Working For Jobs

Here’s a live stream of Sunday’s “Forward on Climate” rally on the National Mall:

Filed under: Climate & Energy

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Over the weekend, a group of protestors affiliated with the group Radical Action for Mountain Peoples’ Survival (RAMPS) managed to shut down operations at Patriot Coal’s Hobet strip mine in Lincoln County, W.Va. Some 20 were arrested; most remain behind bars, facing high bail and likely the most severe charges West Virginia authorities think to throw at them.

During their protest, they faced threats and intimidation from locals and police alike. Here, one woman who attended the protests, Gail Zawacki, shares her personal experience and thoughts. I don’t agree with everything expressed, but I think it’s a valuable look into the mechanics and psychology of activism in coal country.

——

It took several weeks for me to make the decision to travel to Appalachia after first learning of the announced protest against mountaintop removal. Part of my hesitation was just nervousness about venturing into the unknown, and some due to wondering if it would be a failure — a waste of time and money. But as the numbers increased to the hundreds on the RAMPS Facebook page, and a young lady signed up to drive with me from New Jersey on the ride board, I was encouraged to go ahead.

Part of my ambivalence was that I was unconvinced that my agenda was reflected in RAMPS policy, which is avowedly against the localized ravages of mountaintop removal but not necessarily against coal itself. My primary concern, beyond the existential threat of climate change, is trees dying from air pollution, a significant portion of which derives from burning coal, as anyone who reads my blog or Dead Trees…Dying Forests knows. And as it happens, there is indeed a contingent that opposes MTR but not underground coal mining or burning, as subsequently confirmed by statements in an article and video from Waging Nonviolence.

But I discovered there were enough participants involved who are primarily concerned about climate, resource exploitation, and corporate hegemony that I felt I was in good company. In fact I recognized several people from Occupy Wall Street and the tar-sands protests in Washington, D.C., which struck me as both good and bad. It was nice to see familiar faces, but I had the uneasy impression that it meant there are far too few who are willing to actually do anything about the multiple converging disasters on the horizon.

Initially, I was confident in the intention to be arrested, having already done so in planned actions outside the New York Stock Exchange and against tar sands in Washington. In both cases, I was released in a matter of hours. However, when my partners decided to leave after the police arrived and issued a warning, I was relieved. A growing inkling had developed that this action, the largest ever shutdown of a mountaintop-removal site, was likely to provoke a commensurately extreme response.

That suspicion was correct. The organizers had historically cultivated what they considered reasonable relations with law enforcement, but this episode would prove a break with that tradition. Veterans of the long struggle against King Coal warned us that civil disobedience in West Virginia presents a unique set of circumstances, but even they were taken by surprise at the coordinated virulence of the counter-protest, the police complicity, and the ongoing harsh terms of incarceration for those who were arrested.
Twenty people are still in jail, with the ridiculous condition that each must post in-state property valued at $25,000 as bail. Neither cash nor bondsman is acceptable, so for anyone who is not a resident, it’s almost impossible to arrange. This constitutes an outrageous abuse of the justice system, since almost all of the charges are minor offenses. The RAMPS website has updates and a link to contribute to the legal fund.

The camp was, um, rustic to say the least. Even though we retained many modern amenities — propane for cooking, and port-a-potties — it still gave a taste of what it would be like to live without conveniences Americans take for granted. Like showers. Frankly, I doubt many people in the developed world will take to such deprivations with grace. The very nature of mostly leaderless, horizontal protests attracts outcasts and rejects, lonesome ragamuffins, rabble-rousers, and young women with hair flowing unchecked on legs and under arms. Few campers expressed feeling burdened by the constraints of tent living. After three days, however, I couldn’t stand my own stickiness anymore, so I snuck off to a river to wash my hair with the tiny fishes. It turned out to be one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, and I had it all to myself.

At first I didn’t comprehend why we were meant to arrive several days prior to the event on Saturday; I expected to be bored and idle. Instead the schedule was packed and a general feeling prevailed that we could have used more time in advance to prepare and get to know each other. Every morning and evening, the entire camp met in a circle, while orientations were held for smaller groups throughout the day.

We split into self-selected “Affinity Groups” of around eight to a dozen, determined largely by our preferred degree of arrestability. Each group decided for itself which of the two actions they wanted to attend — trespassing at the mine, or a less risky diversionary demonstration at a park. The members then volunteered to attend the trainings offered for various required roles — support, legal information, advanced de-escalation, medics, mine safety, and techniques in locking down and passive resistance. In the process, trust is developed among the members, which is essential when you need to rely on each other in a situation fraught with unpredictable dangers.

