The standoff at Standing Rock was looking like turning to Wounded Knee 3 over the weekend, as a small army of veterans converged on the site to try to defend the "water protectors" protesting against the planned North Dakota Access pipeline.

While Donald Trump's financial ties to the project will no doubt ensure that he will attempt to ensure the success of the project as part of his 4 year plan to increase his wealth at taxpayer expense any way he can, for now the natives and the vets can relax as the Army Corps of Engineers decided to deny the pipeline company a permit for their planned river crossing.

The Army Corps of Engineers will not grant the permit for the Dakota Access pipeline to drill under the Missouri river, the army announced on Sunday, handing a major victory to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe after a months-long campaign against the pipeline. Assistant secretary for civil works Jo-Ellen Darcy announced the decision on Sunday, with the army saying it was based on “a need to explore alternate routes” for the crossing.

The announcement came just one day before the corps’ deadline for thousands of Native American and environmental activists – who call themselves water protectors – to leave the sprawling encampment on the banks of the river. For months, they have protested over their fears that the pipeline would contaminate their water source and destroy sacred sites, and over the weekend hundreds of military veterans arrived at the camps in a show of support for the movement.

Protests about the North Dakota pipeline have been going on for more than 6 months now, with recent reports like "Police fire water cannon at Dakota pipeline protesters in freezing weather" and ugly associated video footage becoming more common. Yale Environment 360 has a look at what has been happening - At Standing Rock, A Battle Over Fossil Fuels and Land.

For more than eight months, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota has been leading a protest to stop an oil pipeline from crossing near its land and potentially threatening its drinking water and sacred sites. In many ways, the battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline, which would carry up to 570,000 barrels of crude oil some 1,200 miles daily, is a traditional fight over Native American land rights. But as indigenous environmental justice expert Kyle Powys Whyte sees it, the demonstration also points to the important role tribes have played in opposing fossil fuel energy projects in recent years, from the Keystone XL pipeline in the U.S. to the Northern Gateway pipeline in Canada.

“Almost everywhere you go, tribes have taken direct action to protect their health and their cultures and their economies from the threats, as well as the false promises of, extractive industries,” says Powys Whyte, an associate professor at Michigan State University who studies climate policy and indigenous peoples and is a member of the Potawatomi Nation.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Powys Whyte talks about the long history of coal and oil and gas development on native lands, the longstanding divisions within indigenous communities over allowing such projects, and why the Standing Rock protest has become a lightning rod for opposition to fossil fuels.

Yale Environment 360 has a look at opposition to the piping of oil from Canadian tar sands projects to Texas for refining - As Alberta’s Tar Sands Boom, Foes Target Project’s Lifelines.

The Sand Hills of Nebraska are a unique Great Plains prairie ecosystem. The rolling dunes, rising to 300 feet, cover about a quarter of the state, and because the grasses and wildflowers there are adapted to wet, sandy soil, many grow nowhere else. Thousands of ponds and lakes dot the Sand Hills, nourishing the Ogallala Aquifer.

This region is an unlikely ground zero for a growing rebellion against a different kind of sand — the Athabascan oil sands of Alberta, 1,400 miles to the north. But that is precisely what is happening as energy companies seek to construct a pipeline from Alberta’s tar sands — the second-largest petroleum deposit in the world, after Saudi Arabia — across the length of the U.S. to refineries in Texas, passing through the Sand Hills on its way.

And the so-called Keystone XL pipeline is not the only tentacle of the tar sands poised to spread across North America: Energy companies are seeking to build a second pipeline to carry tar sands oil across the wild heart of British Columbia, while other firms are proposing to truck gargantuan equipment for the tar sands project along narrow roads in one of most remote parts of the northern Rocky Mountains.

Environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, elected officials, native people, and a host of others have risen up in opposition to the potential environmental threats posed by the expanding reach of Alberta’s tar sands. Some opponents are concerned that pipelines or oversized equipment running through their communities pose an unacceptable environmental risk. But for others, the battle is about something far larger. They believe that wreaking so much environmental destruction to continue expanding supplies of planet-warming fossil fuels is fundamentally wrong, noting that the tar sands project has razed hundreds of square miles of boreal forest, led to the creation of dozens of toxic tailings ponds, and released vast quantities of CO2. And they are convinced that choking off the tar sands pipelines is a way of stopping, or at least hampering, the development of the Alberta tar sands themselves.

Indeed, the fight over the tar sands pipelines has become a proxy battle between two diametrically opposed worldviews: Those who see the planet as heading toward irreversible environmental harm, driven largely by human CO2 emission from fossil fuels, and those who say that the U.S. needs oil at almost any environmental cost to keep its economy growing.

“The pipeline has become a symbol of where America is going,” says Jane Kleeb, director of BOLD Nebraska, a group working to protect the unique ecology of the Sand Hills. “We’re concerned about climate change, absolutely. America is smart enough to figure out how to do clean energy.”

