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:

Read the rest of this article »

Methane is bubbling up from the bottom of Alaskan lakes–the result of ancient organic matter thawing and decomposing from its once icy chamber in an ever warming climate. This is just one of several ways the melting of Arctic permafrost could create a precipitous increase in greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere and speed up global warming. As the New York Times noted in a recent feature on this foreboding phenomenon, “researchers are worried that the changes in the region may already be outrunning their ability to understand them, or to predict what will happen.”

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.

Read the rest of this article »

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.

Read the rest of this article »

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.

Read the rest of this article »

“We won. You won.” Those were Bill McKibben’s first words after the Obama administration’s announcement yesterday that it would delay a decision on the Canada-to-Texas KeystoneXL oil pipeline until after the 2012 election. His next words, however, were slightly less uplifting: “Not completely.”

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.

Read the rest of this article »

“We don’t know how many people it takes to encircle the White House, but we’re about to find out,” Bill McKibben told a crowd of over 12,000 gathered in Lafayette Square on Sunday afternoon.

Such a prospect would have been hard to imagine eleven weeks earlier, when McKibben was standing in the same park with no more than a hundred people listening. It was the first day of what would become a two-week long campaign of mass civil disobedience targeting the planned construction of TransCanada’s 1,700-mile KeystoneXL oil pipeline from the tar sands of Northern Alberta to the refineries of the Texas Gulf Coast.

Shortly before leading a group of 65 people (including this author) into the DC jail system for the next two nights, McKibben told the small crowd, “We’ve already succeeded in nationalizing this fight in a way no one thought was possible. It’s not just a group of people along the pipeline route who are opposing this project anymore. People from all 50 states will be joining us over the coming weeks.”

He was right. Over 1,200 people from across the United States and Canada with all different kinds of backgrounds—farmers, ranchers, Gulf Coast residents, faith leaders, indigenous people and climate activists—came to put their bodies on the line and send a clear message to the president that tar sands oil is a death sentence for the planet. Many echoed the words of NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who said further development of the tar sands would be “game over for the planet.”

What no one could have expected on that day in August was the explosion of mass sustained protest that would soon follow in this country. Occupy Wall Street was only in the planning stages at that point, but its emergence weeks later helped foster the sense that change is only going to come through dedication and relentless pressure.

Read the rest of this article »

A lot has happened since 65 people (myself included) were arrested in front of the White House on August 20th during a protest of the planned 1,400-mile pipeline carrying tar sands oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. For starters, over a thousand more people from across the country were arrested in the subsequent two weeks, including big names like NASA climate scientist James Hansen, author Naomi Klein and actress Daryl Hannah. Support from high places soon followed, from the New York Times editorial page to nine Nobel Peace Laureates.

Momentum kept rolling throughout September with protests popping up at Obama campaign events and an impressive day of civil disobedience where over 200 people were arrested on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. As attention continued to swirl around an issue that had only weeks prior been known by environmentalists and people living along the proposed pipeline route, cracks within government began to emerge.

Read the rest of this article »

One of the organizers of the event, President of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, Dave Coles, is the first to climb the fence and be arrested. Maude Barlow (far left) was in the first wave over the fence and was led away by police.

Ever feel like you aren’t where you should be? It’s okay, we all do. Yet, sometimes, we feel, without a single doubt, we are in precisely the right place at precisely the right moment.

A meticulously-planned civil disobedience uprising demanding climate justice and the honoring of the rights of indigenous people, felt just like that. Even before the drums.

The right place is a hill which belonged to the Algonquin First Nation for centuries, yet is currently occupied by Canada’s capitol buildings and is known as Parliament Hill.

The right time is the blue sky morning of Monday, September 26th. Clayton Thomas-Muller, of the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation and organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, opens a solidarity rally by thanking the Algonquin First Nation for use of their land.

Read the rest of this article »

• In Ottawa, over 200 protesters objecting to the federal government’s enthusiastic support for Alberta’s tar sands and the Keystone pipeline XL were arrested Monday morning as they attempted to stage a sit-in in the House of Commons.

• Postal workers held rallies across the country on Tuesday to back legislation that would repeal a benefit-funding mandate they say lies behind the U.S. Postal Service’s financial woes.

• Bahraini clerics staged a protest sit-in on Monday over the recent mass arrests of women and minors by the Khalifa regime.

• Tens of thousands of French teachers and their supporters took to the streets Tuesday for a national strike and protests over education job cuts under President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government.

• In California, at least 100 prisoners at Calipatria’s Adminstrative Segregation Unit (ASU) and 50-100 prisoners at Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit (SHU) resumed their hunger strike to protest conditions on Monday.

• Philippine Airlines suspended all its early flights Tuesday after some of its workers walked out of their jobs to protest the flag carrier’s plan to outsource airport services, catering and call-center operations.

• On Tuesday, Palestinian and Arab prisoners currently held in 23 prisons and detention camps in Israel and in the West Bank went on a hunger strike to protest the Israeli Prison Service’s (IPS) measures against them and their families.

• Bolivian President Evo Morales has halted construction on a road project through a national park and indigenous land following more than a month of protests.

• More than 2,000 “Moving Planet” clean-energy demonstrations took place on Saturday around the world – at UN Headquarters in New York, in all 50 U.S. states and in 175 countries.

• Tens of thousands of Greek public transport workers, teachers, civil servants and air traffic controllers walked out Thursday to protest the latest round of austerity measures announced the day before by the PASOK government of George Papandreou.

• Thousands of registered nurses, clad in bright red scrubs, marched across Oakland Thursday in what organizers called the largest nursing strike in U.S. history.

• Around 10,000 Moroccans demonstrated against the government in Casablanca on Sunday, threatening to boycott the upcoming elections.

• Thousands of students in Manila walked out of their classes to protest against the looming education budget cuts Friday.

• Around 5,000 teachers gathered outside the cabinet headquarters in Cairo on Saturday to demand better pay, vowing to pursue a strike that has crippled several schools around the country.

• Saudi activists in the eastern city of Qatif took to the streets on Friday to rally against police harassing female protesters and in support for the ongoing Bahraini revolution.

• Thousands of Palestinians flocked to Yasser Arafat Square in central Ramallah on Wednesday for a rally in support of the Palestinian bid for full United Nations membership.

• In Montreal, several hundred people gathered downtown Saturday to protest Premier Charest’s refusal to appoint public hearings into corruption in the construction industry.

• In Indonesia, six activists camped outside the Yogyakarta provincial legislature marked the third day of their hunger strike on Friday in protest against the detention of Tukijo, a farmer arrested for opposing an iron mine in Kulon Progo in Yogyakarta.