Park City, Utah, home of the Sundance Film Festival, the nation’s largest festival for independent cinema. Over the weekend, we spoke with Robert Redford, the founder of Sundance. He’s well known as an actor, a director, a producer, but part and parcel of who he is an activist. We asked him about President Obama’s decision last week to reject the proposal for the Keystone XL tars sands oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. "Oil, coal and gas still dominate, in terms of control, because of their relationship with members of Congress they give a lot of money to," Redford said. "But because times have changed so drastically, and I don’t think we can be at the mercy of what Big Oil wants to do anymore.

Rush Transcript: 

AMY GOODMAN: We’re at Park City Television in Park City, Utah, home of the Sundance Film Festival, the largest festival of independent cinema in this country. Over the weekend, I spoke with Robert Redford. He is the founder of Sundance Film Festival, well known as an actor, an Academy Award-winning director, and a producer. We sat down in the opening days of the film festival to talk about politics and his life. Over these next few days, we’ll play excerpts of that interview.

Today we’re ...

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We wanted to share with you the news: this afternoon the Obama Administration announced that they are denying the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.  READ FULL POST 5 COMMENTS

This Wednesday afternoon, the Obama administration rejected the permit for Keystone XL, a 1,700 mile oil pipeline that would have run from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. The announcement is a huge victory for the grassroots climate movement. As writer and Keystone XL protest leader Bill McKibben wrote this afternoon,

"This isn't just the right call, it's the brave call. The knock on Barack Obama from many quarters has been that he's too conciliatory. But here, in the face of a naked political threat from Big Oil to exact 'huge political consequences,' he's stood up strong. This is a victory for Americans who testified in record numbers, and who demanded that science get the hearing usually reserved for big money."

While the fight to stop the Keystone XL pipeline is over for now, the political battle over the consequences of Obama's decision is just beginning. Big Oil front groups like the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are already spending millions of dollars on TV ads to bash the President over Keystone XL. Republicans in Congress have pledged to continue to use ...

The Obama administration has rejected the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline that would stretch from the Alberta tar sands to the Gulf Coast. On Wednesday, President Obama said he was turning down TransCanada’s application for the pipeline because there was not enough time to review an alternate route that would avoid the Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska. Obama had tried to delay a decision until next year, but Republicans responded by passing legislation forcing a decision by the end of February. Environmental groups have hailed the permit’s rejection, but it does not mark the end of the pipeline fight. TransCanada has already announced it will reapply for a permit based on a different route, and Obama said he was only making his decision based on time constraints, not on the pipeline’s "merits." We get reaction from Jane Kleeb of Bold Nebraska and 350.org founder Bill McKibben, an expert on climate change who has led massive protests in Washington, D.C. against the pipeline over the past six months. "This was a real victory for people standing up," McKibben says. "If we hadn’t gone and done what we did in the streets ... then the oil industry, as usual, would have gotten away with a really bad idea."

A provision attached to the recent payroll tax bill requires President Barack Obama to decide by Feb. 21 on the construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the United States.

But even if the administration rejects the project, it may not be enough to kill it, industry analysts said. Americans' thirst for oil probably will push the administration and TransCanada Corp., the pipeline's sponsor, to find a way to transport Canadian crude across the United States even if it's not through a pipeline called Keystone XL, industry analysts said.

"We think it will be built," said Jamie Webster, senior manager for markets at PFC Energy, a Washington consulting firm. "The interesting bit is, what is 'it'? The future of the pipeline could go a couple of different ways."

TransCanada said it had already started to work with Nebraska authorities to find an alternative route. Once one has been determined, the environmental review could take about nine months, TransCanada said.

Over the next six weeks, TransCanada could pull the Keystone application to avoid deepening the political fight over the permit and submit it later with a new route through Nebraska, said Frank Verrastro, director of energy and national security at the Center for ...

My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve -- dangerously naïve.

