A view of Alberta's tar sands, which were once covered by lush boreal forests

In a statement released this afternoon, President Obama rejected the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would have linked Canada’s tar sands to Texas’s refineries. Obama had already effectively rejected the pipeline in early November, when he put off a ruling until after the 2013 elections. But the fossil fuel lobby and their allies in Congress pushed through legislation in mid December that forced the president to make a decision within 60 days. The White House seems to have taken such bullying as an opportunity to reiterate its earlier point: a decision will not be made this year.

While environmentalists should be excited that their efforts played a clear role in making the pipeline a complex campaign issue, there is no indication that Obama won’t eventually allow a tar sands pipeline, if reelected. Congress gave the Obama administration a huge out by allowing him to  reject the pipeline on procedural grounds, which he more-or-less noted in his statement today:

“This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people,” Obama said. “I’m disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my administration’s commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil.”

Had he been forced to reject the pipeline on the sole basis of environmental concerns, the news today might be very different. Obama can’t be seen as too anti-pipeline these days–even though it has been proven to be a jobs bust.

The 234 Congress members who voted to expedite the pipeline, however, won’t be so generous (or shortsighted) in the future, which is why tar sands activists have made them their next target. On January 24, the day after Congress returns to Washington, tar sands opponents will be converging on Capitol Hill and processing to the headquarters of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s #1 lobby, dressed as referees.

As organizer Bill McKibben explained in an email earlier this week:

We’re going to call penalties—forget facemasking, this is vote-buying. Forget unsportsmanlike conduct—this is undemocratic conduct.

This time we plan to get up close and personal with some of the worst folks on Capitol Hill. Not only will we be sending an unavoidable message (I don’t think a gaggle of refs is a common sight in DC), we also hope to make a media stir that will be a counterbalance to the flood of ads and propaganda unleashed by the industry over the past two weeks.

Warning: it won’t work right away. These guys have been having their way for so long that it won’t dawn on them quickly that the game is us. We’ll have to fight them all spring long to prevent Keystone, and to take away the billions in subsidies that they present each year to the oil industry (with our money). But if we’re going to take back our country we’ve got to start somewhere, and January 24 is the day.

For more information on the action visit 350.org.

While Gladwell’s work has been greatly debated, scientists working far from the literary spotlight have produced complex, but no less compelling, findings in the realm of tipping points. The latest came out this summer when scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York published a paper with findings that truly trump Gladwell’s assertions. They found that when 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, the majority of the society will eventually adopt it.

Here’s their prophetic equation in all its mathematical glory:

p<p_c, T_c~exp[α(p)N], whereas for p>p_c, T_c~lnN

That, in a very calculated nutshell, is what explains the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and other such global phenomenons. Don’t ask me to explain it, though. I can only assume it means what they say it means.

“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

Gladwell might be wrong about the 20 percent figure, but he’s probably right about the types of people who make “the law of the few” possible. You need connectors, mavens and salesmen to spread the idea. Perhaps that’s why it’s taken me six months to even hear about this fascinating new study. After all, scientists aren’t exactly socialistas in the Gladwell sense.

It was Grist columnist David Roberts who alerted me to this fascinating 10 percent figure in a recent piece where he argues for being a climate hawk.

There’s long been an obsession among climate/energy folks with finding a message that appeals to to the “middle” (about which myths abound, but that’s a subject for another time) or the climate undecided/uncommitted/skeptical. Since honest (read: terrifying) talk about the severity of climate change doesn’t win over the uncommitted or disinterested, it is deemed unhelpful to that effort and scolded whenever it pops up.

As I’ve said so many times, though, what drives social change and shifts politics is not broad-based support but intensity. An intensely committed minority can act as a lever that moves larger populations.

According to a Yale study, 12 percent of Americans are “alarmed” by climate change. If that’s the case, why hasn’t it invoked a tipping point?

What complicates matters, of course, is that there’s a roughly equally sized (but vastly better funded and organized) cadre of people who are passionately intense about spreading doubt and blocking action. I’m not sure what the Rensselaer researchers would say about the spread of ideas in the face of concerted opposition, but I imagine it requires clearing a higher hurdle.

Roberts goes on to argue that because of these “two opposing camps battling it out,” the vast majority of “Normal People” don’t know what to think. This, he says, “explains why public opinion is shallow and fickle on the subject.”

Ironically, the right wing once stood in this position of trying to push its views through to the mainstream.

Forty years ago, supply-side economics and opposition to basic social safety net protections were crank, extremist views held by a small minority of hardcore conservatives — the folks who rallied behind Goldwater in 1964 and lost. But as historian Rick Perlstein recounts in Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, they didn’t stop. They kept organizing and pushing, organizing and pushing. Then came Nixon, Reagan, GW Bush, Sarah Palin. Now extremist conservative views are part of the mainstream fabric.

What if they’d given up after 1964? What if they’d looked at surveys, concluded the American middle didn’t favor their views, and spent the next decades trying to tone down and soften those views?

