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The Activist Beat with Rose Aguilar, host of Your Call on KALW in San Francisco is a weekly roundup of progressive activism that the mainstream media ignores, undercovers, or misrepresents.

Environmental activists are ramping up their campaigns against the Keystone XL oil pipeline. This project has not received the attention it deserves.

It’s a $13 billion pipeline that would run almost 2,000 miles from the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, all the way down to oil refineries in Texas. Over 900,000 barrels of tar sands a day would travel through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Think about what a project of this scope would entail. Think about the damage it would do to the environment. John Stansbury, an environmental engineer at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, says a rupture could release seven million gallons of oil. He says a slow leak in a remote part of Montana, for example, could go undetected for weeks.

A recent New York Times editorial points out that the pipeline would have no effect on oil prices. This crucial piece of information is not in most articles. “On the merits – economic and environmental – and in terms of future energy policy, this is the wrong pipeline for the wrong oil.”

A few weeks ago, more than 100 environmental activists from across the country occupied the office of Montana Democratic Governor Brian Schweitzer to demand he rescind his support for the pipeline. He met with the activists for nearly 20 minutes, but refused their demands.

A number of environmentalists, including Bill McKibben and Maude Barlow, are asking concerned citizens to take part in a civil disobedience action in Washington DC on August 3.

The invitation says, “To call this project a horror is serious understatement. The tar sands have wrecked huge parts of Alberta, disrupting ways of life in indigenous communities—First Nations communities in Canada, and tribes along the pipeline route in the U.S. have demanded the destruction cease. The pipeline crosses crucial areas like the Oglalla Aquifer where a spill would be disastrous—and though the pipeline companies insist they are using ‘state of the art’ technologies that should leak only once every seven years, the precursor pipeline and its pumping stations have leaked a dozen times in the past year. These local impacts alone would be cause enough to block such a plan.”

McKibben, Barlow, and the others say this won’t be a one-day action. They’ll stay for weeks – as long as it takes for the administration to halt the plan.

Because the pipeline would cross the US border, it has to be approved by the State Department. That means Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has the power to derail the project, but her former deputy campaign manager Paul Elliot is now a lobbyist for TransCanada, the sole owner of the pipeline.

Therein lies the problem. Big oil and lobbyists are clearly calling the shots. There’s no other explanation. The pipeline makes no sense. This will do nothing to minimize this country’s addiction to oil or reduce greenhouse gases. The administration’s plan for an “energy independent future” is nothing more than empty rhetoric.

We all need to take action on this before it’s too late. The State Department is planning to issue its final environmental review next month. The EPA has told the State Department that both of its drafts thus far have been inadequate. The State Department is also expected to have public meetings in the six states that will be affected. They are still being planned. A final decision must be made by November 1.

Spread the word. Once the pipeline is approved, there’s no going back.