News update by Ryan Maue
Update: The jails were emptied Monday morning. Also, Daryl Hannah has announced that she is heading to the White House oil-sands protest.
Update: New York Times editorial page comes out for against the Tar Sands Pipeline. However, their language sounds half hearted, and they seem to be checking a box knowing that inevitably the pipeline will go forward regardless of it’s carbon footprint, or something.
The Tar Sands protest organized by Bill McKibben has hit an unexpected snag: the US Park police have cracked down on the protesters. Instead of a simple “traffic ticket” type of arrest and release with a few hours in jail, many climate activists were stunned to learn that their “civil disobedience” may keep them behind bars for at least 48-hours until arraignment [Link to Grist.com lament].
Meanwhile, President Obama is managing the end of Gaddafi in Libya from his beautiful luxury vacation spot in Martha’s Vineyard. With Janet Napolitano always talking about the threats from domestic extremism typically orchestrated by environmental or “green” groups, one has to wonder if the US Parks police in the Capitol are sending a warning message by locking up the protestors for a good spell.
When Obama approves the pipeline and slaps these “true believers” in the face again, will they desert him for another candidate in the upcoming election? Nah.
More pictures of the “protest” including McKibben hauled away in handcuffs here at the Puffington Host. Please try and refrain from mocking these people as hippies or 70s retreads.
Also, has anyone heard if this upstart climate scientist (apparently the only academic currently employed as a professor “descending” on Washington) will still come — and will he risk being arrested?
Climate scientist willing to face arrest at tar sands pipeline protest
Climate scientist Jason Box says oil sands are a moral issue that he feels compelled to address at Keystone XL pipeline protests — UK Guardian
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On a side note
While I disagree with some of the supporters of the protest who are on this thread, it’s still good to see them here. WUWT provides a wonderful medium for debates and opinions on both sides, and still allows a civil, rational debate. Keep up the great work, Anthony and mods!
RC doesn’t know what it’s missing 😀
Surfer Dave, if you are uninformed about the Oil Sands, perhaps you shouldn’t post anything.
http://www.syncrude.ca/users/folder.asp?FolderID=5909
http://www.syncrude.ca/users/folder.asp?FolderID=6927
Interesting to see the level of the debate going on here.
I get that:
– at the moment, the majority of the developed world lives an oil-dependent lifestyle;
– my own lifestyle is completely dependent on oil/other fossil fuels;
– it’s scary to imagine that how we live now is not something that can be sustained in perpetuity;
– it’s hard to make the connection between how one lives and the consequences of our lifestyle.
However, I can only look at what the global political and business community have now agreed are the facts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Accord:
– the climate change we are seeing right now is faster than any in the known history of Earth – in terms of speed of change over a period of time – that this is anthropogenic is clear from the scientific consensus that has been reached;
– if the climate continues to warm we are now sure that we will see: significant sea level rise; species loss; increasingly violent storms and of increasing number; drought in some areas (we are already seeing climate effects in a number of countries) and floods in others – as a result food and water scarcity; increased risks from consolidating diseases such as malaria; and other impacts to varied to list;
– that the physical impacts of climate change wil have serious social impacts and that these may be far-reaching and frightening; and,
– we do not have enough resources of any kind to support the human population (~7bn) that we now have or the anticipated 9bn by 2050.
From thinking and reading about what’s going on, and also by feeling some responsibility to the children growing up today and those that are not yet born, I can only conclude that we need to radically rethink our lives and how our world works. I would rather not see mass war, death, and horror. I would rather we try to find a new way forward that doesn’t involve causing more destruction of our own habitat than what has already taken place.
It seems strange to me that one would not want to think these things through and instead just say ‘I’m happy with my status quo – to hell with my children and grandchildren and the world they will live in.’ The NASA scientist, James Hansen, is resolutely non-partisan – so I don’t think you can attribute his thoughts to Obama who, to my knowledge, is a lawyer by training rather than a climate scientist.
The US military have declared climate change to be a ‘serious national security threat’ http://www.cna.org/sites/default/files/news/FlipBooks/Climate%20Change%20web/flipviewerxpress.html and companies such as GM, GE, Alcan, Alcoa and BP have established the US Climate Action Partnership calling for ‘strong’ federal action to combat climate change http://www.us-cap.org/.
What I would love to know from this blog community is just who has to say that we need to sort things out around fossil fuel dependency and climate change for you to believe it and use your minds to help come up with a solution?