As time passed, a number of people, disgruntled from various controversies, drifted away. My affinity group — the late, lamented McPherson Madness — collapsed completely as the bulk of the members recoiled from an emerging consensus that bail and jail time were far in excess of what most of them had anticipated. Several stated resentfully that they felt they had been misled, which left me adrift. Not all affinity groups were inclusive of new members. Finally, I met two late arrivals and we formed a band of three, as the advance brigade with a banner warning the target vehicle to stop, loosely associated, with the only remaining affinity group intending to lock down on a vehicle.

In fact, with some stellar exceptions, there was a pervasive atmosphere of cliquishness and, in some individuals, an overweening self-importance that was downright obnoxious. It was more pronounced than anything I encountered at Occupy. For a movement that wants to expand, they might want to consider some sort of systemic outreach, because for a newcomer to join it is quite overwhelming and requires mastering new terminology that almost amounts learning a new language, not to mention norms that seem bizarre to the uninitiated — like announcing, at every single meeting, your preferred gender pronoun along with your name. Seriously? I prefer She, Her, He, His, They?

I’m 57 years old, so perhaps I don’t understand the zeitgeist of the younger generation’s elaborate concerns about gender identities, personal space, and rules about touching. I wonder if this cohort is justifiably more aware and explicit about boundaries, or whether perhaps they are reacting to a lifetime of exposure to too much casual pornography, erosion of respect, or even sexual assault. One girl related to me her anger that her boyfriend refused to use a condom which resulted in her contracting an STD. Well, I suppose there’s nothing new about that.

Beyond those relatively benign issues, the atmosphere was almost excruciatingly intense. In fact, the morning of the action I woke up and wondered in a moment of slight panic whether I had inadvertently stumbled upon a cult. Very late the night before, while constructing the pipes and chains to lock themselves in place, the young people shared a peculiar fervid light in their eyes almost like they were in a drugged trance, no doubt from exhaustion and anxiety.

There were certainly moments of levity and friendly interactions, but overall it was extremely stressful and many people were on edge. Whether that’s endemic to the sort of personality attracted to direct actions or is a temporary condition from the apprehension just prior, I can’t say. It didn’t help that surveillance helicopters regularly swept over our camp.

The “Rainbow People,” a scruffy lot of vagabonds who travel on a dilapidated old bus, departed after being publicly chastised for saying “you guys” instead of “y’all” and not accepting the onus of white male privilege, among other transgressions. They also resented being told that they had to wear shirts and not peace signs. Hippie is an image shunned by most activists.

Everyone was expected to engage in role playing in a mock conflict with miners and protesters and this proved invaluable practice for what indeed followed. Much was made of the importance of sensitivity to the plight of the miners, who are already losing jobs because mountaintop removal requires fewer workers and the demand for coal is waning. It wouldn’t have been prudent of me to reveal that I just don’t feel the special empathy for miners we were supposed to have.

Did anyone mourn for the lost canvas sail makers when steam ships came along, or the farriers who became obsolete when people abandoned horses and took to cars? We are supposed to feel for the miners because it’s all they know how to do, it’s a culture, and it has a history, but to me it’s an ethic that — like just about all human endeavors everywhere — simply grabbed onto to a cheap, easy income to live beyond our environmental means. I believe RAMPS has the fanciful notion that they can bridge the differences with miners if only they can educate them, which has about the same probability of success as convincing a fundamentalist religious zealot that they imagined God.

Several times I asked organizers: What would West Virginia look like if there just happened to be no coal? How would people get by?

The answer was inevitably: There just wouldn’t be so many people. Really, it’s likely there wouldn’t be any people. In other words, those mountains are incapable of sustaining a human population. Even the Indians, I was told, never lived there — they only visited to hunt.

So I guess you could say, the problem isn’t MTR, or coal. It’s our numbers.