Are you starting to see the potential for climate activists?

That’s where climate hawks are — their own 1964. Surely one of their most important tasks is to grow and support the committed minority of people who have absorbed and understood the severity of the climate crisis. From this perspective, it doesn’t matter if climate truth initially fails to reach the mushy middle. What matters is that the committed minority grows.

There are plenty of signs of that happening, from 350.org to Tar Sands Action to the grassroots movements against mountaintop mining and fracking. Action–particularly that which is honest and unmediated in regards to the threats we face–is the key ingredient.

There’s no reason that intensity, activism, protest, and agitation — “alarmism,” as they’re snottily called by Very Serious People — need to be seen an alternative to pragmatic, incremental process pushed by moderate insiders. They are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they ought to be mutually reinforcing. At the very least, less infighting would be nice.

But everyone, it seems to me, no matter what role they play, could stand to push the edge a little bit occasionally, reminding their audience, whatever audience, that climate change is some genuinely dire sh*t and that now is the time for ambition and courage.

It is tempting to succumb to despair, what with the onslaught of major media coverage telling us all the bad news, dismissing the promising news, and ignoring the good news. Consider the challenges: the unraveling violence of the Egyptian revolution, the 5,000 killed in Syria, climate change and the instability and disasters brought by extreme weather patterns and an ill-equipped global populace with inadequate leadership, the threat of random violence and terrorist activity–Norway, Belgium, India, the US, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq–and state and cultural violence against immigrants, women, refugees, the poor, GLBTQ persons, and people of color. So where is the hope? Well, in 2011, the fires of our hope were stoked by the global protest movements–the Arab Spring, the Indignados, Occupy Wall Street–of millions of people rising up to say: كفاية …Basta…Enough!
Resistance was in the streets and occupations in city squares. A resounding “no” echoed around the world–what Bernard Harcourt has perceptively termed “political disobedience”–signifying contempt, dissatisfaction, and rejection of entrenched governments and status quo economics. Dictators were ousted in Egypt and Tunisia. Revolutionary fervor was sparked by nonviolent action in Libya, Syria and Yemen. South Korean activists are poised to possibly shutter the building of a controversial US naval base with profound geopolitical implications. Afghan youth are getting organized–an incredible feat considering all the challenges they face. Palestinian nonviolent resistance and the Free Gaza movement is growing as are Israeli protests for social justice. In the US, activists and organizers in Wisconsin and Ohio occupied their state capitals to protest budget cuts and GOP anti-unionism. Undocumented students–DREAMers–took it to the streets and Senators’ offices. Environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, students and citizens staged sit-ins at the White House to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline–whose fate is still TBD but the resistance is growing. And then there was Occupy Wall Street. The movement propelled American activism back into public purview and is proving to be the era where a generation of young people–equipped with the tools, knowledge and experience of the civil rights and anti-war generations–are cutting their teeth in nonviolent social change. We are telling ourselves that there is reason to hope because we incarnate it.

The protests of 2011 are the harbinger of what we’ve already known–what we’ve been waiting and working for–that neoliberalism’s carte blanche as signed by the Washington Consensus is on the way out. The days of political regimes that are not truly democratic (and, apparently, equitable) are–at the very least in ideological terms–numbered. In the 00s, there was an explosion of social commentary on globalization: Thomas Freidman, Naomi Klein, Paul Hawken, Vandana Shiva. Paul Kingsnorth, a British journalist, penned a book whose title has stayed with me: One No, Many Yeses. The catchy, chant-like title offers a simple way to reflect on the the historical moment we are experiencing. As symbolized by Time‘s “Person of the Year,” there is a global “no!” to anti-democratic governments and unfettered capitalism. But at the same time, that singular no of protest is united by the multitude of “yeses” whose global resonance signifies the arrival of a comprehensive vision of nonviolence.

This yes to nonviolence signals the awakening consciousness that summarily connects us to that which is most important in our lives and our communities: the desire to be connected, to live without fear, to be healthy and be in healthy relationships, to be free to have self-determining and mutually-supporting ways of living, working, parenting, learning, teaching, creating, and, yes, even dying. Never before have we witnessed the acute, raw, powerful desire for life in such a way that so many diverse peoples are willingly struggling for that way of being.

Nonviolence–however broadly we choose to define it, whether that be strategically, principally, as a communication technique, as a tactic, as a religious commitment, as a process–has inspired hope, awakened creativity, and substantially changed, once again, the world. Gandhi’s term, “satyagraha,” contains a meaning so varied yet concrete and so distinct yet common that “nonviolence” left lacking. Satyagraha is means and ends. It is an effective tactic of protest, a viable social program and an eternal, utopian hope. The nonviolence in 2012 is shoving the nonviolence of protest into the “constructive program” that rejects the there-is-no-alternative to global capitalism. The nonviolence of 2012 will continue to hold up the alternatives to violence, oppression, and injustice by being the vision it seeks. Democratic participation, consensus-based decision-making, decentralized leadership models, shared responsibility, and economics of common wealth and individual affirmation of uniqueness are being experimented with across the world in thousands of different contexts–and with success! “General assembly” being a household word, the lack of charismatic leadership and establishment confusion over what protesters demand all confirm that nonviolence is more than just protest.

