UPDATE: Bill McKibben doesn’t seem to want to address the question. See below.
Earlier today, 350.org’s founder Bill McKibben tweeted this:
[Source: http://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/442052998324551680 ]
Tom Nelson asked about those boxes and the environmental impact to which I replied:
[Source: http://twitter.com/wattsupwiththat/status/442055366595977216 ]
And sure enough, here’s a picture of those boxes full of comments delivered today by Bill’s claimed “100 people” from NRDC, 350.org, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth. League of Conservation voters, and many other environmental organizations:
![Comment%20boxes%20from%20KXL%20NID%20Delivery%20Credit%20Rocky%20Kistner%20NRDC-thumb-500x375-14923[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/comment20boxes20from20kxl20nid20delivery20credit20rocky20kistner20nrdc-thumb-500x375-149231.jpg?quality=83)
Source, NRDC news website. Credit Rocky Kistner NRDC Note some boxes don’t have labels. more on that below.
I made up a humorous comparison photo that speaks to the photo op issue:
But having finished that, I decided to look around a bit more for news, to see if there was a complete list of organizations involved and maybe an actual number of petitions. I found this video shot today of the march to deliver these described by Bill McKibben.
With 18 minutes to go, over 2 million anti-kxl comments into State Dept. Took 100 people to carry the boxes over. Amazing work by all!
(BTW: Note the banner says 1.5 million, in the news article, they say that another half million comments were added at the last minute, and the banner had already been printed)
And watching that video, I noticed something very odd at the 27 second mark, note the arrows:
Either those gnarly looking protestors are endowed with near superhuman wrist strength, or those boxes are empty.
It makes me wonder how many petitions they really delivered, and how many boxes were empty, but brought along just for the photo op.
Who knows with these clowns? So much for Bill’s required 100 people.
==============================================================
UPDATE: 3/8 10AM PST
No response from Bill since this post went up last night.
@billmckibben Hey Bill any comment on those "2million" KXL comments delivered in empty boxes? http://t.co/wnz0PlgKjQ
— Watts Up With That (@wattsupwiththat) March 8, 2014
Readers that have Twitter accounts might want to ask him as well.
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Nothing like lying to save the planet! How many people to deliver the boxes?…..like, two million?!
As a Canajun we have some reg’s on petitions, being documenting names, addresses etc. and no doubles, triples etc. I’m sure the same in USA. Where is the documentation of the “two million” comments…half by Bill?
Kool-aid endows them with superhuman powers to lift boxes and ignore the reality within (or without).
Perhaps one of those boxes had a thumb drive in it
a small minority of people trying to determine the path for all of us.. time for a serious butt whoopin on these liars.. I do think however that the pictures are worth a thousand words.. Caught lieing about their claims… Priceless!
Roger Dueck says:
March 7, 2014 at 8:28 pm
As a Canajun we have some reg’s on petitions, being documenting names, addresses etc. and no doubles, triples etc. I’m sure the same in USA. Where is the documentation of the “two million” comments…half by Bill?
=====================================
More like 2 million from Bill’s spam bot…
I bet they used thin paper.
Sometimes you have to destroy the plant in order to save it…
Let’s say there were 1.5m people and not 100,000 activists using fake identities.
So what? What if 1/2% of the country oppose something? Here we get 6000 people to a protest march – big deal. Get 50%+1 to sign, and I’m interested.
Those boxes appear as empty as their heads…
Why bother with KXL? The US can always get its oil from OPEC and the Middle East. After all, folks in the middle east love the US. If there is a crisis, they will be sure to help. If not, call on Putin, he’ll be only too happy to help. Canada’s oil is dirty, washed in a sea of CO2. The oil from the middle east is clean, washed in a sea of blood and patriotism. The US leadership will always look out for the interests of the common man and woman, no matter what sacrifices are necessary. God bless America*.
*stock closing in political speech. Similar to beauty pageant stock answer, “world peace”.
