Climate activist Bill McKibben brought his message to a big Occupy Wall Street crowd gathered in Washington Square in New York City on Saturday. Watch his teach-in about the threat of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline:
As Matthew McDermott of Treehugger explains, “Regarding the call-and-response, for those not up on OWS, the police have prohibited all methods of electronically amplifying sound. The protestors have developed what they call the ‘human microphone,’ where the crowd repeats the words of the speaker so that all in attendance can hear what’s being said.”
McKibben invited the activists to come to Washington, D.C., on Nov. 6 and encircle the White House in a protest against the Keystone pipeline, which would carry filthy tar-sands oil 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of the U.S.:
[We’re] going to be carrying signs with quotations from Barack Obama from the 2008 campaign. He said, “It’s time to end the tyranny of oil.” He said, “I will have the most transparent government in history.” We have to go to D.C. to find out where they’ve locked that guy up. We have to free Obama because there’s some kind of stunt double there now.
The Obama administration is starting to feel the heat on this issue, thanks to McKibben and the other 1,252 activists who were arrested in front of the White House while protesting against the pipeline in late August and early September. “Keystone XL pipeline becomes a political headache for White House,” Juliet Eilperin reported in The Washington Post on Friday.
McKibben is a member of Grist’s board of directors.
