Challenging the Rhetoric : 03/29/16

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Environmentalists Join Forces in New Orleans To Foster A Growing Alliance to Combat Climate Change and Fossil Fuels

By Julie Dermansky • Monday, March 28, 2016 - 07:37

“Creative alliances are formed when you are invited to come together,” Janet MacGillivray, Esq., with Indigena, told DeSmog. “That’s what we did with the four days of gatherings at the New Orleans Healing Center.”

Keeper of the Mountains Foundation president Paul Corbit Brown, and Jane Kleeb, founder of Bold Nebraska, were among the invited speakers who stressed the need for groups to come together.

They joined Louisiana environmental groups and activists who participated in panel discussions in the days before a protest by hundreds of Gulf Coast residents and environmentalists from across the country against the federal lease sale of 44.3 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to the oil and gas industry.

Video: Paul Corbit Brown speaks in New Orleans

Holding up a bottle of polluted water from Fayetteville, West Virginia, at a panel discussion on climate change injustice, Brown told the audience that water from the river where he took the sample made it to New Orleans before he did.

“Polluted water in West Virginia doesn’t stay in West Virginia,” he said. ”It makes it way to other places, including here.”

The Keeper of the Mountains Foundation’s mission is to move Appalachian communities away from an extraction economy to an economy that values people, land, and mountain heritage. The foundation conducts outreach programs to teach groups from around the world about mountaintop removal and other negative impacts of the coal industry. The foundation is involved with fighting for human rights while working toward helping the region transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

The foundation also acts as an environmental watchdog. Brown was the first photographer to document the site where a train carrying North Dakota crude derailed into a West Virginia creek and burst into flames in 2015. After a state trooper blocked his way, threatening him with arrest if he tried to get to the accident site, he chartered a plane and shot aerials of the wreckage that were published by the Huffington Post.

His photos contradicted Governor Earl Ray Tomblin’s description of how much oil contaminated the creek, according to Brown.

Brown’s work as a human rights photographer before he became an environmental activist taught him that you can’t separate human rights from environmental injustice.

“There is a growing movement of people trying to connect the dots,” Brown told DeSmog. “It is not that mountaintop removal is worse than uranium mining – or worse than what happened with oil and gas in Louisiana, or worse than frackng or any other environmental catastrophe created by the oil and gas industry. People are waking up to the understanding that this fight is all of these fights.”

On a panel of women in the environmental movement, Jane Kleeb announced that Bold Nebraska is expanding with the formation of the Bold Alliance, which will have branches in Iowa, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. The alliance will continue Bold Nebraska’s work that includes stopping fossil fuel developments by developing clean energy projects.

Bold Nebraska is a progressive political advocacy group that was a leading voice in the fight to stop the northern route of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The organization joined forces with indigenous tribes in the fight to stop the tar sands pipeline.

Video: Jane Kleeb speaks in New Orleans

When word reached Kleeb that President Obama rejected the permit TransCanada needed to build the northern route of the Keystone XL Pipeline, she had a celebratory whiskey and then spent a little time with her family. But hanging up her hat was never an option for her.

“The fight to save the planet is bigger than stopping one pipeline,” Kleeb told DeSmog.

Kleeb announced that Cherri Foytlin will run Bold Louisiana. Foytlin, a Louisiana native, became an activist after the BP oil spill, and has been at the forefront of the fight against pollution and social justice ever since.

“We plan to continue to tackle fossil fuel projects while lifting up clean energy and developing a base of populist independent voters,” Kleeb said.

Hundreds crashed the government’s lease sale on March 23 held at the Superdome in New Orleans. Though the protesters weren’t able to stop the auction, their action sent a message to the federal government that further development of the fossil fuel industry is not a popular move with those concerned about climate change.

Video: Jane Kleeb and Mekasi Camp-Horinek protest against new oil and gas lease sales In the Gulf of Mexico.

“Here in New Orleans, apathy just isn’t an option,” MacGillivray told DeSmog. Despite the trauma from superstorms and the destruction of the environment, she believes the spirit of the people in New Orleans can’t be extinguished.

Brown was moved by the protest. It was a reminder that he is not alone in recognizing the need to unite people fighting for social and environmental justice, which happened at the protest.