I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet. Try as hard as you can, you’re never going to be as cynical as the corporations and the harem of politicians they pay for.  It’s like trying to outchant a Buddhist monastery.

Here’s my case in point, one of a thousand stories people working for social change could tell: All last fall, most of the environmental movement, including 350.org, the group I helped found, waged a fight against the planned Keystone XL pipeline that would bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Canada through the U.S. to the Gulf Coast. We waged our struggle against building it out in the open, presenting scientific argument, holding demonstrations, and attending hearings.  We sent 1,253 people to jail in the largest civil disobedience action in a generation.  Meanwhile, more than half a million Americans offered public comments against the pipeline, the most on any energy project in the nation’s history.

And what do you know? We won a small victory in November, when President Obama agreed that, before he could give the project a thumbs-up or -down, it needed another year of careful review.  (The previous version of that review, as overseen by the State Department, had been little short of a crony capitalist farce.)  Given that James Hansen, the government’s premier climate scientist, had ...

Who would have thought that some young people camped out in lower Manhattan with cardboard signs, a few sharpies, some donated pizza, and a bunch of smart phones could change so much?

The viral spread of the Occupy Movement took everyone by surprise. Last summer, politicians and the media were fixated on the debt ceiling, and everyone seemed to forget that we were in the midst of an economic meltdown—everyone except the 99 percent who were experiencing it.

Today, people ranging from Ben Bernake, chair of the 
Federal Reserve, to filmmaker Michael Moore are expressing sympathy for the Occupy Movement and concern for those losing homes, retirement savings, access to health care, and hope of ever finding a job.

This uprising is the biggest reason for hope in 2012. The following are 12 ways the Occupy Movement and other major trends of 2011 offer a ...

Finally. After a year of artful camouflage and concealment, Republicans let us glimpse the rift between establishment pragmatists and Tea Party ideologues. There may be hope for the republic after all.

Forty Republican senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), joined Democrats in voting for compromise legislation providing a two-month extension of unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut. The bill passed 89 to 10, the kind of margin usually reserved for ceremonial resolutions in favor of motherhood. Senators clearly were confident that House approval would quickly follow.

But it didn’t, because Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) couldn’t get his Tea Party freshmen to go along. The result was a kind of intramural sniping among Republicans that we ­haven’t seen in years.

“It angers me that House Republicans would rather continue playing politics than find solutions,” said Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts.

The stalemate “is harming the Republican Party,” said Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

READ FULL POST 6 COMMENTS

Attached to the payroll tax deal was a provision forcing President Obama to decide within 60 days whether or not to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, before its route is even finalized. The deadline runs out on February 21, 2012. The State Department has made it clear it can’t do a proper review of the pipeline, especially considering that TransCanada has agreed to change the pipeline’s pathway in Nebraska but hasn’t even finalized the new route.

With this new and arbitrary deadline, the punditocracy is relitigating the question of whether it should be built. The DC political elite assumed that the pipeline was an inevitability, dismissive or ignorant of the popular opposition to a risky, foreign tar sands pipeline cutting across the center of the nation. Most were blindsided when the State Department announced it needed to review its obviously flawed assessment of the project, and when the state of Nebraska held an emergency legislative session against the pipeline.

With the new rush to approve TransCanada’s tar sands pipeline, let’s review some key facts that should underlie any analysis of the proposed 1700-mile project from Alberta to Texas:

The approval process for the Keystone XL pipeline was tainted by corruption. The federal approval process was run by a contractor for the pipeline company itself. Cardno Entrix was chosen and paid by TransCanada to draft the State Department’s environmental and historical impact statement, manage public hearings, and receive public comment. Big oil’s lobbying group American Petroleum Institute was also involved in drafting the environmental ...

Methane is bubbling up from the bottom of Alaskan lakes–the result of ancient organic matter thawing and decomposing from its once icy chamber in an ever warming climate. This is just one of several ways the melting of Arctic permafrost could create a precipitous increase in greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere and speed up global warming. As the New York Times noted in a recent feature on this foreboding phenomenon, “researchers are worried that the changes in the region may already be outrunning their ability to understand them, or to predict what will happen.”

