STOPPING THE XL PIPELINE: What Do You Do When The President No Longer Has Your Back? Go To Jail, Directly To Jail
So you might be wondering: Given that President Obama seems to have jettisonned nearly every affirmative agenda item in the Democratic playbook, in favor of every affirmative agenda item in the GOP playbook, is there any remaining advantage to having a Democrat holding the White House? Turns out the answer is yes. Among other things, Obama has the executive branch ability either to conserve large swaths of land, or to open said swaths to rapacious oil and gas exploitation. So he’ll do the former, right? Actually, not so much.
Okay, so yes, there is no readily apparent remaining advantage to having a Democrat in the White House. What does that leave for the Left? Protest and jail. In a nutshell.
And on the issue of the Tar Sands/Keystone XL Pipeline, that’s precisely what a group of folks (including Vermont’s Bill McKibben) have in mind.
Why go to such lengths — a trip to DC, and mass civil disobedience, pressuring the President to do the right thing — to stop a single pipeline? For one thing, this is a pipeline that would stretch from Canada to Texas. In other words it would traverse the nation, and bring serious environmental risk to every state it touches. But for another, any responsible carbon-reduction policy begins with leaving “unconventional fossil fuels” (like tar sand) in the ground.
Long story short: a posse of Vermonters are headed to DC to be disobedient, and then — in all likelihood — get busted.
And VDB wants to help.
So we’ll be MCing an event to help fund this expedition, a week from today: Wednesday, August 24, 7:30 pm in the Film House at the beautiful Main Street Landing. The fundraiser is built around a screening of the documentary Petropolis, which is worth seeing even if it weren’t also helping to send Vermont’s best and brightest to the pokey.
Facebook event page is Close out the summer with us. Should be brilliant, and worthwhile.
on August 24th, 2011 at 12:32 am
[…] So Bill McKibben, arrested with the first wave of XL Pipeline protesters in DC, has finally been cut loose. He was in for three days, was McKibben, and they fed him — wait for it — only bologna sandwiches, “one every twelve hours.” Oh, and the prisoners slept on stainless steel shelves “with no bedding.” Why go through this voluntarily? It has to do with a ““1,500-mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet,” and we covered it all here. The big question is this: will you attend tomorrow night’s fundraiser at Mainstreet Landing in Burlington, to help fund the next wave of protesters? And to avenge the bolognying of Vermont’s most respected environmental activist? Facebook event page here. Let’s do this thing. […]