Environmentalists yesterday launched a massive grass-roots lobbying campaign aimed at dissuading the Senate from taking up the Keystone XL pipeline this week even as it remained unclear whether the GOP's push for an up-or-down vote on the Canada-to-U.S. oil link would pay off in the upper chamber.

Top green groups' push to send a half-million anti-pipeline emails to senators was timed to an effort by Sens. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and John Hoeven (R-N.D.) to attach their measure overriding the White House rejection of Keystone XL to a pending transportation bill.

Before the conservationists celebrated hitting their 500,000-message mark less than one-third of the way into their 24-hour project, 15 climate scientists released a letter urging the Senate to reject the GOP pipeline plan.

"When other huge oil fields or coal mines were opened in the past, we knew much less about the damage that the carbon they contained would do to the earth's climate and its oceans," wrote the group of climatologists, including James Hansen of NASA and Michael Mann of the University of Virginia, who is facing an inquiry by that state's Republican attorney general (Greenwire, Jan. 13).

"Now that we do know, it's imperative that we move quickly to alternate forms of energy -- and that we leave the tar sands in the ground."

That broad-brush case against the $7 billion pipeline, focusing on its long-term potential to divert attention and investment from clean energy, has helped align many senior Democrats with greens and other liberal advocates looking to ensure the XL link stays dead. But with his House-side counterparts expecting to see the 1,700-mile project corral conservative votes for their transportation bill, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is likely to push hard for debate on the Lugar-Hoeven plan before the Senate version can come to a final vote.

Hoeven declined to predict late yesterday that his bill would win consideration as an amendment, saying only that senators "are talking about it" and "we'll see."

The politics of the pipeline, which would nearly double U.S. import capacity of Canadian oil sands crude if approved, do not strictly line up along partisan lines. Red-state Democrats such as Jon Tester of Montana and Kent Conrad of North Dakota are openly supportive of greenlighting the project, yet they ultimately could weigh the risks of fighting the White House on Keystone XL as greater than those of aggravating the oil industry that has staked considerable political capital on getting it approved.

On the other side of the aisle, three Republican senators have declined to publicly endorse their party's pipeline plan: Mark Kirk of Illinois, and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine.

Collins said yesterday that while she is "for the pipeline," she remains concerned that the GOP bill "is going to make permanent changes in the process" for approving cross-border projects. The XL line would run from the Alberta oil sands across six states to Gulf Coast refineries.

Trade controversy

In recent days Democrats have turned to a trade-focused case against the pipeline, arguing that the prospect for some of its Canadian and domestic crude to enter the export markets would rob U.S. consumers of any benefit from its emissions-intensive fuel.

Several House Democrats are pitching amendments on this front during debate on their chamber's transportation bill, including a general export ban for products sent through Keystone XL and another focused on the origin of steel used for the project.

Hoeven acknowledged yesterday that hashing out a compromise with upper-chamber Democrats on limiting exports from the pipeline was under consideration but suggested that a deal was out of reach. "We haven't been able to come with something on the export ban" idea, he said.

Talks on the export issue are somewhat complicated by the refining industry's strong support for the pipeline as a generator of what they note are manufacturing jobs turning crude oil into diesel and other sellable products (Greenwire, Jan. 31).

"The best way to reduce gasoline exports is to get our economy speeding ahead, and the best way to do that is to get people to work on Keystone XL and other private-sector investments," Lugar senior adviser Neil Brown said via email.

A final word on the status of the Keystone XL amendment could come as soon as today from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-Nev.) office. Meanwhile, one member of Reid's caucus vowed to mobilize a push of his own to bring down the GOP proposal. "I'll do everything I can to defeat it," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said yesterday.