As complex as this unraveling chain of events may seem, it’s not nature, but politicians–particularly those in Washington–who have made it so. Although they exhale the same amount of carbon dioxide as the average human being, theirs is just as potent and polluting as the gas bubbling out of that lake. The latest example of this can be seen in the Senate’s passage of a bill that requires the president to make a decision within 60 days on the Keystone XL pipeline–which would link Canada’s tar sands to Texas’s oil refineries or, more accurately, the dangerous melting of Arctic permafrost.

The bill is a rather duplicitous effort by Republicans to link an issue the president would prefer not to deal with (Keystone XL) to one that’s close to his heart: payroll tax breaks. As Grist explained, “They have nothing to do with tar sands. But the president wants them, so the House [and now the Senate] is taking them hostage and using them to bargain for the pipeline.”

What does this mean for Tar Sands Action, the campaign that raised the pipeline issue ...

Early Saturday morning, the Senate passed the Temporary Payroll Tax Cut Continuation Act of 2011, which extends a payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits for two more months—while requiring that the Obama administration make a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline within the same time period.  

In November, President Obama delayed the Keystone decision until at least January 2013, while alternate routes around Nebraska were considered. But this bill requires a decision with 60 days. Here’s a summary of the provision:

Sec. 501 Keystone XL Pipeline Permitting Process (no cost)

Within 60 days, the President, acting through the Secretary of State, is required to grant a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline project application unless he determines the pipeline would not serve the national interest. Any permit issued shall require the reconsideration of routing the pipeline within the State of Nebraska. Any permit granted is deemed to satisfy all the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act and any modification required by the Secretary to the construction mitigation and reclamation plan shall not require supplementation of the final environmental impact statement.

So this will require Obama to make a final permitting decision by mid-February, while still allowing for a potential reroute around Nebraska, where the Republican governor there has opposed the project.

Obama said at a press conference this month that “Any effort to try to tie Keystone to the payroll tax cut, I will reject.” That clearly was an empty threat, since he plans to sign this bill on Monday when the House will presumably approve it. In brief remarks at the ...

Fox anchor Martha MacCallum is clinging to the discredited claim that the Keystone XL pipeline would create at least 20,000 jobs. In fact, even the pipeline owner acknowledges that the total jobs created by the pipeline would be far fewer, and an independent report has found that the project could actually destroy more jobs than it creates through higher fuel costs and environmental damage.

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Fox Anchor Pushes Claim That Keystone XL Pipeline Would Create 20,000 Jobs

Fox Anchor Martha MacCallum: 20,000 Jobs Is "The Low-End Estimate." On America's Newsroom, host Martha MacCallum said:

MACCALLUM: The keystone pipeline would be privately-funded. That means no taxpayer cash. It would carry oil from Canada all the way down to the Gulf Coast giving us a massive new resource of energy in this country. 20,000 jobs would be created, that's the low-end estimate. Now Republicans are asking why the president would not support that plan and the jobs that it promises? 

[ ...]

MACCALLUM: So obviously, you know, it would create jobs. It would also add energy resources to this country. So why is he sticking his neck out on this, you know, and going against it? [Fox News, America's Newsroom, 12/8/11]

To see Fox's previous efforts to inflate the number of jobs that might be created by the ...

The Obama Administration’s recent decision to delay the approval process for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline has shifted attention to alternate routes for bringing a glut of tar sands oil in Canada to refineries and ports abroad.

Last week, Canadian firms bought up thousands of miles of existing pipeline in the U.S. Midwest, intending to reverse oil flows southward to Gulf Coast refineries – a “workaround” that would get oil flowing in the right direction, but still not enough to accommodate the volume of crude being produced.

A second – lesser known -- alternative involves piping tar sands oil westward across Canada to Vancouver, where it would reach West Coast refineries by tanker. California, which up until now has remained out of the fray in the fight over tar sands oil, would be key to such a northern pacific route.

