We’re way past Condition Sarandon into Alert Level DiCaprio. With the Oscar-award winning star of “The Revenant” joining the global protest chorus against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Obama administration leaving the project in temporary limbo, it’s starting to feel as if we might have reached a tipping point in public attitudes and policy toward energy pipelines.

Once treated as a public convenience beyond dispute, they’ve been increasingly recast as poisonous conduits of private profits.

Targeting pipelines on the Missouri

It isn’t just the Dakota Access, or the Keystone XL expansion blocked by President Obama last November. In the Northeast, the state of New York is withholding a water permit for the Constitution, a pipeline that was originally expected to be in use 18 months ago, conveying gas currently trapped in northeast Pennsylvania to upstate New York and beyond.

Kinder Morgan (NYSE: KMI)  has been forced to abandon plans for a southeast U.S. fuel pipeline and another that was to have carried Marcellus natural gas into New England. Both ran into insurmountable political and legal obstacles into two states that couldn’t be more different: one overwhelmingly Democratic and the other run by Republicans.

Even in energy-dependent Canada, Kinder has run into determined opposition to its plan for an expanded crude pipeline from Alberta to the Vancouver area.

Given the trend, it’s not all that surprising that an aerial photo of some 400,000 Woodstock musical attendees might get passed off as a North Dakota pipeline protest, where actual attendance has ranged from hundreds to a few thousand. An effective lie contains a kernel of truth, and given the mounting difficulty of securing pipeline approvals investors too might be forgiven for imagining that the whole world is arrayed against them.

Reality, of course, is more complex. Even in this litigious, not-in-my-back-yard day and age, new pipelines are debuting all the time, though they tend not to make the news like the high-profile delays and cancellations.

Pipelines remain broadly if superficially accepted: in a variety of national polls consistently and convincingly favored approval of the Keystone XL. Gallup has been asking Americans for more than 30 years to prioritize between “protection of the environment” and “economic growth,” and while the environment has generally come out ahead, its overwhelming lead in the 80s and 90s has been much reduced by energy price spikes and economic insecurities over the last 16 years.

Superficially in Favor

But even where support for energy infrastructure is wide it often isn’t deep. The coal mines, at least, still employ a few miners. Pipelines, in contrast and contrary to industry claims, don’t create many permanent jobs. Their benefits are generally diffuse, while the people along the route end up living with the risk, disruption and displacement. So opposition tends to be of the intense sort, tying up projects in the courts and courting the support of politicians.

With politics increasingly fragmented and deadlocked, highly motivated interest groups naturally exercise more sway. For instance, Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton have been criticized for failing to oppose the Dakota pipeline by environmental activists, and Clinton badly needs the votes of those activists’ supporters come November. Pictures of state police and federal marshals clearing out pipeline protesters would not help.

Of course, sometimes the passionate interest group is a corporation. Republican opponents of Kinder’s proposed Palmetto pipeline in Georgia attacked plans to use eminent domain to acquire land along the pipeline route, as often happens with such project. Earlier this year, the Georgia legislature imposed a moratorium on such takings as well as project permits, leading Kinder to shelve the project. Republican hostility to this private-sector undertaking also might have had something to do with open lobbying against it by the Georgia-headquartered Colonial Pipeline, which would have borne the brunt of competition from Palmetto.

The upshot is that the political and regulatory climate now looms as a major threat to the midstream sector’s growth, especially as it relates to lengthy pipeline routes crossing multiple state jurisdictions.

Blessed Are the Middlemen

Domestic energy producers in basins without sufficient market access will pay the heaviest price in foregone output and reduced profits. (As noted above, the effect of pipelines on the people along their route is also disproportionate.)  The cost to consumers will be less obvious but no less real, whether at the top of the electric bill or at the pump.

And sometimes the fallout will be unpredictable, highly inconvenient and readily apparent, as in the event of a recent spill on the Colonial that, in the absence of ready alternatives, has left many Georgians scrambling to fill their gas tanks.

Terry Nall photo

The pipeline companies, on the other hand, will be just fine. While growing opposition to energy infrastructure could certainly crimp their growth plans, it will also serve to make their operating assets that much more valuable, not least because it’s easier to secure approvals to lay a second pipe alongside an existing pipeline than to develop an entirely new route.

Further, it might be easier to make the case for a gas pipeline needed to keep the lights on locally than for one connecting a distant crude producer with a refinery. Relatively compact demand-driven expansions off a gas trunk line are likely to stir less unrest than long-haul crude transport, even if in the absence of a pipeline the oil still figures to be moved, more hazardously and expensively, by road and rail. It’s no accident that the two leading Canadian pipeline companies have recently moved to acquire demand-driven U.S. gas shippers.

Huddling for Warmth

And if organic expansion slows we can certainly expect more mergers, if only for the tax savings they often deliver. The acquired assets get revalued based on the purchase price, boosting the depreciation allowance.

Ultimately, to the degree that opposition to pipelines impedes growth, it will tend to boost midstream dividend yields as funding needs decline, while limiting capital appreciation.

We’re not to yet to the point where any of these effects is a foregone  conclusion: there’s an awful lot of midstream construction taking place, and more and more of it is happening in Mexico, where the regulatory climate might now be friendlier than in the U.S. The Dakota Access remains very likely to be eventually cleared and completed.

But investors in an oil and gas producer or a shale basin will need to be certain that the market access they’ve been promised isn’t etched in shifting political sands. Similarly, pipeline MLPs with big plans will need to show that they can secure the needed clearances.

Big natural gas shippers like Kinder Morgan, Energy Transfer Equity (NYSE: ETE) and Williams (NYSE: WMB) will be the long-term beneficiaries from strong energy demand in the fastest-growing U.S. regions.