The other morning I took a call, like so many other calls I’ve taken over the last four years, from another Dakota farmer wondering how his land may be affected by the Keystone XL pipeline. He had a notice of condemnation and interrogatories from TransCanada in hand, and I wish I’d had better news for him. He’s in the path of a monster. Keystone XL will be a 36-inch-diameter pipeline, carrying nine times the volume of the Silvertip line that just vomited 1,000 barrels of crude into the Yellowstone River. It will cross some of the most isolated places in the high plains, cutting through the ecologically fragile Nebraska Sandhills and the irreplaceable Ogallala aquifer.

Keystone XL won’t carry “light, sweet” crude, which floats on top of water and can be mopped up with absorbent booms. Bitumen — a tarlike substance mined from the Alberta tar sands, chemically diluted, and heated to improve flow — will travel at high pressure across Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas to Gulf Coast refineries. If and when it leaks into water bodies, this product will sink. To judge the risk of that happening, it helps to know that the first piece of the Keystone system, TransCanada’s Keystone I pipeline that crosses the eastern Dakotas, has sprung a dozen leaks in its first year of operation.

Our nonprofit, Plains Justice, has been following this unfolding mess since we took the first calls about Keystone I from North Dakota landowners in 2007. They were getting bullying letters from TransCanada insisting that they sign pipeline easements immediately or see their land condemned. Appeals to state regulators in North and South Dakota fell on deaf ears. In the Dakotas, the oil industry has near-monolithic political power and hires lawyers in bulk. There was no resisting its plans for a pipeline across farms, tribal ancestral homelands, and even the drinking water catchment area for the city of Fargo, which only became aware of the risk after state regulators had signed off on the project.

Plains Justice lawyers have represented landowners and small, instate nonprofits asking hard questions about the risks of Keystone I and Keystone XL through state and federal siting proceedings for the last several years. We obtained the first scientific analysis of risks to the Sandhills and Ogallala aquifer and submitted it as part of comments to the U.S. Department of State on the draft environmental impact statement, which all but ignored these impacts. In 2010, we published two deeply researched reports [PDF], based on a series of Freedom of Information Act requests, about the safety of steel and emergency response planning for Keystone I. We turned up alarming conclusions:

• Federal regulations for crude oil pipeline response plans are much weaker than regulations for other potential polluters, such as oil tankers and oil refineries;

• In calculating its worst-case spill scenarios, TransCanada does not consider the possible impacts of operator error during use of its complex pipeline control systems, and therefore underestimates worst-case spill amounts;

• For on-water spills, TransCanada underestimates needed shoreline cleanup equipment capacity by 50 percent;

• Equipment allocated for potential spills in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska is completely inadequate to the scale of spill risk;

• Designated responders lack capacity to move adequate amounts of equipment to major rivers put at risk by the Keystone Pipeline System fast enough to protect them. Such rivers include the Missouri River at both the Fort Peck Dam and at Yankton, S.D., the Yellowstone River at Miles City, Mont., the Niobrara and Platte Rivers in Nebraska, and more;

• In much of the northern Great Plains, local businesses do not have the ability to shelter and feed thousands of workers at short notice, with the result that TransCanada and its contractors would be responsible not only for responding to an oil spill, but for caring for the needs of thousands of spill responders far from large commercial supply networks. Should a spill happen during harsh winter conditions, these logistical problems could turn into a nightmare.

The Yellowstone River spill, 1-20th the size of last year’s Enbridge pipeline spill on the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, has attracted hundreds of spill-response workers to the Billings area. Fortunately, Billings is the largest city in Montana, and far enough from the booming oil, gas, and coal fields to the south and east to have significant available lodging. Many areas along the Keystone I and Keystone XL routes would be incapable of providing for a large spill response workforce without major, time-consuming shifts in infrastructure. There is no indication that TransCanada has plans in place for this kind of logistical effort.

All the red flags flapping in the breeze have done little to drown out the sound of inevitability. Our own shoestring efforts have been defunded as the international anti-tar-sands campaign picks up momentum and the big green groups soak up available funding, so what little help existed for landowners is petering out.

The thing that always strikes me in conversations with farmers about the tar-sands pipelines is their use of this phrase: “They’re siting it across me.” Not “across my land,” but “across me,” because out on the harsh, beautiful plains that so many take for granted, people identify with their land like they identify with their own bodies. Most Americans have no experience with this level of connectedness. It’s something we’ve lost, and something many of us are trying to recover.

