XL Pipeline Vigils? You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet, Obama: Epic Showdown Mounting

Global warming is not why Nebraskans have planned for their state to be a hotbed of civil disobedience involving actions unlike any ever seen in the United States if President Barack Obama authorizes XL Pipeline’s completion, according to insiders, as thousands attended anti-pipeline vigils this weekend.

Americans unite against Obama’s XL Pipeline health, safety and job lies

Rather than participating in hyped Super Bowl frenzy this weekend, thousands of human and Earth rights defenders held 280 candlelight vigils in 50 states and one in front of the White House, calling on Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry to reject the tar sands pipeline.

Such vigils are tame compared to what’s planned if Obama and Kerry violate the human right to self-determination and instead, authorize the pipeline, again, fostering corporatism.

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline would transport raw, toxic tar sands oil through America’s heartland. From Alberta, Canada to Texas refineries, it would threaten human life and the environment on both sides of the border, transporting poisonous tar sands from under Canada’s Boreal forest, 2,000 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico, to be refined and exported. 

Obama’s approving the pipeline would increase production of one of the dirtiest, most polluting forms of oil for decades.  Tar sands oil is not only difficult, costly and energy-intensive to produce. This oil is also dirtier and more corrosive than conventional oil. Leaks and spills would threaten rivers, aquifers, and people all along the route. It appears as though Americans have had enough of that.

Obama’s approving the pipeline would create fewer jobs that clean, healthy renewable energy projects would. His claim that the pipeline would employ tens or even hundreds of thousands of people is simply untrue.

“A Cornell University study concludes the pipeline would kill more jobs than it would create, by reducing investment in the clean energy economy,” says the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Furthermore, many refineries due to profit from the XL pipeline are in Foreign Trade Zones, where oil can be exported to international buyers without paying U.S. taxes.

Not just hugging trees and sit-ins for Nebraskan protesters

In Obama’s State of the Union address last week, he vowed to do whatever he has to to “help the economy,” even threatening to work around Congress.

“What I offer tonight is a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class and build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class,” he said. “Some require congressional action, and I’m eager to work with all of you. But America does not stand still, and neither will I.”

Neither will the people stand still on the XL Pipeline construction completion under the guise of development.

The White House has bullied that the president has a ”phone and a pen” and is not afraid to use them. In a 2013 State of the Union, Obama insisted ”my administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits.” In 2012, he stated, “In the next few weeks, I will sign an executive order clearing away the red tape that slows down too many construction projects.” (LA Times)

That was after the president vowed furthering more deregulation, not strengthening regulations so American families will be more secure and healthy in their homes and communities. 

“All of this was in the wake of Obama’s 2011 executive order requiring the elimination of “redundant, inconsistent or overlapping” regulations,” the LA Times reports. “The administration had hailed the order as an ‘unprecedented’ move to boost growth.”

In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal touting the order, the president remarkably wrote: ‘We’re also getting rid of absurd and unnecessary paperwork requirements that waste time and money.’”

Such pesky regulations blocking ”growth and development” include those that might have prevented a recent poisoning of 300,000 West Virginians alone. Corporate-government development over human rights and needs trump in the 1%’s New World Order’s globalization, precisely why many Americans rallied against the pipeline at vigils this weekend.

From Choctaw sacred grounds where south Louisiana’s monster sinkhole grows, to south West Virginia’s recently poisoned Appalacians, to tribal lands around the planet, the human family and the Earth that once nurtured it are being sacrificed under the guise of bogus “sustainability.” This is the theme of a film, There you go!​ by Survival International (below), a satirical film written by Oren Ginzburg and narrated by actor and comedian David Mitchell.

While a new State Department report was expected to clarify Keystone XL pipeline issues for Obama. He’d not continue nurturing non-renewable energy industry’s pipeline if the report showed it would impact global warming. That, however, went up in smoke in recent days, at least for the time being. The report claimed global warming was no problem regarding the pipeline.

Unfortunately, global warming and related carbon emissions were the primary one concerning old-school staunch environmentalists and Obama. Immediate human needs and rights were dismissed.

