A post too hot for the Huff?

Bill McKibben, the founder of http://www.350.org/ was arrested over the weekend  along with a hundred or so other demonstrators in front of the White House.  They are part of a several week long vigil to draw attention to the environmental risks involved in moving ahead with the Keystone XL Pipeline project that would bring tar sand oil from  Alberta, Canada  to US Gulf Coast oil refineries.  The tar sands extraction project in Alberta is taking place on First Nation lands. The tribal members, with whom I spoke in Detroit at the US Social Forum in June 2010, felt that their land was being exploited.  Moreover, a huge swath of lush North American forest the size of one of our New England states has been removed to mine the tar sands.  The process of extracting the tar sands oil requires huge amounts of fresh water and more energy expenditure through natural gas than is retrieved in oil.  The resulting oil itself is so polluting that transport via pipeline or whatever means is a threat to any environment through which it flows.  Aside from the obvious contributions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere merely from removing forests and cooking the tar sands, the product itself is extremely toxic.  Unless we can persuade the ruling elites to chart another course, this is what will be occurring in fossil fuel extraction as the “easy to access sources” are exploited.  This would be a great time to convert on a national scale to renewable, sustainable energy.  That is what, in a nut shell, the protests are aiming to accomplish.  We are at the turning point.  Convert now to sustainable energy systems or become a second rate civilization.