I know that there been some bitterness in the blogosphere in recent weeks between those who are mad at President Obama, and those who are mad at those who are mad at President Obama.
I want to tell you about an upcoming action -- it looks set to turn into the biggest civil disobedience protest in the history of the North American climate movement. It will take place at the White House from August 20-Sept. 3, and we need your help spreading the word. But I want to explain the reasoning behind it in some detail, because for me it helps illustrate how some of the debate about Obama is unproductive.
First, the issue: the Canadians are proposing to build a huge new pipeline from their tar sands in Alberta down to the Gulf of Mexico. It's disastrous for native lands in the far north (check out this video from the wonderful Cree activist Melina Laboucan) and it will doubtless cause horrible spills much like last week's disaster on the Yellowstone River.
But there's a bigger problem here too. Those Alberta tar sands are the biggest carbon bomb on the continent -- indeed, on the whole planet, only Saudi Arabia's oil deposits are bigger. Some of you have followed the work fo 350.org, and know that above 350 parts per million co2 in the atmosphere you can't have, in the words of NASA climatologist James Hansen, "a planet similar to the one on which civilization evolved and to which life on earth is adapted." We're already at 390 ppm, which is why last year, according to Weather Underground's Jeff Masters, we had the most extreme weather the planet has seen at least since the great volcanic eruption of 1816. But the tar sands of Alberta will make it impossibly worse: if you could burn all that oil at once, you'd add 200 parts per million co2 to the atmosphere, and send the planet's temperature skyrocketing upwards. Any serious exploitation of the tar sands, says Hansen, means it's "essentially game over" for the climate. So, high stakes. And don't think that the Canadians will automatically find some other route to send their oil out to, say, China. Native tribes are doing a great job of blocking a proposed pipe to the Pacific; Alberta's energy minister said recently that he stays up nights worrying that without Keystone his province will be 'landlocked in bitumen.' Without the pipeline, said the business pages of Canada's biggest paper, Alberta oil faces a 'choke point.'
Happily, President Obama can stop the pipeline, and even in a dysfunctional D.C. no one can stop him. Before the so-called Keystone XL pipeline can be built, he has to issue a certificate saying it is "in the national interest." The House can't make him do anything, nor the Senate. For once, it's entirely up to the president. That's why we're headed to the White House for two weeks towards the end of August, and why we'll be (a la the fight against Don't Ask Don't Tell) trespassing along the outside of the executive mansion. It will be extremely civil civil disobedience -- we're asking everyone to be 'businesslike in dress and demeanor,' in an effort to show who the radicals in this fight are. (Hint -- they're the people vying to fundamentally alter the composition of the atmosphere).
I suppose you could argue that this is anti-Obama, since it shows we don't 100 percent trust him to do the right thing. And I suppose we don't -- earlier this year, for instance, he opened an enormous swath of federal land in Wyoming to coal-mining. It was the equivalent of turning on 300 new coal-fired power plants.
On the other hand, none of the people who issued the call are anti-Obama ideologues. It came from people like me (and I was an early member of Environmentalists for Obama), the great Kentucky farmer and essayist Wendell Berry, the agronomist Wes Jackson, the indigenous leader Tom Goldtooth, and north of the border people like Naomi Klein, David Suzuki, and Maude Barlow, leader of the Council of Canadians. We asked people who had Obama buttons in their closets to bring them and wear them -- many of us still remember the shivers that ran down our spines when he said, on the eve of his nomination, that with his election "the rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet begin to heal."
In fact, instead of focusing constantly on Obama's flaws and virtues, I'm enough of a Methodist Sunday School teacher to want to focus on mine and ours. We haven't, perhaps, kept up the pressure we should have to see the change we need. I think that Lisa Jackson, the great administrator of the EPA, was on to something earlier this month when she told a Colorado newspaper that one reason Obama's environmental record was not what it might have been was because "they're not marching on Washington the way they did on Earth Day in the '70s." I think Dan Pfeiffer was on to something when he told Netroots Nation: "We WANT you to push us -- we absolutely do. The president is someone who comes from a tradition of grassroots organizing, community organizing. A lot of the pushing that you guys are doing on a national level, he did on a local level in Chicago, and he understands that."
So here's the good news. There are already hundreds and hundreds of people signed up to risk arrest over those two weeks. Hopefully it will resemble the remarkable protests Transafrica organized in the 1980s outside the South African embassy. Hopefully we will give the president plenty of support for the idea that climate change is not in the national interest and that the Keystone pipeline is unthinkable.
