gyost

April 28, 2017, the FERC in Washington — Beyond Extreme Energy once again used food and friendliness to communicate a serious message at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline is a $5 billion high pressure fracked gas pipeline proposed for WV, VA, and NC. Among its many potential harms, it would negatively impact farmland and farm families along its 550 mile route. BXE’s sweet potato action gave voice to impacted communities in all three states while focusing on the particular concerns of sweet potato farmers in NC (NC is the nation’s leading producer of sweet potatoes).

By Greg Yost for NC PowerForward

Atlantic Coast Pipeline co-developers Dominion Resources and Duke Energy together are valued at one fifth of a trillion dollars—and friends, that’s trillion with a “t”. So the 550 mile, $5 billion fracked gas pipeline project they announced several years ago must be a done deal by now, right?

Wrong. As delays to the project mount, opposition to the energy companies’ plan continues to stiffen. In Natural Bridge, Virginia recently, nearly two hundred landowners, legal experts, property rights defenders, consumer advocates, and environmental activists assembled mid-November for a full day strategy session about how best to further their collaboration on their common goal of stopping the ACP. As an attendee from North Carolina, I was impressed by how advanced this organizing already is. From the beginning, Virginia has led the way in grassroots opposition to the pipeline.

But now my state is catching up. On Saturday, November 19, three impacted North Carolina counties staged coordinated, simultaneous marches to draw attention to the pipeline and to educate their communities about possibilities for resistance. As announced in a joint press conference held November 15, each march was planned and sponsored by a local community organization. In rural Nash County, the organizers were from a group called Nash Stop The Pipeline. In Cumberland County, home to Fayetteville and the Ft. Bragg military base, planners were a multi-racial group of landowners targeted by the pipeline calling themselves Cumberland County Caring Voices. And in Robeson County, itself an especially racially diverse community given its 38% indigenous peoples population, organizers were members of the group, Eco-Robeson.

Of course, marching is nice, but it’s fair to ask what normal people like these can do in the real world against the combined might of behemoths like Dominion and Duke. The answer, I think, lies in pipeline opponents’ sense of their own strength and resolve. They believe that despite a monetary disadvantage, they have a clear set of diverse issues around which they can build a broad based coalition and a winning campaign. The misuse of the power of eminent domain, for example, is opposed by people from across the political spectrum. Similarly, organizers believe that an inevitable dramatic increase in energy bills for ratepayers is a winning issue once the public becomes educated about the enduring costs not only of the pipeline, but of the nearly twenty gas-fired plants which Duke Energy intends to build in the place of new sun and wind power generation. Organizers also believe that the role fracked gas plays in producing catastrophic new levels of flooding and climate change will be persuasive in an area like eastern North Carolina which experienced devastation only recently from Hurricane Matthew.

This pragmatic optimism about the fight ahead was captured for me Saturday in an offhand comment by Marvin Winstead, a Nash County farmer and leader in Nash Stop The Pipeline whose burgeoning skills as a community organizer are impressive. A heckler had just driven by our line of walkers late in the day to taunt us with the astonishingly unoriginal shout of “Get a job!” before speeding away. One bemused marcher was heard to ask, “It’s Saturday and I have a job–what’s so surprising about me spending a weekend afternoon doing something that I want to do?” I laughed and agreed.

“If you’ll get out and give me a half an hour chance to talk with you right here, right now on the side of this road, I bet you’ll change your mind about what we’re doing.”  –Marvin Winstead

Marvin’s own response a moment later, however, made me stop and think. He simply said, “I wish that I could have spoken with him. I would have said, If you’ll get out and give me a half an hour chance to talk with you right here, right now on the side of this road, I bet you’ll change your mind about what we’re doing.” And as I reflected on Marvin’s attitude, I saw in it a source of strength for this campaign. In the competition for minds and hearts across the region, state, and nation on this issue of building yet more expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary fossil fuel infrastructure, corporations like Duke and Dominion are at a distinct disadvantage. By telling the truth about this pipeline in persistently courageous and creative ways, we will build the necessary power to deny Duke and Dominion what they need but do not yet have despite all of their money:  the support of local communities and the land upon which to build. As Marvin and his friends understand, this story is far from over. In fact, in light of the unprecedented level of coordination of local and state opponents on this issue, it’s only now just begun.

