The symbolic nature of the issue makes the spending involved all the more striking. Keystone millions: Who benefits?

Keystone XL isn’t pumping oil yet — and may never be — but in the Washington, D.C., political industry it’s already a gusher.

The TransCanada pipeline has been stuck in limbo for over half a decade now; last month, President Barack Obama again postponed a decision on the project, likely until after the 2014 elections.


Yet in just a few years, the political debate over Keystone has exploded into an entire sector of the Washington influence economy. Funded by multibillion-dollar oil companies, labor unions and ultrarich environmentalists, the fight has filtered into every crack and crevice of the nation’s capital — all for a project some advocates on both sides privately concede wouldn’t be an environmental or economic game-changer.

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From advertisements blanketing Metro stops near Capitol Hill and the State Department to TV commercials saturating the Sunday morning talk shows, to print and digital promos in this publication and others, Keystone has been virtually omnipresent. Well over 100 lobbyists have registered to lobby the issue. Top consultants from Obama’s campaigns have signed up on both sides. The pro-pipeline American Petroleum Institute holds regular war councils to plot strategy and has shelled out millions promoting the project; just this week, API spent more than $50,000 on radio ads promoting Keystone in states with competitive 2014 Senate races.

Longtime Beltway operators say the scope of the Keystone battle has grown to an astonishing scale — perhaps the largest ever for a standoff over energy and the environment, and at the very least one that rivals the years-long and decades-old fights over acid rain and Arctic drilling.

The largely symbolic nature of the Keystone issue makes the titanic spending involved all the more striking. Political observers and even some industry officials and activists question all the activity surrounding a project that — according to many estimates — wouldn’t create more than a few dozen permanent jobs or exacerbate climate change in a significant way.

That means this whole advocacy campaign is probably just a small down payment on what the country will see when the harder-edged energy issues — strict new power plant regulations expected from the administration this summer, or a renewed legislative debate on climate change — come into focus in the months and years ahead.

( Also on POLITICO: Little hope for Keystone vote)

“All of this stuff has been through an arms race,” said Carl Pope, the former Sierra Club chief who has had a front-row seat for decades of environmental fights. “The biggest battles we fought used a fraction of the resources.”

For all the money flowing into the Keystone issue, said David Tamasi, a senior vice president at Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communications, there is “little space for new information or arguments” in the debate at this point.

“It’s become almost easier for the president and project proponents to fall into a comfortable partisan crouch, because the issue has been so defined along political fault lines,” said Tamasi, whose firm worked for a time on Keystone for the government of Alberta.

It’s difficult to pin down the exact cost of the Keystone saga, since nonprofit and private-sector advocacy groups don’t have to disclose their revenue and spending like conventional political campaigns. But the sum is clearly well into the tens of millions of dollars — and because the pipeline project remains frozen in place, that makes almost everyone involved in the political debate a winner.

( PHOTOS: 'Cowboys and Indians' Keystone XL protest)

Meet the ‘grass roots’

Besides bankrolling TV ads and hiring an army of lobbyists, advocates on both sides of the Keystone fight have spent millions mobilizing the public — or at least creating the illusion of mass mobilization.

On the pro-pipeline side, that has meant setting up an array of self-described “grass-roots” groups with generic-sounding names — the API-funded entities Energy Nation and Energy Citizens, for example — to build public support through social media, advertising and petitions.

Nebraskans for Jobs & Energy Independence is another such entity. It was set up ostensibly as a vehicle for native Nebraskans to channel their support for building the pipeline. But the group’s ties to national organizations lobbying for the pipeline’s approval are extensive.

It was founded by a local labor official with LIUNA, the national builders union that supports Keystone; Michael Whatley, a lobbyist and executive for the Texas-based Consumer Energy Alliance, sits on the organizing group’s board. NJEI once listed a TransCanada official as an officer in its tax documents (that official is no longer affiliated with the group).

( Also on POLITICO: The green case against Keystone)

Barry Rubin, a former head of the Nebraska Democratic Party and the pro-pipeline group’s vice chairman, was candid about its role.

“Are we a front group for building the pipeline? Sure, proud to be,” he said in an interview.

Not all the front groups, shell entities and opulently funded “grass-roots” organizations are quite so blunt about their advocacy. API, the industry group with virtually unlimited resources, has established a slew of organizations aimed at drumming up Keystone support; API’s president, Jack Gerard, was inspired by the Obama campaign’s savvy Web and voter-mobilization operations, according to an aide.

