Oilsands protest goes Hollywood;Margot Kidder plays Earth Mother for real, expects to be arrested as some are already handcuffed

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More arrests on second day of oil pipeline protests
A Toronto woman was among those arrested on the second day of a mass protest held outside the White House to denounce a planned pipeline that would transport Canadian oil from Alberta to Texas. Dozens of protesters were removed by U.S. Park Police on Sunday for failing to obey orders governing demonstrations on the grounds of the White House.

Patricia Warwick, 68, of Toronto, and a 65-year-old woman from Massachusetts were arrested shortly before noon and by the end of the day about 50 people had been detained. U.S. Park Police Sgt. David Schlosser said late Sunday everyone arrested was later released.

On Saturday, police arrested 50 demonstrators during the first day in a two-week series of sit-ins to denounce the proposed pipeline that would transport crude from Alberta's oilsands to a refinery in Texas. According to Schlosser, activists jailed Saturday will likely be released late Monday. A number of reasons could account for the delay, he said, including previous arrests or inadequate identification.

The demonstration, which is expected to run until Sept. 3, comes as the U.S. State Department prepares to release its final environmental analysis of TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline. The State Department is tasked with making a decision on the pipeline because it crosses an international border. After it produces its assessment, President Barack Obama will have 90 days to determine whether approving the $7 billion pipeline is in his country's national interest.

Jane Kleeb, an environmental activist, told CTV News Channel on Sunday that when the protestors first started demonstrating they believed they had a five per cent chance of convincing the government that the project should be nixed. But Kleeb said she is now more optimistic that their efforts may prove successful. "We know how powerful big oil is in the States and in Canada, but there has been very sustained community and grassroots donors who are really pushing back on this and I think we have a 50/50 shot," she said. "We're telling Obama that we are serious and there is a serious risk facing our communities."

Environmentalists have condemned the Alberta oilsands, accusing them of being the world's biggest emitter of carbon and responsible for so-called "dirty" oil. Alberta Environment spokesperson Mark Cooper has brushed off the suggestions that the oilsands emit excessive amounts of carbon, accusing the coal industry of being far dirtier. In 2009, a single coal plant in China produced roughly the same greenhouse gas emissions as the entire oilsands industry, he said on Saturday.

Kleeb said many people in Nebraska, one of the states the pipeline would snake through, are concerned about their drinking water if the pipeline were to leak oil.

She said the activists would rather see a shift in energy sources. "We want to see more sustainable energy," she said. "We think that will bring long-term economic benefits instead of a short-term gain."

Sit-in organizers said Sunday they expect more protesters to join them on Monday, including a group of farmers and ranchers from Nebraska. On Sunday, protesters included a group of doctors from Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Dozens arrested outside White House during oil sands protest
A Canadian woman was among as many as 50 environmentalists handcuffed and taken to jail Sunday on the second day of peaceful White House protests against TransCanada Corp.’s controversial Keystone XL pipeline.

Fifty protesters are already in a downtown D.C. jail following their arrests outside the White House on Saturday, the opening day of a two-week civil disobedience campaign. They’re expected to be released Monday night.

By noon on a steamy Sunday, police began arresting more demonstrators, including 68-year-old Patricia Warwick of Toronto. A 65-year-old woman from Massachusetts who’s celebrating her birthday was also led away in handcuffs from a stretch of sidewalk outside the White House.

The activists are facing charges of failing to obey an order governing protests on the sidewalk, said an official with the U.S. Park Police. The protesters were asked to move and when they refused, they were arrested and taken to the central cell block of the city’s police department.

Officials for Tars Sands Action, the group that has organized the two-week campaign, say police originally assured them protesters would be released after being warned. Instead, they have been charged and held in jail for two nights. "We’ve been told now that they’re doing it as a deterrent," spokesman Daniel Kessler said. The Martin Luther King Jr. memorial is going to be unveiled on the National Mall on Saturday, and police want to get the message across that they don’t want the Keystone protest to mar those festivities, he said. "Which is ironic because these are peaceful demonstrations, and exactly the type of protests that Martin Luther King advocated," he said.

President Barack Obama will decide by the end of the year whether to allow Calgary-based TransCanada to build the controversial, $7-billion (U.S.) pipeline. It would transport millions of barrels of Alberta oil sands crude a week through the American heartland and to Gulf Coast refineries.

Opponents say Keystone is an environmental disaster waiting to happen, pointing to a number of recent spills along pipelines. They also oppose Alberta’s oil sands due to their high greenhouse gas emissions.

One Canadian at the protest on Sunday said she hoped the event would draw further attention to the pipeline controversy in the United States. "I definitely feel like this is a moment where we can highlight this issue in the general public, in particular in the U.S.," said Heather Milton Lightening, who’s part of a group called the Indigenous Environmental Network. She added the Keystone XL would traverse "a huge amount of land. There are many sacred sites it’s going to pass through.. The tar sands don’t make sense, but the pipelines make even less sense."

People from across the United States participated in Sunday’s event, including a group of doctors from Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility. They wore white lab coats as they stood at a White House gate and awaited arrest. Mr. Obama hasn’t been in Washington to take in the protests; he’s vacationing with his family in Martha’s Vineyard.