Despairingly, I don’t have much hope in protest alone any more; many of us do not. The record-breaking millions who protested the 2003 Iraq War and the continued political impotence on climate change–like in Copenhagen, 2009, and Durban, 2011–show that the “system” is incapable of responding to genuine democratic sentiments. But the hope of nonviolence, besides having some ability to shake the system into response, is in its birthing new paradigms that are more about praxis and participation than they are about ideology. Through these protests, power is in the process of being fundamentally redefined as something to be shared. Political systems and social relationships–having been more or less stagnant since political liberalism first appeared on the Enlightenment scene and later re-affirmed post-Cold War–are showing early signs of social evolution, an indicator that we are not yet at the end of history. Nonviolence, then, as a common denominator in politics, economics, relationships, and resistance movements can be a guiding–and deciding–force for local and global solutions that are democratically-directed and people-powered. I have hope in 2012!

As complex as this unraveling chain of events may seem, it’s not nature, but politicians–particularly those in Washington–who have made it so. Although they exhale the same amount of carbon dioxide as the average human being, theirs is just as potent and polluting as the gas bubbling out of that lake. The latest example of this can be seen in the Senate’s passage of a bill that requires the president to make a decision within 60 days on the Keystone XL pipeline–which would link Canada’s tar sands to Texas’s oil refineries or, more accurately, the dangerous melting of Arctic permafrost.

The bill is a rather duplicitous effort by Republicans to link an issue the president would prefer not to deal with (Keystone XL) to one that’s close to his heart: payroll tax breaks. As Grist explained, “They have nothing to do with tar sands. But the president wants them, so the House [and now the Senate] is taking them hostage and using them to bargain for the pipeline.”

What does this mean for Tar Sands Action, the campaign that raised the pipeline issue to a national level and pushed the president to initially delay a decision until after the election? It means the gears are churning among the organizers. They’ve been on a week-long retreat to figure out the next moves for this campaign–after a month of local and regional brainstorming–but were no doubt caught by surprise with the quick emergence and passage of this bill.

In an email to Tar Sands Action campaigners yesterday, Bill McKibben did his best to outline immediate steps to be taken:

Our hope — and what you should ask the President for when you write him — is that when he signs the bill he will say the obvious thing:

“Two months is not long enough to review the pipeline. The Canadians themselves have just delayed review of their tar sands pipelines over safety concerns, and we’ve just come through a year that set a record for billion-dollar climate-related disasters; I’m not going to do a rush job just to please the oil industry lobbyists. So this pipeline is dead.”

Since the State Department has already, in essence, said two months is not enough time, this should be straightforward.

We should know how it’s going to play out within 48 hours or so. We’re of course ready to fight like heck.

But for this weekend? If you haven’t gotten through to the White House, or you think you can round up some friends, you can send them a message here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments (the switchboard is now closed for the weekend) – and click here to spread the word on Facebook and Twitter.

Even if the president says the right thing, it seems inevitable that TSA will have to get back out on the streets. If discussions over the past month from the local level on up are any indication of what’s to come, possible courses of action include targeting Obama campaign centers as sites for protest and civil disobedience, starting divestment campaigns against the banks that finance the pipeline project, and occupying the pipeline’s endpoints in Texas and Alberta.

Washington may be far removed from the chain of events it’s facilitating up in the Arctic, but climate activists and the broad range of other folks opposed to this pipeline–including Nebraska farmers and Texas ranchers–are already catalyzing another chain of events that politicians will have a much harder time ignoring.

• South Korean protesters calling attention to the women forced into sexual slavery during WWII reached their thousandth weekly demonstration on Wednesday. Marking the occasion, a statue honoring the victims was erected in front of the Japanese embassy.

• Chicago activists progressively interrupted a school board meeting on Wednesday in an act of nonviolent resistance—eventually forcing the board members to retreat out of the room—in protest of proposed changes to low-income schools.

• Demonstrators opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline staged a ‘human oil spill’ in front of Speaker John Boehner’s office in Washington D.C. Wednesday.

• Portugal’s top trade union confederation CGTP on Monday launched a week of protests against the government’s austerity policies.

• Employees of the Lahore College for Women University in Pakistan held a boycott of classes for the second day on Tuesday, demanding better terms for school workers.

• Thousands of taxi drivers in Guinea Bissau went on strike Tuesday to call for an end to police extortion.

• Disabled persons in Athens held a rally on Tuesday to oppose further austerity measures being considered by the Greek government.

• Inmates at seven Kyrgyzstan prisons coordinated a hunger strike on Tuesday to agitate for better living conditions and meals.

