Police arrested 398 young people protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline project in Washington D.C. Sunday, calling for President Barack Obama to reject the plan.
According to organizers, more than 1,000 people demonstrated in front of the White House.
The protest was planned by students with support from environmental groups 350.org and the Energy Action Coalition. The event began with a rally at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., where Obama unveiled a climate change initiative last summer, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Ishan Raval, a junior in philosophy and campus coordinator of the event, said those who refused to leave the sidewalk in front of the White House agreed to risk arrest. Of the nine attendees with Raval’s group, seven were arrested, six being students.
*Editor’s Note: Raval is a currently a staff columnist for the Technician.
Protestors were predominantly college students, Raval said.
Raval said demonstrators wanted to remind the White House that young people will be the ones who must deal with the consequences of climate change, and the environmental effects of the pipeline will be costly for this generation.
After the demonstrators marched to the White House, police began arresting the protestors and assembling them into small groups in tents set up along Pennsylvania Avenue.
Raval said he believes the protests will have a significant impact. In 2011, after thousands of demonstrators attempted to convince Obama to block the pipeline, the decision was delayed until more investigations were conducted by the State Department. In that instance, Obama rejected the application amid protests about the pipeline’s impact on Nebraska’s environmentally sensitive Sand Hills Region, The New York Times reported.
Raval said the tone of the demonstrators was particularly enthusiastic.
“People were really joyful to have the privilege of being arrested and not be charged,” Raval said.
Jordan Connor, a sophomore in physics and computer science, attended the event and said he represented Fossil Free N.C. State.
Connor said the event inspired him to bring back a sense of activism to the University.
“It was powerful to see so many like-minded students attend,” Connor said.
The protest was a theatrical performance and symbolic in nature, rather than a direct challenge to institutions that attempted to challenge economic and political structures, Raval said.
“If a group had directly tried to challenge the systems in place, the response would have been more drastic, and the police officers wouldn’t have been as gentle in arresting us,” Raval said.
One group of protestors clad in white jumpsuits spattered with black ink that represented oil laid down on a black tarp on Pennsylvania Avenue attempting to stage a mock spill, Raval said.
The pipeline has a $5.4 billion price tag, Reuters reported.
“[Sunday’s] protest represents a fringe minority of people against any use of fossil fuels,” Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Oil Sands Fact Check told Reuters. “This extreme position is well outside the American mainstream. Even President Obama says we need an ‘all of the above’ approach to energy. As a result, today’s protest does little but expose the extreme nature of these last remaining Keystone XL opponents.”
Canadian energy firm TransCanada Corp proposed the pipeline that would carry crude oil from Alberta’s oil sands to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
TransCanada Corporation changed the original proposed route of Keystone XL to minimize “disturbance of land, water resources and special areas” and the new route was approved by Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman in Jan. 2013.