API boasts a more than 23 million-person “grass-roots network” made up of individuals who have spoken or written on behalf of the industry, though it’s unclear how API arrived at that number. Groups such as Energy Citizens promote API talking points on their websites and tout testimonials that support the industry’s views on oil and gas. (Obama “needs to get off his hands on this issue,” wrote Joe B. from Colorado.)

Among the groups funded by API is Vets4Energy, which API says has 1,400 members (citing privacy concerns, the group declined to provide a member list) and has recruited veterans to press for the pipeline on Capitol Hill. Another is Oil Sands Fact Check, a group that aggressively rebuts assertions that the pipeline would cause environmental devastation. The latter group, run through the firm FTI Consulting, often sends representatives to anti-Keystone protests and emails reporters to highlight low attendance numbers.

Vets4Energy organized a recent pro-Keystone news conference with Nebraska Rep. Lee Terry and North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven. Both Republicans demanded action on the pipeline in front of a small handful of reporters — and a throng of Keystone-backing veterans associated with the group.

“The greatest generation conquered Nazi Germany in a little over four years,” Terry said. “But here we are, five years after the permits have been filed to build the Keystone XL pipeline, and we’re still waiting.”

Keystone foes with smaller budgets have nevertheless established national operations of comparable sophistication, often hiring brand-name Democratic firms to help. They have coordinated activities between national groups like the League of Conservation Voters and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and activist organizations like environmentalist Bill McKibben’s 350.org — often with the help of nationally known political consultants. McKibben’s group has paid thousands of dollars to the liberal PR firm FitzGibbon Media to amplify its message.

On its website, powerhouse Democratic firm Global Strategy Group touts its role in creating an umbrella coalition of anti-Keystone interests, dubbed All Risk, No Reward, which has held events and run television ads opposing the pipeline.

Acknowledging that “public opinion on [Keystone] is very mixed,” GSG’s online case study states: “GSG organized opportunities for experts to speak directly with top reporters and media outlets, planned and executed several high profile events, and earned top flight coverage in the nation’s most prominent print and broadcast media.”

Lower-profile groups have played an influential role in the pipeline fight: The progressive Bold Nebraska worked with state landowners to challenge Keystone’s intended route, while an eclectic collection of environmental and tribal groups calling itself the Cowboy and Indian Alliance gathered for an April protest on the National Mall — complete with teepees and horses.

It’s all come a long way since 2008, when McKibben and a band of activists based at Vermont’s Middlebury College started 350.org to advocate for action on climate change. Since then, McKibben has helped organize protests against the pipeline in front of the White House that have resulted in well over 1,000 arrests.

“Everyone is working together in a pretty unprecedented way,” McKibben said, calling the collaboration across diverse groups “the greatest joy of the whole fight, since we’re badly going to need unity for all the battles against the fossil fuel industry to come.”

The consulting ‘arms race’

With the fight over Keystone now more than five years old — TransCanada filed its first permit application in 2008 — it’s almost harder to find a consultant or lobbyist in Washington who hasn’t been involved than one who is.

Since 2009, advocates directly employed by TransCanada have reported $6.7 million in lobbying expenses related to Keystone. (A TransCanada official said after the publication of this story that $3.8 million was spent exclusively on the pipeline, as opposed to the broader TransCanada agenda.) A second Canadian entity, the In Situ Oil Sands Alliance, has reported spending $1.7 million.

But those sums only begin to approach the total cost of the Keystone lobbying campaign, since many interest groups — including companies such as Shell and Exxon, and umbrella organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — disclose massive, unitemized lobbying expenses, with Keystone just one of the many issues their advocates address.

API, for example, has disclosed spending $22 million in lobbying reports that include Keystone as a target issue. For the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, that figure was nearly $15 million.

Pipeline opponents have spent a fraction of those totals, but the expenses still run into the millions: The League of Conservation Voters, League of Women Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council and National Wildlife Federation spent a combined $3.1 million on lobbying campaigns that touched on Keystone.

The pro-Keystone coalition includes some of the most prominent names in Washington influence, including former Reagan White House chief of staff Ken Duberstein and former Michigan Gov. John Engler, both registered to lobby on behalf of Keystone for the Business Roundtable, and Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist. Former Democratic Reps. Allen Boyd of Florida, John Tanner of Tennessee and Michael Arcuri of New York are all registered pro-Keystone lobbyists.

