Amy Goodman: D.C. Protests That Make Big Oil Quake

[marmar]

from truthdig:




D.C. Protests That Make Big Oil Quake

Posted on Aug 23, 2011
By Amy Goodman


The White House was rocked Tuesday, not only by a 5.9-magnitude earthquake, but by the protests mounting outside its gates. More than 2,100 people say they’ll risk arrest there during the next two weeks. They oppose the Keystone XL pipeline project, designed to carry heavy crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

A “keystone” in architecture is the stone at the top of an arch that holds the arch together; without it, the structure collapses. By putting their bodies on the line—as more than 200 have already at the time of this writing—these practitioners of the proud tradition of civil disobedience hope to collapse not only the pipeline, but the fossil-fuel dependence that is accelerating disruptive global climate change.

Bill McKibben was among those already arrested. He is an environmentalist and author who founded the group 350.org, named after the estimated safe upper limit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of 350 ppm (parts per million—the planet is currently at 390 ppm). In a call to action to join the protest, McKibben, along with others including journalist Naomi Klein, actor Danny Glover and NASA scientist James Hansen, wrote the Keystone pipeline is “a 1,500-mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet.”

The movement to oppose Keystone XL ranges from activists and scientists to indigenous peoples of the threatened Canadian plains and boreal forests, where the tar sands are located, to rural farmers and ranchers in the ecologically fragile Sand Hills region of Nebraska, to students and physicians. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/dc_protests_that_make_big_oil_quake_20110823/?ln

[midnight]

1. I liked some of the responses to this article at the site...

"Btw, a Stimulus Spending program to create jobs would look like this:
1) Enhance a dilapidated electricity grid towards making it more efficient
2) Embark upon an aggressive program to implant windmill farms in rural areas, and
3) A tax deduction for materials necessary to better insulate American homes,
4) Stiff controls on oil/gas fired electricity generating plants."

[E_Pluribus_Unitarian]

4. Burying the power lines nationwide would...

provide a more secure network, saving countless millions of dollars in downtime from power outages from severe weather, not to mention the elimination of an eyesore that should have disappeared a century ago.

[Stuart G]

2. k & r

[Firebrand Gary]

3. K&R, I wonder how I can help from California on this.

[rainy]

5. What bothers me is that this is not national news.

We all know too well if it was 5 tea baggers in the capital protesting there would be 10 journalists on the scene.

[yurbud]

6. that's why protestors have to literally obstruct the action the don't want taken or at least the

legislators or executives about to do it.