A few radical environmentalists get arrested and people want to make a big deal of it... On August 28, 2012, I had prior commitments and wasn't able to make it out to a scene in South Polk County (off FM-943) where two women and five men were arrested and charged with trespassing on private property. Honestly, I don't think I wanted to make the scene. The deal was there were seven radical environmentalists who decided to try and take the law into their own hands and trespass on private property and tried to use their bodies to stop the construction of the Keystone pipeline which is a pipeline that runs from Alberta Canada across the United States and transports synthetic crude oil and diluted oil sands to refineries in Illinois, Oklahoma, and the Gulf Coast. The pipeline consists mostly of 36 inch pipe. The part of the pipeline that's being extended to the Gulf Coast is called the Keystone XL project. The whole idea of this energy project has radical environmentalists beside themselves. Several of the protestors chained themselves to the underside of one of the trucks. Law enforcement was forced to disassemble parts of the trucks where the protestors were chained in order to remove them from under the trucks. My cell phone was ringing, and I was receiving text messages asking why I wasn't at the scene. These radical environmentalists are not going to stop the construction of this pipeline. They have their own website and several of the environmentalists speak about their beliefs and their cause on a video. One of the people on the video even compared what they're doing to the civil rights marches of the 60s. I believe that the more oil we get from North American resources, then the less money we'll spend buying oil from places like Saudi Arabia where you can be arrested just for being a Christian. I guess the radical environmentalists are so consumed with senselessly stopping the project, that things like this just doesn't register with them. Please don't get me wrong, I don't want to destroy the earth, but I doubt the construction of an oil pipeline is going to rob our grand kids of seeing grass outside, blue skies, or walking in the woods. I have to wonder how much this radical environmentalism is hurting our nation. The United States has an abundant supply of coal. Coal is used to generate electricity. We have enough coal in this country to power the USA with electricity for the next 250 years. Technology has made it possible to burn coal cleaner today in a way that's no threat to the environment, but the out of control environmentalists have gained so much control that it's all but impossible to feasibly build a coal generation plant. The last two coal generation plants were built in 2009 and there probably wont be anymore built for a long time. Things like this make me wonder, just how much is this environmentalism is costing our nation (affordable electricity is just one aspect of this). Several weeks ago, there were some Nation of Islam guys that came up from Houston to Livingston trying to stir up racial trouble here. Of course, they were seeking media attention, I chose to not give them the time of the day as media attention just helps to fuel their "cause". I'm not going to treat some zealous environmentalists any different. The names of the seven arrested yesterday were not released, but probably appear on today's Daily Arrest Report.
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