Climate change activist Bill McKibben isn’t the only Vermonter who went to Washington, D.C., last weekend for yet another protest badge of honor.
Dozens of Vermonters skipped the three-day ski weekend, a.k.a. President’s Day holiday, and spent the day in the frigid cold on the Mall with 35,000 protesters shouting Earth first slogans. Six buses of Vermonters — including one each from the University of Vermont, St. Michael’s College and Middlebury College — made the 14 hour journey.
Their objective? To pressure President Barack Obama to back off support for a proposed pipeline that would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to points south in the United States. Environmentalists say the tar sands fuel, which involves surface mining thousands of acres of land and requires intensive fuel resources to extract, is a disaster for the environment.
The planet’s climate has undergone dramatic shifts over the last 30 years as a result of an overload of man made pollutants — namely carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. McKibben, who wrote the seminal book on the topic, End of Nature, in 1989, has long warned that if governments don’t take action to curb carbon dioxide emissions, coastal cities and island nations will be inundated by rising sea levels and devastating storms and droughts further inland could cause extensive damage.
Read all about it. Seven Days reporter Kevin Kelley has the scoop.