I’ll go one step further and say (and I in no way mean to include all the other fine folks in West Virginia, because this statement already got me accused of, perish the thought, stereotyping!) that the counter-protesters were not just vicious and belligerent, they were incredibly stupid. Why do I say so? In one of many “conversations” that ensued over the course of the afternoon of the protest, a woman demanded to know why we were there given that we weren’t from West Virginia. I told her as politely and calmly as I could that the toxic emissions from coal plants travel hundreds of miles, giving people far away (like my daughter) cancer. Despite this, she continued to demand to know why I was there, as though she hadn’t even heard my answer. Two miners in the back of a pickup engaged in a loud discussion, meant to be overheard, deriding us for caring about the environment. One declared, “Ain’t no pollution here!” Not two miles from this:

One local article doesn’t come anywhere close to describing the reality of what we called “The Gauntlet” as we walked for hours after the protest to find our vans. Dozens of anti-protesters in miners’ gear drove pickups, ATVs, and motorcycles that threatened to run us off the road, roaring around the twisting, narrow corners at insanely high speeds, throwing sticks and rocks. I would say most of us were terrified.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the only reason they didn’t shoot or otherwise attack us is that they, too, had training, from the coal companies, and were instructed to intimidate us but not do anything that would create bad publicity for the coal companies by causing permanent injury. Having said that, there is no question in my mind that had we responded with anything in kind, the situation could have easily crossed the line into physical violence.

When we finally did locate our vans, which had been prevented by the police from rescuing us, the trucks blockaded our vehicles on the street. The verbal assault continued for about two hours while we were trapped, fearful we would be stranded at their mercy in the dark. Finally three state troopers arrived and made them let us through. Several vehicles then tailed us for well over an hour into the night, boxing us in on the freeway, before we finally lost them.

Among the anti-protesters, the women were the worst, cursing and screaming. My favorites were, “Brush your fucking teeth!” and “Take a fucking bath!” It occurred to me, when one girl complained that we were insufficiently appreciative of the sacrifice miners had made to provide the rest of us with electricity — such as her brother, who had sustained injuries on the job — that their dependence on coal resembles the emotional traits of abusive relationships, in which victims cling irrationally to their abusers.

Confederate flags and signs that demand “End the War on Coal”decorate their houses, many of them trailers. The inhabitants feel besieged and in their minds are clearly waging a war. Even neighbors of our isolated campground, which was located down a long, graveled single lane, were overtly hostile. The morning of the action, one person was missing and it turned out that he had been out walking when a man shouted to him, “Get off the road!” Thinking a car must be approaching, he leapt onto the lawn, and the man, who was brandishing some sort of club, said, “I can’t believe you’re so dumb you fell for that. Y’all are on private property now and according to West Virginia law, I can take you hostage.” Really! Our comrade refused to fight and so eventually the man’s wife called the police and they arrived and set him free.

When we finally got back to camp, we found out that someone had put spike strips on the drive, cut trees with a chainsaw to block it, and left a half-dozen 9mm bullet holes in the campground sign (one right through the sheep’s heart).

I have speculated that perhaps the reason more people haven’t realized that trees are dying from pollution is that so many of us live in cities or are otherwise cut off from nature. And yet here in the midst of huge forests, the worst epithet the miners could derisively hurl at us was “tree-hugger.” They have no appreciation for the trees at all, other than to exploit them. They are still logging relentlessly.

All in all, it was an excellent adventure, even fulfilling the cliché of “empowerment.” Although the trees in West Virginia are no healthier than the sickly specimens that haunt me in New Jersey, there are just so many on so many mountains that it was an enormous pleasure to walk in their blue shadows. And I do actually have sympathy for one of the signs on a miner’s truck, which declared, “Don’t Like Coal? Burn Candles.”

The miners, like other climate deniers, understand in a visceral way that there is no technological replacement for the concentrated power of fossil fuels. They continue to stick their fingers in their ears because scientists and activists simply haven’t been truthful, and deniers know it. There is no way that catastrophic climate change — and consequent extinction for most species — can be averted unless human population is deliberately restricted and individual consumption in the developed countries is drastically curtailed. So they tune out the scientific evidence of climate change.

Ecological and health costs of industrial civilization have been given short shrift in the climate-change narrative: epidemics of cancer and heart disease, hormone-disrupting plastics leading to obesity and diabetes, ocean acidification and coral bleaching, habitat destruction and water contamination from coal mining, tar sands, and hydrofracking … and what is completely obvious, but never discussed, the collapsing ecosystems on the land as trees and annual agricultural crops absorb ozone and lose resistance to insects, disease, fungus, and drought.

Food and health are things that people care about, not melting ice caps in the Arctic from CO2, as dangerous as that is. With this obstinate strategic error, the climate movement has won very few battles and totally lost the war.

But don’t go down without a fight.

Filed under: Article, Climate & Energy

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A version of this article originally appeared on Climate Progress.

Americans for Prosperity (AFP) now sees children flying kites as a major threat to society.

Earlier today, I opened my email box to find an uproarious AFP promotion for protests in Asbury Park and Ocean City, N.J., this Friday.

