On Indigenous People’s Day, the 10th of October, Declare Emergency and fifteen Indigenous activists from Minnesota sat down on the Capitol Beltway in almost the same place protesters had blocked it on July 4. The road was blocked nearly an hour. Again many were arrested.

Declare Emergency is demanding that President Biden declare a national climate emergency(as he ALMOST did a while back), and then back it up by halting all fossil fuel extraction on federal and indigenous lands.

In Minnesota, Enbridge wants to ram the Line 5 tar sands pipeline through some indigenous lands and and where they cannot they have diverted around one reservation but are endangering the water supply there by crossing the same river. All this is so Canadian tar sands “oil” can be refined and exported globally. Like the defeated Keystone XL that was intended only for export other than to the US, Line 5 literally has “nothing to do with the price of gas” at US gas stations. Even if it did, part of that “price of gas” would be paid by people who don’t even drive but have to drink poisoned water after a tar sands spill.

Line 5 has to do with the price of gas elsewhere in the world-and with the income of Enbridge’s investors. It has been estimated (years ago) that if all road subsidies were ended, the price of all wars fought over oil included, and all environmental harm from burning gasoline were included in the price at the pump, gas would sell for over $20 a gallon.