“California is the prize,” said Greg Karras, senior scientist with Oakland-based Communities for a Better Environment. “It’s where the [Canadian tar sands] industry is going. They have this gigantic reserve of fundamentally dirtier oil that they want to exploit, sitting above the best refining country in the world.”

The Golden State is well-positioned to take in tar sands oil, a heavier, lower quality crude that requires intensive processing, Karras said. Its oil refineries, in the last few years, have undergone upgrades to process heavier crude, and the state’s ports provide an easy gateway to Asia.

California’s sources of crude from within the state and Alaska are dwindling, leading to increased reliance on imports of heavier forms of crude to meet demand. The state currently imports half of its crude from the Middle East and Latin America, according to Karras, and that number could grow to three-fourths in the next 10 years.

Severin Borenstein of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and co-director of the UC Energy ...

Conventional wisdom has it that the next election will be fought exclusively on the topic of jobs. But President Obama’s announcement last week that he would postpone a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline until after the 2012 election, which may effectively kill the project, makes it clear that other issues will weigh in -- and that, oddly enough, one of them might even be climate change.

The pipeline decision was a true upset.  Everyone -- and I mean everyone who "knew" how these things work -- seemed certain that the president would approve it. The National Journal runs a weekly poll of “energy insiders” -- that is, all the key players in Washington. A month to the day before the Keystone XL postponement, this large cast of characters was “virtually unanimous” in guaranteeing that it would be approved by year’s end.

Transcanada Pipeline, the company that was going to build the 1,700-mile pipeline from the tar-sands fields of Alberta, ...

Fox News figures have been claiming that the Obama administration's decision to delay the Keystone XL pipeline project puts "politics ahead of jobs for the American people." But Fox failed to report on health and environmental concerns raised by the Keystone project; Fox also failed to report that it was unpopular with officials of both parties and residents of the Nebraskan communities where it would have been located.

Obama Admin. Announces Delay Of Keystone XL Pipeline Decision

NYT: "The Obama Administration ... Announced Thursday That It Would Review The Route Of The Disputed Keystone XL Oil Pipeline." From a November 10 New York Times article:

The State Department said in a statement that it was ordering a review of alternate routes to avoid the environmentally sensitive Sand Hills region of Nebraska, which would have been put at risk by a rupture of the 1,700-mile pipeline carrying a heavy form of crude extracted from oil sands formations in Alberta to refineries in Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast. [The New York Times, 11/10/11]

Fox Claims Keystone Decision Was "Political"

Gallagher: Keystone Decision Sacrifices Jobs "In The Name Of Political Expediency." On the November 11 edition of Fox News' America ...

The bursting to life of the Occupy Wall Street movement is the most hopeful development in American politics since Barack Obama was elected president three years ago this month. Obama's election has turned out to be largely a false hope. But that false hope might still be redeemed - and the president motivated to become the reformer he once pledged to be - if the Occupy movement grows into the kind of massive, broad-based, relentless movement no president can afford to ignore.

Already, the Occupy Wall Street website claims that the movement has spread to 100 cities in the United States and inspired sympathy actions in 1,500 cities around the world. Momentum appears to be building in other ways as well. Activists in other progressive movements - environment, labour, anti-poverty and housing - are beginning to collaborate with Occupy. TV commercials are airing on mainstream media outlets, even Fox News, spreading Occupy's message that the US political and economic system is rigged in favour of the top one per cent. And opinion polls are indicating that a sizeable majority of Americans agree with this analysis, though there seems to be less support for the Occupy activists themselves.

The latest big protest targeted the White House itself, when an estimated 12,000 people physically surrounded the home of the US president last Sunday to urge rejection of a ...

A decision on whether to build a pipeline from Canada's oil sands to Texas will be delayed, probably until 2013, to allow time to consider rerouting a section in Nebraska, the State Department announced Thursday.

