The standing rock protest occurred in 2022 in response to ___.

More than 1 million people have checked in on Facebook to the Standing Rock Indian reservation in response to a viral post claiming that doing so would help protect activists in North Dakota protesting against an oil pipeline from police surveillance.

Members of more than 90 Native American nations have converged on Standing Rock in North Dakota since April to protest against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, saying it would jeopardize the tribe’s water supply and threaten sacred tribal sites.

Early on Monday, a Facebook post said that the Morton County sheriff’s department was using Facebook check-ins to target people at the protest camp.

“Water Protecters are calling on EVERYONE to check-in at Standing Rock, ND to overwhelm and confuse them,” the post said, going on to urge that everyone copy and share the text along with their check-in.

The origin of the text is not known. But it is spreading quickly; the number of check-ins at the Standing Rock reservation page went from 140,000 to more than 870,000 by Monday afternoon.

The pipeline’s proposed route, to transport fracked crude oil from the Bakken oilfield in North Dakota to a refinery near Chicago, would cross the Missouri river just upstream of the reservation.

Thousands have set up camp on land abutting the reservation, and hundreds have been arrested in numerous clashes with police. Protesters say they are ready for a “last stand” as the pipeline’s construction advances.

A spokesperson for the Morton County sheriff’s department told the Guardian in a statement that it was “not monitoring Facebook check-ins for the protest camp or any location for that matter. These rumors/claims are completely false.”

Lindsey Jones, from Wethersfield, Connecticut, was one of the million who remotely checked in on Facebook at the protest camp on Monday. She said that she was skeptical of the capability of checking-in on Facebook to disrupt police activity but added that, in general, “I guess it’s a nice gesture to show solidarity.”

“It’s definitely better than just sticking your head in the sand. And it does often lead to ‘real’ activism when people who don’t know anything about organizing or activism connect with people who do,” Jones said.

Kandi Mossett, a 37-year-old Native American activist who has been at the Standing Rock protest since August, said she was more concerned about ground surveillance than Facebook monitoring.

“I think they’re listening to us right now as we speak,” she said. “My concern is the invasion of privacy … It’s eerie and frankly quite irritating.”

Mossett, of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara nation, said she thought the police could easily detect whether Facebook users were falsely checking in from other locations because of geotagging tools, but added that it was still nice to see so many mentions of Standing Rock on social media. “It gives people a way to support us.”

Marty Aranaydo, a member of the Muscogee tribe currently stationed at one of the camps, admitted he was initially confused when he thought random acquaintances from college had shown up in person.

“People want to be here, but sometimes life doesn’t allow it,” he added. “I take this as a visible way people can show solidarity. I don’t know if the strategy will work.”

Aranaydo pointed out that the direct monitoring – including the low-flying helicopters that frequently hover above the camps, sometimes shining bright spotlights in the middle of the night – was much more upsetting to him and other protesters.

“Their monitoring gives them a way to mess with us. They know it gets to us and can make things worse.”

Wiyaka Eagleman, a member of the Sicangu Lakota from Rosebud, South Dakota, who has been at the protest camp since it began in April, described the check-ins as “a form of support”, but added: “It would be nice to have those 550,000 people [really] here.”

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Hundreds of people sit in silent protest against the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline. (Photo by Chip... [+] Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Except for the last remaining climate change deniers, of which there are still a surprising number, it is generally acknowledged that many of the oil reserves that have already been discovered are “stranded assets.” This means that in order to ensure that global warming does not rise to 2C above pre-industrial levels, the target agreed to in the COP21 Paris Agreement which went into effect on November 4, 2016, these reserves cannot be extracted.

The U.K. nonprofit Carbon Tracker calculates that only 565 gigatons of CO2 from the world’s coal mines, oil wells, and gas fields can be emitted between now and 2050 in order to meet the COP21 benchmark. This is only 20% of the 2,795 gigatons of CO2 in existing reserves. While the market value of these stranded assets is obviously a function of price, in the days following COP21 analysts at Citigroup estimated the potential value of stranded assets at $100 trillion. However much oil ends up being taken out of the ground, much of it will go through pipelines. A corollary of stranded assets is that, in addition to oil reserves, some amount of pipeline capacity will become stranded assets as well.

$647 billion was invested in drilling last year, a figure that is in the same region as the $1 trillion that needs to be invested per year in clean energy between now and 2030. And just as oil and gas companies continue to drill, pipeline companies continue to build. A dramatic and contentious recent example is Energy Transfer Partner’s (ETP) proposed Dakota Access Pipeline Project (DAPL)—a 1,172-mile, 30-inch diameter pipeline that will connect the Bakken and Three Forks production areas in North Dakota to Patoka, Illinois. This pipeline goes through the drinking water, sacred sites, and traditional lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (SRST), leading to an increasingly contentious conflict. ETP contends that it obtained all necessary permits and licenses from the federal government to build DAPL. Meanwhile, the SRST argues that these permits and licenses were awarded without proper consultation, adequate environmental assessment, or Free, Prior, and Informed Consent—which is required under the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to which the U.S. is a signatory.