If this is a blog dealing with science rather than politics, why has the original caption to the photograph been substitutted for “A typical group of leftists…”
[ryanm: because they were instructed to wear their Obama 2008 buttons — and they did — look at the photo.]
Surfer Dave says:
August 21, 2011 at 6:05 pm
Quite sad to see the nasty comments from the bigots here.
Bigots? That’s a bit strong, don’t you think? Those protesters hate oil (or think they do). Yet they depend on it as much as anyone, unless they live in a wood-heated yurt and ride bicycles instead of cars, grow their own food, etc. That makes them hypocrites as well as idiots. That isn’t being “nasty”, that is the truth.
Here’s their slogan:
“Defuse North America’s Largest Carbon Bomb”. That’s their agenda. Basically, they want us to go back to the stone age, based on a stupid, and extremely dangerous myth. They deserve to be locked up, and more.
Maria, I have not read “Storms of my grandchildren”, but I did read the Wikipedia page about it. Tell me, why does Hansen think that we should “save the world” for the sake of *his* grandchildren. Doing it for the sake of the polar bears will get more traction. Hansen does at least allows us to have children. He does not seem to have come from the population bomb faction. How did Hansen first come to the realization that CO2 is bad for the climate? Who did he catch that bug from?
What Surfer Dave seems to miss is that the “Tar Sands” are naturally occurring and massive areas of toxic sludge that are hostile if not outright lethal to plants and animals. Extracting the bitumen and rehabilitating the area actually provides enormous new stands of flora that are quickly being inhabited by critters of all sorts. The land is then left to go bonkers, teaming with life of all kinds! This is, as JRR stated above, a gigantic oil clean up operation! Imagine that — protesting the removal of massive amounts of toxic oil sludge and establishing millions of acres of wild, verdant wilderness. Sounds insane.
Canada is the #1 supplier of oil to the USA. Saudi Arabia is #2.
Obama (who bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia) wants the USA dependent on Saudi Arabia.
As a Canadian I’d rather see a pipline to BC and sell the oil to Asia. The USA is doomed anyway. The sooner it happens the better.
What kind of mental r-tard would be against us NOT using middle-east oil???
Oh, the same one that buys the Gore/Hansen/Mann/Jones drivel….
Myth Builder Inc.
Quite sad to see the nasty comments from the bigots here. So we agree that man-made climate change is a myth. Why does that mean that land stripping (which will includes “eminent domain” stripping of privately-owned land) Myth # 1. Alberta Tar Sands = Federal (Canadian) land.
should be blindly supported?
Sure, some fuel sources are okay, but some are not. Do we want oil wells and oil spills in national parks? – ABSOLUTELY my dear Luddite! Do you know how minimally invasive an oil well is? Check the Philip’s Petroleum site for some documentary films on exploratory wells on the North Slope during the ’80’s. Amazing to see before and after shots, where —except for the J pipe cap for monitoring, you can’t tell that there was ANY activity on the tundra once the well equipment was removed.
Anthony, I am disappointed that you posted this and seem to want people to make obnoxious bigoted comments about these earnest people. – Frankly, if I were emperor of the world, they’d be HAPPY to be merely arrested.
They may have the wrong end of the stick, but demeaning them is not the correct way to respond. – Really? When I lived in Omaha and helped organize noisy counter protesters to the ritual Aug 6th, Strategic Air Command/Hippie – Radical “protests”, obediently covered by the local media SHEEP…the next year there WAS NO PROTEST. (Word got back, the MOCKING they got at the counter protest, covered by US News and World Report and AP, “damaged” the anti-nuke kooks, and they didn’t want to risk that again. )
And I thought that free-speech, the right to protest without violence and the right not to be jailed arbitrarily were core values of the enlightened educated peoples of the world. Apparently not.
-The right to shout “fire” in a crowed theater, the right to SCALE WALLS, chain oneself to property, interrupt normal business, and in general cause TORT or DAMAGES has NEVER been part of “free speech”. A little education here: Free Speech, in terms of the “founding Fathers” meant (look it up) FREE POLITICAL SPEECH. Thus I must thank you that you have
VALIDATED that this is a POLITICAL matter, not an environmental matter? It’s nice to have that clarified.
[ryanm: Anthony is not the author. I have no clue what his particular beliefs are in the matter. I haven’t read any bigoted comments — and no one is questioning their motivations. We all know what they are trying to do, and that’s the point of this news post. Even this peaceful protest according to the laws of the District is not allowed, which was explicitly known beforehand. Hence, that’s why McKibben and his rodeo went to DC — to get arrested — in order to get some publicity.]