To be sure, #NoACP promises to be a struggle every bit as epic as #NoDAPL. But the cooperation, vision, and the growing strength which these North Carolina communities of resistance are now demonstrating augurs well for their upcoming battles. The fight to wrest control of our clean energy future from abusive, domineering corporate power is on!

BY TIM DeCHRISTOPHER : Reprinted from Institute for Public Accuracy

While our political leaders are pretending that being better than Trump is an adequate response to the climate crisis, the climate movement is boldly stepping up to the unprecedented challenge of climate change with courage and commitment. Just in the past few days since the presidential debate ignored climate change, there have been several bold acts of civil disobedience around the country. The sustained resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota had 29 people arrested on Monday for refusing to back down in the face of increasing repression and state violence. Four activists in New York spent all day Monday occupying the Spectra fracked gas pipeline that will run right next to the Indian Point Nuclear Power plant.

Then Tuesday, activists in four states shut down all five tar sands pipelines entering the U.S. from Canada. Ten people involved in that action remain in jail right now with bails that range from $5,000 to $75,000.

There is a stark divide between the politicians who seem incapable of thinking about the climate crisis outside of the boundaries of old assumptions about political feasibility and the activists who are making real sacrifices to treat climate change like the unprecedented crisis it is.  Al Gore is campaigning for Hilary Clinton without questioning her extreme support for fracking and fossil fuel infrastructure expansion, while Al Gore’s own daughter, Karenna, is currently facing a potential two-and-half-year jail sentence for protesting fracked-gas pipeline construction in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.

Too many failed centrist attempts to address climate change without standing up to the fossil fuel industry have taught honest pragmatists that we simply can’t deal with climate change in a non-confrontational way. Those failures have brought us to this point of record-breaking climate impacts. As the climate crisis quickly intensifies, the climate movement is committing to intensifying our efforts to defend a livable future, as yesterday’s huge pipeline shutdown demonstrated. We hope that our political leaders will join us.

DeChristopher is the founder of the Climate Disobedience Center and is featured in the award-winning film “Bidder 70.”

Guilty verdict for disorderly conduct for four protesters to be appealed

They were protesting Crestwood’s plans to store highly pressurized, explosive gas in abandoned salt caverns on the western shore of Seneca Lake. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) green-lighted the plan in 2014, but to date, construction has not begun. Opponents say the storage plan threatens drinking water for 100,000 people, and the regional economy based on farming, wineries and ecotourism. Thirty-two municipalities around Seneca Lake have passed resolutions denouncing Crestwood’s plans because of overwhelming public opposition citing grave geological and public health concerns. To date, there have been 657 arrests at peaceful protests. On Sept. 1, Senators Gillibrand and Schumer requested that FERC withdraw the permit.

Activists called out TD Bank today for its financing of a gigantic, $3.8 billion fracked-oil pipeline that would cross Lakota Treaty territory in North Dakota.

While drumming, chanting and carrying posters and banners, the protesters first walked from Lafayette Park in front of the White House to the TD Bank branch on 17^th Street NW. They drew the attention and cameras of many tourists with their call-and-response, “One: We are the people. Two: You can’t ignore us. Three: We will not let you build this pipeline.”

Several of the activists walked into the branch to deliver a letter calling on TD Bank to stop lending its investors’ money to Energy Transfer Partners to build the 1,134-mile Dakota Access Pipeline that would run from North Dakota to Illinois, crossing beneath the Missouri River near Standing Rock Reservation and threatening the tribe’s water supply and sacred and cultural lands.  TD Securities, the bank’s parent, is contributing $365 million to the project.

As the letter-deliverers rejoined the group outside, bank officials locked the doors as the protest continued on the sidewalk.

“I believe that we will win. I believe that we will win,” the group chanted. And “Stop funding this pipeline. Stop funding genocide.” And “White, black, yellow, red; without water, we’re all dead.”

Protesters strung yellow crime-scene tape that said “FRESH GRAVES KEEP OUT” across the bank’s doors.

“This is not just an assault on Mother Earth. This is an assault on Native Americans,” said Caro Gonzales of the International Indigenous Youth Council.  The pipeline originally was to cross under the Missouri River farther north, near Bismarck, North Dakota’s capital. “The white people there said, ‘We are afraid for our children,’ ” she said. So, they moved the pipeline route to “right above Native American territory – that has children. That is racism,” she said.