• Around 200 Los Angeles high school students walked out of classes on Tuesday and marched several miles to stage a sit-in at district board meeting, decrying cuts to school budgets.

• Thousands of public sector workers in Cyprus staged a three-hour stoppage Tuesday in protest over government moves to freeze salaries for two years as part of an austerity drive to avoid an EU bailout.

• A network of progressive South Korean Christian groups began a four day hunger strike on Monday to protest vote buying and corruption in the country’s largest Protestant association.

• Arab and Bedouin Israelis held a state-wide general strike on Sunday as several thousand demonstrators gathered at the Prime Ministry to express their outrage at a government plan that would relocate Negev Bedouins out of their homes into impoverished townships.

• In cities all across Russia, unauthorized demonstrations were ongoing Sunday after anti-Putin protesters escalated their dissent in Moscow at a massive rally on Saturday as tens of thousands marched for free elections.

• On Sunday, Syrians in some regions observed the opposition’s call for a general strike, despite reports that police in the capital forced shop owners to reopen.

• After leading scores of protesters inside of Durban climate talks on Friday, Greenpeace activists posed as representatives of wealthy corporations on Sunday to call attention to the beneficiaries of failed action at the ICC.

• Bangkok, Thailand saw a rare second rally in two days Saturday as a throng of marchers engaged in a ‘fearlessness walk’ reiterated their objections to laws that punish those who speak out against the monarchy.

• A flash mob erupted in a Pittsburgh Target on Saturday as Occupy organizers briefly flooded the store in protest of the company’s hiring policies.

• For the second day in a row, hundreds of Indian teachers in Bangalore boycotted classes on Friday in protest of low wages.

• Demonstrations condemning the NATO airstrike in Pakistan have been ongoing for two weeks across the country, and were sparked anew after prayers Friday.

• Tens of thousands of Yemenis took to the streets again Friday chanting ‘no partnership with the murderers’ after a new Cabinet—half filled with pro-regime politicians—was announced.

• In the Dominican Republic on Thursday, hundreds of activists rallied against the government’s practice of confiscating or annulling birth certificates for those of Haitian descent.

• Building on the largest opposition rally in years Monday, Russian protests spread to more cities on Tuesday as demonstrators denounced federal election results—resulting in hundreds of arrests.

• On Tuesday, thousands of young Yemenis in Sanaa continued their sit-in, despite President Saleh’s signed agreement that he would step down, declaring that their revolution is far from over. This followed demonstrations which erupted on Sunday, as residents of Taiz marched in protest of immunity provisions given to the outgoing President.

• Greenpeace activists infiltrated a French nuclear plant Monday and hung a banner on a reactor building in an attempt to expose nuclear national security weaknesses.

• Dozens of Occupy D.C. members were arrested late Sunday in an act of civil disobedience when they refused to dismantle a structure that they were building for shelter.

• Thousands protested at the UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa on Sunday, calling for a strong international plan to address climate change.

• Animal rights advocates in Taipei, Taiwan gathered by the hundreds on Sunday, condemning the conditions of animal shelters throughout the country.

• In India on Sunday, thousands marched and several began a hunger strike to show their support for the decommissioning of a damn in the interest of protecting local farmers.

• Kashmir witnessed protests and sit-ins on Saturday as residents of Srinagar decried the police’s use of pepper guns in breaking up demonstrations the day before.

• On Saturday, secular Tunisians held a counter-rally in front of Parliament, opposing a group of Islamists who were calling for female university students to wear a full-face veil.

• Thousands in India blocked train tracks Saturday, agitating for compensation to be given to victims of the industrial accident at Bhopal in 1984.

• Protests were ongoing Sunday in Tahrir Square after thousands of protesters rallied on Friday for an end to the Army’s rule in Egypt.

• Despite strict controls on public speech, Singapore saw a rare public demonstration on Sunday as hundreds of activists participated in the global “Slut Walk” movement, calling attention to violence against women.

• Jordanian environmentalists staged a sit-in Saturday at the Prime Ministry, objecting to the country’s atomic program.

• Friday marked the seventh day of protests in Pakistan as demonstrators decried a NATO airstrike in Pakistani territory which killed 24 soldiers.

• On Wednesday, a mass rally took place in Bulgaria as thousands demonstrated against austerity measures, including a government plan to raise the retirement age.

• In India, several fired workers agitating for their union’s recognition were arrested Wednesday after protesting in front of a Hyundai plant’s gate.

• Millions of shop owners in India closed their doors on Thursday, striking and marching in protest of a bill which would allow foreign superstores like Walmart to have greater access in their country.

• In the United Kingdom, Wales was the center of one of the largest public sector strikes in a generation Wednesday as around 170,000 workers—including teachers—abandoned their posts in ongoing protests against government pension reforms.

• In the Philippines, hundreds of inmates continued a hunger strike Thursday, instigating noise barrages to agitate for faster case disposition, the release of political prisoners, and to address other grievances.

