For a fourth straight day outside the White House, environmentalists were arrested for protesting a pipeline that would can a carry acidic crude oil, if you can call it oil, from western Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast.
In our third story on the countdown, the protestors begin what should be a two-week long demonstration, Saturday against the proposed Key Stone XL Pipeline.
The so-called Tar Sands Pipeline, it would travel about 1,700 miles.
Tar sands or oil sands are sluggish mixes of sand, clay, water, and a molasses-level-thick petroleum. It used to be considered so unusable that until recently none of it was counted as the world's oil supply.
Extracting it, heating it, moving it will destroy Canadian forests, risk spills on sensitive terrain and increase U.S. dependence on carbon based fuels. One demonstrator from Maine summed it up.
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ANDIE BURR: It's a terrible idea, and it is time for us to turn the tide on climate change.
OLBERMANN: Part of the pipeline already exists, but most of it must still be built by the TransCanada Company.
To the benefit, surprisingly enough, of many oil companies including some from Texas, which we should not be surprised then, that a Republican Congressman, Ted Poe, recently spoke in favor of the project.
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TED POE: An easy choice for this administration. Either they can force Americans to continue to rely on unfriendly, foreign countries for our energy, like Venezuela and the Middle Eastern dictators, or work with our friends in the North to supply over 1.4 million barrels of oil per day.
OLBERMANN: And rely on Texas dictators.
The Obama Administration says it will decide on the pipeline by the end of the year.
The "New York Times," in a strongly worded editorial last Sunday sided with the environmentalist, saying, "We have two main concerns -- the risk of oil spills along the pipeline, which would traverse highly sensitive terrain, and the fact that the extraction of petroleum from the tar sands creates far more greenhouse admissions than conventional production does. The state department will decide whether approve or reject the pipeline by the end of the year. It should acknowledge the environmental risk on the pipeline and the larger damage caused by tar sands production and block the Keystone XL."
Joining us now from Washington, Bill McKibben, an environmentalist and author who spent the weekend with fellow demonstrators in a Washington jail.
Mr. McKibben, thanks for your time tonight.
BILL McKIBBEN: Keith, what a pleasure to be with you.
OLBERMANN: Thank you, sir. It's ours.
President Obama can decide this without Congress. What's his political calculation and which side do you expect him to end up on?
McKIBBEN: Well, I think we're changing the odds of that at the moment. You know, a week ago, I think there was little question he would have gone ahead.
Think of the pressure coming from the most powerful, profitable industry on the planet. But we have succeeded by organizing the largest civil disobedience protest in the environmental movement in decades in nationalizing this issue.
It's no longer just people along the pipeline route and native people who have been carrying this fight for a couple of years. Now, it's people from all 50 states who have come to Washington to get arrested, and the media coverage that they are drawing is producing things like that editorial in the “Times.” So it's beginning to shift.
It's going to be gut-check time for the president. When he ran for president, he said -- the night he was nominated, in fact -- he said, “You know what? When I am president, the rise of the oceans will begin to slow and the planet will begin to heal.” That's powerful talk.
He hasn't yet done heroic things on the environment.
He has done some good things around the edges but nothing transformative, and he has backed down on some important fights.
This time, he can't blame it on Congress. He doesn't need to ask Jim Inhofe's permission. He doesn't need any help from the congress. He can turn down this permit himself, and if he does -- and here I think is the political calculation -- If he does, it will send a surge of excitement through that base.
We were sitting and lying on the metal shelves in the, what's called central cell block in the Washington jail the other day, and people were saying, “You know, the last time I was this uncomfortable, I was lying on a church basement getting ready to go knock on doors for Barack Obama.”
I sure hope I get reminded of why I was doing all of that.
OLBERMANN: Obviously, transporting oil involves risks. Even the most dedicated environmentalist president would not be able to dismantle the oil reliance of this country in a matter of years --
let alone decades, probably.
McKIBBEN: Very true.
OLBERMANN: -- let alone decades, probably. But why is this one project worse than usual, worse than acceptable?
McKIBBEN: Sure. The answer lies at heart in the place it's coming from.
The Tar Sands of Canada are the second largest pool of carbon on Earth. Only after the Saudi Arabian oil fields.
We plumed those Saudi oil fields 70 years ago when no one had heard of global warming. If we do the same kind of thing, make the same kind of investment, produce the same volumes of oil from Canada, then as Jim Hansen, our leading climate scientist put it not long ago, it will be essentially game over for the climate.
That's about as strong language as you will get from a scientist, and it's a reminder that we need to leave carbon in the ground. It's exactly the same principle as say, telling the Brazilians that they need to guard their rain forest, not cut it down.
If the Brazilians who are poor are supposed to guard their rain forest – and, actually, they've begun to do a pretty good job of just that -- then surely North Americans who aren't poor should be able to keep their hands off something as dangerous as all that oil.
It's risky in transmission. It will almost certainly spill in places like the Ogallala aquifer.
The precursor pipeline has leaked 12 times in 12 months, you know?
But even if that oil gets safely to Texas, that's just that much more of it to spill into the atmosphere, essentially game over for the climate. That's why this has emerged as the premier environmental test for Barack Obama between now and the next election.
OLBERMANN: And the rationalization for going ahead for it, obviously they're not going to say, "We're going to do this to put more money in the oil companies pockets." But there is not some huge gain in jobs creation or something to throw out?
McKIBBEN: Well, you know, you're going to have to -- some people are going to have to build the pipeline. The State Department, in its analysis, estimates a few thousand jobs, about 800 or 900 of them for people along the pipeline route.
But, of course that's dwarfed by the number of people who would be employed turning to the wind and the sun, if we decide that we are no longer going to allow our addiction to oil to grow, that we are not going to find one more vein in, you know, to exploit.
Instead, we are going to make the beginning of what, as you pointed out, will be a long and difficult transition off of fossil fuel.
But as long as we keep pumping to the ground every barrel we can find, then we will never make that transition. And it's that kind of transformation that Barack Obama needs to show us he will lead on.
OLBERMANN: Bill McKibben of tarsandaction.org, great. Thanks for your time, and good luck with this.
McKIBBEN: Thanks so much.
OLBERMANN: Thank you.
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