Pipeline protesters arrested
High-profile marchers come to Washington
WASHINGTON — The battle over the Keystone XL pipeline came to Washington Wednesday where leaders of American environment movements, including a prominent NASA scientist, got themselves arrested to raise public awareness of the dangers they claim the pipeline poses to the Earth’s climate.
Those arrested included Robert Kennedy Jr., president of the Waterkeeper Alliance and nephew of former president John F. Kennedy; Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, prominent civil rights leader Julian Bond and climate change scientist Jim Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
In all about 50 people wearing “No KXL” buttons were arrested including several ranchers from Nevada through which a section of the pipeline will travel. About 30 supporters cheered from behind police barriers and chanted slogans such as “Lead on climate change. No XL” as police made their arrests.
“Today is the first day of the demise of the Keystone,” California activist Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins told the crowd before she was led off in plastic cuffs.
The event attracted extensive media coverage and was orderly and polite. The police had been warned of the protesters’ intentions in advance. A white tent for processing, a couple of police vehicles and a motorcycle escort awaiting the protesters even before they arrived. One by one they were cuffed, searched and taken away to be fined $100. The media was corralled into a fenced section in front of the White House to record the event.
Brune said the Keystone will permit oilsands producers to expand substantially their production, resulting in much higher carbon emissions. The protest, he said, was designed to pressure U.S. President Barack Obama to kill the Keystone pipeline and take ambitious steps to convert the U.S. to clean energy.
“Oilsands oil is three times more carbon intensive than conventional oil,” he said in an interview before his arrest. “Why would we invest in oil that is worse than conventional oil when we have clean energy solutions that are available today.”
The protest will be followed on Sunday with a march from the Washington Memorial to the White House. Brune said about 20,000 people are expected to take part.
“Both of these events are designed to help inspire the president to do all that he can to fight with both fists to really lean into the challenge of transitioning to clean energy,” he said.
Kennedy said in an interview before his arrest that Obama has to draw a line in the sand by stopping fossil fuel projects such as Keystone, which will transport bitumen from the oilsands in Alberta to the Texas Gulf coast. Approving the pipeline will lead to the expansion of the oilsands and will “load the cost of our prosperity, our nation’s prosperity onto future generations,” he said.
He claimed Obama is too “moral” a leader to approve Keystone. “He won’t do something that is this reckless and this mean spirited towards future generations,” he said.
“This is a project that is going to enrich a few billionaires … while impoverishing the rest of humanity and threatening the future of civilization,” he said. “We already have millions of environmental refugees in this country. And there are tens of millions of environmental refugees all over the world. We can’t keep condoning or sanctioning this kind of behaviour. It’s criminal.”