• Thousands of Greek workers participated in this year’s seventh general strike on Thursday, continuing their calls to end government austerity programs.

• Students from three high schools in Seattle staged a walk out on Thursday to gather at City Hall in protest of a Washington state proposal to fill budget holes with cuts to education funding.

• Building on a series of protests this month against Bank of America’s poor environmental record, a Thursday rally in Asheville, NC culminated in the arrest of several nonviolent resisters who wanted to call attention to BOA’s support of the coal industry.

Most of the rich nations gathering at this year’s UN climate summit have already conceded defeat when it comes to producing any kind of binding treaty to slow greenhouse gas emissions this decade. But that isn’t going to stop poorer, more climate-vulnerable nations from trying.

Costa Rican president José María Figueres is calling on these vulnerable countries to “occupy Durban” — the South African city hosting the summit from its launch yesterday until December 9th.

“We went to Copenhagen [in 2009] with the illusion we could reach an equitable agreement. We went to Cancún [in 2009] where we saw slight but not sufficient progress. Frustration is now deep and building. Now we hear that we will need more conferences. Sometime we have to get serious. We should be going to Durban with the firm conviction that we do not come back until we have made substantial advances.”

While it is not known whether anyone will take up Figueres’s call to action, the Guardian did speak to one ambassador who said, “In the corridors [here] there is talk of occupying the meeting rooms, but there could be sanctions. So it needs to be big inside in order to have impact and nobody is punished. We are at the beginning.”

The Guardian also noted that Seyni Nafo, spokesman for the important 53-country Africa group, is on record as saying, “Action that might make it [climate change] visible must be considered. We are exploring a lot of avenues and options. You have to take that seriously.”

Meanwhile, outside the conference space, protestors have formed Occupy COP17 (as this is the 17th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Climate Change). The General Assembly held its first meeting yesterday against the backdrop of a banner that read “Conference of People.” Before breaking off into groups to discuss ideas for solutions to the climate crisis, former Bolivian Ambassador to the UN Pablo Solon took the people’s mic:

“The only way to bring balance is to have the rights of nature and the rights of human beings. I have been a negotiator for two and a half years. We opposed the Cancun Agreement one year ago. Why? Because it is going to cook the world and it is going to cook Africa.”

This point has been raised by many African environmentalists as well. At a COP17 protest in Johannesburg on Saturday Earthlife Africa program officer Makoma Lekalakala told the South African Broadcasting Corporation that she was marching to “make sure that this COP doesn’t become another failure, a failure that would cost the lives of millions of South Africans.”

To further highlight what many Africans may soon face as a result of climate change, civil society groups have set up a mock refugee camp near the convention center, where about 2,000 climate justice activists from around the region will be based during the next two weeks. One of their main goals is to get the youth involved, which is vital since they represent 70 percent of Africa’s population.

There are some, however, who are already involved. About 200 young people traveled from Nairobi for two weeks in a caravan of buses through Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana and South Africa, organizing concerts along the way to draw attention to the impacts of climate change. Now in Durban, they plan to organize more events that will appeal to the African youth.

As pressure mounts both outside and inside a climate conference many people see as one of the last great hopes to avert the worst effects of climate change, it’s worth pointing out, as Occupy COP17 does on its website, that Durban is the place where “Nelson Mandela cast his first vote and Gandhi held his first meeting.” In other words, Durban is a symbol of what people power can achieve and these next two weeks are without a doubt the right time for that legacy to grow.

Environmental victories are so rare that apparently even environmentalists don’t quite know how to kick back and rejoice. At a rally in Trenton, New Jersey on Monday, discussion veered between joyous celebration of Friday’s announcement by the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) to indefinitely postpone a vote that would have paved the way for 20,000 natural gas wells in the region and serious preparation to one day block their construction through nonviolent direct action.

These activists can be excused, however, for mixing business with pleasure because even more rare than an environmental victory is one that’s complete and total. Much like the recent announcement by the Obama administration to delay a decision on the KeystoneXL pipeline that would transport tar sands oil from Canada to Texas, the DRBC vote delay was hardly an indictment of extreme carbon-based extraction that poisons water and the atmosphere. If anything, it’s a temporary roadblock to something government seems all too happy to allow.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie have already promised to vote “yes” for drilling in the Delaware River Basin–a region that provides drinking water to 15 million people. Corbett is no surprise because drilling–or fracking as it’s more commonly called–is already a common practice in Pennsylvania. New Jersey, on the other hand, does not have any natural gas deposits. But it does have Christie, who earned nearly $30,000 last year from selling his shares in a company whose clients include gas drilling operators.

The holdouts as of now are New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Delaware Governor Jack Markell–neither of whom are sure bets to stay that way. Both would apparently switch their vote if the right regulatory processes were put in place. Nevertheless, Markell’s decision to vote “no” came as a surprise, since it is believed that the Obama administration–DRBC’s fifth and final voting member–was pushing the Delaware governor to vote “yes” so that it wouldn’t have to and thereby tarnish its environmental image.