The spirited local action, organized by Beyond Extreme Energy, was one of many across the nation this month during Global Weeks of Solidarity, which was called by the Camp of the Sacred Stones and the Red Warrior Camp in North Dakota.  A day earlier, for example, hundreds rallied in front of the White House to call on President Obama to stop the pipeline. In response to the expanding protests, the Justice and Interior departments and the U.S. Army have called for a halt in construction until the pipeline can be reviewed.

After a 23-hour drive from the North Dakota resistance camps, Gonzalez and Lauren Howland had arrived in Washington late the night before. Their first stop: the White House.

“It’s funny how I felt like a tourist in my own land,” Howland said. “My ancestors died here. … Everywhere there’s a building built, my ancestors are underneath. … Everywhere in America is built on my ancestors’ [burial ground]. That is desecration.”

She said about 5,000 people are at the Sacred Stone and Red Warrior camps near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. “Money doesn’t exist at Standing Rock, and we are making it work very well,” she said. “To TD businessmen and women:  You have caused violence. … You cannot drink oil.”

Gonzalez and Howland plan to take their urgent message to President Obama and Congress. “They need to know that Native Americans are no longer expendable,” Howland said. She added that she is relearning her culture and Native ways:  “I am decolonizing my people.”

“We are living proof that we are not giving up,” she said. “A hundred million Native Americans died to make the United States what it is today. … It was stolen; it was genocide.”

After writing #NoDAPL messages in chalk on the sidewalk, the group headed for a second TD branch on 14^th St. NW, where the doors had already been locked.

Activists are sending a message to TD bank officials, customers and employees that they don’t approve of their investments, said Gabe Shapiro of BXE and Chesapeake Climate Action Network. “It is 2016. It is time for us to take a moral stand on these issues, whether or not it’s your job, whether or not it’s how you put food on the table for your kids,” he said. “This bank right now is funding the destruction of Indigenous sovereign land, land that was granted to be Native land. It was the concession to them – after we stole it from them and invaded this country violently.”

“Every person working for this bank is complicit,” he said. “This bank is profiting off of genocide of the Indigenous people in this country.  Is it not enough, everything that has been done? Is it not enough? When do we draw the line?” He called on the president to stop the pipeline or be prepared for more actions and arrests. “This pipeline is already history,” Shapiro said.

“The federal government has paused the pipeline, and its future is uncertain,” said BXE member Drew Hudson. “It would be prudent for TD’s customers, and for the planet, if they pulled the funding now and invested in clean energy instead.”

 Since April, Native Americans and their allies have flocked to the Sacred Stone and Red Warrior camps. The tribes are seeking supplies and preparing to stay until the pipeline is stopped permanently.

By MELINDA TUHUS

About 125 people came to New Haven, CT, on Sept. 7 for an action in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, which is  fighting to stop the Dakota Access oil pipeline from invading its historic territory. The pipeline would cross the Missouri River just outside the reservation in North Dakota, threatening the tribe’s water supply. (More from at BXE’s blog post here.) “Water is Life,” many of our signs said.

Our target was TD Bank, conveniently located across from the New Haven Green and Yale University. Dozens of students joined community members in picketing outside the bank, since it is a financial backer of the pipeline to the tune of $365 million. After awhile, most of us entered the bank to deliver a letter asking the branch manager to pass on our demand to TD Securities that it cut off its line of credit to the pipeline company. We made a lot of noise and eventually left.

We crossed back and forth on Chapel Street – a main thoroughfare in town – between the bank and the Green, where several speakers gave their perspectives on the need to support the indigenous leadership of the Sacred Stones camp and the Red Warrior camp at Standing Rock.

Many people asked me, “What’s the next action?” One said she’s ready to go to North Dakota and would like to organize others to go with her. We collected 85 names and emails. Once the federal judge issues his ruling on the tribe’s request for a restraining order to stop construction until a more thorough assessment can be done of the pipeline route, I will send an update with information from many local groups that participated in the action, including 350CT, Black Lives Matter, SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) and BXE.