What are they so upset about?

An event so dastardly and maniacal, it has the potential to tear down everything we love about our freedoms as Americans. I almost couldn’t stomach it when I found out more.

Yes, it’s “extremist” kids flying kites in support of offshore wind energy.

Don’t worry, AFP is on the case (as explained on their website, accompanied by a picture of a smoking wind turbine):

You heard that right! Friday is “Global Wind Day” and environmental extremists throughout New Jersey will be celebrating by flying kites at beaches along the Jersey Shore and calling for more and more of our tax dollars to be used to subsidize their crazy offshore wind pipe dreams!

AFP will be going toe to toe with the environmental extremists to combat their radical agenda and tell the truth about the costs of offshore wind.

Yes, that’s right. With monetary assistance from the Koch Brothers, AFP will be going toe-to-toe with these kite-flying kids who represent such a threat to the free market.

Here’s how the Sierra Club describes the event in support of Global Wind Day: “We’ll be gathering at a beach near you for a kite-flying rally and celebration of NJ’s offshore wind potential. Bring your family, friends and kites.”

The horror!

In order to combat these “extremist” families and their kite-flying antics, AFP is throwing in all the resources it can — chartering six buses (yes, six) to bring people in from around the state.

How will this battle unfold? Will the crusading free-marketeers be able to withstand this beach full of radical children? Tune in Friday on Global Wind Day …

Filed under: Article, Wind Power

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By Twilight Greenaway

Shrimp has been hovering near the bottom of the list of things I will eat for a while. Unless you make a point to get it wild, chances are very good it has been raised in a crowded pond and treated with loads of antibiotics. Factor in its mammoth carbon footprint, and the fact that many of the developing world’s mangroves have been displaced in recent years to make room for shrimp farms, and my appetite for these crustaceans all but disappears.

Now we can add labor abuse to shrimp’s laundry list of problems.

A group of shrimp workers has been protesting dismal conditions in a Thai factory for weeks. The factory, Phatthana Seafood, is one of several brands under a corporate umbrella called PTN Group, and is distributed by Rubicon, a major supplier to Walmart here in the U.S.

Not only is Phatthana being accused of skimping on the pay they’ve promised to workers (and keeping a percentage of it against the debt workers incur to travel to the factory — a practice described in the human rights community as “debt bondage”), but they’ve also reportedly been keeping the workers’ passports and releasing them only for a (steep) fee.

Sok Sorng traveled from Cambodia to Thailand to work in a large, industrial seafood factory and is now regretting the choice to leave home. According to the Bangkok Post, the 20-year-old was told he “would have the job for two years and would receive living arrangements and a food allowance.” But when he arrived, he found that fees for both living expenses and passports not mentioned in the original contracts had been deducted from workers’ salaries. The Thai paper also reports:

He found he had to work 26 days a month. He got his salary every two weeks, but half was withheld to ensure he did not run away. “Most of the workers wanted to go home, but we will be in debt from preparing to travel and an unknown amount we are told to pay to get passports and transportation,” he said.

All this might explain why Sorng has become a spokesperson for the protest. And while the Asian news outlets covering the story don’t pretend the seafood processor is using practices unheard of for Thailand, the mere fact that so much of the product is being distributed globally — and to Walmart, no less — has helped raise the profile of the protests.

To put this in context, shrimp is America’s top-selling seafood. Walmart, meanwhile, is our biggest grocery retailer. Put the two together and you can picture how the massive global stream of frozen, cooked shrimp pours into American households. (This also explains how the shellfish went from being a rare, expensive delicacy to a $1.99 fast-food menu add-on.) There are still a few sources of domestic shrimp in the U.S. (the Gulf of Mexico being one of the largest), but around 90 percent of the shrimp we eat comes from abroad, and most of that comes from Thailand, Vietnam, and South America. (China is also a large producer, but they eat much of what they produce.)

In other words, this is not an obscure story about one of those less important foods. And if the recent media spotlight on Foxconn Technology and its relationship with Apple have taught the American public anything, it’s that most things made for the U.S. travel en masse a convoluted path from one closed-door operation to another. And it’s never easy to access the truth about the way workers are treated behind those doors. The foreign factories producing our food are no different.

Organizers for Making Change at Walmart — a project of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union — have been helping the shrimp workers at Phatthana Seafood raise their profile and put pressure on the multinational retailer. The group recently sent a letter to Walmart [PDF] detailing the abuses in the factory (as well as a second factory in Thailand that ships over 70 percent of its canned pineapple product to Walmart).

