Jean Chemnick, E&E reporter
Published: Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Chanting and wearing protest buttons, 43 activists were arrested today after zip-tying themselves to White House gates to oppose approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. The group that gathered in Lafayette Park this morning to press President Obama to reject TransCanada’s permit for the proposed pipeline included leaders of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and 350.org, and well-known activists including NASA scientist James Hansen, Robert Kennedy Jr. and actress Daryl Hannah.
Shortly before noon, they moved to the sidewalk in front of the White House to sit on the pavement or chain themselves to the fence, chanting slogans such as “Barack Obama, yes you can/stop the dirty pipeline plan.”
After three warnings, U.S. Park Police began to make arrests.
The mostly middle-aged protesters and their supporters wore buttons printed with “NO KXL” — the O’s featuring the Obama campaign logo of a rising sun.
The protesters said Obama wanted them there, pushing him to make the “right” decision this year to reject the Alberta-to-Texas pipeline, which they said would make the lofty climate-mitigation goals he expressed during last night’s State of the Union address all but impossible to achieve.
“The president’s just starting his second term,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, which today broke a 120-year tradition of not engaging in illegal protests to take part in the action. “We want to make sure his ambition meets the scale of this challenge.”
Brune said that the president made “a good speech,” but that he needed to take action. “You can’t necessarily solve climate change with a single speech,” he said. “The president has an enormous amount of executive authority that he has not yet utilized.” He urged the president to move quickly on environmentalists’ top two objectives for the second term: an aggressive greenhouse gas rule for existing power plants and rejection of the pipeline permit.
The State Department will make a recommendation on a supplemental environmental impact statement for the pipeline’s new route in the coming months, though Obama will have the final say on whether the project goes forward.
Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, said he was engaging in civil disobedience for the first time.
“I think that with the appointment of Secretary [John] Kerry now at the State Department, things may look good for the cancellation of Keystone XL,” he said. The former senator and ardent climate action proponent took over the top diplomatic post earlier this month. “But having said that, we still have to apply the pressure,” he said. He noted that Canada and the oil industry are both pressing the administration to grant the Keystone permit. The American Petroleum Institute is touting its own research today that it says shows a groundswell of support for the project (see related story).
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, an activist group, said that disobedience is an appropriate tool to use.
“Sometimes it’s important to do civil disobedience because it’s the way we underline the moral certainty of the questions that we face,” he said.
Julian Bond, civil rights leader and chairman emeritus of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said he participated in the action on his own behalf. “All these movements tend to learn from each other,” he said. “They borrow from each other, they learn from each other’s tactics.”
He said he was particularly concerned about the effect climate change might have on the health of residents in poor neighborhoods.
Hannah, dressed in a military-style jacket with an anti-Keystone XL patch embroidered on the shoulder, said the pipeline would allow the high-carbon Canadian oil sands development to expand.
“They can’t put it for sale on the global market unless it gets to a coast somewhere,” she said.
Today was the actress’s fifth arrest for civil disobedience. “It gets people to think deeper about these issues, to look deeper, to do their homework,” she said. “It’s the last stand.”
Special thanks to Richard Charter