tar sands action

Photo Credit: Shadia Fayne Wood

This is what we’ve been fighting for. Moments ago, the Obama Administration announced they are rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline.

When Big Oil threatened “huge political consequences”, our movement countered with a message of hope. Today, President Obama stood up for the generation that put him in office.

Today is a victory for the thousands of people across the country who summoned every ounce of courage and creativity they could muster, and resoundingly declared that our future will not be sold to the highest bidder.

Today is a big step for the planet, and it’s an even bigger step for our movement.

Post this photo to Facebook, and more importantly post it on the wall of someone who inspired you to join the movement for clean energy and the campaign against Keystone XL.

Yesterday, the environmental movement won a huge victory. The controversial Keystone XL Pipeline — which would carry heavy corrosive crude oil from the Tar Sands of Alberta, Canada to Texas and would cross over communities throughout the Midwest and over the Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies water to 30 percent of U.S. agriculture — received a delay from the Obama Administration that is likely to permanently keep the dirty oil in the ground. The delay, analysts say, is one that the pipeline’s investors cannot financially handle. Moreover, when a full environmental review is carried out — one where the corporation building the pipeline doesn’t write the environmental review and where Hillary Clinton’s deputy campaign director isn’t that corporation’s head lobbyist — there’s no way the Keystone XL will be approved.

While the delay isn’t an all out rejection, and represents yet another White House cop out on critical environmental regulation, the victory is still a huge one. Just three months ago, no one but a coterie of Tar Sands lobbyists and a few committed activists were aware of the pipeline. Yesterday, it was on the front page of The New York Times. What has become one of the strongest movements in the country has forced Obama to take ownership of the decision and forced him to indefinitely block its construction. What’s even more impressive is that the photo in the New York Times was of young people marching in front of the White House — an image that tells the story of the explosion of youth activism from the largest generation in our country’s history.

On September 26th, more than 200 people crossed over a police barrier on Parliament Hill, making the Ottawa Tar Sands Action the largest civil disobedience in the Canadian climate movement. As an American student attending a Canadian University I found the day particularly exciting for several reasons, not least of which was the sense of international solidarity in this fight against TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

To all of those who haven’t decided if they are going to the Tar Sands Action on the 6th at the White House or one of the many solidarity events around the country:

I know some of you are on the fence, but I am excited for the Tar Sands Action on November 6th. I am excited because we have a chance to say, “There are Americans with a way of life that is slipping, and if they don’t have soil and water you don’t have food.”  I grew up in Wyoming and Colorado where my great grandparents had their homestead, and I have friends and family in three Western states and all over the East Coast who farm and ranch.  As any good farmer or rancher will tell you, soil, water, and weather is all they have going for them; climate change directly threatens their very way of life.  Already, less than 1% of our Citizens can be called farmers, and with global warming influenced droughts, fires, and floods people have been forced to think about moving to the city.  The proposed Keystone XL Pipeline would be a physical scar of what is yet to come.