Among the growing protests over Alberta’s tar sands and the proposed pipelines are a series of acts of civil disobedience planned in Washington, D.C., for the last two weeks of August. The campaign, Tar Sands Action, will feature protests at the White House and will include author and environmental activist Bill McKibben, NASA climate scientist James Hansen, and Canadian scientist and broadcaster, David Suzuki.

Roughly 173 billion barrels of Alberta tar sands reserves, worth more than $15 trillion, underlay an area the size of Florida, making it by far the largest petroleum deposit in North America. The strange solid or semi-solid oil, called bitumen, is essentially mined, and doing so means digging up large tracts of boreal forest and releasing a lot of CO2, which is why critics call the product of the tar sands “dirty oil.”

But supporters of the tar sands and the pipelines say that the “dirty oil” rap is unfair. Canada’s environment minister, Peter Kent, says tar sands crude creates just 1 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions generated annually by U.S. coal-fired power plants. It’s really “ethical oil,” he says, because the profits won’t go to corrupt dictators or civil wars.

Oil companies have limited refining capacity for the dense crude in Alberta, and that’s where the biggest pipeline project, Keystone XL, figures in. Each day the proposed Keystone XL pipeline — to be built by Calgary-based TransCanada Corporation — would move 910,000 barrels of a slurry of bitumen, natural gas, and undisclosed chemicals through a 36-inch-diameter, high-pressure pipe, buried four feet underground. The nearly 1,700-mile route would run from Hardisty, Alberta, through Saskatchewan, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska (including 92 miles of the Sand Hills), and Oklahoma. After connecting with an existing pipeline in Nebraska, the new Keystone XL would begin again in Cushing, Oklahoma and continue on to Houston and Port Arthur, Texas. There, company officials say, they would have the special refining capacity they need.

The $7 billion pipeline, which must be approved by the U.S. State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has drawn both opposition and support across its route. But it has run into the fiercest resistance in the conservative farming state of Nebraska, largely because the pipeline would cross the Sand Hills. Should the toxic brew leak, it could pollute not only the water there, but could seep into portions of the Ogallala Aquifer, the 174,000-square-mile underground reservoir, fed in part by water from the Sand Hills.

Spills are not a far-fetched scenario. In a year of operation, a similar pipeline in the U.S. — the existing Keystone, also owned by TransCanada Corporation — had 11 spills. Most of them were tiny, but the largest, in southeastern North Dakota, was 21,000 gallons, and federal officials temporarily suspended the company’s operating permit. And last year a 30-inch oil pipeline owned by Enbridge, another Canadian pipeline company, suffered a 4-foot-long rupture and spilled nearly 20,000 barrels — 840,000 gallons — of oil into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, killing much of the aquatic life for miles. It was the worst spill ever in the Midwest.

The Times reports that the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline may be damaged by the conflict that has erupted in Georgia - Analysis: energy pipeline that supplies West threatened by war in Georgia conflict. Pepe Escobar at The Asia Times once dubbed the pipeline Pipelineistan - "a supreme law unto itself".

The Guardian reports that Georgia has declared a state of war, and Russian forces are now occupying much of the province of South Ossetia.

A blog called "The Global Buzz" noted the strange coincidence of the PKK allegedly bombing the pipeline in Turkey a few days ago. There are also rumours that the US is sending 2 more carrier groups to the Persian Gulf, though Cryptogon cynically notes these sorts of stories have been spread more than a few times in the past, without incident.

The conflict that has erupted in the Caucasus has set alarm bells ringing because of Georgia's pivotal role in the global energy market. Georgia has no significant oil or gas reserves of its own but it is a key transit point for oil from the Caspian and central Asia destined for Europe and the US.

Crucially, it is the only practical route from this increasingly important producer region that avoids both Russia and Iran.

The 1,770km (1,100 miles) Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which entered service only last year, pumps up to 1 million barrels of oil per day from Baku in Azerbaijan to Yumurtalik, Turkey, where it is loaded on to supertankers for delivery to Europe and the US. Around 249km of the route passes through Georgia, with parts running only 55km from South Ossetia.

The security of the BTC pipeline, depicted in the James Bond film The World is Not Enough, has been a primary concern since before its construction. ...

Output from the pipeline, which is 30 per cent owned by BP and carries more than 1 per cent of the world's supply, is likely to be on hold for several weeks while the fire is extinguished and the damage repaired. ...

Only a few days before the Turkish explosion, Georgian separatists threatened to sabotage the pipeline if hostilities continued. The latest eruption of violence could easily spur fresh attacks. The BTC pipeline, which is buried throughout most of its length to make sabotage more difficult, was a politically highly charged project. It was firmly opposed by Russia, which views the Caucasus as its own sphere of influence and wants central Asian oil to be exported via its own territory.

Russia also backs the South Ossetian and Abkhazian separatists in Georgia and relations between Moscow and Tbilisi have curdled into outright hostility in recent months. The BTC pipeline, which cost $3 billion to build, is a key plank of US foreign policy because it reduces Western reliance on oil from both the Middle East and Russia.