Amid rumors that the Obama administration might try to cut an emissions deal with Canada in order to justify approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, leaders from 25 US environmental groups—backed by millions of members and at least 75,000 individuals willing to engage incivil disobedience—warned the president on Tuesday that such a deal would be considered nothing less than a bitter betrayal.
In a tersely-worded letter signed by 350.org, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, NRDC, Sierra Club, and twenty other well-known green groups, the signers welcomed the idea of Canada finding new ways to reduce its growing rate of carbon pollution, but were direct in saying that making promises of future reductions the basis of a deal on Keystone would ignite a serious backlash.
“On behalf of our millions of members and supporters nationwide,” reads the letter, “we oppose any deal-making in return for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Our rationale is simple. Building Keystone XL will expand production in the tar sands, and that reality is not compatible with serious efforts to battle climate change.”
In an interview with the Washington Post, president of the League of Conservation Voters Gene Karpinski—whose group is not often associated with the more activist-oriented groups like Greenpeace or Rainforest Action Network—said that his organization’s members are among the tens of thousands who have expressed their willingness to engage in civil disobedience if Obama approves the pipeline.
“The intensity out there has not diminished one bit,” he said. “If anything, the willingness of people to go to jail over this is expanding.”
Karpinski’s reference is to an online pledge of resistance hosted by Credo Action, and supported by many of the groups who signed Tuesday’s letter, that asks people who are willing to pledge to “engage in acts of dignified, peaceful civil disobedience that could result in arrest in order to send the message to President Obama and his administration that they must reject the Keystone XL pipeline.” As of Tuesday, 75,709 people had signed the pledge.
In a separate letter sent to the White House by the Sierra Club on Tuesday, the group’s president Michael Brune directly challenged the idea that the emissions reduction plan reportedly offered by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper could offset the explosion of carbon pollution that would follow if tar sands operations were allowed to expand.
In the letter, Brune begins by applauding Obama for recently announced EPA rules designed to limit future pollution from yet-to-be built coal- and gas-fired plants, but expressed his deep concern that any progress made on this front would be “undermined by a backdoor bilateral agreement on the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline that would commit us to transporting the dirtiest of fossil fuels for decades to come.”
Brune continued:
Both of Tuesday’s letters to President Obama come on the heals of a nationwide day of action organized by 350.org on Saturday in which hundreds of local groups told the White House and State Department that they were “drawing the line” against Keystone XL, dirty tar sands, and other extreme forms of fossil fuel energy.
The full letter (pdf), including the twenty-five listed signatories, follows:
And the separate letter from Sierra Club president Michael Brune:
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