Turn your Prius into a Hummer

The bottom of the barrel. The backwash in that last sip of soda. The Hail Mary pass. The eating of the roach.

Aunt Ruth didn’t think desperation for oil would get this bad this soon.

Surely, you’ve heard: Everybody whose anybody in the environmental movement has been arrested in front of the White House, in protest of a pipeline that will take 500,000 barrels of crude Canadian tar-sand oil down to the Gulf Coast of Texas daily.

Those arrested include Elijah Zarlin (author of fundraising emails for Obama), Courtney Hight (former youth vote director in Florida for the Obama ’08 campaign), Daryl Hannah, Naomi Klein, and Josh Fox. The leadership of CREDO and Greenpeace. And Bill McKibben of 350.org. And James Hansen, one of NASA’s leading climate scientists. All in all, more than 1,200 people have been arrested at Auntie R’s press time. Thom Yorke of Radiohead and Al Gore have blogged their protestations. The Republican governor of Nebraska has joined the governor of Vermont in opposing it.

It’s been called the largest environmental act of civil disobedience in a generation. As Secretary of State—this is an international affair, after all—Hillary Clinton gave indications of support for the pipeline in October 2010, later backed off and now, apparently has reversed, with her state department issuing an environmental impact report in late August, saying the pipeline would have “no significant [environmental] impact.”

Hooey.

In “Our Choice,” Al Gore notes that “a Toyota Prius running on gasoline made from tar sands has the carbon footprint of a Hummer.”

The $7 billion pipeline runs from Alberta, Canada, down through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and then finally into the Gulf Coast of Texas, where, according to statements made by Shell, Total and Valero, the crude will be turned into diesel fuel to be shipped abroad. That’s not gas in your tank, and—evidently—never mind the risk of rupture.

The target of the protests is Obama himself—he can just say no to the usual idiots in Congress—and public hearings are to ensue through October.

If you have time to go get on a plane and get busted in D.C., bully for you. Or check in with www.tarsandsaction.org and do your durndest.