Activists gathered at Steele Indian School Park and called on President Obama to revoke permits for construction on the pipeline that would run almost 1,200 miles carrying oil from North Dakota to South Dakota and Iowa to an existing pipeline in IL. “Concerns about the pipeline’s impact on the local water supply are unfounded”.
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“We call on President Obama to remove the permits for the Dakota Access Pipeline”, Vershum said. Nurses urged the government to permanently block the disputed project that nurses say is a threat to public health, as well as to the tribe’s sacred sites.
The administration overruled a federal judge Friday who had denied the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s request to halt work on the pipeline, a project the tribe says threatens to destroy its ancient, ancestral lands.
Bernie Sanders may have lost his bid to move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – but today, he protested a controversial oil pipeline right outside the White House.
On Tuesday, protestors locked themselves to construction equipment, resulting in law enforcement arriving with rifles and riot gear and 20 “water protectors” being arrested.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed a lawsuit in July against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which approved the permit for the pipeline.
The arrests brought to 66 the total number of people arrested since protests started about a month ago, including 22 taken into custody Tuesday at a construction site near Glen Ullin, the most arrests in one day so far.
“We are committed to completing construction and safely operating the Dakota Access Pipeline within the confines of the law”, Kelcy Warren, Energy Transfer Partners’ chairman and chief executive officer, said in the letter. The speakers encouraged President Barack Obama, who visited the reservation in 2014, to back their cause. “It is the transformation of our energy system away from oil, away from pipelines and away from carbon”.
Thousands of people calling themselves protectors, not protesters, have gathered in North Dakota to demand that the president reject “this dirty and unsafe proposal”, Gmeiner said in a prepared statement about the local protest.
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“For these reasons, the Friends of Peace/Climate stand in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux and the climate action community in opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline”, Northcutt said.