Shrewd as that may sound, it’s not hard to believe given Obama’s tar sands pipeline non-decision. He has demonstrated a clear intention to avoid angering either side of the issue, as he enters campaign season. But it was only until recently that Obama realized he had to worry about environmentalists. As actor Marc Ruffalo told the crowd of several hundred gathered in front of Trenton’s Patriots Theater, “There’s no doubt that President Obama chose not to take this vote today because of what we did with the Keystone pipeline action in Washington D.C.”

Fittingly, perhaps, these two issues overlap in ways beyond just the activists and politicians involved. They represent desperate efforts to wring the planet of its remaining fossil fuels, which have until recently been cost prohibitive due to their inaccessibility. Fracking, which is short for hydraulic fracturing, is a process that requires mass amounts of water and chemicals to tap into natural gas reserves. Methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas, is usually released as a byproduct, effectively counterbalancing any benefits of switching from coal. In turn, the tar sands industry uses enormous amounts of fracked gas and water to extract the oil from its reserves, which are second only in size to Saudi Arabia. Given that every barrel of tar sands oil emits three times the amount of greenhouse gases as conventional oil, it’s no wonder NASA scientist James Hansen has warned that further development would be “game over” for the climate.

Furthermore, the tar sands and fracking processes are known to contaminate water, poison the air, and, in general, diminish the quality of life. For many, these environmental health factors are the most pressing. Craig Sauter–a resident of Dimock, Pensylvania, which has been called natural gas drilling’s ground zero–spoke of his troubles getting Cabot Oil & Gas, the company that drilled on his land, to pay for poisoning his well water with methane, arsenic, barium, and uranium. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has also refused to help despite Sauter’s exhaustive efforts to engage them. The state capitol police are now threatening to arrest him if he calls the DEP one more time.

Upon hearing this, the crowd chanted, “We will call for you.” Plans are also in the works to for a protest in Dimock at the end of the month, when Cabot takes away the drinking water tank they provided Sauter, before shirking any responsibility.

Another stirring account was rendered by Stephen Cleghorn–an organic farmer from Pennsylvania’s Jefferson County, whose land was leased for natural gas extraction without his knowing. He offered a heartfelt, if not wrenching, story of testifying before an impotent Department of Energy subcommittee on natural gas, while his wife was dying of cancer.

“I have a power in my soul now to enforce a moratorium of one if I have to,” he said. “But I don’t have to, because we are building a mighty movement to stop this.”

Immediately following these testimonials, the crowd marched to the New Jersey State Legislature, demanding they “ban fracking now.” Of course, New Jersey’s legislature was the first of any state in the country to ban fracking. It passed overwhelming, but Governor Christie vetoed it, proposing a one-year moratorium instead. Nevertheless, activists seem hopeful that the legislature might overturn Christie’s ruling. And why not? They’re starting to get the kind of momentum leaders were hoping for years ago.

In his address, Oscar-nominated director Josh Fox, whose 2010 documentary Gasland made fracking a national issue, reminded the crowd of one such leader, the recently imprisoned Tim DeChristopher.

“Three days ago, I got a call from a guy named Tim DeChristopher in a federal penitentiary on his 30th birthday… He says to me, ‘I feel really isolated in here. I feel one step behind everybody.’ And I said, ‘You were five steps ahead to begin with. And he was looking at all the things that have happened, the victory of the KeystoneXL. And his birthday happened to be the day that we won this [the fracking vote delay]. And he was looking at Occupy Wall Street. And he said, ‘I feel like we’re headed toward something much much bigger than this.’ And we are. He said, ‘You know that sound when you walk into the opera house and you hear all the violins and everybody tuning up? And everybody’s starting on a little bit of a different note, but they’re trying to get to the same note. All these strands are coming together. We’re fighting extreme energy. We’re fighting KeystoneXL. We’re fighting mountaintop removal. We’re fighting the banks that finance these things. So we’re tuning up this orchestra and we’re going to be here for a really long time.’”

In keeping with the mood, however, Fox made sure to follow up this feel-good sentiment with a hard-hitting call to action, saying, “When it comes time to blockade the well-sites, we’ll blockade the well-sites.” And before the day was over, the crowd retreated to a nearby Quaker meeting house, where nonviolent direct action trainings began–assuring that this movement, if the time has come to call it that, is not about to let any amount of success go to its head.

Since last week’s “victory” against the tar sands industry, the question circulating among this growing climate movement has been, “What to do next?” When 350.org polled its supporters, twice as many people voted to fight oil and gas fracking than for any other cause.

While it’s hard to prioritize any one threat to the climate, there is a certain pragmatism to the fracking issue. Much like the tar sands and the process to approve the KeystoneXL pipeline, there’s a hard deadline fast approaching to approve drilling in the Delaware River Basin. At least there was, until an announcement was made today by the Delaware River Basin Commission that Monday’s planned vote in Trenton would be postponed indefinitely.

