Keystone XL

Today is Earth Day, but this year the usual corporate greenwashing and symbolic gestures aren’t going to cut it. This year, we’re taking it back.

Students on dozens of campuses are organizing Take Back Earth Day events to demand their colleges and universities address the climate crisis with more than just words. At the same time, a movement-wide coalition is pushing on the national level by flooding the State Department with over 1 million public comments against the disastrous Keystone XL Pipeline.

#TakeBackEarthDay: Join the students taking action across the country by demanding the Obama Administration reject Keystone XL!

Whether it’s your administration on campus or the administration in Washington, we’ve got to hold our leaders accountable to their climate commitments, and push them to make a clean break from big polluters: divesting from fossil fuels and moving to 100% clean energy.

That’s what Earth Day needs to be about.

Yesterday, Checks & Balances Project and 11 environmental, faith-based and public interest organizations called on Secretary of State John Kerry and the State Department Deputy Inspector General Harold Geisel to investigate whether Environmental Resources Management (ERM) hid conflicts of interest which might have excluded it from performing the Keystone XL environmental assessment and how State Department officials failed to flag inconsistencies in ERM’s proposal.

When Virginia Senator Mark Warner decided to flip his stance on the tar sands pipeline, Virginians were ready to march to his door and let him know that if he claims to be a leader on climate change, he cannot support the Keystone pipeline!

Yesterday, over 20 climate activists, including students and constituents from across the state, stormed Warner's Richmond office to voice their outrage over his recent support for the KXL. After marching through downtown Richmond, we rallied outside Warner's building and flooded his office with our bodies and our voices. Activists from CCAN and 350.org spoke with one of his top legislative aids for almost half an hour about the catastrophic consequences we will face if Warner continues to support the pipeline. We handed over a letter expressing our need for a leader who will fight with us for a clean energy future and demanded that the aid deliver our message immediately to the Senator. Our request? Vote no on any legislative efforts to support the Keystone XL pipeline, and respond to our concerns within one week.

In February of 2009, as an excited but scared freshman, I boarded a mini-van and drove 15 straight hours from my college in St. Louis to Washington DC. I was attending my first big event for climate justice, Power Shift 2009, and I was looking forward to a conference that I thought would be a fun weekend in a new city. Instead, the conference changed my life.

Youth rally at the Capitol at Power Shift in 2009.

Something happened to me in the presence of the 12,000 other passionate young people attending Power Shift in 2009. I was deeply inspired and felt connected with something much larger than myself. And as I walked through the halls of Congress to lobby my representatives, I felt completely empowered, that I was meant to be there and that I could actually change the world. This was my baptism into the world of activism, and since those four days in Washington DC I have actively campaigned for climate justice.