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Activists in Texas report that Big Oil is working with local police to use violence against peaceful Keystone XL protesters.
Tell TransCanada that you won’t stand for violent attacks on U.S. citizens!
Shocking — and appalling — news: In Texas, Canadian oil giant TransCanada has been accused of actively encouraging the police to use aggressive violence against U.S. citizens standing in the way of the Keystone XL pipeline.
After conferring with TransCanada, sheriff’s deputies in Wood County, Texas, allegedly put two peaceful protesters chained to Keystone XL equipment in chokeholds and stress positions, bent them over backwards to knock them unconscious, pepper sprayed their open wounds, and used a Taser for a full five seconds. This went on for five hours.
This behavior is atrocious, un-American, and immoral — and there is absolutely no excuse for local law enforcement officials to act this way.
When the deputies were done, the top TransCanada official on the scene was overheard congratulating them on a “job well done.” The Lieutenant reassured him, “If this happens again, we’ll just skip to using pepper spray and Tasing in the first ten minutes.”
But we can’t lose heart — these brave activists have fought too hard, and the stakes are too high. According to an organizer on the ground,
They were able to make it through their mutual torture by intimating personal reassurances to each other. [Benjamin] Franklin and [Shannon] Bebe say they were able to endure the pain knowing that they were in it together. Despite the immense pain our brave blockaders remained locked to the machinery for several hours — determined to stop this toxic tar sands pipeline.
Normally we wouldn’t send you two emails in a day, but this is a shocking development, and it is absolutely crucial that we stand up to both the Keystone XL pipeline and Big Oil’s brutal tactics.
The Keystone XL pipeline would carry the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel, tar sands oil, from Canada to Texas, where it would be shipped overseas. To build the pipeline, TransCanada has to seize private land from ranchers and farmers, and then expose what’s left to a higher-than-usual threat of oil spills and leaks. Clean water, clean air, agriculture, and our shared climate would all be put at risk for what have been greatly exaggerated benefits.
And now we know, they’ll do anything — including using violence against U.S. citizens — to get it done.
Thanks for all you do for the environment,
Sarah Hodgdon
Sierra Club National Program Director
P.S. After you take action, be sure to forward this alert to your friends and colleagues — five letters will have five times the impact as one!