Bill McKibben is charlatan. So good in fact that you could put his picture and bio next to the word in the online dictionary as a prototypical example of a charlatan. One day all those idiots who listened to him will wonder, “WTF was I thinking?” Those of course that are capable of thinking for themselves, which I admit is few in the 350.org crowd.
All right, let’s do some basic math here. 2,000,000 comments, assuming one page of paper per comment. 100 “handlers” for all of them. That means 20,000 pages per person. Those boxes are smaller than the standard case of printer paper one can buy at an office supply store. Those cases hold ten reams (500 pages) of paper, or 5,000 sheets. That means each person would need to be carrying four such boxes. Shall we talk physical impossibility here?
REPLY: I was waiting for somebody to notice this. Note the photo of the boxes stacked. The Sierra Club box has the number 204,500 written on it.
The whole photo-op is a sham, and either Bill McKibben is too dumb to understand paper density, or he outright lied with his claim about needing “100 people” to carry the boxes. – Anthony
McKibben is obviously a paid operative of Big Oil.
Policy dictates of the last 40 years have required sucking the Middle East oil barons dry. Big Oil wishes to retain continental North American oil for itself, once the import wells have run dry.
Clever, clever people…
Note the numbers hand written on the sides, some over 100,000, others less than a thousand. A box or two with tens of thousands would be heavy enough to crush boxes below, but some boxes look empty.
Silly “Flat Earthers”, Only deniers are subject to gravity!
It takes 100 environmentalists to carry 24 boxes of paper. That’s pretty weak.
On the bright side, I because the boxes were empty, they didn’t destroy any trees with their scam! ;-))
Inspector Watts never misses a clue!
Nothing to see here… When I was still young and handsome, I used to steer fully loaded shopping trolleys with my wrist for improving wrist strength; so that is how I would carry, say, pro-nuclear power petitions about town myself. Of course I would reinforce the top edge of those flimsy boxes with sheet metal, because the handle would rip the instant you’d try to lift a box like that from one side only. But then again, that is probably what that lady in the vid did, as well… 😛
No seriousy, kids. If any of you work in an office, go to the Xerox machine, where they store the A4 paper for copying – in boxes just like that. If you genuinely tried to lift one, let alone carry it for any amount of time at all, you’d sprain your wrist like 1-2-3 🙂
LOL: all good except little A4 in the USA; it’s all 8.5″ x 11″.
That leaves 312 million Americans who don’t mind having the poor pay less for energy, this is worse than 97%.
Dude. They were just pumped to deliver them. Everyone had been doing furious, Arnold-like strength training the weeks prior.
Ok, sarcasm aside, I do lifting as a hobby. I can move some serious weight. In the “arm” category, I can straight-bar curl 185 pounds. But I am not sure I could carry a box full of paper the way your picture shows. That’s a lot of weight on a little joint in the maximum flexed position. To anyone who thinks that an easy feat, I dare you to grab a box of paper from Staples and carry it, wrists straight as pictured, while walking. Post the video. Show the open box, full of paper, you putting the lid on, and then carrying it that way.
Deceptive is indeed a sad word. The boxes are presented for dramatic flair, as though all are full. There are 25 boxes and 1,500,000 signatures? That makes 60,000 signatures/box. If you can fit 50 (front and back) per page, that’s 2,400 pages of paper total. Or, around 100 pages per box. If you double it, that is 200 pages per box. A ream (500 pages) weighs 4.7 pounds. So there was 0.94-1.88 pounds of paper in each box. That was, really, just an awfully big show. Inflated to look even more important.
Can every skeptic FOIA request for these on paper?
Saw an interesting graphic on Ace of Spades HQ blog tonight.
The US currently has 2,600,000 miles of pipeline criss-crossing it.
The KXL extension would add only 852 more.
KXL in perspective
http://c8.nrostatic.com/sites/default/files/corner%20post%20image_lz_1.jpg
It looks like there were far fewer than 100 people at the so called march/protest. Good photo op — can they all squeeze into a VW bug?
Maybe they all rode a short bus.