(An article from the New Haven Register is here. )

Our Native American brothers, sisters, relations & settler supporters have assembled at the Sacred Stone Camp and are converging with hundreds of Indigenous Tribal Nations and thousands of Water Protectors at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. They are holding the line against construction of a pipeline that would carry highly flammable, fracked oil from the Bakken oil fields in that state to Illinois. The pipeline would go under the Missouri River, and protesters — referring to themselves as “protectors” and holding signs such as “Water is Life” — are carrying out radical non-violent resistance. Their numbers swell daily at the Camp of the Sacred Stones and the Red Warriors Camp. They have maintained their determined, nonviolent stand even when confronted with force, such as on Sept. 3, when security workers brought dogs and mace to the work site to terrorize the men, women and children who had rushed to an area where bulldozers had begun digging the pipeline trench. Shouting, “We’re not afraid of you!” and “Make your money some other way!” they pushed the security workers, dogs and bulldozers off their land.

The $3.8 billion, 1,134-mile Dakota Access pipeline crosses the Missouri River a half-mile outside the Standing Rock Reservation, but Cody Hall, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux and spokesperson for the protectors, says it’s still on Indian land.

“This proposed pipeline, it’s going to go right over the 1851 treaty land. That’s what we’re talking about being native domain land. And then of course the powers that be shortened the 1851 treaty down to the 1868 treaty and then said, ‘Here’s what the native people have on what is presently Standing Rock.’ But we’re going by the 1851 treaty land.”

The white-supremacy, genocide, land theft, and greedy-conquest culture that dominated Indigenous encounters in the mid-1800s was on display again in the planning for the pipeline. As reported in Inside Climate News, the Army Corps of Engineers approved the Dakota Access pipeline, owned by Energy Transfer Partners, while ignoring not only tribal concerns but those of three federal agencies: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. “Citing risks to water supplies, inadequate emergency preparedness, potential impacts to the Standing Rock reservation and insufficient environmental justice analysis, the agencies urged the Army Corps to issue a revised draft of their environmental assessment,” Phil McKenna reported. But the Army Corps ignored these concerns and a few months later issued its final environmental assessment, which stated, “The anticipated environmental, economic, cultural, and social effects” of the project are “not injurious to the public interest.” That assessment gave the project the green light.

The assessment also said the route specifically avoided tribal land as a way of addressing environmental justice concerns, and included the statement: “The Project does not anticipate any impact to water supplies along its route, and to the extent a response action is required [emphasis added], federal regulation will be complied with.”

The pipeline would carry about 500,000 barrels of crude oil a day through four states, from North Dakota to Illinois, along a route parallel to and east of the rejected Keystone XL pipeline. That battle was won with a national mobilization, led by local people known as the Cowboy and Indian Alliance.

The judge hearing the case has indicated he will issue a ruling by mid-September on the tribe’s request for a temporary injunction that would halt construction on sections of the pipeline where it hasn’t already started (which could explain the appearance of the bulldozers working on new ground last week). The injunction would allow a lawsuit requiring the Army Corps to redo its permitting process to be heard.

Over Labor Day weekend, sacred burial sites were bulldozed, prompting the tribe to file for another temporary restraining order to halt construction of the Pipeline. (DC Media Group reports that U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg has ordered the parties involved in a standoff over the Dakota Access Pipeline to appear in court on Sept. 6 to hear a motion for an emergency injunction.)

Cody Hall says every minute of every day is critical for the company to lay its footprint. “They want to have a good majority of this construction done so by the time the judge hears the case, the judge will say, ‘How far have you progressed? Where are you at?’ And if they can say, ‘We are 95 percent near completion for North Dakota,’ the judge will say, ‘Well, there’s not much I can do about it, if you’re that close. I’ll let you complete it, just pay your fines, and move forward.’ We’re trying to prevent all that from happening, because it’s not right. You know, we’re not going to wait for the judge to make a call. If we can stop that momentum, then we have to. We need to take that action. And hopefully the judge will rule in our favor.”

Hall says that several protectors have already been arrested. He urges everyone  to heed the call of The Red Warrior Camp, which is leading the non-violent resistance, to hold solidarity actions from Sept. 3 – 17 that target the pipeline owners’ offices,  the consortium of financial institutions bankrolling the project, or the construction company doing the work. Information about solidarity actions is here.

“This is a movement, this is a people’s movement,” he says. “This isn’t one tribe or many tribal people saying it’s their movement. It’s everybody’s movement. It’s a humanitarian issue right now. Because this water will be poisoned, and it will affect the Standing Rock people first, and then it goes down the river and it will affect my people at Cheyenne River next, and it just keeps going down the line. It’ll affect all of South Dakota; it’ll affect all of Nebraska. So we just have to raise awareness on this. There are other alternative means for fossil fuels. There’s no alternative for water. There’s no Plan B if the water’s gone.”

