Kristin Moe : Polluted Houston Neighborhood Draws the Line at Tar Sands

Children from the Manchester neighborhood in Houston with oil refinery smokestack in the background. Photo by Tar Sands Blockade. Photo by Tar Sands Blockade / YES! Magazine.

Houston's most polluted neighborhood
draws the line at Alberta Tar Sands

East Texas is the belly of the beast: the heart of America’s oil country and the seat of power for the fossil fuels industry.

By Kristin Moe / YES! Magazine / May 2, 2013

HOUSTON -- If the Keystone XL pipeline is approved, 90 percent of the tar sands crude that flows through it will be processed near an embattled Houston neighborhood called Manchester. Residents are joining up to demand a healthier future.

The playground in Manchester, a neighborhood on Houston’s east side, is empty much of the time. Children who play for too long here often start to cough. They go back inside, leaving an empty swing set in the shadow of a nearby oil refinery.

Yudith Nieto, 24, has lived in Manchester since her family came from Mexico when she was a small child. While it’s OK to visit the playground, she says, it’s not OK to bring her camera. On several occasions, security guards from the Valero refinery next door have appeared and asked her to leave, claiming that taking pictures in the park was “illegal.” They’ve even brought in Houston police as reinforcements.

Valero, one of the major oil companies operating in this industrial part of Houston, keeps its security busy: Nieto says that they have harassed documentary filmmakers and journalists. And when college students participating in an “alternative spring break” program came to the park to talk to her about the neighborhood’s problems, a guard drove up in an unmarked vehicle and took video of the meeting on his cellphone.

“I'm not afraid of the attention I'm getting from these people,” Nieto says, “because we want people to know that we're aware.”

Manchester, one of Houston’s oldest neighborhoods, is surrounded by industry on all sides: a Rhodia chemical plant; a car-crushing facility; a water treatment plant; a train yard for hazardous cargo; a Goodyear synthetic rubber plant; oil refineries belonging to Lyondell Basell, Valero, and Texas Petro-Chemicals; as well as one of the busiest highways in the city.

Industrial development continues uninterrupted down the Houston Ship Channel for another 50 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. The refineries around Houston have been called the “keystone to Keystone” because they’re expected to process 90 percent of tar sands crude from Alberta if the controversial Keystone XL pipeline is completed.

It’s one of the most polluted neighborhoods in the U.S., one where smokestacks grace every backyard view. But it’s taking on a new significance as the terminus of Keystone because the pipeline is at the center of the highest-stakes environmental battle in recent years. As international pressure builds, residents are beginning to organize, educate themselves, and speak out for the health of their families.

For them, the struggle over Keystone is not a political game. It’s not even about climate change, at least not exclusively. The effects of the pipeline will be right next door.


A grassroots movement begins to grow

Manchester is in some ways typical of low-income urban neighborhoods: it’s almost entirely Latino and African American, with a large number of undocumented immigrants. A full third of residents live below the poverty line. Drugs, unemployment, and gangs are a problem. And there’s a strange smell in the air: sometimes sweet, sometimes sulfurous, often reeking of diesel.

The most striking thing is that people here always seem to be sick. They have chronic headaches, nosebleeds, sore throats, and red sores on their skin that take months to heal.

Playground with Valero refinery
in background.

It took a groundbreaking study by the Houston Chronicle in 2005 to reveal for the first time the extent of the air pollution here. It identified five human carcinogens (a 2010 EPA study identified eight), including enough benzene that one scientist told the Chronicle that living in Manchester was “like sitting in traffic 24/7.” Toxin levels “were high enough that they would trigger a full-scale federal investigation if these communities were hazardous waste sites,” the Chronicle wrote.

Given this, it’s easy to understand why there are so many chronic respiratory problems. But the health risks go beyond asthma: for children living within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel, chances of contracting acute lymphocytic leukemia are 56 percent higher than for children only 10 miles away. “Children are being bombarded with toxins every day of their lives,” Nieto says.

Nieto, like many others in Manchester, grew up with asthma. Now an after-school teacher at Southwest Elementary, she spends her spare time working to organize this community, which has long been paralyzed by poverty, language barriers, and lack of access to information about exactly what is making them sick.