Starting earlier this year, the SRST staged a protest to block construction of DAPL. The protest has grown to an encampment of 7,000 people, many of whom vow to hold out through the brutal North Dakota winter. The SRST is also taking ETP to court and as of November 2, the Army Corps was considering options for alternate routes. In the meantime, protesters are being arrested, attacked by dogs, pepper sprayed, and shot with rubber bullets.

From the beginning, ETP disregarded the tribe’s concerns about sacred lands and water. Its behavior has gotten so bad that even the industry newsletter North American Energy News stated that instead of trying “really, really hard not to make more enemies…and use a common sense approach to resolving conflict…the exact opposite approach [was] used by the company and its supporters. From the beginning, everyone on the industry side has played hardball.” According to SRST Chairman David Archambault II, “At the heart of our grievances is our water. ETP has a terrible water track record, with pending contamination lawsuits in four states. Just last month there was another leak at one of the company’s subsidiary pipelines in Pennsylvania. Would you trust this company with your water?”

One would think that by now pipeline companies have learned the lesson that their social license to operate is critical, and would seek to constructively work with communities to get that license. The Keystone XL Pipeline was a $15 billion investment that failed to come to fruition due to the absence of the social license. In Canada, the Northern Gateway Pipeline has been mired in delays caused by litigation with First Nations along its route. There is also growing local resistance to railroads—the other primary means of transporting oil besides pipelines—after a series of fiery oil train explosions over the past two years.

So what is happening here? I think there are two underlying forces that will make such conflicts more numerous and more brutal despite the economic evidence of their costs. The first is dramatic differences in time frames. The SRST’s time frame is basically forever. This land has belonged to the tribe for generations and they feel a deep economic, cultural, and spiritual responsibility to the environmental consequences of pipelines. On the other hand ETP, and the banks supporting it, have a very short time frame.

The stakes are high for DAPL. A total of 38 banks have committed $10.25 billion in loans and credit facilities directly supporting this pipeline project. The sooner the pipeline is built and oil starts flowing, the sooner ETP starts making money and the banks start getting paid back. This sense of urgency is reflected in court briefs in which the company has claimed “it could lose $1.4 billion a year if delays continue.” Even more dramatically, “customer contracts could be permanently lost if Dakota Access’s January 1, 2017 delivery schedule isn’t kept.” Exacerbating this difference in time frame, the relatively high price of the oil to be delivered is not guaranteed if the delivery schedule isn’t met. ETP is feeling intense pressure from both its oil company customers and its banks.

The second powerful force is the ironic one of stranded assets. As pressure builds on oil and gas companies through divestment campaigns, shareholder resolutions for 2C plans (such as those filed with ExxonMobil and Chevron), and perhaps ultimately a carbon tax, the degree of “strandedness” of these assets will grow. The rational response from these companies facing short-term market pressures is to get as much of these assets out of the ground as quickly as possible. This desire to pump is magnified if boards of directors are putting pressures on their CEOs (who have limited tenure in their jobs) because they believe the long-term prices of these assets will only decline.

These pressures then translate to the pipeline companies who help bring these assets to market. Here they confront the legitimate rights of Indigenous Peoples over whose lands these pipelines must traverse. We are looking at a combustible mix of stranded assets due to environmental issues, closing windows of opportunity to get these assets out of the ground, and the rights of Indigenous Peoples and other communities to provide FPIC.

Within this conflict is a potential solution. Just as capital markets are increasingly addressing environmental issues raised by oil and gas (such as pricing down these assets, pressuring companies to more accurately represent the value of these assets on their balance sheets, and demanding greater transparency on strategies for transitioning to a 2C world), they must do the same for social issues. Investors have enormous leverage to ensure FPIC before committing money and have an obvious self-interest in doing so, as the frequency and scale of conflicts between companies and communities continues to rise.

Why provide financing to a project that may not be completed? The SRST recognizes the power of capital markets and has asked the NGO First Peoples Worldwide to coordinate a shareholder advocacy campaign. According to First Peoples Worldwide Founder and President Rebecca Adamson, “The tribe is demanding that the market capture the full social and environmental costs of the pipeline, and investor response has been overwhelmingly positive. The standoff shows the pressing need for integrated reporting and better ESG data. Nothing in the company’s quarterly filings would have enabled investors to foresee a problem of this magnitude.”

What was the conflict at Standing Rock?

Who started the Standing Rock movement?

When did the Standing Rock protest take place?

What happened at the Standing Rock Reservation?