Bill McKibben and the Fight to Stop the Tar Sands

In a defiant act of civil disobedience, protestors stage a sit-in at the White House to implore Obama to stop the Keystone XL pipeline.

At 11 a.m. on Aug. 20, 65 people, many dressed in their Sunday best, walked single file across Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House gate and turned their backs to it, facing Lafayette Park. This group of peaceful protesters is in Washington to petition for U.S. President Barack Obama to prevent construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

As the crowd of protesters formed, a well-briefed police squad cordoned the area with black fences and yellow tape. By Parks Service regulation, a person holding a sign, or a group of more than 25, may not linger in front of the central White House sidewalk longer than 10 minutes; after three warnings, the Parks Police cuffed and led people, one-by-one, away to Anacostia to process them for central holding.

By today's standards of civil disobedience, a protesting group of 65 – the number of people arrested Saturday morning – is large. Saturday's protest, the first of more than a dozen planned every morning through Labour Day, was organized by a broad front of environmental, indigenous, and religious climate-change activists, coming to Washington from all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Canada with a succinct, urgent message for President Obama: Make the Keystone pipeline a line in the sand.

Do Canada's new oil sands regulations go far enough? The Pembina Institute weighs in here.

International groundswell for this organized civil disobedience evolved after the prominent environmental writer Bill McKibben circulated an old-fashioned letter, co-signed by Canadian writer Naomi Klein; the U.S. government's top climate scientist, James Hansen; and other environmentalists. It calls for a grassroots movement to resist further development of Alberta's oil sands. These oil deposits, they note, are the second-largest source of carbon on earth; choosing to burn them is the equivalent of igniting a "carbon bomb."

By staging the demonstration at the White House, the protesters have deliberately targeted Obama as the recipient of their message. The decision to grant a transboundary pipeline permit is an executive decision, not a legislative one: Unlike climate-change law or raising taxes on the rich, the president needs neither to negotiate with, nor consult, Congress in order to take action. "It is Obama alone with the ball at the foul line," McKibben stated in a brief talk before the sit-in, using a basketball metaphor he repeated frequently to reporters in the days leading up to his arrest. "Will he take the 20-foot jump shot, or will he pass?"

Since June, more than 2,000 people have signed up to participate in a movement of non-violent disobedience to stop TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline, which will connect the oil sands of northern Alberta to the refineries of Port Arthur, TX, on the Gulf of Mexico. It is a movement built on local and regional activities spanning indigenous communities from Alberta to Oklahoma, activists in Utah, landowners along the Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska, and climate-justice advocates on the Eastern Seaboard.