In a message to the many people across New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey who were planning to rally outside the commission’s meeting, filmmaker Josh Fox–whose 2010 documentary Gasland made fracking a national issue–called the announcement “a big win,” as well as “a drop in the bucket.”

You stopped fracking in the Delaware River Basin for now.  You won this round.  It is not a complete victory but it is a huge victory.  You brought us back from the brink of total devastation.

BUT WE ARE STILL GOING TO RALLY IN TRENTON ON MONDAY!

Buses have been chartered, Amtrak tickets have been bought, hotels have been booked.  Great speakers will be there and we have a hugely important moment on our hands to push the momentum forward.

We have just had a major victory, that is true. But there is immense suffering happening and irreparable damage being done across Pennsylvania, across the US and across the world from fracking. New York state is in the process of holding crucial hearings on it’s drilling regulations and we must weigh in. We are not stopping now, we must redouble our efforts, encouraged by this significant and symbolic but momentary win. Stopping fracking in the Delaware River Basin, even just for this moment is huge but it is also a drop in the bucket. We must push ahead.

While it is no doubt encouraging to see the proliferation of these small, but significant victories, the bigger news is that organizers are realizing the pressure they are building cannot relent. Perhaps this a sign of a new activist logic taking hold in the occupy era.

• A few hundred protesters marched on Waikiki Saturday as leaders of Pacific Rim nations gathered for a summit to discuss free trade agreements and other issues. During the gala dinner, renowned Hawaiian guitarist Makana spent almost 45 minutes repeatedly singing his new protest ballad “We Are the Many” instead of the expected instrumental background music. Over a dozen heads of state, including President Obama, heard Makana’s message that included lines such as “The lobbyists at Washington do gnaw…. And until they are purged, we won’t withdraw.”

• Police confronted an estimated 1,000 protesters in Portland, Oregon, on Sunday after clearing parks occupied by demonstrators for weeks. 50 were arrested after refusing to leave one of the parks. The demonstrators regrouped in the streets, blocking traffic for hours.

• Twenty-seven “Occupy St. Louis” protesters were arrested early Saturday morning after defying an existing park curfew.

• Portuguese civil servants and soldiers staged an anti-austerity protest in Lisbon on Saturday, a sign of the rising social tensions in debt-hit Portugal over deep cuts in spending.

• Thousands of demonstrators rallied in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday against oil legislation that could cost the port city and surrounding state billions of dollars in revenues.

• Angry over a range of environmental issues, about 250 protesters erected a mock coal-fired power station on the steps of Australia’s Parliament House before marching backwards to Treasury Gardens, arguing the government’s policies have taken Victoria backwards.

• More than 350 people linked arms to form a “human chain” on the Stirling Bridge in Fremantle, Australia on Sunday to protest the live animal export trade.

• About 100 peaceful marchers sent a clear message Sunday to vandals who torched cars and scrawled Nazi swastikas in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn. The march included about 25 people from the Occupy Wall Street movement in Manhattan, which put out a statement condemning the vandalism.

• More than 2,000 students marched through London last week to protest cuts to public spending and a big increase in tuition fees.

This seems like an accurate read on the situation. On the positive side, as McKibben noted:

It’s important to understand how unlikely this victory is. Six months ago, almost no one outside the pipeline route even knew about Keystone. One month ago, a poll of “energy insiders” by National Journal found that “virtually all” expected easy approval of the pipeline by year’s end. As late as last week, CBC reported that TransCanada was moving huge quantities of pipe across the border and seizing land by eminent domain, certain that its permit would be granted. A done deal has come spectacularly undone.

Additionally, and perhaps more telling, TransCanada CEO Russ Girling thinks the delay will kill the pipeline:

“How long will those customers wait for Canadian crude oil to get to the marketplace before they sort of throw up their hands and say this is just never going to happen?” he asked.

On the less hopeful side of things, McKibben mentioned the possibility that Obama made the announcement because he merely “wanted us off the streets — and off his front lawn — until after the election, at which point the administration can approve the pipeline, alienating its supporters without electoral consequence.” While that may have been a factor, McKibben doesn’t seem to think it should matter.

The president should know that if this pipeline proposal somehow reemerges from the review process, we will use every tool at our disposal to keep it from ever being built; if there’s a lesson of the last few months, both in our work and in the Occupy encampments around the world, it’s that sometimes we have to put our bodies on the line.

We need to let the president and oil companies know that we’re ready to take action should they try to push this pipeline through in a couple of years. There’s a pledge to take nonviolent action against the pipeline up on the Tar Sands Action site; if you sign it, you’ll be the first to know about anything we need to do down the road.

It’s also important to note that TransCanada doesn’t have all its eggs in one basket. They are looking to build pipelines west from the tar sands to Canada’s Pacific coastline. Canadians, led in large part by indigenous peoples, are fighting to stop this and are in need of support.

