25 Apr Keystone XL Pipeline Update

Just days after the EPA's decision that the Environmental Objections on their draft Environmental Impact Assessment of the Keystone XL Pipeline (published in March) were insufficient, protests are picking back up! Obama's decision is still looming but the EPA's letter to the US Dept of State sent a clear message that a decision for the pipeline now would be short sighted. In Oklahoma today, a protester has locked his arm in concrete buried where the pipeline is slated to go. 

According to the Great Planes Tar Sands Resistance page, in "Lula, OK—Thursday, April 25, 7:30AM a protester with the group Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance has stopped construction of the Keystone XL pipeline by locking his arm into a concrete capsule buried directly in the pipeline’s proposed path. Fitzgerald Scott, 42, is the first African American to risk arrest while physically blockading TransCanada’s dangerous tar sands pipeline, and the second person to take action this week. On Monday a 61 year old man locked himself to a piece of construction equipment effectively shutting down another Oklahoma pipeline construction site. This week of action, called the “Red River Showdown,” is intended to protect the Red River, which marks the border between Oklahoma and Texas and is a major tributary of the Mississippi." Read more here. 

These men and women with the Tar Sands Resistance and blockades all over the country are still putting their bodies on the line. This process has been a long one, years now, and even though they have started the eminent domain process and construction on the pipeline the fight isn't over yet. With a solid no from the state department or the president we could still stop this pipeline. 

What you can do right now: call the Texas House Calendars Committee! There are two bills in the calendars committee of the Texas House of Representatives that would effect the outcome before the president's decision. 

From Indy Texans: "HB 2748 devastates individual rights and sets the bar for even being able to get your eminent domain case to a court for a hearing on the facts very very high.  Considering the high cost of litigation, the ability to get to court is tough enough already for most landowners.  Lewis’ bill makes the Railroad Commission’s decision as to whether a pipeline is a common carrier a conclusive determination.  Many rightly fear that the “process” by the Railroad Commission will be no process at all but merely a rubber stamp “approved” on any pipeline’s application.

Chairman Oliveira’s bill, HB 3747, establishes a more formal objective process to be administered by the State Office of Administrative Hearings and requiring at least one public hearing in effected counties in an effort to insure that all relevant facts are heard and considered before a designation of common carrier (and the ability to condemn property using eminent domain) is granted." Read more here.

I personally got enthralled with the fight against the Tar Sands when I found out about the extraction process that was taking place in Alberta, Canada by Shell and other companies. The extraction process seemed to be causing or contributing to colorectal cancer in the native/indigenous people that live in the area who depend on the Athabasca river and tributaries where the extraction chemicals were ending up (source, 2). The extraction also causes deforestation of the Boreal Forests in Canada, one of the largest carbon sinks that humans can depend on.  

For more information on tar sands, you can read here and here.

Dawnielle is a staff writer and editor at Austin EcoNetwork as well as her personal site, dawniellecastledine.com. You can find her at @dawniellecas on twitter.