398 youth
activists
were arrested Sunday in front of the White House, after staging a
“die-in” protest against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The
protesters marched from the Georgetown University site of President
Barack Obama’s 2013 climate
speech
to the street in front of Secretary of State John Kerry’s house before
arriving at the White House. Kerry is slated to make a decision on on
whether the pipeline — which will unlock access to Canadian tar sands
and have a carbon footprint equivalent to fifty new coal-fired power
plants
— is in the national interest. President Obama is responsible for the
final determination.
“We are trying to escalate as much as we can,” Michael Greenberg, a Columbia University sophomore who helped organize Sunday’s protest, told the National Journal’s Ben Geman. “We are not playing softball with the president any more.”
“Young people are tired of watching a president who ran on the promise of ‘ending the tyranny of oil’ keep caving to the fossil fuel industry,” wrote Jamie Henn, Communications Director for 350 Action, at MSNBC.com
There is a Flickr set of XLDissent photographs, and Annie-Rose Strasser at Climate Progress has compiled photos from Twitter of the march and protest.
“An entire movement has thrown itself into in this Keystone fight, from local frontline groups to big national green organizations,” said 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben. “But this weekend shows the power and bravery of some of the most crucial elements: young people, and activists who understand the centrality of environmental justice.”