From the beginning, opposition to the 1,700-mile Keystone tar sands oil pipeline, and to tar sands mining itself, has crossed ideological and societal lines that don't usually get crossed. First Nations indigenous people in Canada and the United States joined not just with the usual suspects in the environmental advocacy community but also with farmers and businesspeople in Nebraska and elsewhere to defeat the project that President Obama has put on hold. That untraditional alliance may well be why the Natural Resources Defense Council blew past its Valentine's Day goal of half-a-million messages urging senators not to resurrect the pipeline. By the end of the day, more than 800,000 messages had been sent.

The Senate matters because it will soon take up the transportation and energy bill passed by the House of Representatives Thursday. That bill—brimming with GOP-sponsored, roads-only backwardness, including the go-ahead for oil drilling in protected Arctic wilderness—contains a provision that would take decision-making power for the pipeline away from Obama and give it to Congress.

How much impact the outpouring of anti-Keystone Valentines will have on the senators can only be speculated about for the moment. But what's clear is that hauling out the old hippie tree-hugger argument won't cut it for the pipeline's propagandists. They seem likely to be stuck with the debunked 20,000 jobs argument:



“I could stand on the street corner and jump up and down as loud as I can. But the environmental message would only go so far,” Ian Davis, a Texas-based Sierra Club activist, told Roll Call. The environmental group that typically draws Democratic-leaning liberals and is often at odds with conservative causes is coordinating with unusual allies in the Keystone fight. They include Debra Medina, a tea partyer who challenged Texas Gov. Rick Perry in the 2010 Republican primary and won 19 percent of the vote. “We’ve been doing the environmental bit for years here, and nothing’s caught fire. But what [Medina] is doing has created momentum,” Davis said.

But deals with the devil eventually burn participants. The single-issue alliance around the pipeline could be a short-term blessing and a long-term curse. That's because, although the growing local tea party opposition expresses worries about spills and other environmental factors, the key concern is the use of eminent domain for the advantage of a private company, a foreign private company, Texas landowner David Daniel points out. He had first agreed to lease land to TransCanada, the pipeline's builder, and then discovered he had been misled about safety issues. He consequently started Stop Tarsands Oil Pipelines and works with Medina's group, We Texans.

The problem with signing onto the extreme version of opposition to eminent domain is that it also can be used to squelch renewable energy projects and, among other things, the routing of transmission lines tying those projects to the electrical grid. For now, however, such concerns are being submerged to the immediate needs of getting Washington to give a permanent "no" to Keystone.

While the Texas coalition is starting to look more like the broad-based and successful Nebraska coalition, in a state still driven by big oil, whose lobbyists have hammered Washington over Keystone for months, there is a hard, hard slog ahead against a cash-fueled opponent. John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, the state's two Republican senators, both support the pipeline. And Hutchison is a leading co-sponsor of the legislation that would turn approval of Keystone over to Congress. A vote could come as early as the first week of March.