If you want to sign up to be part of it, here's the place to go. We shouldn't just leave this to the college kids -- it's also the job for those of us who have been pouring carbon into the atmosphere for years. And we shouldn't, I think, get so caught up in electioneering 15 months before an election that we forget our duties to other kinds of political work. We need to keep that carbon in the ground and out of the atmosphere. I hope I'll get to see you in D.C. in August.
This piece originally appeared on DailyKos.
Follow Bill McKibben on Twitter: www.twitter.com/billmckibben
Keystone Pipeline - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Keystone XL as Environmental Cudgel - NYTimes.com
EPA: State Department Analysis Of Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline ...
TransCanada CEO banks on Keystone XL schedule | Reuters
U.S. will do new studies on Keystone XL tar sands pipeline ...
Do Saudi Arabia and Venezuela have the same environmental laws Canada does?
Do they even have environmental laws?
At least with the Alberta oil sands, the US can work with Canadian lawmakers to improve their
regulations.
I doubt the US would have the same reception with Hugo Chavez' government.
A pipeline from Canada into Illinois would seem to be in the best interests of both the United States and Canada.
How lucky we are to have Canada as our neighbor to the north.
The refined crude will be shipped to China, just as the Powder River basin coal will be shipped out of the country.
The people are awake to the Koched up neo-fascists posting here. I just want to know how much they get paid per post?
If you want to advocate for better fishing controls, or reduced run off (which mostly comes from farms) have at it. But if you want to say "industrialization is killing us, we need to stop", then I refer you to this graph and move on. http://tinyurl.com/3pdhpl6
15,000 years ago all of Canada and half of the U.S. was covered in ice 2 miles thick - what warming phenomena caused the ice to melt and what's preventing that warming influence from returning ?
Or do you believe the Ice Age didn't occur ?
Your question is very interesting and important, and has been studied extensively.
It is not a "gotcha." It's more of a "been there, done, that."
Are you interested in reading a fairly deep paper that using paleoclimatology to draw conclusions about our current situation?
Our precious Gulf of St. Lawrence is home to over 2,000 marine species including endangered blue whale, right whale, humpback whale, leatherback turtle, harlequin duck etc.Dr. David Suzuki calls it "one of the most precious ecosystems on earth".
It is also one of the windiest regions in North America with ice cover in winter. Boom in a nor'easter would be a dirty joke.
At this moment in time, our Gulf is rig free. We don't want devastation here like the Gulf of Mexico last year.
Citizens from all five provinces impacted have been lobbying the federal government for a year now to stop this short sighted madness. Google Coalition Saint-Laurent or Facebook/SOS Coalition St. Lawrence.
We can save the Gulf of St. Lawrence. But we need your help. Please! Email Canada's Minister of Environment Peter Kent at kent.p@parl.gc.ca and tell him we need a moratorium on offshore oil and gas development in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Thank you.
Gasoline at almost $4 a gallon and he's going to block a piece of infrastructure that reduces the friction for buying oil from our largest trading partner.
Man, if Obama blocks the pipeline Romney can pretty much start picking his cabinet right now. What a political gift that would be....
The bulk of the population rates global warming pretty low on the priority list.
Even if that weren't true, putting in the pipeline is a way to encourage tar sands oil development while creating blue-collar jobs in the US. This is a double win to the electorate at large, (although perhaps a double loss to HuffPo readers).
It's when you stop wanting it for yourself and start enforcing it on others that we end up with problems.
You might as well stay home, and use less oil.
The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring an advanced civilization's level of technological advancement. The scale is only theoretical and in terms of an actual civilization highly speculative; however, it puts energy consumption of an entire civilization in a cosmic perspective. It was first proposed in 1964 by the Soviet Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev. The scale has three designated categories called Type I, II, and III. These are based on the amount of usable energy a civilization has at its disposal, and the degree of space colonization. In general terms, a Type I civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its home planet, Type II of its solar system, and Type III of its galaxy.
Human civilization - 2011 is currently somewhere around 0.72, calculations suggesting we may attain Type I status in about 100–200 years, Type II status in a few thousand years, and Type III status in about 100,000 to a million years
Hansen do I find him honest? Thoroughly? Do I believe in those interested in making huge profits and have no understanding of climate science honest? NO