In their letter, the American labor union references Walmart’s standards for suppliers, which states that “all labor must be voluntary” and “workers must be allowed to maintain control over their identity documents.” The union’s letter reads:

As you know, the confiscation of documents is a violation of Thai law as well as Walmart’s Standards for Suppliers. Receiving half the hours and pay promised to them and without promised lodging and transportation, many of the workers face malnutrition because they are unable to even afford enough to eat.

Walmart, meanwhile, has spent the week promoting the company’s progress on its sustainability milestones (which they presented to the public in a glitzy meeting that was webcast around the world). The company’s goals, as it describes them, are: “To be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy; to create zero waste; and to sell products that sustain people and the environment.”

Meanwhile, around 300 of the migrant workers at the shrimp factory must rely on a donated rations from an NGO because they can’t currently afford to eat. As organizer Sok Sorng told The Phnom Penh Post: “They need food so much because [they have received] no money from work.”

Filed under: Food

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by Greg Hanscom.

When
Peter Gibson first set out with spray paint and stencils into the streets of
Montreal, he had protest on his mind, not art. He had little sense that his
small act of sabotage would usher him into the boundary-pushing realm of street
art — or land him in the back of a police car, facing serious criminal charges.

It
was just after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and Gibson, a
university-trained pianist who was 27 at the time, watched as the U.S. and its
allies searched for an object on which to inflict their revenge. “Everybody was
rattling sabers, getting ready to go to war,” he says. “But there was a
disconnect between our way of life and consumerism — and oil in particular — and
the effects that they were having around the world.”

For
Gibson, the connections were clear: It was our passive acceptance of car
culture that had gotten us into this mess. Had it not been for our addiction to oil, we wouldn’t have been meddling in the Middle East in the first place.

Searching
for a way to express his frustration, Gibson turned to the pavement beneath his
feet. He started by spray painting vigilante bike-route markers on city streets,
inspired by a trick he’d seen in Adbusters (the anti-consumerist magazine that kicked off the current Wall-Street-directed mischief). It was his
subtle way of making room for a less oil-dependent lifestyle.

Gibson’s
art, he says, “evolved from there.”

Working
under the moniker Roadsworth, he began to retrofit crosswalks with custom works
of artistic protest. He morphed one into a giant boot print. “The idea was that
pedestrians were taking over — this giant footprint taking back the streets,”
he says. Elsewhere, he turned crosswalk bars into bullets, and interlaced
others with barbed wire. “I was trying to make a connection between our
lifestyle here and our use of oil and the wars that go on around the world,” he
says.

From
these beginnings, Roadsworth’s work became more abstract — and more
subversive. He began adding designs and flourishes to the lines on the streets
just to mess with the accepted structure of the city. He stenciled flowers and
windmills on the asphalt, along with his trademark “shadow demon,” which perched
mischievously atop painted lines or street-sign shadows. “It was just
like putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa,” he says. “I was challenging
something that has this aura of authority to it. Tweaking those lines became a
message in itself.”

The
fun came to an abrupt end in the wee hours of November 29, 2004, when the
police arrested Gibson while he was painting on the street, charging him with
85 counts of public mischief. The charges might sound like something out of a
Monty Python skit, but this was serious business: Gibson faced jail time and
hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.

“It
was pretty intense,” says Gibson. A local newspaper ran a story with the
headline, “Roadsworth RIP.”

The
case dragged on for more than a year, during which Gibson was under a loose
form of house arrest, prohibited from leaving Montreal, yet confined to certain
parts of the city. In the end, Gibson accepted what amounted to an out-of-court
settlement. He admitted he was guilty, did 200 hours of community service, and
spent two years on probation. In return, he avoided jail time and paid
only about $250 in fines.

Public
support was key to his gentle handling, Gibson says today — and it didn’t hurt
that the city itself had commissioned him to do a piece of legal art on a
street even as it was prosecuting him for his illicit deeds. Apparently he had
some admirers even in city government.

His
anonymity lost, Gibson says he has stopped all street work in Montreal. “When I
think of street art, for me, it’s an illegal art form by nature,” he says.
While he may join an occasional bombing run in another town, he sticks to the
rules when he’s home, making a living doing commissioned art and mural work.
He’s just back from Northern Ireland, where he was working with school kids.

Meanwhile,
the city of Montreal has improved its bike infrastructure, he says — and his
guerilla bike route stunt has been repeated around the world by residents
who are tired of the car being king. And Gibson doesn’t miss an opportunity to speak out about the oil-soaked
culture that he believes is the root of much evil in the world. “It’s easy to
point fingers, blame governments and corporations for the ills of the world,”
he says, “but we all participate in it.”

