President Obama's aides are "listening" to green fury over the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline, making him uniquely susceptible to the public pressure set for exertion at a Nov. 6 White House demonstration, Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said yesterday.

Addressing fellow activists on the upcoming XL protest, where organizers plan to carry only placards displaying pro-environmentalist remarks Obama made during his 2008 campaign, Brune said the united front among conservation groups over the Canada-to-U.S. pipeline is making an impression on the White House.

"The White House is listening," Brune said. "We know it's a controversy within the White House. We need to make sure the president stands up and makes the right decision."

The 1,700-mile pipeline would nearly double U.S. imports of Canadian oil-sands crude if approved, securing a significant new energy supply from a stable neighbor -- albeit a supply that also brings a higher emissions footprint than conventional fuel and a risk-management system often slammed by Canadian conservationists.

The Canadian government, however, strongly defends its work to improve environmental monitoring of oil-sands development and has thrown its weight behind the XL link's approval. Its support for the pipeline is echoed by oil industry and business interests as well as congressional GOP leaders and a sizable number of more conservative Democratic lawmakers.

The unification of major environmental groups around stopping Keystone XL as a symbolic step toward slowing oil-sands operations reached a peak during a two-week August protest (Greenwire, Sept. 23). The political heat has steadily risen ever since as protesters appear during Obama's public events, with another band of pipeline critics popping up during a presidential visit to San Francisco yesterday.

"One of the beautiful things is to see everyone working together really easily and powerfully on this issue," climate activist and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, who first organized the summertime pipeline sit-in, told fellow greens yesterday.

The Nov. 6 protest, he said, is aimed at "preserving as best we can the chance for [Obama] to do the right thing" and block the pipeline's construction. Anti-XL advocates also began a print and online ad campaign this week that stokes charges of bias within the State Department, which holds decisionmaking power over the border-crossing permit for the pipeline (E&E Daily, Oct. 3).

Choosing placards with the president's words, McKibben added, amounts to "hoping in a sense that we can liberate that 2008 Barack Obama, because sometimes it feels like there's a stunt double who's taken over."