Yesterday, Oil Change International, SumOfUs, and Environmental Action teamed up to place a series of hard-hitting ads essentially taking over the Foggy Bottom metro station in Washington DC. These ads, pushing for rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline with images of the recent tar sands pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas, will be up for the next month.
For those not familiar with the Washington DC metro system, the Foggy Bottom station is the station closest to the State Department, thus making it a frequently traveled station for hundreds of State Department staffers every day.
Why bring these images to under the feet (literally) of State Department staffers right now?
Two reasons:
1) While the public comment period has ended for the draft environmental impact statement, now is the time that State Department staffers are working to put the finishing touches on the impact statement, taking into account the million+ public comments they received against the pipeline, and the critical analysis from other agencies such as the EPA, which issued a stinging rebuke of their draft analysis. Now is the time to make sure these staffers are confronted with what they are really deciding.
2) Directly after the oil spill in Arkansas, Exxon did all it could to avoid public attention to the spill, from intimidating reporters to sealing off the area to photographers. It's important that images such as the ones in our ads get out, so that the public knows exactly what is really going on.
We're also promoting these ads on Facebook, to be sure folks outside of DC get a shot at seeing them as well. We've uploaded this image below, and hope you'll share it around.
You can see
more photos of the ads here.
And more details on the campaign, as reported by Huffington Post here.
And while you're at it, feel free to join us by signing the petition here: http://action.sumofus.org/...