Biggest Civil Disobedience in History of Continent’s Climate

Biggest Civil Disobedience in History of Continent’s Climate Movement Starts Sat. 8/20

When: Sat., Aug. 20 – Sat. Sept. 3
Where: The White House, Washington, DC

More than 1500 people have committed to get arrested while over 2100 people are coming. As Bill McKibben remarked, “This is a big deal.” This is not a single “day of action”, but instead a wave of daily civil disobedience from August 20th – September 3rd with a simple, sit-in style action at The White House fences mid-morning every day.

The planet is steadily warming: 2010 was the warmest year on record, and we’ve seen the resulting chaos in almost every corner of the earth. This summer in Washington DC, the State Department and the White House have to decide whether to grant a certificate of ‘national interest’ to some of the biggest fossil fuel players on earth. These corporations want to build the so-called ‘Keystone XL Pipeline’ from Canada’s tar sands to Texas refineries.

To call this project a horror is serious understatement. The tar sands have wrecked huge parts of Alberta, disrupting ways of life in indigenous communities. The pipeline crosses crucial areas like the Oglalla Aquifer where a spill would be disastrous. The biggest burdens of the Keystone XL pipeline and tar sands development inevitably fall on the least well off. Communities all along the pipeline route - from indigenous communities in Alberta, to rural farmers in the midwest, to working class neighborhoods on the Gulf Coast - face an eminent threat from the toxic pollution this pipeline would carry.

These local impacts alone would be cause enough to block such a plan. But the Keystone Pipeline will make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet, the one place to which we are all indigenous.

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