But the business of grassroots organizing is a slow one. It’s family to family, house to house. Many residents have reasons to resist taking action. They’re preoccupied with earning a living, fearful of authorities -- often because of their legal status -- and hesitant to accept just how bad their air might be.

Most people, Nieto says, just want to get out of Manchester. But they can’t afford rents anywhere else, and it’s impossible to sell. After all, who would buy a house with an oil refinery in the backyard?

So far, government representatives have been unwilling to act on behalf of residents who live along the Ship Channel. Juan Parras, a community organizer who founded Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, or TEJAS, says that a major goal is simply holding public officials accountable and enforcing the laws already in place under the Clean Air Act.

But in a state where oil is king, he says, “our elected officials are more responsive to industry than they are to community needs.” Fossil-fuel companies -- and the politicians whose campaigns they fund -- stand to profit enormously from projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, Parras says. “They have our elected officials in their back pockets.”


Where grassroots meets DIY

But residents of Manchester are finding ways to take action that don’t depend on those representatives. Alongside two organizers from the group Tar Sands Blockade, Nieto, her partner Emmanuel, and a few other young people have set up a “free store” with regular hours.

It’s an outdoor community space based in a neighbor’s yard, a tent and some tables crammed with information and arts-and-crafts materials for children. The store offers free donated clothes, food, information on air pollution, meetings of local government officials, and trainings in skills like talking to the media and filing pollution complaints with the city.

The free store starts to address some of the immediate, daily needs for things like clothing and healthy food, which might prevent residents from engaging politically. It seems tiny in comparison with the industrial behemoth that’s so close. But it represents a critical shift towards mutual aid and self-sufficiency, an alternative to the feelings of helplessness that have long been dominant here.

By creating a space where neighbors can come together to take control of their own needs, organizers hope they’ll pave the way for deeper empowerment.

After a small rally and march last year, two activists from the Gulf Coast locked themselves to trucks entering a Valero facility in Manchester and launched a 45-day hunger strike, demanding that Valero divest from the Keystone XL pipeline. For now, the people risking arrest in these actions remain outsiders -- U.S. citizens with greater access to resources and support. For many locals who struggle with supporting families under already difficult conditions, civil disobedience isn’t an option.

For Nieto, though, it’s about “building the support from people that I’ve known all my life.” Residents are mistrustful of even the most well-intentioned outsiders. That puts Nieto and the small handful of other young people from Manchester in a unique position to create change from the inside.


A critical position

The Alberta tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline have taken on a monumental significance for the North American environmental movement. It’s not just another pipeline; former NASA climate scientist James Hansen famously referred to it as “the fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” In February, it was a rallying point for the largest demonstration on climate change in U.S. history. Over 60,000 people have already signed a pledge to engage in civil disobedience should the final leg of the pipeline be approved.

East Houston man pickets pipeline.

If that happens, almost all of the tar sands crude that flows through Keystone will be processed at refineries in East Houston. Activists from Tar Sands Blockade say that Valero has contract rights with TransCanada, which will allow them to purchase up to three-quarters of Keystone’s capacity. Tar sands crude oil is much more toxic than regular crude, and contains 11 times more sulfur and nickel, and five times more lead.

That puts neighborhoods like Manchester in a critical position not only to affect the future of the pipeline -- and by extension the fight against climate change -- but to raise environmental justice issues around race and class into the national conversation.

After decades in the shadow of the refineries, Ship Channel residents have the potential to play a major role in the debate. The political pressure around Keystone might be just big enough to catalyze both residents and public officials to change the composition of the air in East Houston and the carbon in our atmosphere.

What’s more, East Texas is the belly of the beast: the heart of America’s oil country and the seat of power for the fossil fuels industry. Juan Parras of TEJAS says he tells national environmental groups concerned about climate change to get involved in Manchester. “Because if you can fight them here,” he says, “and beat them to the punch, it’s going to have a huge impact on the rest of the nation.”

But Parras also worries that spotlighting Keystone will allow the media to forget the myriad other issues faced by residents of Manchester -- that even if the pipeline is stopped, public attention will move on, and local people will still be dealing with polluted air, cancer and asthma, and the poverty that makes it impossible to leave.

Yudith Nieto, through her activism, has started to travel. She has met organizers from places all along Keystone’s path, including indigenous people from the Alberta tar sands.

Meeting them only deepened her sense of shared destiny, she says, the sense that she and her neighbors are not alone. “It put everything else into perspective,” she says. “This has been going on for such a long time. I became an ally to those people, and they became allies to me.”

Keystone is a threat to the health of communities along its path, from the source in Alberta to the terminus in Texas. But it also presents a challenge, and an opportunity, for those communities to realize what they have in common and make their voices heard. What’s at stake is not only the air quality in East Houston, but the stability of the climate across the planet.

This article was originally published by YES! Magazine and distributed by Truthout under a Creative Commons License.

[Kristin Moe writes for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media project that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Kristin writes about climate, grassroots movements and social change. Follow her on Twitter @yo_Kmoe.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Pipeline Debate is Mired in Disinformation

Coming your way? Pieces of the pipeline. Image from National Radio Canada.

Keystone XL Pipeline debate
is mired in disinformation

The Keystone XL Pipeline project has virtually nothing to do with American energy independence, but everything to do with enriching Canadian tar sands oil interests and the interests of refineries that are in the oil products exporting business.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / March 5, 2013

One of the attributes of our current politics is the repetition of false information, even after it has been proven false. Such repetition is the use of propaganda based on deceit -- not to persuade, but to manipulate.

A year ago, when I wrote about the Keystone XL pipeline, I assumed that the debate would be over by now, but the pipeline project has been delayed by protests in Texas and Oklahoma -- the Tar Sands Blockade -- which have kept the debate alive for a while longer. (To read more about the Tar Sands Blockade, go here and here.)

These delays have given the proponents of the pipeline an opportunity to push their disinformation campaign into high gear, although virtually all they have to say amounts to outright lies or distortions of the truth, to make a few petrochemical companies and investors richer at the expense of the environment -- which means to the detriment of the people.

I’m in favor of advocacy, but when advocates are caught in lies, they have to change their message or expose themselves as untrustworthy or worse. Apparently this exposure does not bother the proponents of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which is intended to carry tar sands oil -- perhaps the most environmentally destructive oil found on the planet -- from Canada to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast.

• Deceit 1: Tar sands oil will move the U.S. toward energy independence

The most egregious lie told repeatedly by pipeline proponents is that the tar sands oil will move us toward energy independence. However, most of the petroleum products made from the tar sands oil will be sold overseas at prices even higher than we pay in the U.S. Nothing about the tar sands oil makes the U.S. energy independent, but it does increase the profits of the oil companies that are regularly gouging Americans by manipulating the availability of gasoline.

Sen. John Cornyn, Texas’ senior Republican senator, along with others, stated in a January 2013 letter, “The pipeline is also a major step toward American energy security.” How can a source of oil that will be used primarily to make diesel fuel to be sold overseas help domestic energy security? Canada is seeking a way to have its tar sands oil processed for the international market, not the American market. Refineries in Texas, primarily the Valero refinery in Port Arthur, have been retrofitted to process tar sands oil, rather than to process the kind of oil that comes from domestic production and from OPEC, Venezuela, and Mexico.

The Valero refinery operates in a Foreign Trade Zone so that tar sands oil products will not be taxed when they are sold overseas. At conferences with investors since 2008, Valero has touted its ability to make and export diesel from its Port Arthur facility -- the primary purpose of the tar sands oil. But it should come as no surprise that Sen. Cornyn is willing to deceive the public about an issue that involves the profits of oil companies. Since 1999, Sen. Cornyn has taken more than $2.1 million in oil company political contributions, including over $42,000 from Valero alone.

An honest look at the Keystone XL Pipeline project shows clearly that it has virtually nothing to do with American energy independence, but everything to do with enriching Canadian tar sands oil interests and the interests of refineries that are in the oil products exporting business.

• Deceit 2: If the U.S. doesn’t get the tar sands oil, China will get it

Another unsupported proposition is that if we don’t allow Canada to send the tar sands oil to Gulf Coast refineries, they will just send it to Canada’s West Coast to be sold to China. This proposition is doubtful at best. China is trying to rid itself of massive pollution caused by its own industrialization. Tar sands oil is dirtier than other oil and will just make China’s environment worse, so it is unlikely to want the extra pollution problems it will cause.

Canada also has another problem with pipelining the tar sands oil to its west coast, through British Columbia: More than 100 indigenous groups along the Canadian pipeline route, organized in a coalition called First Nations, oppose the pipeline through British Columbia.

First Nations opposition is largely environmental and cultural. Over the past two years, First Nations tribes have signed an agreement to oppose all pipelines that cross through indigenous territory largely because of environmental concerns that focus on bird habitat, endangered boreal woodland caribou, and the Great Bear Rainforest. They fear also that oil spills from giant tankers will harm Fraser River salmon.

• Deceit 3: The tar sands pipeline will result in many U.S. jobs

Proponents of the tar sands pipeline have claimed from 20,000 to half a million new jobs related to construction of the pipeline. But the original application for the pipeline made to the State Department claimed at most 4,200 temporary pipeline construction jobs. Every independent assessment of job claims has concluded that the projections of pipeline proponents are wildly inflated. The Cornell University Global Labor Institute, for example, reported last year the number of permanent pipeline jobs (inspection, maintenance, etc.) at about 50.

The Cornell Global Labor Institute published the only jobs study that was not funded by TransCanada, the developer of the XL Pipeline project. That study found that the pipeline project could destroy more jobs than it creates by causing long-term increases in domestic gasoline prices in the Midwest (where Canadian oil is processed in refineries that make gasoline for domestic use) and because of the cost of environmental impacts.

 The Institute reports that

TransCanada has already purchased most of the steel it intends to use for the pipeline from India; that most of the work will be conducted by people already employed by TransCanada; and that the Perryman Group (which did a study paid for by TransCanada) included already-completed pipeline projects in its job-creation estimates.

Something that has delayed the Texas portion of the pipeline project has been the unwillingness of a few Texans to be bullied by a foreign company that has manipulated Texas eminent domain law to its advantage until now. TransCanada claims that it is a “common carrier” in Texas, a status that would allow it to condemn property to use for its pipeline project.

But its status as a common carrier is not settled. Until we get an opinion from the appeals court in Texarkana (for information on the eminent domain suit, go here), we may not know if TransCanada is operating legally with regard to eminent domain. But if eminent domain can be used by a foreign company to take private land against the will of its owner, we are a lot less free than many of our politicians claim we are.

Even if you aren’t concerned about the environmental effects of the pipeline, the risk of leaks polluting surface water and aquifers, and the extra pollution caused by refining and transporting tar sands oil, it is hard to ignore the basic fact that the project has little, if any, benefit for the American public. We won’t get any closer to energy independence and we will get few, if any, permanent jobs out of the project. The pipeline project is not a public works project for which eminent domain should be used. There is no public benefit.

Let TransCanada make its money without burdening Texans by taking their land for the benefit of TransCanada’s owners.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Bryan Farrell : The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You, Keystone XL

Four activists are locked down to construction equipment on a recently clearcut easement leased by Keystone XL pipeline builders TransCanada. Inset photos below show local residents supporting the demonstrators and treesitters in the 50-foot pines at the rural East Texas site. Photos by Bryan Farrell / Waging Nonviolence.
Hey, Keystone XL:
The eyes of Texas are upon you

As the sheriff’s deputies finally moved in on the tree-sitters, you could hear them referring to their targets -- as opposed to the Canadian corporation on whose behalf they were interceding -- as 'the foreigners.'

By Bryan Farrell / Waging Nonviolence / November 27, 2012

NACOGDOCHES, Texas -- “CLOSED. Happy Thanksgiving,” read a handwritten plywood sign propped against a makeshift tire barrier outside a work site for the Keystone XL pipeline in rural East Texas. For those who had come to protest and engage in civil disobedience against the pipeline’s construction, the message made clear that their visit was expected.

It was still just the Monday before Thanksgiving, making for a surprisingly early break for a project that has been fast-tracked at practically every level of government. Such enthusiasm for a U.S. holiday hardly seemed right for TransCanada, the Calgary-based energy corporation building the pipeline.

Not that the activists’ presence was any kind of secret. Tar Sands Blockade, the campaign seeking to stop the pipeline connecting Alberta’s tar sands to Texas’s oil refineries and shipping ports, had announced the day’s mass action a week earlier.

The only real surprises were the two locations that the campaign would be targeting, which the organizers kept hidden -- even to fellow participants -- right up until the last minute.

Their goal was to shut down construction for a day. The real imperative, however, was directing media attention to a pipeline that poses a significant danger to the health of the local community, as well as to the global climate.

Four activists came prepared to lock themselves to construction equipment, and despite the closure of the site by TransCanada, they went ahead as planned. Another dozen or so supporters -- including photographers, videographers, live-bloggers, medics, and spokespeople -- waited nearby for the police. Having arrived shortly after 5 a.m. in order to preempt the workers who never came, they ended up waiting for a long time.

Among these supporters was an elderly couple from Iowa. Two days earlier, in time to take part in Sunday’s direct action training, they had driven nearly 16 hours to Nacogdoches -- a small town in the Texas Forest Country that advertises itself as “the oldest town in Texas.” Having already been arrested outside the White House at last year’s Tar Sands Action, they were ready to do it again. But five hours of waiting wore their patience thin.

“We want some action!” said 76-year-old Ann Christenson as she leaned on a cane, which she admitted was more for show than for balance.

Although she and her husband did not end up getting arrested, plenty of action followed. The local police just needed time to come up with a plan of attack. First, they pepper-sprayed the four people locked to the construction equipment, hoping the discomfort would force them to disconnect themselves. When that didn’t work, they set about dismantling the lockboxes made of PVC pipes and a bolt in the middle by which the protesters were linked to one another in pairs.

I cringed as I saw them do this to the one I’d gotten to know the night before, a 23-year-old named Gill. Before arriving at the Tar Sands Blockade, he had been backpacking around the country, hitching rides on freight trains.

Once broken apart, the four protesters were immediately cuffed and dragged into a police van. Onlookers pleaded with the police to give the arrestees water, as they were not only nearing dehydration from being out in the hot Texas sun, but the pepper spray had also left their faces a mucousy mess. The police, however, remained indifferent, which only further angered the onlookers, who began shouting and cursing.

Meanwhile, a few Texans belted out the University of Texas alma mater: “The eyes of Texas are upon you,” they sang.

More reporters and TV news cameras started arriving. Local preachers came to watch. For them it was an opportunity to save souls -- although they seemed far more worried about those of the activists than those of the police.


At a different work site several miles away, three other Tar Sands Blockade activists had deployed into the trees. This was the result of a long night’s work that involved rigging platforms in the tall pines with support lines connecting them to the heavy equipment below. The contraptions forced workers to choose between halting construction or risking the activists’ lives.

Seattle-based filmmaker Rebecca Rodriguez, who is working on a project that involves walking the entire 1,700-mile length of the pipeline, spent the night in the woods documenting their efforts. “They were so organized, so disciplined,” she said. “I have such a newfound respect for tree-sitting.”

Rodriguez described how they spent hours in the cold, dark woods getting everything set up. The tree-sitters would slowly make their way up, securing their positions with rope, and sometimes slipping down along the way.

By daybreak they were all in place, and in this case TransCanada was taken by surprise. A worker showed up and quickly called the county sheriff, whose officers arrived and threatened to cut the activists’ life-lines before retreating to plan their response.

When I asked Alex Lundberg, a longtime Earth First! activist and trainer who helped set up the tree-sit, how much planning went into it, a smile showed out from under his bushy beard. “None,” he said. His answer, however, spoke not to a lack of preparation but to just how well they knew what they were doing. For two months already, Tar Sands Blockade had been conducting an extended tree-sit against the pipeline in another part of the state.

Tar Sands Blockade, Lundberg explained to me two days earlier, was initially conceived of as just a one-off day of action in August to show solidarity with the pipeline’s local opponents and the broader climate justice movement. But then organizers reached out to direct action trainers like him for advice. “We don’t just do things for one day” was how he more or less put it.

With their invitation, the organizers opened their fight to a whole network of environmental activists, who came and didn’t leave. Lundberg, for instance, had been camping out for three months before spending his first night indoors a week earlier.

The Texans, in particular, who choose to resist the pipeline do it at great risk.

For locals like Vicki Baggett, who was among the founders of Nacogdoches STOP Tar Sands Oil Pipeline, the prospect of working with these activists from outside was not appealing at first, even as someone who had devoted years to environmental issues.

“I wasn’t really sure that I could support them,” she said. “They seemed a little far out for me, but the more I spoke with them and got to understand what they were doing and understand how it fits into what we’ve done, it is the logical next step. Now I’m like their biggest supporter.”

The main core of blockaders have done their best to reach out to locals by attending church services and speaking in classrooms. But many still dismiss them, according to Baggett, as “just those crazy kids who don’t have anything else to do.” She blames the media for preventing her neighbors from seeing what she sees, that “they’re the most passionate, committed people I’ve ever met.”

As the sheriff’s deputies finally moved in on the tree-sitters, you could hear them referring to their targets -- as opposed to the Canadian corporation on whose behalf they were interceding -- as “the foreigners.” But one of the tree-sitters was 21-year-old Austin-native Lizzy Alvarado, who attends the state university in Nacogdoches.

As protesters tried to block a truck carrying a cherry picker that would eventually remove the sitters from their perch, the deputies pepper-sprayed two local residents: 75-year-old great grandmother Jeanette Singleton and 22-year-old Jordan Johnson, whose family has been raising chickens in East Texas for generations.

The Texans, in particular, who choose to resist the pipeline do it at great risk. Many landowners who were forced into leasing parts of their property to TransCanada through eminent domain have been threatened with lawsuits and effectively silenced as a result. Others fear being ostracized by their communities. They have to choose their moments of dissension carefully, and they’re thankful for the outside support to help them do so.

Over the last week, also, there have been more than 40 solidarity actions worldwide, with the largest being led by 350.org in Washington, D.C. Several thousand people rallied outside the White House and called on President Obama to reject the permit for the Keystone XL’s northern segment, which would run from Alberta to Nebraska. Even this show of support, however, feels to some in Texas like abandonment.

“The North gets all the press,” said Vicki Baggett. “This is where the fight is, and 350 has left us. They should be here, not in D.C.”

Baggett was particularly stung by 350.org founder Bill McKibben’s recent cancellation of a speaking event that would have taken place in Nacogdoches this week. “He could have been here. This could have been the convergence. It was meant to be and it was just very disappointing. I think we just get written off because this is a very rural, poor area, and it’s real conservative.”

Rally against the Keystone XL pipeline in Washington, D.C., on November 18, 2012. Photo by Anna Robinson / Waging Nonviolence.
McKibben cancelled the event in order to launch a national tour called Do the Math, designed to foster a fossil fuel divestment campaign on college campuses. While there is little question that McKibben and 350.org mean to support the Tar Sands Blockade, it upsets critics further that there are only two Southern cities on the entire 21-date tour. Atlanta is the closest they get to the southern segment of the pipeline that runs from from Cushing, Oklahoma., to the Gulf Coast of Texas.

While the rest of the national climate movement may have written off the South, the 100 or so locals and visitors who took a stand in East Texas this past weekend -- including the 11 who were arrested -- plan to continue.

“I know it’s not looking good,” Vicki Bagget said. “But it’s not done, and I think what is happening here will continue to resonate for years.”

Also see:

• Chris Hedges' October 17, 2012, article, "Heartland Resistance to the Pipeline."
• More Rag Blog reporting on issues related to the Keystone XL Pipeline and opposition to it.

[Bryan Farrell is an editor at Waging Nonviolence , where he writes about environment, climate change, and people power. His work has also appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, Mother Jones, Slate, Grist, and Earth Island Journal.]

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Chris Hedges : Heartland Resistance to the Pipeline

Treesitters in Winnsboro, Texas. Photo from the Tar Sands Blockade.
Resistance in the heartland:
The Great Tar Sands Blockade

Ranchers, farmers, and enraged citizens, often after seeing their land seized by eminent domain and their water supplies placed under mortal threat, have united with Occupiers and activists to oppose the building of the Keystone XL tar sand pipeline.

By Chris Hedges / Truthdig / October 17, 2012

Also see " Texas landowners take a rare stand against Big Oil," an AP story at Salon.com, "Keystone XL pipeline opponents turn to civil disobedience" at The Washington Post, and this video from Democracy Now!

The next great battle of the Occupy movement may not take place in city parks and plazas, where the security and surveillance state is blocking protesters from setting up urban encampments. Instead it could arise in the nation’s heartland, where some ranchers, farmers, and enraged citizens, often after seeing their land seized by eminent domain and their water supplies placed under mortal threat, have united with Occupiers and activists to oppose the building of the Keystone XL tar sand pipeline.

They have formed an unusual coalition called Tar Sands Blockade (TSB). Centers of resistance being set up in Texas and Oklahoma and on tribal lands along the proposed route of this six-state, 1,700-mile proposed pipeline are fast becoming flashpoints in the war of attrition we have begun against the corporate state. Join them.

The XL pipeline, which would cost $7 billion and whose southern portion is under construction and slated for completion next year, is the most potent symbol of the dying order. If completed, it will pump 1.1 million barrels a day of unrefined tar sand fluid from tar sand mine fields in Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast.

Tar sand oil is not conventional crude oil. It is a synthetic slurry that, because tar sand oil is solid in its natural state, must be laced with a deadly brew of toxic chemicals and gas condensates to get it to flow. Tar sands are boiled and diluted with these chemicals before being blasted down a pipeline at high pressure. Water sources would be instantly contaminated if there was a rupture.

The pipeline would cross nearly 2,000 U.S. waterways, including the Ogallala Aquifer, source of one-third of the United States’ farmland irrigation water. And it is not a matter of if, but when, it would spill. TransCanada’s Keystone I pipeline, built in 2010, leaked 12 times in its first 12 months of operation. Because the extraction process emits such a large quantity of greenhouse gases, the pipeline has been called the fuse to the largest carbon bomb on the planet.

The climate scientist James Hansen warns that successful completion of the pipeline, along with the exploitation of Canadian tar sands it would facilitate, would mean “game over for the climate.”

Keystone XL is part of the final phase of extreme exploitation by the corporate state. The corporations intend to squeeze the last vestiges of profit from an ecosystem careening toward collapse. Most of the oil that can be reached through drilling from traditional rigs is depleted. The fossil fuel industry has, in response, developed new technologies to go after dirtier, less efficient forms of energy.

These technologies bring with them a dramatically heightened cost to ecosystems. They accelerate the warming of the planet. And they contaminate vital water sources. Deep-water Arctic drilling, tar sand extraction, hydraulic fracturing (or hydro-fracking) and drilling horizontally, given the cost of extraction and effects on the environment, are a form of ecological suicide.

Appealing to the corporate state, or trusting the leaders of either party to halt the assault after the election, is futile. We must immediately obstruct this pipeline or accept our surrender to forces that, in the name of profit, intend to cash in on the death throes of the planet.

Nine protesters, surviving on canned food and bottled water, have been carrying out a tree-sit for more than two weeks to block the path of the pipeline near Winnsboro, Texas. Other Occupiers have chained themselves to logging equipment, locked themselves in trucks carrying pipe to construction sites and hung banners at equipment staging areas.

Doug Grant, a former Exxon employee, was arrested outside Winnsboro when he bound himself to clear-cutting machinery. Shannon Bebe and Benjamin Franklin, after handcuffing themselves to equipment being used to cut down trees, were tasered, pepper-sprayed, and physically assaulted by local police, reportedly at the request of TransCanada officials.

East Texas great-grandmother and farmer, Eleanor Fairchild, was arrested Oct. 4 while blocking TransCanada bulldozers on her property. Image from Tar Sands Blockade / Facebook.
The actress Daryl Hannah, along with a 78-year-old East Texas great-grandmother and farmer, Eleanor Fairchild, was arrested Oct. 4 while blocking TransCanada bulldozers on Fairchild’s property. The Fairchild farm, like other properties seized by TransCanada, was taken under Texas eminent domain laws on behalf of a foreign corporation.

At the same time, private security companies employed by TransCanada, along with local law enforcement, have been aggressively detaining and restricting reporters, including a New York Times reporter and photographer, who are attempting to cover the protests. Most of the journalists have been on private property with the permission of the landowners.

I reached climate activist Tom Weis nearly 1,000 miles from the blockade, in the presidential battleground state of Colorado, by phone Friday. Weis is pedaling up and down the Front Range, hand-delivering copies of an open letter -- signed by citizens, some of whom, like Daryl Hannah, have been arrested trying to block the XL pipeline -- to Obama and Romney campaign offices. He has been joined by indigenous leaders, including Vice President of Oglala Lakota Nation Tom Poor Bear, and in Denver by members of the Occupy Denver community.

Weis last fall rode his bright-yellow “rocket trike” -- a recumbent tricycle wrapped in a lightweight aerodynamic shell -- 2,150 miles along the proposed Keystone XL pipeline route. He was accompanied by Ron Seifert, now a spokesperson for the Tar Sands Blockade. Weis’ “Keystone XL Tour of Resistance” started at the U.S.-Canada border in Montana and ended 10 weeks later at the Texas Gulf Coast. He recently produced a 15-minute video in which he interviewed farmers, ranchers, and indigenous leaders who live in the path of the project.

“Keystone XL is being built as an export pipeline for Canada to sell its dirty oil to foreign markets,” he said. “This is not about energy security; it’s about securing TransCanada’s profits.”

Weis cited a report commissioned by Cornell University that concluded that the jobs estimates put forward by TransCanada were unsubstantiated and that the project could actually destroy more jobs than it created.

Barack Obama delayed, until after the election, a decision on permitting the northern leg of the pipeline after a series of civil disobedience actions led by Bill McKibben’s 350.org in front of the White House a year ago, as well as fierce opposition from ranchers in states such as Nebraska. The president, by announcing the delay, put an end to the widespread protests.

Obama, however, flew to Cushing, Okla., in March to call for the southern leg of the pipeline to be fast-tracked. Standing in a pipeline yard, he said, “I’m directing my administration to cut through the red tape, break through the bureaucratic hurdles, and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done.”

Obama’s rival for the presidency, Mitt Romney, was no less effusive in his support for Keystone XL, saying to a Pittsburgh audience in May: “If I’m president, we’ll build it if I have to build it myself.”

Grassroots organizing along the proposed pipeline has grown, especially as the project began to be put in place.

If completed, the 485-mile southern leg, from Cushing to Nederland, Texas, would slice through major waterways including the Neches, Red, Angelina, and Sabine rivers as well as the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer, which provides drinking water for some 10 million Texans. The southern section of the pipeline is now the focus of the Tar Sands Blockade.

The invasive extraction of tar sands and shale deposits, as well as deep-sea drilling in the Arctic, Alaska, the Eastern Seaboard, and the Gulf of Mexico, has been sold to the U.S. public as a route to energy independence, a way to create millions of new jobs, and a boost to the sagging economy, but this is another corporate lie.

The process of extracting shale oil through hydraulic fracking, for example, requires millions of gallons of chemically treated water that leaves behind poisoned aquifers and huge impoundment ponds of toxic waste. The process of extracting oil shale, or kerogen, requires it to be melted, meaning that tremendous amounts of energy are required for a marginal return. The process of tar sand extraction requires vast open pit mining operations or pumping underground that melts the oil with steam jets.

Tar sand extraction also releases significantly more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil drilling, meaning an acceleration of global warming. Drilling in the Arctic, with its severe weather, costs as much as half a billion dollars per well.

Tar sands protesters block TransCanada truck on August 29, 2012, in Livingston, Texas. Image from In These Times.
These processes are part of a desperate effort by corporations to make profits before a final systems collapse. Droughts are already sweeping the Midwest. The battle between farmers and fossil fuel corporations for diminishing water sources has begun. Yet our ruling elite refuses to face the stark reality of climate change. They ignore the imperative to find other ways of structuring our economies and our relationship to the environment. They myopically serve a doomed system. And, if left unstopped, the cost for all of us will be catastrophic.

Weis, a former congressional staffer, expects the last section of the pipeline to be authorized by the president once the election is over.

“It is critical that people understand that completion of the southern leg of Keystone XL -- which President Obama and Gov. Romney both fully support -- would give TransCanada a direct line from Alberta’s landlocked tar sands mine fields to refineries in Texas for export overseas,” Weis explained. “By tapping into Keystone I, which has already been built, the southern leg of Keystone XL would open the floodgates to tar sands exploitation in Canada. At a time when the climate is already dangerously destabilizing before our eyes, I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.”

He described Obama’s and Romney’s “failure to stand up to this corporate bully” as a “failure to defend America.”

“It is unconscionable to put the interests of a transnational corporation before the health, safety, and economic well-being of the American people,” he said.

Weis sees the struggle to halt the Keystone XL pipeline as a symbolic crossroads for the country and the planet. One path leads, he said, toward decay. The other toward renewal.

There comes a time when we must say to the ruling elite: ‘No more,’ ” he said. “There comes a time when we must make a stand for the future of our children, and for all life on Earth. That time is here. That time is now.”

[Chris Hedges, a columnist for Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.]

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