At the heart of the operation is API, the deep-pocketed industry alliance that employs a long list of lobbyists, along with an unknown number of consultants who are said to sign nondisclosure agreements keeping all their API work strictly confidential. Two lobbyists connected to the Keystone fight said API holds regular huddles with a collection of interested groups, looping in powerful interests like the Chamber, Business Roundtable, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers and National Association of Manufacturers.

TransCanada and its Canadian allies have thrown money at a number of D.C. firms, including white-shoe lobbying outfits like Bryan Cave LLP and Dutko, and the Democratic super-PR firm SKDKnickerbocker, which includes former White House communications director Anita Dunn and former Clinton-Gore adman Bill Knapp among its partners. This week, CEA released polling from the Democratic firm Hickman Analytics showing public support for Keystone in Iowa, Michigan, Montana and New Hampshire.

What Keystone opponents lack in lobbying muscle — they largely rely on the in-house lobbyists of national environmental groups — they make up for with a lineup of political consultants that looks like the roster of a presidential campaign.

Some literally are right off the roster of a presidential campaign: Steyer’s group hired Obama-linked companies like the TV firm GMMB and the pollsters at Benenson Strategy Group to plan a national advocacy campaign. The GSG team that worked for the League of Conservation Voters on organizing the All Risk, No Reward coalition included former White House spokesman Bill Burton; that coalition, in turn, has hired the Democratic firm New Partners to do its PR.

The finances of many anti-Keystone groups are opaque, but at least some of them have benefited from Steyer’s largesse: In 2013, LCV received $500,000 from a group funded by the hedge fund mogul, according to Federal Election Commission reports. In September, NextGen Climate Action gave $30,00 to the Chesapeake Climate Leadership Alliance and $125,000 to the National Wildlife Federation Action Fund, the political arms of two anti-Keystone groups that recently co-sponsored the Cowboys and Indians protest.

Pope, the former Sierra Club head, said that these days it’s far easier for groups of all sizes to engage in grass-roots mobilization — real or manufactured — thanks to social media. They’re not collecting petition signatures by hand anymore: “We had to have people with clipboards in parks,” Pope recalled.

The air war

Keystone wouldn’t be a full-fledged Washington advocacy fight without plenty of television commercials — many of them aimed squarely at the D.C. market. As much as the players on all sides of Keystone want to marshal public opinion in their favor, the ad spending reveals who their real audience is.

Both TransCanada and Steyer’s anti-Keystone vehicle bought ample Beltway airtime, particularly during the all-important Sunday morning talk shows. NextGen spent $340,000 on local broadcast airtime last September to run 90-second ads over the course of several Sundays, according to information shared by the tracking firm MunKato ADvantage. The group also bought national cable ads during that time, including CNN on Sundays.

TransCanada answered the spending a month later, putting about $300,000 into local broadcast and cable TV ads in October, according to MKAD.

The company says it launched the first paid media in its history in 2011 to combat opposition to the pipeline and estimates it has done 3,500 interviews with reporters since 2010. Over the course of 2013, the Canadian company spent approximately $700,000 in the all-important Washington media market; this year, it has already shelled out an additional $159,000 to reach viewers in the nation’s capital.

Both entities — TransCanada and NextGen — have purchased airtime elsewhere but in markedly lower volumes. (A recent NextGen ad campaign targeting Florida Sen. Marco Rubio cost about $7,000, MKAD said.)

The behemoth on the airwaves is API: Since 2012, the group has spent more than $18 million on local broadcast and cable television advertising, pushing a range of industry priorities including Keystone and reaching markets from Little Rock to Pittsburgh to Sioux Falls, the MKAD numbers show.

But many of the API ads have been straightforward Keystone advocacy spots aimed directly at D.C. The group spent more than a quarter-million dollars pushing Keystone on Washington local broadcast and cable — in July 2013 alone.

Unlike NextGen, which discloses its political vendors in FEC reports, API is under no such obligation. There’s little doubt, though, that a handful of GOP media firms have profited handsomely.

The ads have likely helped push public opinion at least modestly in favor of the pipeline: A Pew survey released in March showed that 61 percent of Americans support the project.

But that’s only slightly higher than in March of 2012, when 57 percent of Americans told Gallup they favored building Keystone — and Mitt Romney featured the pipeline in his first general election ad.

“What would a Romney presidency look like?” the ad began. “Day One: President Romney immediately approves the Keystone Pipeline, creating thousands of jobs that Obama blocked.”