“What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves. It is that simple,” Brown told DeSmog. “If we continue to contaminate the earth and take from her as if there is no tomorrow, we will not have an Earth we can live on tomorrow – it is that simple.”

Video: Chief Arvol speaks in New Orleans

Environmentalists Converge on New Orleans To Disrupt Gulf of Mexico Oil and Gas Lease Sale

By Julie Dermansky • Thursday, March 24, 2016 - 01:58

Hundreds of Gulf Coast residents and environmentalists from across the country protested against a federal lease sale of 44.3 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to the oil and gas industry yesterday in New Orleans.

The group marched from Duncan Plaza to the Mercedes-Benz Superdome — where the sale was held — calling for an end to drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and an immediate hiring of a thousand workers to clean up and repair aging oil infrastructure, including rigs, platforms, pipelines and refineries.

They included Gulf Coast residents and local environmental organizations 350 Louisiana, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Bridge the Gulf and Vanishing Earth. Members of national groups Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Oil Change International, Indigena, Bold Nebraska, Keeper of the Mountains Foundation, the Center for Biological Diversity, Rethink Energy, Tar Sands Blockade and Rainforest Action Network also took part in the protest.

No effort was made to stop the protesters from entering the Superdome or the room where the auction took place. While the protest had been publicized since February on social media, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) seemed caught off guard.

The protesters chanted throughout the lease sale, which lasted about an hour and a half. They drowned out the voice ofBOEM Gulf of Mexico Regional Director Michael Celata who was calling out the bids and announcing the lease winners.

VIDEO

“We have being saying ‘Yes’ and going along with drilling in the Gulf far too long,” Cherri Foytlin, a Gulf Coast activist, told DeSmog, “Today I said, ‘No.’”

Security personnel tried to remove Foytlin from a platform at the lease sale. When police officers grabbed her, Foytlin went limp, ending up lying on her back. Rather than drag her away, she was permitted to remain on the platform.

“They could have arrested me,” Foytlin told DeSmog. “But there were too many of us that they would also have to arrest.”

A representative from BOEM asked Foytlin what the group thought they were going to accomplish since their actions were not going to stop the sale. Foytlin explained she was protecting the planet for the sake of her children.

She asked him to “go back to the President and tell him that this is just the beginning. Our numbers are swelling.”

“If this president really wants to be the guy he said he was going to be after Paris, he needs to be proactive and stop the sale of federal land for drilling right now,” Foytlin told DeSmog.

VIDEO

“This is horrible,” BOEM representative Caryl Fagot said to DeSmog. “What do they think they are doing?”

At a March 17 public hearing on the next round of Gulf of Mexico lease sales slated for 2017, Fagot said nothing would stop the March 23 auction and that the place to voice one’s opinion was at one of the BOEM public hearings beforehand, not at the event itself.

The activists disagreed. “This is beautiful,” Bucket Brigade director Anne Rolfes told DeSmog.

Rolfes testified at BOEM’s hearing, but still had hoped to stop the lease sales. The hundreds of people willing to disrupt the meeting gave her hope. Two years before, only a couple dozen protesters attended the lease sale.

After the sale, a few of the protesters taunted workers who were taking down BOEM’s displays in the Superdome’s hallway. “You should be ashamed,” one of the activists said to them.

“The sneakers you are wearing are made with oil. Your cell phone too,” a worker countered. The worker conceded safety on the oil rigs isn’t what it should be, but told DeSmog he thought the protesters were ignorant.

Twenty-six offshore energy companies submitted 148 bids on 128 blocks for Central Sale 241. No bids were submitted for Eastern Sale 226, according to BOEM’s press release. It was the fewest bids submitted at in auction in the last 20 years.

The protesters held a rally outside the Superdome after the sale. Among them was activist Hilton Kelley, the Goldman Environmental Prize winner who has fought to keep pollution at bay in the African-American West Side neighborhood of Port Arthur.

“The people who live on the Gulf Coast have suffered enough because of BP,” he told DeSmog.

“Though we didn’t stop the sale, our voices were heard,” Kelley said, describing the protest as “righteous.”