Actress Daryl Hannah joined more than 500 people who have been arrested since August 20 for a sit-in protest outside the White House. The movie star was one of nearly 100 people were arrested last Tuesday for protesting the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Daryl Hannah was seated by the White House sidewalk and refused to move under orders from U.S. Park Police.
According to the Financial Post, Hannah was heard shouting, “No to the Keystone pipeline” as she was being handcuffed and taken away by city police officers.
The planned Keystone XL pipeline is set to run from the Canadian tar sands in Alberta to refineries on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. It is currently waiting on approval from the White House.
In a blog post for the Huffington Post Philip Radford and Daryl Hannah wrote:
“This week, President Obama will find hundreds more people in front of the White House — us included — willing to go to jail for peacefully protesting the President’s short-sighted decision to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. President Obama’s decision on this enormous fossil fuel project will not be a quiet deal with oil industry lobbyists; it will be witnessed by millions of voters who had hoped that President Obama would have the vision to get America off of oil with a moonshot program for oil-free cars by the next decade. Instead, oil profits have been pitted against the world that our children will live in, hooking America to some of the highest polluting oil without moving America quickly to a foreign oil-free future.”
On Friday, the State Department found that the pipeline would not have a “significant impact” on the environment and suggested that the project should go ahead. Over the weekend, an interview aired of a former State Department official saying that Clinton would likely approve plans for the pipeline.
Earlier in the month, an editorial in The New York Times opposed the pipeline:
“We have two main concerns: the risk of oil spills along the pipeline, which would traverse highly sensitive terrain, and the fact that the extraction of petroleum from the tar sands creates far more greenhouse emissions than conventional production does.”
Bill McKibben protest leader of Tar Sands Action said:
“It’s clear that this message is spreading out of Washington fast. This has become the test for the president to show the country and the global community that he’s serious about climate change.”