At the same time, there are other battles on the climate front, including mountaintop-removal coal mining, deep-sea oil drilling, and fracking for gas and oil. None of these can be ignored, especially — as the International Energy Agency put it in new study — with the point of no return approaching in just five years.

Were such news to be announced any other time than on the heels of this Tar Sands victory or the growing Occupy Wall Street movement, it might be reason to give in to despair. But now, let’s hope it’s a clarion call.

• In spite of the crackdown that has killed at least 110 people in Homs over the last five days, protesters in Hama, Damascus, Deraa as well as several other towns in Idlib and Deir Ez-Zor have taken to the streets in support of those in the beseiged city.

• On Friday, students at Essex High School in Vermont staged a sit-in and protest to support freshman Cole Peterson after he reported being assaulted in anti-gay attack.

• In Chicago, more than 1,000 senior citizens joined forces with Occupy Chicago on Monday to protest cuts to social security, Medicare and Medicaid. After a large march about 50 people were arrested for blocking traffic on the street.

• About a dozen people occupied a historic building in the Romanian city of Cluj on Monday to protest a plan to mine gold using the controversial cyanide process in a nearby heritage area.

• A four-hour general strike took effect across Israel on Monday to demand the government improve working conditions of contract workers.

• Nine Greenpeace activists were arrested after they chained themselves to a gate and climbed a crane Monday at a South African coal-fired power station to protest dependence on coal, weeks before the country hosts a global conference on climate change.

Today the American people are in a similar position with Obama’s intransigence on environmental justice. President Obama has acknowledged the danger of our fossil fuel addiction and the necessity to fight climate change. But Obama has failed to take an ethical stand. Obama must be clear that environmental justice is a public moral imperative that demands action. Man-made climate change threatens the existence of every species on Earth and immediately threatens the most vulnerable and impoverished human beings. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline running from the dirty tar sands of Alberta to the American Gulf Coast is currently the greatest obstacle to stopping climate change. If we don’t stop the pipeline, NASA climatologist Jim Hansen said it’s “game over” for stopping climate change. Stopping climate change is the greatest moral imperative that challenges humanity.

Between Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960 and his speech embracing civil rights as a moral issue in 1963, civil rights activists fought to awaken the conscious of the nation. During the sit-ins of 1960, thousands of African American students and youth endured intimidation, physical violence, and jail for the right to eat at a lunch counter. While he was campaigning for the election of 1960, JFK told the nation that he supported the sit-ins. Shortly after being elected though, Kennedy allowed dozens of “Freedom Riders” to be beaten and their bus firebombed as they attempted to desegregate interstate travel throughout the South. Despite thousands being jailed and beaten, activists kept pressuring Kennedy. In 1962, James Meredith enrolled as the first African American at Old Miss. Meredith’s courage to demand equal rights and a good education was met with a mob of thousands of violent segregationists. President Kennedy was forced to call in 23,000 federal troops to restore order. Slowly civil rights activists were forcing the president to act. Martin Luther King’s 1963 Birmingham campaign was the tipping point for the movement and Kennedy’s consciousness. After men, women, and children were blasted with fire hoses, shocked by cattle prods, and mauled by attack dogs, President Kennedy came to see civil rights as a moral imperative that must be urgently addressed.

Despite inspiring millions of youthful Americans, when Kennedy assumed the presidency in 1961 his actions and rhetoric ignored the issue of civil rights. Like Kennedy before him, Obama tapped into the deep well of American optimism and gave hope to millions. Yet also like Kennedy, Obama has simply paid lip service to the most important social justice issue of our day, environmental degradation. In many ways Obama has been more disingenuous than Kennedy. JFK never promised the nation that he would call for civil rights legislation or commit federal troops to enforce desegregation. Obama promised the nation that he would free us from the “tyranny of oil,” “heal” our dying planet, and “slow” the rising oceans. If Obama allows the Keystone XL to be built, he would further addict us to oil, scar our dying planet, and contribute to the rising ocean.

Like the civil rights activists and JFK, our current environmental movement (if you want clean air, fresh water, and a toxin free atmosphere, welcome to the movement) must engage in nonviolent direct action to convince President Obama that climate change is a moral injustice. Today a historic direct action campaign is currently underway to stop the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. 1,253 courageous citizens have already been arrested to arouse the conscience of the nation. Yet this is only the beginning. Without direct action and the suffering of thousands of activists, Kennedy would not have been driven to catharsis.  Kennedy’s timid stance on civil rights had the effect of emboldening civil rights activists and elevating the importance of nonviolent direct action. We too must continue to be emboldened, inspired by the imagination of eco-activists like Bill McKibben and Tim DeChristopher, and focused on waging nonviolent direct action.

Through our dedication and suffering, President Obama will come to see environmental devastation as a public moral imperative. President Kennedy understood that “We face… a moral crisis as a country and a people.”  With each sit-in, teach-in, lock-out, and bold act of environmental civil disobedience, we will arouse the conscience of this nation. We will give our president an ethical education and stop this pipeline for the sake of all of humanity.