Scientists block BC coal train, urge others to take up civil disobedience.
by Alejandro Frid, with addendum by Stephen Leahy
Prominent academics, fed up with governments that ignore science and heed the priorities of corporations, have turned to civil disobedience. James Hansen, a senior climate scientist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, led by example last year when he got himself arrested in front of the White House to protest the Keystone Pipeline that would carry oil from the Alberta Tar Sands to the US. That was his third arrest in three years; the previous two involved civil disobedience against the mining of coal, a huge contributor to greenhouse gases.
On May 5 2012, In the wake of Hansen's arrests, Mark Jaccard (a prominent economist, IPCC member, and professor at the Energy and Materials Research Group of Simon Fraser University) got himself arrested in White Rock, BC, for blocking a coal train carrying US coal for export to China via BC ports. There were 12 others with Jaccard, among them a man in his 80s, several men in their 60s and 70s, and a few youngsters like myself and my good friend Lynne Quarmby. Lynne happens to be chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Simon Fraser University.