Bill McKibben, an environmentalist author and professor, took to the op-ed page of today's Washington Post to organize a national campaign of "civil disobedience" starting this weekend against TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline, the $7 billion project to bring crude oil from the Alberta oil sands to the United States for refining. In these days of tweeted protests and flash mobs, it seems a little quaint to be relying on the newspapers to gin up activism, but it's not really funny. McKibben starts his pitch by invoking the Seattle WTO chaos of 1999, a terrible history to cite so soon after the British riots, and the upcoming protests, if effective, would lead to greater unemployment and U.S. reliance on foreign oil.

First, Seattle. In the piece, "A watershed moment for Obama on climate change," McKibben writes:

Already, more than a thousand people have signed up to be arrested over two weeks beginning Aug. 20 — the biggest display of civil disobedience in the environmental movement in decades and one of the largest nonviolent direct actions since the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle back before Sept. 11.

Your correspondent was at the WTO meeting in Seattle as a staff member for the governor of North Dakota and recalls at most a day of "nonviolent direct action." After that, the illegal street blockages turned into physicial intimidation of WTO delegates, which gave way to running battles with the police, clouds of pepper spray, widespread property crime and the breakdown in civil order. They weren't demonstrations, they were riots, and indeed the left explicitly memorializes their violence, e.g. the 2007 movie, "Battle in Seattle." One finds it disturbing that McKibben  would use that collapse of public safety in Seattle today as implicit rallying cry, so soon after the riots, fires and looting in Britain.

Second, economics. McKibben's movement seeks to prevent any use of the Canadian oil sands in the United States in the ultimate hope of shutting down Alberta's production and resulting carbon dioxide. But their victory would be send the Canadian oil overseas, while the United States had to turn to other, less reliable regions of the world to meet our petroleum demands. The Hill last week reported on an interview in Platts with TransCanada CEO Russ Girling:

“Make no mistake, that resource is getting developed. It's the single-greatest driver of the Canadian economy. If the US doesn't want the oil, then somebody else will,” he told the energy news service.

Girling also said: “It's a question of whether you want Canadian oil or you want oil from other places around the globe that don't necessarily share the values which would include environmental protection, protecting rights of workers and other things that Canada strongly stands behind.”

McKibben is trying to put pressure on President Obama to block the pipeline project by stoking fears about global warming, but the President today seems more focused on jobs. And in that respect, the pipeline is a winner. As Thomas Pyle of the Institute for Energy Research recently explained in US News, "Approving Keystone XL Pipeline Would Create Jobs and Lower Gas Prices":

In addition to reducing the United States' reliance on imported oil from hostile foreign countries and volatile regions, the project is expected to create 20,000 direct high-wage jobs. Furthermore, the states along the pipeline route are anticipated to receive an additional $5.2 billion in property tax revenue and thousands of indirect jobs relating to the project. [Read more about unemployment.]

McKibben is playing with fire in invoking the Seattle WTO protests, and his proposed policies would prevent the creation of high-paying jobs while leaving the United States less energy secure. It's an irresponsible pitch all the way around.

In April, Business Roundtable released a briefing paper that called for State Department approval the Keystone XL project.