He adds, “If you can make it, physically [to the camp], come support and we welcome you with open arms and open heart. But if you cannot make it in a physical presence here in North Dakota, please keep us in your prayers, and just hear our fight. Even if it’s a word of encouragement to give the camp, that means a lot to the people that are on the front lines.”

Three of the seven activists arrested for blocking the driveway at FERC headquarters during Beyond Extreme Energy’s #RubberStampRebellion in May are taking their cases to trial.

At the Superior Court of the District of Columbia yesterday, #Sidewalk7 members Claude Guillemard of Baltimore, Ellen Taylor of Washington D.C., and Donald Weightman of Philadelphia said that they would go to trial, set for Dec. 8, for their May 9 blockade at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. BXE and other groups have long criticized the agency for rubber-stamping fracked-gas pipelines, compressor stations and export facilities that it reviews.

“We have been charged with unlawful entry,” Weightman said, “but the real crime is the unlawful entry of methane and carbon dioxide into our air, the unlawful entry of toxic waste into our water, and the unlawful entry of global warming into the future of our world. The real weapon is fracked gas; FERC is the real defendant; we will charge FERC with the commission of a crime.”

The other Sidewalk7 activists – Melinda Tuhus of Connecticut, Clarke Herbert of Virginia and Linda Reik of NY – agreed to perform 32 hours of community service and to stay away from the 800 block of 1st Avenue NE, the area of the FERC offices, for four months. Peter Nightingale of Kingston, RI, says he intends to go to trial as well.

The court actions yesterday was part of the ongoing resistance to fracked-gas infrastructure, including demanding a halt to construction of Spectra’s Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) pipeline.  #StopSpectra activists have declared a “state of emergency” in advance of a noon press conference Thursday outside the Manhattan offices of Sens. Charles Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. The senators wrote a letter to FERC on Aug. 3 calling for construction to stop. In February, Gov. Andrew Cuomo also asked FERC to postpone the pipeline construction.

After the court hearing, New York and BXE activists hand-delivered invitations to the press conference to the senators’ Washington offices.

The pipeline “would bring fracked gas from Pennsylvania to New England, despite a report from the Massachusetts Attorney General that shows no need for this gas,” the letter said. “In NY, if completed, the AIM Pipeline would carry gas through residential communities and within 105 feet of critical Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant safety facilities. Just last April, Spectra Energy’s Texas Eastern line erupted into a giant explosion due to pipeline corrosion, and New Yorkers fear what an explosion of this magnitude could mean in such close proximity to Indian Point. Over the last several years, communities along the pipeline route have risen up against the pipeline, and are counting on New York Senators to help stop this dangerous project.”

In June, DeSmog Blog reported  that a FERC employee who was the agency’s project manager for reviewing the then-proposed AIM pipeline had been hired by an engineering company that is one of Spectra’s main contractors. DeSmog Blog reported in May and July that a contractor hired by FERC to conduct an environmental review of a Spectra project was already working on related Spectra pipeline projects. U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey have written to FERC Chairman Norman Bay asking about the “potential conflicts of interest.”

A campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience is also ongoing in West Roxbury, MA, where 165 people have been arrested so far blocking construction of the West Roxbury Lateral pipeline.   Resist the Pipeline is coordinating those actions. In addition, the City Council, mayor, the state representative, state senator and U.S. Congressman Stephen Lynch oppose the project.

Boston City Council President Michelle Wu said, “Climate change impacts us all and especially future generations. We need immediate, bold action to transition rapidly away from reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy. Building new natural gas infrastructure, such as Spectra Energy’s West Roxbury Lateral Pipeline, is wrong for our communities and wrong for future generations. I applaud the thoughtful, purposeful, nonviolent civil disobedience West Roxbury residents and friends are practicing to accomplish what needs to get done.”

In addition, Massachusetts’ highest court ruled today that the state can’t force residential ratepayers to subsidize the construction of pipelines.  “This is an incredibly important and timely decision,” said David Ismay, lead attorney on the case for Conservation Law Foundation. “Today our highest court affirmed Massachusetts’ commitment to an open energy future by rejecting the Baker Administration’s attempt to subsidize the dying fossil fuel industry. The course of our economy and our energy markets runs counter to the will of multi-billion dollar pipeline companies, and, thanks to today’s decision, the government will no longer be able to unfairly and unlawfully tip the scales.”

##