Beginning Aug. 20, 2011, in response to a Call to Action by Bill McKibben and other renowned environmentalists, thousands of climate activists will converge in Washington, DC. to take action, and many will risk arrest, in order to try and stop a disastrous development known as the Keystone XL Pipeline which would transport oil from the Alberta tar sands in Canada to refineries in Texas.

Extraction and development of the tar sands is the largest, most expensive, and most destructive energy development project in the world. NASA scientist and climate activist James Hanson (who first sounded the alarm about global warming in the 1980′s) has gone so far as to say that it is basically “game over” regarding climate change if the Keystone XL Pipeline gets built. This is because not only are the tar sands the second largest known deposit of carbon in the world, after the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, but the oil from the tar sands is far dirtier and more costly to extract and refine, thereby adding many hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere.  Besides that, the process of extracting that oil from the tar sands is itself very energy intensive and extremely destructive to the local environment. Click here to read more about the environmental impact of the tar sands project.

Before the pipeline can be build, however, President Obama must issue a Presidential finding certifying the importance of this project to the “national interest”. In other words, the President could stop this project in its tracks by refusing to grant that certification.

Bill McKibben, author of “The End of Nature” and “Eaarth” and founder of 350.org, and many other prominent environmental activists have called for a sustained campaign of protest, including civil disobedience, to take place at the White House over the course of several weeks during the end of August and beginning of September, in order to try and persuade the President to use his authority to block the building of Keystone XL.

Read the Call to Action issued by McKibben and others, then sign the petition calling on President Obama to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline. Anyone interested in traveling to Washington, D.C. to be part of the protest action, click here.