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Keystone XL State Department report ignites protests in 289 American cities

In San Francisco last night, speakers led the group in with chants of "No KXL!" protesters waved signs that said, "No Tar Sands on Our Lands," "Honor Our Treaties" and "One Planet, One People, No Pipeline!"

Keystone XL Pipeline protest in San Francisco photos by Charlie Siler

More than 300 people turned out in San Francisco Monday night to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring crude from Canada's oil-sands region to U.S. refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. The hour-long demonstration on Spear Street in the city's financial district was one of hundreds of protests across the U.S. organized by 350.org, CREDO, the Rainforest Action Network and the Sierra Club.

A police officer on the scene estimated the crowd at 300. Becky Bond, political director at CREDO Mobile, a U.S. telecommunications company that helped organize the event, said 300-400 were there. The event was part of 289 protests around the country aimed at stopping the pipeline, Bond said.
 
"TransCanada got to pick the contractor the State Department hired to do an environmental impact study," Bond (pictured below) said in an interview after the protest. "That environmental impact study is a total sham."
 
 The demonstrations come three days after the U.S. State Department released its Final Environmental Impact Statement on the 1,179-mile pipeline. 
 
U.S. President Barack Obama must now decide if the pipeline is in the national interest. White House spokesman Matt Lehrich said in a Jan. 31 statement that to meet that criteria the line must not  “significantly exacerbate” greenhouse emissions.
 
"We think that this pipeline is not in our national interest and we don't want the president to give a foreign oil company a permit to bring this oil across our land to export it to Asia," Bond said.
 
"We really admire the First Peoples and the environmentalists in Canada who have made it virtually impossible for TransCanada to ship this out to the east or to the west," Bond said.
 
"Just because they can't sell this in their own country doesn't mean we should let them put this pipeline across ours. There is a reason why Canadian oil companies want to build a pipeline across our northern border, across the United States, down to the Gulf coast refineries, where they can refine the dirtiest crude oil in the world and ship it to Asia."
    
Some of the speakers at the event said they were former Obama campaign staffers and that they had been arrested in earlier protests against Keystone XL.
    
 As speakers led the group in with chants of "No KXL!" protesters waved signs that said, "No Tar Sands on Our Lands," "Honor Our Treaties" and "One Planet, One People, No Pipeline!" As the speeches wound down, the group sang the 1949 protest song, "If I Had a Hammer," by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays.
    
"If Canadians aren't willing to risk a spill in their beautiful West, then we are not willing to risk a spill in our beautiful heartland," Bond said. "If TransCanada could get it out to the west, then I assume that they would take it that way. They feel like the way they are going to get this oil out to export markets like China across the United States of America, and we are here to say, `no we are not going to do that.'"

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