D.C. Protests That Make Big Oil Quake, by Amy Goodman

[G_j]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/24-3

Published on Wednesday, August 24, 2011 by TruthDig.com

D.C. Protests That Make Big Oil Quake
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.

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[Overseas]

1. K&R. Many thanks to the protesters.

With all the subsidies we have given to big oil over the years, they still haven't developed much safer ways of extracting and transporting the oil.

It was quite horrifying to see them using 1980's technology to hide/clean up the BP Deep Water Horizon Disaster.

They have made incredible profits from just ignoring public safety and ecosystem destruction around the world.