Related Links:

Sharing time: Tracking the ‘sharrow’ on city streets

Will Congress keep paying the Koch brothers and others?

Writing on the Wall: Street artists transform the urban landscape

View full post on Grist.org – the latest from Grist

by Lisa Hymas.

Climate activist Bill McKibben brought his message to a big
Occupy Wall Street crowd gathered in Washington Square in New York City on
Saturday. Watch his teach-in about the threat of the proposed Keystone XL
pipeline:

As Matthew
McDermott of Treehugger explains, “Regarding the call-and-response,
for those not up on OWS, the police have prohibited all methods of
electronically amplifying sound. The protestors have developed what they call
the ‘human microphone,’ where the crowd repeats the words of the speaker so
that all in attendance can hear what’s being said.”

McKibben invited the activists to come
to Washington, D.C., on Nov. 6 and encircle the White House in a protest
against the Keystone pipeline, which would carry filthy tar-sands oil 1,700
miles from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of the U.S.:

[We’re] going to be carrying signs with quotations from
Barack Obama from the 2008 campaign. He said, “It’s time to end the
tyranny of oil.” He said, “I will have the most transparent
government in history.” We have to go to D.C. to find out where they’ve
locked that guy up. We have to free Obama because there’s some kind of stunt
double there now.

 

The Obama administration is starting to feel the heat on
this issue, thanks to McKibben
and the other 1,252
activists who were arrested in front of the White House while protesting
against the pipeline in late August and early September. “Keystone
XL pipeline becomes a political headache for White House,” Juliet
Eilperin reported in The Washington Post on Friday.

McKibben is a member of Grist’s board of directors.

Related Links:

Can we make nature even better?

Keystone-pipeline protestors link their movement to Occupy Wall Street

Koch Industries stands to profit off Keystone XL

View full post on Grist.org – the latest from Grist

by Jay Mallin.

Activist and author Bill McKibben was sprung from jail on Monday, as were the dozens of others arrested on Saturday at the start of a two-week protest against the proposed Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline. Videographer/photographer Jay Mallin was on the scene outside the courthouse to record the mood. McKibben said the freed protestors may have looked a bit saggy because they’d lost their belts, but that wasn’t bringing them down: “Our pants may be low but our spirits are high, and our determination intact.” He was excited to learn that the New York Times editorial board had come out strongly against the pipeline on Sunday.

More than 160 people have been arrested so far while taking part in the protest in front of the White House, and people from around the country continue to pour in to make their voices heard. Hear some of their voices in this video. The sit-in will continue through Sept. 3. Find out more and support the cause at TarSandsAction.org.

Editor’s note: Bill McKibben serves on Grist’s board of directors.

Related Links:

How to save 20,000 oiled penguins

Why I’m marching against the tar-sands pipeline

Daryl Hannah joins tar-sands protest

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

by Richard Graves.

Cross-posted from It’s Getting Hot in Here.

Seventy people from across the U.S. and Canada were arrested in front of the White House Saturday morning on the first day of a two-week sit-in aimed at pressuring President Obama to deny the permit for a massive new oil pipeline. More than 2,000 additional people are expected to join the daily civil disobedience over the coming days.

At stake is what has quickly become the largest environmental test for Obama before the 2012 election: The president must choose whether or not to grant a Canadian company a permit to build a 1,700-mile pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

Environmentalists warn that the pipeline could cause a BP disaster right in America’s heartland, over the largest source of fresh drinking water in the country, the Ogallala Aquifer. The nation’s top climatologist, James Hansen, has warned that if the Canadian tar sands are fully developed, it could be “game over” for the climate.

“It’s not the easiest thing on earth for law-abiding folk to come risk arrest. But this pipeline has emerged as the single clear test of the president’s willingness to fight for the environment,” said environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, who is spearheading the protests and was arrested this morning. “So I wore my Obama ’08 button, and I carry a great deal of hope in my heart that we will see that old Obama emerge. It’s hot out here today, especially when you’re wearing a suit and tie. But it’s nowhere near as hot as it’s going to get if we lose this fight.”

McKibben was amongst those arrested today, along with NRDC co-founder and former White House official Gus Speth, gay rights activist Lt. Dan Choi, author and activist Mike Tidwell, Firedoglake founder Jane Hamsher, and many others.