Bruce says:
August 21, 2011 at 7:01 pm
Canada is the #1 supplier of oil to the USA. Saudi Arabia is #2.
Sorry Bruce,
You’re wrong on both counts. The USA is the #1 supplier of oil in the USA. Canada is a distant 2nd. Mexico is #3. Saudi Arabia doesn’t supply America except in the sense that they modify the world commodity price.
@Toto
Hansen is a physicist who worked first on the climates of other planets – I think Venus. He is not saying that CO2 is bad for our climate – there is no ‘bad’ or ‘good’ in terms of the planet. He is just pointing out that if CO2 (and other greenhouse gas) levels continue to increase, then Earth’s temperature will rise and that this will initiate a series of events (for example, the continental ice sheets will start to melt) that will push temperatures up further. This will have significant impacts for humans and many thousands of plant/animal species in terms of their likelihood of continued survival.
The background to Hansen’s title is: he has been a scientist for more than 30 years; science as a discipline demands an impersonal examination of fact and experimental evidence; until his grandchildren were born he was resolute about staying out of politics and maintaining his role as a scientist; when his first grandchild was born, it brought home to him what the implications of his scientific work on Earth’s climate would mean for future generations; and this forced him to step out of his science comfort zone and start to publicise his, and other scientists, findings about what we could expect from global warming. He says that he must bear witness as he could not bear for his grandchildren to, in the future when they are adults and dealing with the significant impacts of climate change, to ask him why he had known what was coming but had done nothing. Rather than interpreting his title as a selfish plea for his own progeny, it seems to be intended more as a plea for all of us to think about what we will hand over to future generations.
Wait…did she really say that James Hanson is non-partisan? Really?
Politically, James Hansen is like 95% of climate scientists, professors, and other academics: a liberal Democrat and Obama voter. Ironically, Keynesian economic policies may have accomplished more “carbon” reduction than the dreamiest of EPA regulations. It’s sort of like how the Soviet Union met its Kyoto targets…
Maria says:
August 21, 2011 at 7:33 pm
Maria, Thanks! For so long I have been under the impression that Hansen was a third rate scientist, at best, who found new life as a propagandist for Al Gore’s global warming scam. We know that he has done everything in his power to rejigger the historical temperature numbers so that he can use them to support his claim that today is warmer than the decade of the 1930s. We know this because he published his rejiggering, though not his methods.
Ian H says:
August 21, 2011 at 6:22 pm
“These look like a nice bunch of respectable citizens. And they certainly have a right to their opinions and to peaceful protest. Gloating over seeing people like these locked up is distasteful. This debate will eventually be won only when most of these people have been persuaded to change their minds.”
Ian:
Indeed, the debate will eventually be won only when most of these people have been persuaded to change their minds. I know nice people that believe the AGW meme. They don’t really read any of the technical information that relates to AGW. They just hear the common message in the main stream media and half heartedly accept it as ‘science’. They do not feel compelled to disrupt anyone else’s livelyhood or chain themselves to trucks or trees, however. I gently try to inject opposing facts that they can verify and suggest simple experiments with good humor. Sometimes, it works.
For those that have so thoroughly accepted the AGW dogma that they pursue illegal actions, several days behind bars may be more self reflective and educational. A nice phat fine to pay off can also be instructional. Think of this as ‘a teaching moment’…….
So, these guys are essentially pro-nuke protesters trying ressurect their lost Enron investments in carbon trading?
Maria- So many howlers in your few posts here. Thanks for these in particular-
“The NASA scientist, James Hansen, is resolutely non-partisan…”
Bwahahahaha!!!!! Two howlers in 8 words! By the way, his aka is the Jester-Jousting Adjuster.
“…US Climate Action Partnership calling for ‘strong’ federal action to combat climate change.”
Umm, you do know what the CAP is all about, right? Hint- it ain’t about combating climate change.
“we do not have enough resources of any kind to support the human population (~7bn) that we now have or the anticipated 9bn by 2050.”
Hahahaha! Someone still thinks Malthusian theory applies to modern civilization! Hahahahaha!
“…climate change wil have serious social impacts and that these may be far-reaching and frightening.”
So far the only measurable impacts of anthropogenic climate change are an utter lack of knowledge of historical weather events, and an unwarranted fear of anthropogenic climate change, especially among children and climate scientists.
