By now we know that Occupying was a brilliant tactic -- if you go someplace and just stay there long enough, eventually your message starts getting out. Persistence is the first great attribute of organizing success, as I wrote the other day in the (quite wonderful) Occupy Boston Globe.
But there are places you can't really occupy, and one of them is the grounds of the White House. They have a fence, they have the Secret Service, and my guess is there are some Marines in there somewhere, too. And anti-aircraft guns. So when you can't #Occupy, maybe the next best alternative is #Surround.
Next Sunday we'll be circling the White House with people -- a kind of ring-around-Obama designed to remind him that he has serious support for blocking the Keystone Pipeline. I don't know if the White House has ever been ringed quite this way before; we've been using Google Earth to try and figure out how many people it will take. The answer appears to be: a lot (it's hard to figure because we don't know for sure how wide the police will make the security perimeter). But if we can do it, the image should be kind of beautiful.
Depending on your mood, it will look either like a big O-shaped hug for a guy who's had a hard time from Congress and now with this pipeline decision can finally do the right thing all by himself -- or like a kind of symbolic house arrest for the guy who's already opened the Arctic to oil drilling and is now poised to bust the carbon ceiling wide open with tar sands oil. For most of us, torn between hope and fear, it's probably a little bit of both.
The signs we'll be carrying are ambiguous too, just quotes from Barack '08: "time to end the tyranny of oil," say. They're reminders of the great movement that brought him to power -- and of the disappointment that looms if it turns out he's really sold himself to big oil. Some of us thought we'd kind of succeeded in occupying the White House with Obama's inauguration; we were naive, and the only question is, how naive? Is the fire that powered that epic campaign entirely gone, or are there embers we can blow back to life?
The pipeline is clearly the biggest environmental flashpoint in many years. We've been able to draw a line in the tar sands, and say: this far and no further. On Sunday, that line will loop around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Come #surround with us on November 6.
Follow Bill McKibben on Twitter: www.twitter.com/billmckibben
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Keystone XL Pipeline | Friends of the Earth
What's All the Fuss About the Keystone XL Pipeline? | Mother Jones
Tar sands need access to world markets to flourish, and Keystone gives them that access. But Keystone is not the only way to get tar sands out of Canada. If you want to stop tar sands, you need a carbon tax that hurts.
Unlike conventional crude oils, tar sands extraction generates a lot of CO2 in the extraction process. Refining is also more CO2 intensive and when the refined products are burned, they release more CO2 than the products from conventional crude. A substantial carbon tax would reduce the value of tar sands to below zero at the well head, keeping it in the ground.
A carbon tax would encourage fossil fuel conservation and delay the extraction of the most CO2 intensive fossil fuels, hopefully forever. It's time governments stopped relying extensively on income taxes to raise revenue and taxed fossil fuel consumption heavily instead.
It would have helped to have an actual message.
Despite opposition from Estonia, in addition to the UK and Canada, the EU measure is likely to pass. Waldemar Skrobacki, an EU expert and associate professor at the University of Toronto, told The Calgary Herald, "The opposition is not big enough or strong enough to prevail."
U.S. President Barack Obama has yet to make a decision as to whether a Canadian company will be allowed to construct a 1,700-mile pipeline connecting Canada's oil sands to refineries in the U.S. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline has sparked national protests in the U.S. and a number of prominent individuals have spoken out against it.
Oil Sands Label Defended By EU Commission Despite Canada Criticism
stumble The European Union's climate commissioner announced this week that the EU's plans to label all fuel produced from oil sands as "highly polluting" are based on science and talks will be held with EU member states to discuss the proposed standard, according to Reuters.
The EU plan has been criticized by Canada, which possesses large deposits of the fuel source. Despite Canadian fears that the label would cause economic damage, the EU maintains that their move is not political.
Reuters reports Connie Hedegaard, the EU climate commissioner, said in a press conference, "We have the knowledge and the fact that oil sands are more CO2-polluting than other kinds of fuel." She added that oil sands fuel is not being targeted specifically, but is being labelled using the same methodologies as other fuel sources.
Before this labeling is enacted, it must be approved by the European Parliament. It would become a part of the EU's Fuel Quality Directive, which is "a plan that aims to reduce carbon emissions from transportation by six per cent by 2020," reported HuffP Canada.
Canadian natural resources minister Joe Oliver responded to the EU proposal recently, saying, "Any proposed implementing measure that provides separate, more onerous treatment for oil sands derived crude oil relative to other crude oils with similar or higher GHG emissions intensities is discriminatory, and potentially violates the European Union's international trade obligations."
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Once it's gone, it's gone forever. And this is how you treat your God's garden?
On a side note we applied for and were denied a permit to put a wind turbine on the farm. It's the old not in my back yard: while I use my computer/phone/frig/lights/car/everything electric syndrome.
Come to D.C. on November 6.
F&F