Environmentalists say that the president’s failure to take any substantive steps to protect the environment and stop the climate crisis has left his base disheartened and desperate. While the president can blame Congress for the failure to pass a climate bill, the decision on whether to grant a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline is his and his alone.

The protest began with a small rally in Lafeyette Park, where participants listened to McKibben address the crowd and prepared themselves for what would likely be an afternoon in jail. At about 11:00 a.m., the group formed two lines and marched to the White House fence to the applause of onlookers. A group of participants lined the fence, holding two large banners that read “Climate Change Is Not in Our National Interest: Stop the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline” and “We Sit In Against the Keystone XL Pipeline. Obama Will You Stand Up to Big Oil?” The rest of the group sat-in on the sidewalk in front of the fence.

Within a few minutes, police began issuing warnings to clear the area. At 11:30 a.m., a young woman from Sarah Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, was the first person to be arrested. Arrests proceeded for over an hour as van-loads of protestors were taken away from the White House.

Jane Kleeb, an outspoken opponent of the pipeline and founder of BOLD Nebraska, stood in Lafayette Park this morning and cheered on the protestors as they were arrested.

“Nebraskans are counting on President Obama to do the right thing,” said Kleeb, who is planning to risk arrest on Monday with a delegation of farmers and ranchers who are coming in from Nebraska. “Back home we are fighting to protect our land and water. We decided to bring that fight to the president’s doorstep because our families’ legacies, those that homesteaded the very land now threatened by a foreign oil company, are too important for us sit on the sidelines. We are acting on our values and expect our president to act as well.”

The coalition organizing the protest, Tar Sands Action, is seeking donations and more volunteers to participate in the sit-in throughout the next two weeks. For more information, visit tarsandsaction.org and follow the group on Twitter at @tarsandsaction.

Editor’s note: Bill McKibben serves on Grist’s board of directors.

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by Richard Graves.

Cross-posted from It’s Getting Hot in Here.

Seventy people from across the U.S. and Canada were arrested in front of the White House Saturday morning on the first day of a two-week sit-in aimed at pressuring President Obama to deny the permit for a massive new oil pipeline. More than 2,000 additional people are expected to join the daily civil disobedience over the coming days.

At stake is what has quickly become the largest environmental test for Obama before the 2012 election: The president must choose whether or not to grant a Canadian company a permit to build a 1,700-mile pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

Environmentalists warn that the pipeline could cause a BP disaster right in America’s heartland, over the largest source of fresh drinking water in the country, the Ogallala Aquifer. The nation’s top climatologist, James Hansen, has warned that if the Canadian tar sands are fully developed, it could be “game over” for the climate.

“It’s not the easiest thing on earth for law-abiding folk to come risk arrest. But this pipeline has emerged as the single clear test of the president’s willingness to fight for the environment,” said environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, who is spearheading the protests and was arrested this morning. “So I wore my Obama ’08 button, and I carry a great deal of hope in my heart that we will see that old Obama emerge. It’s hot out here today, especially when you’re wearing a suit and tie. But it’s nowhere near as hot as it’s going to get if we lose this fight.”

McKibben was amongst those arrested today, along with NRDC co-founder and former White House official Gus Speth, gay rights activist Lt. Dan Choi, author and activist Mike Tidwell, Firedoglake founder Jane Hamsher, and many others.

Environmentalists say that the president’s failure to take any substantive steps to protect the environment and stop the climate crisis has left his base disheartened and desperate. While the president can blame Congress for the failure to pass a climate bill, the decision on whether to grant a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline is his and his alone.

The protest began with a small rally in Lafeyette Park, where participants listened to McKibben address the crowd and prepared themselves for what would likely be an afternoon in jail. At about 11:00 a.m., the group formed two lines and marched to the White House fence to the applause of onlookers. A group of participants lined the fence, holding two large banners that read “Climate Change Is Not in Our National Interest: Stop the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline” and “We Sit In Against the Keystone XL Pipeline. Obama Will You Stand Up to Big Oil?” The rest of the group sat-in on the sidewalk in front of the fence.

Within a few minutes, police began issuing warnings to clear the area. At 11:30 a.m., a young woman from Sarah Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, was the first person to be arrested. Arrests proceeded for over an hour as van-loads of protestors were taken away from the White House.

Jane Kleeb, an outspoken opponent of the pipeline and founder of BOLD Nebraska, stood in Lafayette Park this morning and cheered on the protestors as they were arrested.

