Today, Tar Sands Blockade kicked off a sustained, direct action campaign to stop the construction of the southern section of the Keystone XL pipeline through Oklahoma and Texas. The grassroots organization, comprised of concerned landowners, farmers, climate activists and community members who run the gamut from Tea Party members to Occupy activists, unfurled banners in opposition to this reckless project at numerous construction sites across East Texas and Cushing, Oklahoma. Coordinated solidarity events…
Last Tuesday marked the two-year anniversary of the start of the Kalamazoo River disaster where Canadian oil corporation Enbridge spilled over a million gallons of tar sands oil into waters near Marshall, Michigan. The following piece is cross-posted from the Huffington Post.
Since last week, another pipeline operated by Enbridge, Line 14, was shut down after it spilled more than 50,000 barrels of oil in Grand Marsh, Wisconsin, prompting ranking member…
Yesterday, activists with Tar Sands Blockade met President Obama’s motorcade in Austin, Texas wielding banners and signs with one simple message: stop the Keystone XL pipeline, no more tar sands through Texas. Tar Sands Blockade is a local and national mobilization planning nonviolent direct action in Texas against Keystone XL’s southern, export leg should construction begin this summer.
Rallying and marching near City Hall in downtown Austin, the activists’ chants caught the ear of…
Coming off of the freakish extreme weather across the country the past several months, people are anxious for a break from the punishing weather and looking forward to a calmer July. Climate scientists, meanwhile, haven’t provided much solace on this front, amplifying warnings that the recent spate of brutal weather foreshadows the local effects of global climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration strengthened this argument recently by noting that the…
A short piece appeared in the New York Times on Tuesday, quietly noting that one of the three regional Army Corps of Engineers offices reviewing TransCanada’s federal permit application to build the Keystone XL pipeline through Oklahoma and Texas had rubber-stamped the southernmost section through Texas the day before.
On the afternoon that the Times piece ran, concerned Texans -- slated to neighbor this portion of the pipeline -- packed a state oil…
You’d think the State Department would’ve learned its lesson from the first round of review of the controversial Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline, wouldn’t you?
Especially after it took 1,253 people risking arrest on President Obama’s doorstep (including Friends of the Earth staff and activists), dogged and escalated action targeting the administration, and a New York Times front page exposé on conflicts of interest in the department’s review of the…
Greetings from Providence, Rhode Island! I’m here today with Friends of the Earth communications manager Kelly Trout for Netroots Nation, an annual national conference of progressive bloggers, media, grassroots organizations and individual activists from across the spectrum of political issues and social justice work.
I worked with allies in the fight to stop the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline to organize a panel for this morning’s session called “Handcuffs, Conventional Wisdom…
Either Press Secretary Jay Carney was confused at yesterday’s daily White House briefing and misspoke, or the Obama administration has abandoned any semblance of adhering to a legal review process for the southern segment of the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline, stretching from Cushing, Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast of Texas.
As part of a response to a question about President Obama’s approach to the Keystone XL pipeline, Carney answered:
“The…
Yesterday evening, Canadian pipeline company Enbridge kicked off one of the most sweeping expansions in its history, a $3.2 billion (Canadian) series of pipeline projects that would carry some of the world’s dirtiest oil—tar sands oil—across Canada, the American Midwest, and even New England, a region that currently doesn’t import tar sands.
The extraction and processing of tar sands oil is one of the largest industrial operations in the world. Tar sands oil emits…
Enbridge, the Canadian oil giant responsible for a massive tar sands oil spill into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan not yet two years ago, now wants to pipe tar sands oil—the world’s dirtiest oil—through New England with its Trailbreaker pipeline project.
The Trailbreaker tar sands pipeline project
In August 2011, Enbridge filed a permit application with Canada’s National Energy Board to revive a previous tar sands project, called Trailbreaker. Trailbreaker would transport tar sands…