Guest perspective by Ralph Nader
It was the most extraordinary citizen organizing feat in
recent White House history. Over 1200 Americans from 50 states came to
Washington and were arrested in front of the White House to demonstrate their
opposition to a forthcoming Obama approval of the Keystone XL dirty oil
pipeline from Alberta, Canada down to the Gulf Coast.
Anyone who has tried to mobilize people in open
non-violent civil disobedience knows how hard it is to have that many people
pay their way to Washington to join a select group of civic champions. The
first round of arrestees – about 100 of them – were brought to a jail and kept
on cement floors for 52 hours – presumably, said one guard, on orders from
above to discourage those who were slated to follow this first wave in the two
weeks ending September 3, 2011.
The Keystone XL pipeline project – owned by a consortium
of oil companies — is a many faceted abomination. It will, if constructed, take
its raw, tar sands carbon down through the agricultural heartland of the United
States — through the Missouri and Niobrara Rivers, the great Ogallala aquifer,
fragile natural habitats and Native American lands. Major breaks and accidents
on pipelines — four of them with loss of human life— have occurred just in the
past year from California to Pennsylvania, including a recent, major
Exxon/Mobile pipeline rupture which resulted in many gallons of oil spilling
into the Yellowstone River.
The Office of Pipeline Safety in the Department of
Transportation has been a pitiful rubberstamp patsy for the pipeline industry
for 40 years. There are larger objections – a huge contribution to greenhouse
gases and further expansion of the destruction of northern Albertan terrain,
forests and water - expected to cover an area the size of Florida.
Furthermore, as the Energy Department report on Keystone
XL pointed out, decreasing demand for petroleum through advances in fuel
efficiency is the major way to reduce reliance on imported oil with or without
the pipeline. There is no assurance whatsoever that the refined tar sands oil
in Gulf Coast refineries will even get to the motorists here. They can be
exported more profitably to Europe and South America.
In ads on Washington, D.C.’s WTOP news station, the
industry is claiming that the project will create more than 100,000 jobs. They
cannot substantiate this figure. It is vastly exaggerated. TransCanada’s permit
application for Keystone XL to the U.S. State Department estimated a “peak
workforce of approximately 3,500 to 4,200 construction personnel" to build
the pipeline.
The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) and the Transport
Workers Union (TWU) oppose the pipeline. In their August 2011 statement they
said: “We need jobs, but not ones based on increasing our reliance on Tar Sands
oil […] Many jobs could be created in energy conservation, upgrading the grid,
maintaining and expanding public transportation — jobs that can help us reduce
air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and improve energy efficiency.”
The demonstrators before the White House, led by
prominent environmentalist Bill McKibben and other stalwarts, focused on
President Obama because he and he alone will make the decision either for or
against building what they call "North America's biggest carbon
bomb." He does not have to ask Congress.
Already the State Department, in their latest report, is
moving to recommend approval. The demonstrators and their supporters, including
leaders of the Native American Dene tribe in Canada and the Lakota nation in
the U.S., filled much of the area in front of the White House and Lafayette
Square. On September 2, I went down to express my support for their cause.
Assistants to Mr. McKibben asked me to speak at the final rally at the square
on Saturday. I agreed. At 6:25 p.m. we received an e-mail from Daniel Kessler
withdrawing their invitation because of “how packed our schedule already is.
We’d love to have Ralph there in any other capacity, including participating in
the protest.”
The next day, many of the speakers went way over their
allotted five to six minute time slots. Observers told me that there were to be
no criticisms of Barack Obama. McKibben wore an Obama pin on the stage. Obama
t-shirts were seen out in the crowd. McKibben did not want their efforts to be
"marginalized" by criticizing the President, which they expected I
would do. He said that “he would not do Obama the favor” of criticizing him.
To each one's own strategy. I do not believe McKibben's
strategy is up to the brilliance of his tactics involving the mass arrests.
(Which by the way received deplorably little mass media coverage).
Obama believes that those demonstrators and their
followers around the country are his voters (they were in 2008) and that they
have nowhere to go in 2012. So long as environmentalists do not find a way to
disabuse him of this impression long before Election Day, they should get ready
for an Obama approval of the Keystone XL monstrosity.
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2 comments:
It is obvious that Obama's image has changed since he was elected ... it's amazing an Obama approval of the Keystone XL monstrosity.
Greatings
Mark de Zabaleta
Who in their right mind would want to be president? It's just one horrific problem after another with no winning in sight.
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