We have yet another chance to do the right thing where our priceless natural heritage is concerned. America, pay attention, will you?

It’s time for the climate lobby to listen to rural grassroots groups.

But in the aftermath of the climate-legislation train wreck, I’m starting to wonder. Here’s the view from the cheap seats.

My organization works in states that will have to come along if the U.S. Senate is ever going to pass a climate bill: Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. This is the home of the Prairie Populists, the last true moderates, red states that elect blue leaders; a place of political conundrums that coastals find endlessly perplexing and try to avoid.

In the push for climate legislation, we’ve played host to a legion of parachuting climate groups that somehow don’t see themselves as parachutists: one-issue activists hired by national campaigns to organize low-population states outside the existing grassroots structure in those states. They draw resources away from in-state groups and often poison the public discourse on sensitive issues like climate with their tone-deaf messaging and hard-sell tactics. I’d say you know who you are, but apparently you don’t. If you did, you’d stop it, because it doesn’t work.

Grassroots organizing done right in our small-population, large-acreage states can yield extraordinary results. These are places where people who take any interest in the political process can know not just their lone U.S. representative but both U.S. senators on a first-name basis. Sens. Kent Conrad (D) and Byron Dorgan (D) of North Dakota represent a total population of less than 500,000 people of voting age. It’s like being the mayor of Memphis, Tenn., except that your citizens are spread out over 68,976 square miles.

Consider that at best 70 percent of those people vote in a high-stakes election, and you realize that it’s possible in a fairly short time to door-knock every Democrat who voted in the last North Dakota election. Or just catch them when they come to the state fair in Minot. Compared to organizing California, this is the proverbial cakewalk.

Maybe that’s why whoever had that $200 million to spend on advancing a climate bill didn’t take our states seriously. Or they took them too seriously, decided the local yokels couldn’t be trusted, and in came the paratroopers.

The locals may not know D.C., but we do know what matters to voters here. Take a look at the votes that lined up on health care, which benefited from in-state organizing funded at least an order of magnitude better than climate was. In our five states, every Democratic senator voted yes. This reflects the deeply partisan divide in the Senate, yes, but it also proves that there was sufficient political cover for senators in deeply conservative states to vote for “Obamacare.”

That cover doesn’t exist on climate. Coal, oil, and gas are a powerful political force in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Biofuels are just about the only bone thrown to the ag sector in the cap-and-trade bill. And farmers aren’t just worried about higher energy prices in production —  their families live here too, often on fixed incomes, and drive to distant jobs and medical facilities. Winters are cold and summers are hot. Higher energy costs will hit this region coming and going. No sane politician will take that lying down.

Howard Dean had it right with the 50-state strategy. We need not just better messaging but a better message, a real commitment to making the clean-energy transition work for rural America. And yes, rural America does still exist, think, and vote.

Until the coastals listen to those of us on the ground and take seriously the complicated political realities that Blue Dogs have to live with, our only hope is better climate policy in Beijing.

Shatzer’s land is some of the most fertile in North America, part of the fecund breadbasket on which a continent relies. And if New Jersey’s LS Power wins the fight it has started, a 750-megawatt pulverized-coal electrical generation plant will sit right next door by 2011.

Coming to a cornfield near you?

The Shatzers, along with a dedicated coalition of local citizens, have gathered 3,000 signatures on petitions against the proposed plant. They have lawn signs, car decals, a growing library of informational handouts for public meetings, and even a blog. The couple’s whole lives are invested in this land. They say they have not yet begun to fight.

And they aren’t alone. Across the nation, 153 new coal plants are currently proposed, enough to power some 93 million homes. Of those 153 proposals, only 24 have expressed an intent to use gasification technology, which offers a way to handle the large amounts of carbon dioxide produced by coal combustion. A recent report from the National Energy Technology Laboratory anticipates the construction of up to 309 new 500 MW coal plants in the U.S. by 2030. If NETL’s projections are correct, U.S. coal-generation capacity will more than triple by 2010, with corresponding air pollution and greenhouse-gas increases.

Some of the 153 proposed coal plants will add capacity for existing public utilities. Others, like those by developers LS Power and Peabody, are speculative “merchant” coal plants, which ultimately intend to sell the power — or even the plant itself — to the highest bidder. Local need for power is not part of the calculations behind these merchant plants. The concept isn’t new, but the voracious expansion plans are.