“…and other impacts to varied to list;”
Fortunately the ‘list’ is well-established by the erudite John Brignell, and continues to expand: see here-
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
“I would rather not see mass war, death, and horror. ”
Try banning fossil fuels and see what happens. Do you think banning DDT was a good idea, based on sound science? How about banning CFC’s?
I am specifically interested in your plan to deprive Canadians access to over $20 Trillion of their own oil reserves. Will your military invasion come from south of the 49th parallel? Will UN IPCC green-helmet forces will be deployed to enforce the ban?
Maria says:
August 21, 2011 at 5:00 pm
“read NASA Chief Scientist James Hansen’s book ‘Storms of my grandchildren,’ and be informed”
Hansen’s lack of writing skill was at least acknowledged by Hansen in the book, endlessly. This made for a poor read which was slow going and difficult to finish. This aged and boring tome is an unfortunate combination of climate catastophy science primer and political novis memoir. Emotionally charged and endless hyperbole.
Not informing, convincing or current, Maria.
You are correct about one thing, although you express the thought poorly if at all. The fools being arrested are certainly Hansen’s believers in the church of CAGW.
Round ’em up!
Cheers,
Big Dave
In the chemical terms Maria is a wunderbar catalyst, oder?
About 10 paragraphs down in the Guardian piece, the results of the very
s t r a n g e Penn State investigation into Mike Mann’s role in
“hide the decline” as a spin-off of Climategate are discussed. Somehow this
investigation has been transmorgified into a complete exorneration of
NASA/GISS’s Jim Hanson.
?????
If this is true, then it’s news to many folks who thought they were paying
attention to what Penn State said and did.
If not true, then the accuracy of anything related to Hanson in the press
coverage of the “tar” babies lacks credibility.
They did not mention the number of protesters… from the picture it look like a massive demonstration involving perhaps 200 people… perhaps a couple fifty more. LOL
Maria says:
August 21, 2011 at 7:33 pm
Maria,
1. People who are skeptical of global warming claims are also concerned about their grandchildren’s future.
2. Not every scientist offers an impersonal examination of fact and experimental evidence. In fact I offer that it is a rarity.
3. Hansen violates your “impersonal examination” by becoming political, whether or not he does so in his grandchildren’s interest.
4. When these activists are arrested who pays their traffic ticket? Who puts them on the bus in the first place? Are the people organizing these protests political or just concerned citizens?
Steve
By the way, my latest issue of Nature Climate Change, August 2011, page 241 has an article about well-to-wheels CO2 emissions of various oil sources. Canadian oil sands finished product produces about 550 kg CO2/brl. The lowest, West-Texas intermediate produces about 480 kg CO2/brl. The claim by various NGO’s that oil sands processing releases 3 to 5 times more CO2 than conventional oil, is specious drivel.
papertiger says:
August 21, 2011 at 7:23 pm
Bruce says:
August 21, 2011 at 7:01 pm
Canada is the #1 supplier of oil to the USA. Saudi Arabia is #2.
Sorry Bruce,
You’re wrong on both counts. The USA is the #1 supplier of oil in the USA. Canada is a distant 2nd. Mexico is #3. Saudi Arabia doesn’t supply America except in the sense that they modify the world commodity price.
====================================
Papertiger,
I think Bruce meant #1 exporter to the USA. The USA imports over 40% of its oil.
I can’t format tables but below is the list of imported crude into the US for 2011, 2010.
Canada is #1, Saudi Arabia #2-#3, Mexico #3-#2.
Why did you think Saudi Arabia wasn’t an exporter to the US?
BTW the US imports oil from some very nice countries /sarc.
I wonder if the protesters are aware of which countries export oil to the US?
Steve
ftp://ftp.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html
Country May-11 Apr-11 YTD 2011 May-10 YTD 2010
CANADA 2,006 2,079 2,114 1,997 1,928
SAUDI ARABIA 1,197 1,089 1,122 1,093 1,068
MEXICO 1,154 973 1,108 1,290 1,130
VENEZUELA 895 902 917 1,011 918
NIGERIA 808 856 886 1,004 981
COLOMBIA 414 462 348 295 306
IRAQ 407 519 403 394 483
ANGOLA 356 277 308 423 408
RUSSIA 339 288 228 358 250
ALGERIA 263 207 253 352 313
BRAZIL 260 210 211 312 276
KUWAIT 200 78 142 219 201
ECUADOR 134 142 166 160 190
CONGO (BRAZZAVILLE) 59 86 54 89 90
NORWAY 58 88 54 78 39