Amy Goodman on Tar Sands Protest

The White House was rocked Tuesday, not only by the 5.9 Richter-scale earthquake, but by the protests mounting outside its gates. More than 2,100 people say they’ll risk arrest there during the next two weeks. They oppose the Keystone XL pipeline project, designed to carry heavy crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the US Gulf Coast.
A “keystone” in architecture is the stone at the top of an arch that holds the arch together; without it, the structure collapses. By putting their bodies on the line – as more than 200 have already at the time of this writing – these practitioners of the proud tradition of civil disobedience hope to collapse not only the pipeline, but the fossil-fuel dependence that is accelerating disruptive global climate change.
APEC member Rees Shearer was arrested on Saturday, along with others including Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author who founded the group 350.org, named after the estimated safe upper limit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of 350ppm (parts per million; the planet is currently at 390ppm). In a call to action to join the protest, McKibben, along with others, including journalist Naomi Klein, actor Danny Glover and Nasa scientist James Hansen, wrote the Keystone pipeline is “a fifteen hundred 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”.