Activists are stepping up protests this week against the Keystone XL pipeline, signaling that the Canadian oil sands remain the central focus of environmentalist arguments on climate change.

TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline "has always really been about climate change, and everyone knows it. That's why people came out in the streets," said Bill McKibben, founder of climate advocacy group 350.org, in an interview.

Production in the Canadian oil sands emits more greenhouse gases than traditional drilling, although the degree of the emissions increase is a matter of debate.

McKibben said he would be willing to go to jail in the future and possibly tie himself to construction equipment if the Obama administration ultimately approves the $5.3 billion northern half of the oil conduit, which would stretch from Alberta, Canada, to Steele City, Neb.

TransCanada has begun construction on a southern segment of the pipeline, the Gulf Coast Project, running from Oklahoma to Texas not requiring approval from the State Department.

"If we need to use peaceful nonviolent resistance, I suppose we will," said McKibben. "It seems crazy that we would have to."

McKibben led protests at the White House yesterday involving more than 3,000 activists encircling the building and carrying a 500-foot pipeline before a rally in nearby Freedom Plaza. In a diversion from last year, there were no arrests.

They will not be the last White House protests. Daniel Kessler, a spokesman for 350.org, said Friday that a larger protest event will be held in February at the White House -- with likely arrests -- just as Keystone XL faces a final decision from the Obama administration.

Before the election, some environmental groups working with 350.org faced limits on public protests because of their nonprofit status, making it more difficult at the time to hold White House events, according to Kessler.

Protests in Texas, Mo., Utah and the U.K.

This week, the group Tar Sands Blockade also plans protests against oil sands more broadly in Nacogdoches, Texas; St. Louis; Salt Lake City; and London.

In a response, TransCanada released a statement saying, "By trying to stop Keystone XL, these professional activists are taking money away from communities and businesses that benefit from construction and property taxes. They are denying hard-working Americans the chance to use their skills."

With the presidential election out of the way, experts are divided on whether the activism matters much with President Obama's decisionmaking and the pipeline's timeline.

Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, said that if the administration had to pick a second issue outside of the federal budget to focus on, it would likely be immigration, not energy. The immigration issue plays more strongly to constituencies who determined the election's outcome, he said.

"If they [the Obama administration] are thinking about the midterm elections, I think they will still be pretty confident" if they approve the pipeline and anger environmentalists, Zelizer said.

Every signal so far indicates that Obama will behave largely the same on energy in his second term, said Kenneth Green, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.

That means he "will find a way to punt a decision on this again," he said about Keystone XL and Obama. The protests will only make that more likely, he said.

Polling provides a mixed message for Obama. Last week, pollster John Zogby wrote that Hurricane Sandy had shifted public opinion on climate change. He said 48 percent of independent voters select renewable energy as an energy priority now, compared to 12 percent for Keystone XL.

But earlier polls tell an entirely different story. A Washington Post/ABC News poll this summer found that 62 percent of registered voters said the U.S. government should approve the pipeline. Similarly, Gallup found in May that 57 percent of adults nationwide -- and 51 percent of independents -- favored the oil sands line

It has long been expected that a decision on Keystone XL's northern half would come in the first quarter of 2013. Obama originally punted a decision last year on the northern segment, saying that additional analysis needed to be conducted of a pipeline route in Nebraska, where environmentalists have said that an oil spill could taint the state's ecologically sensitive Sand Hills and Ogallala Aquifer (ClimateWire, Nov. 11, 2011).

Financial experts see pipeline being approved

Since then, TransCanada has offered two reroute plans for the pipeline in the state. It has not resolved environmental complaints, but the plans could be enough to resolve concerns of the state's Republican governor, Dave Heineman, who has the final say on an environmental assessment of the reroute from Nebraska's Department of Environmental Quality, analysts say. That review will be incorporated into the State Department's review process.

Chad Friess, an analyst at UBS Securities Canada, echoed TransCanada in saying that the pipeline would be approved in 2013 after the Nebraska situation is resolved by the end of the year. Similarly, Moody's Investors Service released an oil analysis last week stating that the pipeline likely would be approved.

But Moody's added that approval might not be quick because of prolonged permitting, a dynamic that "risks missing the very oil price boom that inspired Keystone XL in the first place."

Before Keystone XL can go ahead, the State Department is expected to release a draft environmental impact statement, as well as a national interest determination that could take time. It is also possible that the process in Nebraska might not be completed by the end of the year.

In the interim, some industry representatives charge that activist focus on climate change is misplaced, considering that Canada accounts for about 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with the oil sands region constituting a fraction of that.

"Why aren't they spending more time on coal or natural gas? Our emissions are a drop in the bucket," said one Canadian oil representative last week about protesters. Even if the Canadian industry more than doubles production as expected by 2030, Canada will still be a small emissions player, the representative said.

Asked about that, McKibben said that he -- and other advocates -- are spending time in protests all around the world protesting fossil fuels and their subsidies. McKibben is spending the next few weeks on a 21-city bus tour broadly focused on fossil fuels, and not just oil sands. "We want to do to the fossil fuel industry what people did to the tobacco industry," he said.

He added he has no immediate plans to protest in Canada against additional proposed oil sands pipelines there, because the environmental movement in the country is already strong.

Keystone XL is a focus in the U.S. movement because it is a test case with a clear outcome for Obama's entire climate agenda, he said. "Barack Obama has poured a lot of carbon into the atmosphere," he said. "He needs to demonstrate that he can, at some time or another, actually stand up to the fossil fuel industry."