The requirement for a new environmental impact statement and more public comments means the decision won't be made until after the 2012 elections. Controversy over the pipeline created a headache for the Obama administration, but the delay might not end it.

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline has become a textbook example of an issue that pits environmentalists against energy developers. Environmentalists have made the pipeline a test case of whether President Barack Obama will fight climate change. The pipeline would ensure decades of an increased supply of a form of oil that produces more heat-trapping emissions than conventional oil does because more energy is needed to extract and refine it.

The State Department said the delay was about the environmental impact on Nebraska, not climate change.

Supporters of the pipeline said Obama was missing an opportunity to create construction and manufacturing jobs and that the U.S. needed Canadian oil.

The president said in a statement that he supported the delay "because this permit decision could affect the health and safety of the American people as well as the environment." He added that he'd promote expanded domestic oil production and "a clean energy economy."

The State Department must decide on the permit for the 1,661-mile pipeline because it would cross the U.S.-Canadian border.

Kerri-Ann Jones, an assistant secretary of state, said the new review wouldn't address concerns about increased greenhouse gas emissions from the oil sands. Nor was the pipeline's route over part of the Ogallala aquifer, a vast reservoir beneath the Plains states that's key to regional irrigation, a reason for the delay, she said. The new ...

More than 10,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., last Sunday with a simple goal: Encircle the White House. They succeeded, just weeks after 1,253 people were arrested in a series of protests at the same spot. These thousands, as well as those arrested, were unified in their opposition to the planned Keystone XL pipeline, intended to run from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of Texas. A broad, international coalition against the pipeline has formed since President Barack Obama took office, and now the deadline for its approval or rejection is at hand.

Bill McKibben, founder of the global movement against climate change 350.org, told me: “This has become not only the biggest environmental flash point in many, many years, but maybe the issue in recent times in the Obama administration when he’s been most directly confronted by people in the street. In this case, people willing, hopeful, almost dying for him to be the Barack Obama of 2008.”

The president, until recently, simply hid behind the legal argument that, as the pipeline was coming from Canada, the proper forum for the decision fell with the U.S. Department of State and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That was until a key Clinton insider was exposed as a lobbyist for the company trying to build Keystone XL, TransCanada. The environmental group Friends of the Earth has exposed a series of connections between the Clinton political machine and Keystone XL. Paul Elliott is TransCanada’s top lobbyist in Washington on the pipeline. He was a high-level campaign staffer on Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House in 2008, and worked as well on Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1996 and Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign in 2000.

Friends of the Earth (FOE) received emails following a Freedom of Information Act request, documenting ...

On Sunday, November 6, thousands of people encircled the White House as part of the ongoing effort to press US President Barack Obama to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. If the nearly 1,700-mile pipeline were to be built, it would run from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, through the heartland of the US, all the way to the Texas coast on the Gulf of Mexico. Should the project go ahead, Obama will have made one of the single most disastrous decisions of his presidency concerning climate change and the very future of our planet.

In August, some 1,250 people were arrested in front of the White House while protesting against Keystone. One of them was James Hanson, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has been studying for decades the impact of fossil fuels on the environment. Hanson argues that the pipeline would sound the death knell for the world’s climate. Oil from the tar sands of Alberta is the dirtiest in the world, and its extraction is already causing problems. If Keystone is built, there will be increased efforts to expand oil production there, making a bad situation much worse.

Opposition to the pipeline throughout the US is growing in intensity – from the activists arrested in Washington, DC, to the governor of Nebraska, who is seeking state legislation to stop the pipeline from running through America’s biggest aquifer, to members of the US Congress, who have petitioned Obama about the project. The outpouring of opposition surprised the oil industry, its highly paid lobbyists, and especially TransCanada Corporation, which would build the pipeline. So, like many huge corporations facing public criticism, they and their allies are responding with a dubious new marketing effort.

"Follow Project Syndicate on Facebook or Twitter. For more from Jody ...