Economic projections indicate that demand for electricity will continue to rise, so developers are gambling that the need for power and the low price of western coal will make them very rich. Merchant-coal developers are also finding ways to minimize the risks posed by possible carbon regulation on the horizon. A recent Business Week analysis approvingly cites Peabody’s plan to sell ownership stakes in its new plants to municipal utilities and electric cooperatives, along with 30-year Peabody coal-supply contracts. If and when federal carbon regulation pushes up the cost of coal-fired generation, a smart developer like Peabody will have insulated itself from that expense. The utilities and cooperatives will pay ever-higher prices to generate electricity, passing those costs on to the consumer — but Peabody’s profits will never falter.

The first public statement from LS Power in Iowa in late 2005 indicated that the power produced at the Waterloo plant would be sold entirely out of state, probably in Illinois. The Shatzers, neighbor Gail Mueller, local city council member Kamyar Enshayan, and a growing group of local volunteers printed up and distributed a few thousand “Why should Iowa kids breathe toxic emissions to light Chicago?” fliers and fact sheets around Waterloo, along with petitions. The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier began to give coverage to this vocal opposition, which held its first rally on Earth Day 2006.

LS Power is not saying why it came to Waterloo, but local demographics paint a poignant picture of a community desperate for any form of economic development and already paying the price for industrial pollution. Iowa census numbers pinpoint some of the state’s highest poverty rates in Waterloo and Council Bluffs (the site of another coal plant already under construction). East Waterloo, the neighborhood nearest the plant, has a large African-American population and high asthma rates. The county has nearly five times the state average of criteria air-pollutant facilities per square mile.

The Waterloo economic development agency, which courted LS Power from the outset, began to push back against local activists by securing union endorsement for the plant. LS Power, its finger in the wind, stated for the first time at a public meeting in May that it planned to sell most of the power in Iowa, although Iowa utilities have publicly stated that they see no immediate need for this new capacity. No details of power purchase contracts or clean air technologies have been released regarding the Waterloo plant at this time. Utility executives unaffiliated with the LS Power proposal speculate that the plan is to develop the proposal to the point where it can be sold at a hefty profit to an Iowa utility. Locals are left wondering what their economic development agency has gotten them into, and why it backs this proposal so fiercely.

Another LS Power proposal, for an 800 MW plant in Riesel, Texas, has also drawn fire. Although the plant recently received permits from the state, appeals have been filed and a fight rages on in the media. Seventeen additional coal-fired power plants have been proposed for Texas over the next five years, many of them near areas that already exceed safe levels for airborne pollutants. Criticism of the LS Power project has centered around the developer’s status as a merchant-coal speculator, the fact that it has never operated a coal-fired generation plant, and the failure to embrace gasification technology. Even the conservative Waco Tribune-Herald recently printed an editorial urging state regulators to embrace gasification as the technological standard for new coal plants.*

There is much irony in the new proposals popping up in Texas and Iowa: the two states were leaders in renewable-energy development long before energy independence became a national buzzphrase. Texas has one of the most successful renewable-energy credit trading programs in the country and a booming wind-power industry. Iowa has the highest per capita amount of installed wind capacity of any state in the country. Both states have made significant strides toward integrating biofuels into their fuel markets, far beyond what many states considered to be more progressive have accomplished.

Their leaders talk the talk on renewable energy and energy independence; the merchant coal boom will be the test as to whether Iowa and Texas can really walk the walk of a carbon-neutral, sustainable energy future. Or, like so many other states, will they be taken in by the promise of quick cash and cheap kilowatts, to be paid for by generations to come?

Back at the Shatzer farm, there is work to do, as always. LS Power has insisted on negotiating one-on-one with elderly local landowners for land purchase options. On some farms, company representatives have allegedly persuaded family members to talk an elder into signing, or, when an option has nearly expired, threatened to buy the land and evict the farmers if they don’t extend the option. Many landowners are afraid to express any public sympathy with the project opposition for fear of losing their land.

These are old-style coal-industry tactics, Waterloo’s amateur advocates are learning. It will be an uphill battle — but unlike the developers, the Shatzers and their friends can’t just move to the next town if things go wrong here. Their equity is in land, community, and family, things that don’t move easily. The reality is clear: There is nothing to do but fight.

*[Correction, 07 Sept 2006: Originally, this article suggested a relationship between global investment bank Goldman Sachs and LS Power. In fact, there is no such relationship. Rather, a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs owns LS Power Funding Corporation, which is wholly separate from LS Power.]