Keystone XL has become a lightning rod for the U.S. environmental movement in the wake of failed climate change legislation once passionately promoted by the president. Several opponents of the project, including jailed U.S. environmentalist Bill McKibben, have pointed out that the pipeline decision is one of few the president can make that does not require congressional involvement.

Oilsands protest goes Hollywood
WASHINGTON - With the U.S. State Department expected to release within days its final environmental analysis of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, environmentalists are cranking up their protest efforts by employing some Hollywood star power.

Mark Ruffalo, the Oscar-nominated actor, is the latest Hollywood figure to get involved in organized opposition to Alberta’s oilsands, asking people to participate in a series of sit-ins outside the White House that begin on today and continue to Sept. 3. Organizers say some 1,500 people have signed up to participate in the protests.

Ruffalo won’t be at the White House today, but "is likely to join some time in the following two weeks," a spokesman for Tar Sands Action, the environmental group behind the protests, said Friday.

In a YouTube clip posted earlier this week, Ruffalo calls on Americans to "put your principles into action." "Up north where the tarsands are located, native people’s homelands have already been wrecked," says Ruffalo, who has also opposed "fracking," a controversial process for extracting natural gas, in upper New York state, where he has a home.

Bill McKibben, a journalist and environmentalist who writes about climate change issues, is among those who will court arrest today. He described the next two weeks as "the biggest organized civil disobedience protests of the climate change movement."

"We’ve got people coming to get arrested from all 50 states," McKibben said in an interview Friday. That includes Margot Kidder, the Canadian-born actress who’s now an American citizen living in Montana. Kidder will travel to D.C. with three other Montana women, all of whom describe themselves as concerned grandmothers, early next week.

In a recent interview, Kidder didn’t have much good to say about the environmental record of her native land, alleging there are few regulatory standards in Canada. "One of the real horrific results of letting this happen is that we’re going to quadruple and quadruple again the output of the tarsands in Alberta because there is basically no governmental control, environmentally, in Canada over the oil and gas industry, far less than there is here," Kidder said in an interview this week with the Livingston Weekly, an alternative Montana newspaper.

Ruffalo and Kidder aren’t the first to lend their celebrity to the movement. Danny Glover will also participate in the protests, while "Avatar" director James Cameron even visited Alberta last year to tour oilsands facilities and nearby communities.

The goal of the sit-ins is to convince the Obama administration to snuff out TransCanada Corp.’s $7-billion proposal to build a pipeline that would carry millions of barrels of oilsands crude weekly through the American heartland and to a Gulf Coast refinery in Texas.

Margot Kidder marches on Washington
Margot Kidder became Hollywood’s most famous Canadian by playing Lois Lane in four Superman movies. But later, when she was orchestrating a comeback after a series of disasters, she took on a gig doing the voice of a character named Earth Mother in the cartoon show Captain Planet.

Among the lines she delivered: "Hold on, Planeteer, I hate to interrupt your eco-argument, but there’s a nuclear waste spill on the ocean."

Next week Kidder will be playing Earth Mother for real - doing whatever it takes to get herself arrested in front of the White House while trying to persuade Barack Obama not to sign a deal allowing a new pipeline carrying oil from the Alberta tar sands to Texas. One of her partners in crime is another celebrated Canadian-born actress and dear old friend, Tantoo Cardinal, an Aboriginal from northern Alberta.

Theirs will be only two faces among the thousands taking part in a large-scale protest, but they will bring a bit of showbiz glitter to the event while showing there are Canadians as well as Americans appalled by the horrifying danger of spreading poison from Alberta all over North America. (A number of other prominent Canadians are also involved in the protest, including Naomi Klein.)

"This is not just about oil," Kidder explained this week in a phone interview from her home in Montana. "It’s about climate change and irreversible damage to the environment."

These days, at 62, Kidder works occasionally, doing such acting gigs as her appearance a year ago at Toronto’s Panasonic Theatre in Nora Ephron’s Love, Loss and What I Wore. But most of the time, she lives quietly, simply and happily in Montana, close to her daughter and grandchildren. Being at the centre of the Hollywood circus may be a distant memory, but Kidder still has the ebullient spirit, charmingly goofy smile and twangy voice that made her a popular favourite.

Her old friend Norman Jewison, who cast her in her first Hollywood movie in the 1960s, recalls that even back then, "she was a woman of causes, passionate and not afraid to stand her ground."

"Tantoo and I are both northern Canadian babies who believe that the North is a beautiful place worth saving. The tar sands have caused a lot of damage already in Alberta, where a lot of people have a weird new kind of cancer. The kind of oil being extracted is thick and corrosive, like molasses, and it has to be pumped at a high heat, emitting poisonous carbon."

There is already one pipeline running from Alberta to Texas, and there have been disturbing leaks. According to Kidder, the proposed new pipeline would destroy the freshwater rivers and other natural wonders of Montana, because it’s bound to leak.

"We already have experts who warn that if the tar sands industry is allowed to expand and build another pipeline, the damages will be irreversible and the long-term consequences horrendous,” warns Kidder. "In fact this is the most serious climate changer we have on the planet."

As for Canada, she laments: "Stephen Harper is more interested in short-term profit than long-term consequences. But I have two beautiful grandchildren, and I would like them to live on a beautiful planet."

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Images courtesy of Tara Walton / Toronto Star and Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press