“Nebraskans are counting on President Obama to do the right thing,” said Kleeb, who is planning to risk arrest on Monday with a delegation of farmers and ranchers who are coming in from Nebraska. “Back home we are fighting to protect our land and water. We decided to bring that fight to the president’s doorstep because our families’ legacies, those that homesteaded the very land now threatened by a foreign oil company, are too important for us sit on the sidelines. We are acting on our values and expect our president to act as well.”

The coalition organizing the protest, Tar Sands Action, is seeking donations and more volunteers to participate in the sit-in throughout the next two weeks. For more information, visit tarsandsaction.org and follow the group on Twitter at @tarsandsaction.

Editor’s note: Bill McKibben serves on Grist’s board of directors.

Related Links:

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Tar-sands pipeline ‘safety conditions’ are smoke and mirrors

Mass Movements in the USA Today

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

by Brad Johnson.

Cross-posted from Wonk Room.

In a startling act of fealty to polluter interests, several senators are fighting scientifically guided smog limits that would save thousands of lives a year. Under the guidance of administrator Lisa Jackson, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is working to clean up one of George W. Bush’s most blatant acts of ignoring science and disregarding the law, when he personally overruled the unanimous recommendations of EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee for an ozone limit no higher than 70 ppb, setting instead an arbitrary and capricious standard of 75 ppb. Jackson intends to instead follow the law by setting a 60-70 ppb standard. However, a group of Democratic and Republican senators led by retiring Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) are trying to preserve Bush’s toxic legacy on behalf of the coal and oil industries in their states, complaining to Jackson that her plan “will have a significant negative impact on our states’ workers and families”:

We believe that changing the rules at this time will have a significant negative impact on our states’ workers and families and will compound the hardship that many are now facing in these difficult economic times.

The pro-smog letter was also signed by Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), Kit Bond (R-Mo.) and David Vitter (R-La.).

Remarkably, the senators do not seem cognizant of Bush’s well-reported act of malfeasance, complaining that “the Agency has not presented new data or evidence to justify its course of action”:

Instead, outside of the regular five-year review process, EPA is choosing to interpret the same basic body of information that existed in 2008 and reach a different conclusion. . .

Given the absence of new or different scientific data, EPA should maintain the current ozone standards, which EPA finalized only two years ago and concluded were adequately protective of public health and welfare with an adequate of safety [sic].

Actually the conclusion EPA staff and scientists drew in 2008, based on the scientific evidence that “ozone has a direct impact on rates of heart and respiratory disease and resulting premature deaths,” was that a standard no higher than 70 ppb was needed. The agency calculated that a standard of 65 ppb “would avoid 3,000 to 9,200 deaths annually,” two to three times more than a 75 ppb standard. The difference is that George W. Bush is no longer the decider.

The senators also claim that the previous smog standards harmed the economy:

We note that many states are only recently coming into attainment with the 1997, 0.084 ppm ozone standard. Attaining that standard required costly mandates on businesses, which greatly restricted the ability of local communities to grow their economies. . .

While we believe we can and should continue to improve our environment, we have become increasingly concerned that the Agency’s environmental policies are being advanced to the detriment of the people they are intended to protect. That is, these policies are impacting our standard of living by drastically increasing energy costs and decreasing the ability of our states to create jobs, foster entrepreneurship, and give manufacturers the ability to compete in the global marketplace.

The claim that attainment with the 1997 standard “greatly restricted the ability of local communities to grow their economies” is without evidence. In fact, the only noticeable effect of the 1997 standards on the economy was to dramatically cut the regulated pollution, making millions of children healthier, even as the economy steadily grew, as this EPA chart shows:

 

 

Finally, the senators claim — again without evidence — that “non-attainment” penalties under the Clean Air Act “undermine the economic viability of communities within our states.” In fact, “there is no clear evidence that non-attainment designations or progress in addressing air quality prevent areas from growing,” EPA officials informed the Wonk Room. Areas such as Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and many others have been non-attainment for years and have had very strong growth rates. The EPA tells the Wonk Room:

We see no significant differences in the trend of employment, wages and number of establishments between attainment and non-attainment areas.

There is clear evidence, however, that this effort to ensure that more children have asthma attacks comes on behalf of coal and oil corporations in the senators’ states. Peabody Energy, the “world’s leading coal company,” is based in Missouri and has mines in Indiana, and is a top campaign contributor to McCaskill, Bond, Lugar and Bayh. Murray Energy, the “largest privately owned coal company in America,” is based in Voinovich’s state.  Landrieu and Vitter have collected a combined $1.5 million from the pollution industry, whose refineries and power plants keep killing children and keep sending these senators back to Washington.

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View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist