Tar sands actions: The Plan to Stop Obama From Letting the World's Dirtiest Oil Project Run Through the US

Guardian: The Plan to Stop Obama From Letting the World's Dirtiest Oil Project Run Through the US
The Obama administration is being intensely lobbied to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, but our campaign will match that.

From 20 August to 3 September, a wildly diverse range of protesters – Nebraskan ranchers and teachers from Wisconsin, Texan landowners and indigenous leaders in Canada, some of the country's top scientists and a few celebrities – will descend on the White House for a series of enormous sit-ins. Their demand: that President Obama deny a permit for a pipeline that would further hook the United States to the Albertan tar sands, the world's dirtiest oil.

TransCanada's 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline will carry as many as 1.1m barrels of crude a day to the Gulf of Mexico. It will cut through the sensitive heartland of the country. It will massively enrich big corporations. And it is certain to spill: the only question is when and how often and with what kind of human and environmental toll.They are up against a Canadian government that has become the foreign branch of the tar sands industry. It is scrambling to beat back the resistance – what officials describe in internal documents as a "ferocious attack by the US environmental movement". TransCanada has hired George Bush's former ambassador to Canada as a lobbyist, alongside Secretary of State Clinton's former deputy campaign director. Last week, Canada's foreign and natural resource ministers were dispatched to Washington to remind Clinton of their service to US "energy security" – the idea that the US can safely suck Canada's oil, instead of unfriendly Venezuela's or the unstable Middle East's.