As they prepare for a high-profile Sunday protest against the Keystone XL pipeline, environmentalists are growing ever more emboldened -- a somewhat unfamiliar state for a movement more often found playing the underdog against better-funded industry foes.

Since critics of the project staged their first White House sit-in this summer, the $7 billion Canada-to-United States oil link has crescendoed to a peak in national attention and political import. Comparing the pipeline battle to the fight over a climate bill that they lost last year, which petered out over the course of many messy months, greens readily acknowledged that Keystone XL represents a significant rebound.

"Cap and trade was very much an abstract, intellectual fight" that was "very difficult to make concrete to people," Sierra Club oil campaign director Michael Marx said today. "Keystone XL not only happens a year and a half after losing that fight, so it's a different context, but it's also concrete, it's also emotional. You can argue from your head, but you're going to win with your heart."

After months of throwing jabs at the Obama administration for a State Department review of the 1,700-mile pipeline that they saw as insufficient and biased, Keystone XL opponents got a major boost this week when the president told a Nebraska TV station that he would personally engage ahead of a final decision (E&E Daily, Nov. 2).

Slowly but surely, conservationists are seeing their core political contention -- that approving the pipeline would cost Obama grass-roots support he needs to win re-election -- gain credibility in the right places.

Climate activist and 350.org founder Bill McKibben, a lead organizer of the anti-XL forces, predicted today that Alberta-based TransCanada Corp. ultimately would not build its pipeline from the Canadian oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries.

"A year ago it was pretty clear they might get away with it," he added after forecasting victory.

Even if TransCanada does win approval from Obama, environmentalists have no plans to give up their push to block XL. Energy Action Coalition co-director Maura Cowley, whose group helps organize younger voters, vowed that "we're going to continue to push him at his fundraisers" and stage state level actions to ensure that "every single mile" the company must build in America faces opposition.

By contrast, many environmentalists acknowledged that the fizzling of the cap-and-trade bill left them in a defensive posture that only intensified after Republicans made major gains in the 2010 election. For groups that have seen members rally around the pipeline as a symbolic target, Keystone XL may be the gift that keeps on giving no matter how the current chapter in the clash concludes.

At the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), members are pressing "to keep the heat on right up until the end," spokesman Tony Iallonardo said in an interview. "The entire [group] has increasingly turned its attention to this signature issue, out of all the environmental and energy issues we face around the country."

Just as the arguments of pipeline skeptics have changed little over the past year, the third that Keystone XL has spent under State Department review, the selling points offered by project proponents remain essentially unchanged. Greens hope to make the XL line a symbol of Obama's commitment to steer the nation away from oil, especially the emissions-heavy oil-sands crude that it would ship; industry interests and unions note that given the inescapable fact that U.S. oil demand will remain high, the president should boost trade with a stable ally in Canada while creating jobs.

"If you're simply against the use of oil and natural gas going forward, I guess that explains why you're going to be against this pipeline," American Petroleum Institute Vice President Marty Durbin told reporters yesterday. "If you look at the reality, which is that we're going to continue to need oil and natural gas for decades to come ... we've got to not only deal with the environmental issues of whatever a comprehensive energy policy is, but we've got to have the energy security, economic growth and job creation that the Keystone XL pipeline will bring."

Republican lawmakers and Canadian energy players have long warned that if the XL line is not built, oil-sands companies would seek alternate paths to export their fuel that could benefit the Chinese and other Asian markets (Greenwire, Sept. 13). Conservation groups slam that argument as an empty threat given the high hurdles that already exist to shipping schemes that would equal Keystone XL's eventual capacity of up to 800,000 barrels per day.

But in Canada, oil executives are already preparing what Suncor Energy Inc. CEO Rick George yesterday called "Plan B's" in case of an XL rejection.

"This industry is very inventive," George told investors, adding that if oil-sands fuel stays priced at a large differential from more conventional products, "we'll get the crude to move around one way or the other. ... There is and there will be a Plan B in case this does not go forward."

Protest tick-tock

McKibben declined to estimate the size of turnout for Sunday's protest, where participants plan to attempt a human circle around the White House while carrying signs printed with pro-environment promises Obama made during the 2008 presidential campaign.

More than 1,200 demonstrators were arrested during anti-Keystone XL events in August and September, however, suggesting that a return stint by thousands of activists would not be surprising. "Everybody's phone banking, everybody's working," McKibben added, with "none of the occasional internecine rivalries."

The group MoveOn.org is among those urging its members to attend the rally.

TV actress Gloria Reuben, a dual U.S.-Canada citizen, is set to lead protesters in the singing of both nations' national anthems before the afternoon event begins.

Former federal scientist turned liberal climate icon James Hansen -- whose quip that Keystone XL would mean "game over" for the environment has drawn no shortage of ardor and ire -- plans to speak, along with Nobel Prize and Medal of Honor recipients opposed to the pipeline, according to protest organizers.