Baptists and Bootleggers Redux?

Here's an interesting piece on oil pipeline issues; a coalition of Native American indigenous faith-folks and envronmentalists have stalled construction of a North Dakota pipeline via a sit-in and slowed pipeline from Alberta to the Canadian west coast and the Keystone pipeline to the US. The Canadian west-coast one seems to be moving forward even with a green-leaning Liberal government in Ottawa and Keystone could well get restarted if it gets the next president's blessing; a near sure-thing with Trump and not improbable for Clinton.

This closing paragraph tickled my funny bone.

Which, in the context of OPEC's fumbling attempts to aid this process, raises a curious notion: that Saudi Arabia and its peers may be quietly rooting for those protesters in North Dakota.

There are a number of areas where people opposed to an industry and folks in the industry that don't want more competition can join forces. A modern example is gambling expansion, where church groups (both left and right, since the damage gambling does to the poor makes quite a few mainliners queasy) oppose it on moral grounds and existing casinos and race-tracks oppose it for business grounds; the latter has been known to help finance efforts from the former, as the Jack Abramoff story from the aughts points out. 

That effect has been called the Baptists and Bootleggers effect, with the churchmen wanting to keep areas "dry" for moral reasons and the folks selling moonshine wanting to keep legal competition at bay.

Could some of that be at play here? Probably not, since any money sent to leftist groups from Russian, Iranians or Saudis would need to be very well laundered to both save the environmentalists from being tarred and the country doing the dirty deed becoming persona non grata to the US.

I wouldn't put it past the Russians; they have a century of practice manipulating things in the US, especially on the left side of the political spectrum, and almost anything that hurts the US helps them become more of a global power.  It's a notch outside of Persian Gulf folks' toolkit, and a few notches too risky for domestic oil producers with secure pipeline access to try.

Those folks might cheer it on, but probably aren't help it along...probably.