On a sunny, cloudless day, thousands of protesters encircled the White House Sunday in a show of numbers intended to persuade President Barack Obama to stop a proposed oil pipeline from being built.

The Keystone XL pipeline would stretch 1,661 miles from Alberta, Canada, to Texas' Gulf Coast and requires a presidential permit because it crosses the U.S.-Canada border. Environmentalists say the project is a key test of Obama's green credentials.

Wearing orange vests with the message "Stop the pipeline #noXL," protesters first heard from prominent environmentalists, a preacher, a Nobel laureate, and a movie star, and then gathered to hold hands in a ring that stretched in front of the White House and several blocks down side streets before joining up behind the White House lawn. Organizers estimated that the crowd exceeded 10,000 people.

"You can't occupy the White House, but you can surround it," said environmentalist and protest organizer Bill McKibben in a reference to the Occupy Wall Street movements spreading around the country.

With the failure of climate change legislation on Capitol Hill last year, environmentalists have made stopping the Keystone pipeline their major focus in recent months. They want the president to reject the pipeline because of the risks of spills and what they say is the likely ...

In an explosive story posted online in the Washington Post this afternoon, pipeline company TransCanada admitted that it has grossly misrepresented the number of jobs the controversial Keystone XL project would create.

The 20,000 jobs involved in pipeline construction? A fabrication supported by misleading mathematics. The 250,000 indirect jobs? A number based on one oil-industry funded study that counted jobs for “dancers, choreographers and speech therapists,” according to the Post.

“Thank heavens some reporter actually questioned this jobs number, instead of just repeating it,” said Bill McKibben, who is leading a major protest against Keystone XL this Sunday at the White House. “The only study not paid for by the pipeline company makes clear that there are no net jobs from this pipeline because it will kill as many as it will create.”

Lawmakers, Republican presidential candidates, and the media have repeated TransCanada’s claim that the Keystone XL project would create 20,000 new jobs if approved–13,000 from direct construction and 7,000 from supply manufacturers. The Post shows both numbers to be inaccurate, quoting TransCanada chief executive Russ Girling: “Girling said Friday that the 13,000 figure was ‘one person, one year,’ meaning that if the construction jobs lasted two years, the number of people employed would be only 6,500.”

The manufacturing jobs are also misleading. The company has already purchased $1.9 billion on pipe and other materials. Of the money still to be spent, the Post and Cornell report both concluded that the majority would go overseas. At least $1.7 billion worth of steel will be purchased from a Russian-owned mill in Canada. TransCanada claims the remainder will be produced in Arkansas. The ...

Proponents of the dangerous Keystone XL project claim that construction of the 1700-mile tar sands pipeline from Canada to Texas will create tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of much-needed jobs across the country. “Jobs for the 99%!” proclaims a website funded by the American Petroleum Institute (API). The Wall Street Journal promises “13,000 union jobs.” On the House floor today, Rep. Alan Nunnelee (R-MS) claimed the pipeline will create “20,000 high-wage construction jobs.” Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) says the pipeline will “create 14,600 jobs in Illinois.” The US Chamber of Commerce claims the project will create “more than 250,000 permanent jobs.” “U.S. jobs supported by Canadian oil sands development could grow from 21,000 jobs today to 465,000 jobs by 2035,” said API Executive Vice President Marty Durbin.

Accepting these figures, reporters like CNN’s Steve Hargreaves, NPR’s Ari Shapiro, and the New York Times’ Kirk Johnson have portrayed the battle over the tar sands pipeline as one of ...

A lot has happened since 65 people (including myself) were arrested in front of the White House on August 20th to protest a planned 1,400-mile pipeline carrying tar sands oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. For starters, over a thousand more people from across the country were arrested in the subsequent two weeks, including big names like NASA climate scientist James Hansen, author Naomi Klein and actress Daryl Hannah. Support from high places soon followed, from the New York Times editorial page to nine Nobel Peace Laureates.

Momentum kept rolling throughout September with protests popping up at Obama campaign events and an impressive day of civil disobedience where over