400 Students Arrested at White House in Protest of Keystone XL Pipeline

March 10, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

March 2, Washington, D.C.—Over 1,000 young people protested in the streets and at the White House against the Keystone XL pipeline. Students reportedly came to D.C. from at least 80 campuses nationwide and from 42 different states.

Keystone XL would increase, by 830,000 barrels per day, the flow of tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada and oil from the Bakken shale formation in the western U.S to the U.S. Gulf Coast for processing. The pipeline would lead to a further expansion of the extraction, burning, and transport of more dangerous and carbon-polluting fossil fuels at a time when the planet already faces an impending climate/environmental emergency. President Obama will likely announce the decision on whether to give a green light to the whole pipeline in the next few months. (For more on the Keystone XL pipeline and the recent U.S. State Department report on it, see "Criminal Whitewash, Unacceptable Logic.”)

The protest was organized online by XL Dissent. The XL Dissent protest was impelled forward by reaction to the U.S. State Department environmental impact report, which was released on January 31 and whitewashed the environmental danger of Keystone XL.  XL Dissent aimed to begin mobilizing a new student environmental protest movement and in the process, “Set the record for the largest single-day act of civil disobedience at the White House in American history.” The call for the action, signed by students at campuses around the country, says in part, “Emboldened by our passion and our frustration, we will partake in an unprecedented action to denounce the Keystone XL pipeline and the ‘all-of-the-above’ energy approach that makes such fossil fuel projects possible. We are young, awaiting a future fraught with uncertainty. This will not deter us from participating in an act of civil disobedience. Indeed it has compelled us to organize one.”

The protest started at Georgetown University and then marched to the White House where 398 people zip-tied themselves to the fence and were arrested. Dozens of others spread out a huge black tarp representing an oil spill, and did a die-in in front of the White House gates. According to the Daily Spectator, the Columbia University student newspaper, few of the students had ever been arrested before and some had never been to a protest before this, though many were active in campus environmental groups.  

One protester told Democracy Now!, “When you get arrested, you first think that, well, you know, this is not going to do anything. But as you go forth and you see people come to you and they tell you the precedent you set, it has a huge impact. And the most important thing it does is it’s putting your body against the gears of the machine and saying, ‘this madness must stop’.” Nine other students were arrested at the “XL Dissent West” sit-in at the U.S. State Department office in San Francisco.

March 2, 2014, Washington, DC. The view from the White House grounds of the hundreds who zip-tied themselves to the White House fence and were later arrested. Photo: AP

These protests are very timely and needed, as the struggle against the Keystone XL pipeline is coming to a head. And they show the potential for much greater opposition and resistance, among students and more broadly in society, to the pipeline and environmental destruction overall.

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