The Real KXL and Big Oil Resistors are on the Ground Protecting the Water, Land and Wildlife

As the excellent folks of the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance movement explain, "There are no safe ways to transport tar sands crud. Tar sands crud [bitumen] must be diluted from its asphalt like consistency to a thinner substance by a proprietary, undisclosed chemical cocktail as well as heated by stations every 40 miles to be moved through pipes.  The nature of this diluted bitumen (dil-bit) is a caustic and corrosive material that will sooner or later leak. The Keystone 1 tar sands pipeline alone leaked 12 times in its first year of operation."

Big Oil has declared that pipelines are the 'safest' way to transport petroleum products, including the tar sands crud. In reality they have a terrible safety record. Since 1990, over 110 million gallons of crude oil and petroleum products have spilled from pipelines across the United States alone.

The Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance folks, along with the folks of the Tar Sands Blockade and others including Bold Nebraska are on the ground resisting Big Oil stateside for the same reason Canada's First Nations and environmental activists are fighting the Northern Gateway Project up here, to protect the water, land and wildlife that sustain us all. Tar sands extraction and pipelines like the Keystone XL and Enbridge’s New Tar Sands Frankenstein pipeline must be stopped. It's all the same fight, there is no American water, no Canadian air, we're all in this together

Together this far-flung band of resistors is facing the combined forces of the largest capitalist industry in human history and the government officials they own and control. But the greater reality is that the resistance to Big Oil is only part of the issue. Big Oil can only exist, as Adam Brandt, an energy expert at Stanford University pointed out recently, "So long as the demand is there, energy producers are going to search for new supplies of fossil fuel - many of them using unconventional means like tar sands extraction. With growing global demand, the economic pressure to develop unconventional resources is enormous and not going away,” he said. “The emphasis should be on demand, not supply. If the U.S. stopped consuming so much of the world’s oil, the economic need for the tar sands would evaporate."

Though it's much more convenient to cover attractive celebrities staging protests about the evil suppliers and non-existent regulations, it's the demand side that drives every economic exchange. The celebrities in Washington, New York and Hollywood provide the MSM something to write about so they won't have to write about consumerism or about the only realistic solution to it which is so revolutionary they can't bring themselves to utter the words... both because their paymasters would reject their articles and because the only inevitable, inescapable solution - the collapse of extractive capitalism - would lead to the end of their Beamer driving, Gucci wearing, world trotting lifestyles.

Folks don't need to travel to Arkansas or Nebraska, or Kitimat or anywhere to join the resistance to dr satan's ['tar sands' letters better arranged] crud. Just stop dropout of the consumer culture where ever you are, stop driving to the mall to buy more needless crap, spend your time and energy growing a garden, walking in the outdoors, listening to the birds sing and watching the miracle unfolding around you.