“The hitch is that environmental groups stupidly made the pipeline a litmus test issue for climate seriousness,” the LA Times reported Tuesday.

Americans are too much in survival mode to worry about climate change implications. They need jobs and un-poisoned food on their tables today. The Pew Research Center reports Americans’ overwhelming top concern has been “strengthening the economy” (80% of respondents in 2014) and “improving the job situation” (74% in 2014). Managing global warming has ranked last or second to last (29% in 2014).

The prospect of a foreign company’s pipeline, the XL, providing unhealthy fuel for shipping overseas, only for foreigners’ use, wrecking communities and sacred grounds, providing fewer jobs than would renewable energy projects of its magnituded, the mega fossil fuel pipeline idea went up in smoke for good a long ago for many Americans. 

Bodies Tied to Tractors 

Ready to put their lives on the line at ground zero, Nebraskans have planned protests unlike any others the United States has seen to date, according to Deena Winter for Nebraska Watchdog. 

While over 76,000 citizens have pledged to resist the pipeline through sit-ins and other non-violent protests, Nebraskans have planned substantially more than sit-ins.

At Ground Zero in Nebraska, the controversial pipeline has united the left and right, grandmothers, tribal elders and other indigenous people, ranchers and human rights defenders. They say they are organized and ready to take unprecedented action if the Obama administration approves the pipeline.

Rather than tying themselves to trees, Nebraskans are more likely to rope themselves to tractors, says head of a grassroots anti-pipeline group Bold Nebraska, Jane Kleeb.

While the group, including Republican ranchers, who oppose a foreign company building a pipeline on their land without their consent, has focused on stopping the pipeline, they’ve also prepared for the worst, the possibility it will be approved.

Pipeline fighters have already constructed a “clean energy barn” in the path of the pipeline, near York, Nebraska.

“If the pipeline is rejected, it will be the site of a celebratory barbecue. If the pipeline is approved, it will be a place to rally for everyone from tribal members to grandmothers to farmers and ranchers,” Kleeb says.

She envisions tribal members, not wanting to see the pipeline on sacred ground, such as Ponca Trail of Tears in Antelope County, encircling the barn in protest. The barn was built where four sisters who oppose the pipeline own the surrounding land.

“The family won’t move it, so they’ll either have to tear it down or really reroute the pipeline,” Kleeb said. “Obviously if they tear down a clean energy barn, that won’t be a good visual for the president.”

Kleeb doesn’t think Nebraskan pipeline opponents in will chain themselves to construction equipment, as protesters did in Texas and Oklahoma.

“To be honest, we don’t have anything against the construction workers,” Kleeb said.

Instead, Nebraskans are more likely to take more family-focused, “creative actions” against TransCanada, the Canadian pipeline company fighting five years to get their pipeline approved.

Nebraskans will also be better prepared to watch construction and document any problems with cameras.

“We would go into that kind of mode where we would be pipeline watchers,” Kleeb said. “We’d be watching everything they were doing.”

Nebraskans have already participated in acts of civil disobedience, getting arrested during protests outside the White House and flooding the Nebraska governor’s mansion with flashlights.

Although protests in Texas and Oklahoma didn’t stop the southern leg of Keystone XL from being built, Bold Nebraska will continue throwing every obstacle it can find in the pipeline’s proposed path.

“Landowners are not going to let it go in the ground without having our voices heard,” Kleeb said.

The nation has moved into the “National Interest Determination” phase of Obama’s decision-making for Keystone XL, the process that now includes 90 days for other agencies to weigh in with the State Department and 30 days for the public to comment (after which point there is no deadline for a decision).

“[I]t is more important than ever for President Obama and Secretary Kerry to hear our voices,” NRDC’s Elizabeth Shope writes.

NRDC says, “The facts reveal this pipeline was never in America’s national interest. Clean energy and fuel efficiency is the path forward for economic and energy security in America – not another tar sands pipeline.

“By rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline, President Obama is helping move America down a cleaner, safer path.”

If only the best interests of people were what the nation’s corporate government really wanted.