Thousands in D.C. protest pipeline
Demonstrators march with a replica of a pipeline during a protest to demand a stop to the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline outside the White House on Sunday, Nov. 6, 2011, in Washington. / AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Last Updated 5:04 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON - Thousands of protesters, including a Nobel laureate and a movie star, gathered near the White House on Sunday in opposition to TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline.
The demonstration is the latest in a series of White House protests aimed at convincing U.S. President Barack Obama to block the $7 billion project that would carry Alberta oilsands crude through six American states to Gulf Coast refineries.
Mark Ruffalo, nominated for an Academy Award last year, and Jody Williams, winner of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her work on banning landmines, were among the celebrities who intended to join hands and encircle the White House despite the fact that Obama was golfing in northern Virginia on a stunning autumn afternoon.
"I'm here to get a message to President Obama to stop the tarsands, Keystone XL pipeline," Ruffalo told The Canadian Press.
"I voted for him because he promised us change and he promised us we were going to be the generation to end tyranny, and now is his chance to come through."
Canadian actress Margot Kidder, arrested at a summer White House anti-Keystone protest, was back on Sunday amid thousands of peaceful protesters who waved banners and chanted anti-pipeline slogans across Pennsylvania Avenue from the presidential residence.
"I have heard he's gone golfing but he has to drive through the wonderful circle to get back to his house, so that's perfect," she said.
The Obama administration is currently weighing whether to give the green light to Keystone XL.
Demonstrators hold up a banner in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., November 6, 2011. Thousands joined hands and circled the White House in protest against the Keystone XL pipeline.
/ KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty ImagesThe U.S. State Department is making the ruling because the pipeline crosses an international border, but the president has said the final decision will reflect his views and suggested he isn't swayed by the argument that the pipeline will create jobs.
"Folks in Nebraska, like all across the country, aren't going to say to themselves, 'We'll take a few thousand jobs if it means our kids are potentially drinking water that would damage their health,"' Obama said in an interview with an Omaha TV station.
"We don't want, for example, aquifers to be adversely affected. Folks in Nebraska obviously would be directly impacted."
A decision on the pipeline was supposed to be made by the end of the year, but the State Department suggested last week that it might defer the decision as they continue to assess whether Keystone XL is in the national interest of the United States.
Keystone XL has become a political hot potato for the Obama administration, especially since the release of emails that suggest a cosy relationship between State Department officials and TransCanada's chief lobbyist, Paul Elliott.
Elliott worked on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful presidential bid in 2008.
There have also been allegations that the State Department failed to do an impartial environmental assessment of Keystone XL by hiring an environmental consulting firm, Houston-based Cardno Entrix, recommended to it by TransCanada itself.
With a presidential election less than a year away, key Obama advisers are reportedly growing increasingly nervous about losing supporters if they approve Keystone XL.
The pipeline's opponents point to a series of recent spills along oil pipelines and argue the Keystone XL project is a disaster waiting to happen as it would carry millions of barrels a week of carbon-intensive oilsands crude through environmentally fragile areas of the U.S. Great Plains.
Proponents, meantime, say the pipeline will create thousands of much-needed jobs and help end American reliance on oil from volatile and sometime hostile OPEC regimes.
The project has not only become a symbol of the increasingly heated debate in the United States about the country's reliance on fossil fuels and a perceived reluctance to embrace renewable sources of energy, but also the distrust many Americans feel towards big corporations.
Pipeline opponents have said their anti-Keystone protests reflect larger scale public anger at corporate greed, pointing to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.
"You can't occupy the White House, but you can surround it," Bill McKibben, a leading U.S. environmentalist and one of the protest's organizers, told a news conference last week.
Keystone XL has become a flashpoint for the environmental movement in the U.S. following last year's failed federal climate change legislation. More than 1,000 protesters were arrested this summer in two weeks of sit-ins outside the White House.
The Nebraska legislature, meantime, is in special session considering legislation that could force TransCanada to reroute the pipeline away from the Ogallala aquifer, a major source of drinking water for the region.
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A habit. A habit of people's minds to think that someone will make it right. We have to realize our role in environment as it is Nature. We are natural. At heart, hear the truth.
