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t took some serious digging in the sock drawer, but eventually I found my ‘Environmentalists for Obama’ button left over from the ’08 campaign. I needed it because I’m headed to Washington in a couple of weeks to get arrested in front of the White House, and I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be misunderstood.

I’m not alone – as many as a thousand people will risk arrest in daily protests at the White House over the last two weeks of August, making it the largest outbreak of civil disobedience in recent environmental history.

The target: a proposed 2,400 km pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. Those tar sands are the largest pool of carbon on the continent; the federal government’s pre-eminent climate scientist, James Hansen, said recently that if we begin burning it in large quantities, it’s “essentially game over” for the climate.

The politics

So in scientific terms it’s a no-brainer (in fact, earlier this week more than a dozen of the nation’s most senior climate scientists weighed in against the proposed pipeline). But in political terms? That’s harder, because there’s serious money at stake. Since the first permit must come from the State Department, for instance, it’s probably no wonder that the pipeline consortium hired Hilary Clinton’s former deputy campaign director as its chief lobbyist. And indeed, even before any data was collected, the secretary of state said she was ‘inclined’ to grant the permit.