Activists Shut Down Five Canada-US Oil Sands Pipelines

Activists against the use of fossil fuels said that they shut down on Tuesday morning five pipelines on U.S. territory used to supply tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada.

Five activists employed manual safety valves to shut down Enbridge’s lines 4 and 67 at Leonard, Minnesota; TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline at Walhalla, North Dakota; Spectra Energy’s Express pipeline at Coal Banks Landing, Montana; and Kinder-Morgan’s Trans-Mountain pipeline in Anacortes, Washington.

The activists are calling upon U.S. President Barack Obama “to use emergency powers to keep the pipelines closed and mobilize for the extraordinary shift away from fossil fuels now required to avert catastrophe,” they said in their statement.

The ‘Shut It Down’ movement said on its Facebook page that nine people have been arrested across four states, including all five activists that had manually shut down the pipelines. They also posted a video of one of the arrests.

This has surely not been the first protest action by green activists along pipelines or projects for pipelines in the U.S.

In a celebrity-activist news from Monday, actress Shailene Woodley was arrested in North Dakota while she was protesting the Dakota Access pipeline, planned to run for 1,100 miles and bring oil from the Bakken in North Dakota to Gulf Coast refineries.

At the beginning of last month, clashes erupted between security guards and Native American protestors at the construction site of the Dakota Access pipeline, with protestors saying that the project would desecrate sacred sites, and fearing that the pipeline could leak oil into nearby rivers.

A few days later, the U.S. Department of Justice stepped into the dispute, issuing a joint statement with the Department of the Army and the Department of the Interior, effectively halting construction on federal land for the time being. Since then, the pipeline has been restarted and halted yet again.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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