Tim DeChristopher: 'We Have to Be the Carbon Tax'

By Peter Rugh, Waging Nonviolence,07 November 13 - Reader Supported News

f you walk along Manhattan's West Side Highway, upon the long strip of bike lanes and greenery between the Hudson River and the droning automobiles, you'll come to a fresh patch of pavement that's a stone's throw away from the Pier 51 Playground. You can't tell by the look of it, but beneath the new asphalt hundreds of millions of cubic feet-worth of natural gas are flowing.

While the national climate movement has focused on the transnational Keystone XL pipeline, this tiny site has been the object of a more-than-two-year local battle over the first natural gas pipeline to enter New York City in 40 years. Objecting to the high radon content of the fracked gas and the risk of explosion this pipeline carries, my friends and I waged a campaign of legal challenges and protests against its operator, Spectra Energy Corporation.

Despite our best efforts, however, the pipeline went live on Friday. The following day, we gathered for one last act of defiance, bringing all seven lanes of the West Side Highway to a standstill.

"They built a pipeline, we built a movement," said Clare Donahue, a Manhattanite who has dedicated the last three years of her life to stopping Spectra, as she and a dozen others were being arrested. The banner they had strewn across the highway read, "Shut down this pipeline." But it may as well have read "Shut down all pipelines" because everyone there knew that this was just one battle in the greater war against fossil fuels.

FULL ARTICLE HERE