Economy will not buy the future. All the governments have enough knowledge and practice of solar energy, for example. I have numerous research findings - all- from the best scientists and environmental researches of the world, and all of them say that the governments know how to make a transition from fuel based economy to renewable solar one. They do not want to. WHy? because it means no corporate rulership, no poverty, no otherization, no hunger, no food issues, no neocolonialism....no governmnent.
We are self-sufficient, and Nature knows. It also has an agency. Today, we participated at the cosmic events that are never coincidence. In cosmos nothing is a coincidence. The whole cosmos sends us energy, be It. All these events were in prophecies and the time has come to make a decision.
My community and I choose natural being and no government. And we will see thousands protests worldwide to oppose and change regimes of power and domination. The Earth had enough. By the way, the earthquake in Canada has the Parliament Hill as its epicenter. The earth herself is telling us to get rid of the parliament and its structures of thought, domination, stories.
The environmentalists are waging such a war against energy companies that they've frozen the government permit process with incessant demands for more "environmental impact studies" and "wildlife studies", and so on.
And every time one administration gets close to issuing the first new refinery permit in over 30 years...... the next Congress or Administration botches the whole thing.
Or the EPA delays things because the 24275th environmental group to lodge a petition is worried about some local grubworm that's going to be displaced when the refinery is built.
And round and round it goes. Meanwhile, existing refineries are running dangerously close to capacity, and any burp in production caused by even the most minor malfunction sends prices at the pump soaring.
They should build the refinery on the site in Canada.
From there rail it out on electric power.
Simple, clean, and necessary.
Two years ago they increased our sewage rates 11% because the power required for the treatment plants has gone up and availability of treatment chemicals has gone down because no one can afford to produce them locally anymore.
"I supposed a line buried in concrete, which itself runs only through a wide steel-reinforced granite canal lined with a heavy borax compound would be even better yet, but really, shouldn't safety have limits like anything else?"
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Yes, the same sort of rational objective observation that should be applicable to infinite growth economics which is exponentially growing the consumption of petrol. Which is to say, our irrational infinite growth economic system is the root cause of this conflict.
Consumption is the driver and infinite consumption as predicated by infinite growth is irrational and ultimately self destructive.
And now....... they have no idea when we'll run out because we keep finding more untapped resources.
Its kinda like with computers. I remember when the first Pentium chips came out, everyone swore you couldn't break the 100MHz "barrier" because of heat. And here we are, almost 20 years later, running multiple processors in excess of 3GHz each, all on a chip smaller and cooler than its 100MHz forefather.
And as for resource exhaustion... it will never happen. The only energy that's lost from earth is what we send into space to power space probes. Everything else just gets recycled here on earth. :)
We still need this pipeline but not next to water.
The EPA won't grant permits because there's a CHANCE something might leak. Rational thinking tells us there has to be an acceptable level of risk. But EPA regulators aren't rational, they're ordered by the White House to simply not issue permits.
The EPA are also the geniuses that want us to use CFL light bulbs, even though you have to follow hazmat protocols for clean up if you happen to break one. I'd much rather have the old incandescents thank you very much.
Yet I never hear Greenpeace or the Sierra Club holding mass suicide demonstrations to do their part in lowering the human population's impact on Mother Earth. Hmmmm.... I wonder why that is?
Obama's plan is to hike gas prices to about $11/gal. which is what his energy secretary accidentally let out. He's using the EPA to strangle oil production, and giving billions to his "green" contributors like Solyndra. But the reality is, "green energy" can't produce near enough to meet 1930 America's needs, much less today's. The funny thing is, pipelines are MUCH more eco-friendly than tanker ships and trucks. They seldom leak, and there have been few large-scale pipeline catastrophes because there's so many safety shut-offs along the way. But these occupy and eco-wackjobs will never be satisfied until we live like they do on Star Trek.
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What of the "ticking time bomb" scenario. A couple of cheap bombs placed strategically. Was this not the rational for torture; was this not the rational for the removal of freedoms? It is not like protecting a couple of buildings since it spans 5 states.
Is this not an invitation for terrorists....is this not the rhetoric of the right?
As for invitations for terrorists, THEY DON'T NEED ONE! They already want to get at us. But you don't see them going after the Alaskan Pipeline, do you? And they won't go after oil tankers because they WANT us paying their Saudi brethren so they can continue getting funded by them.
Fact is, they're finding it very difficult to do so because the average American tends to turn in fishy people to the authorities before they can do anything dangerous, and the FBI is great at compromising these people once they know about them.