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Earlier this week, EID published the testimony of a landowner who attended a meeting with the U.S. Forest Service regarding oil and gas leasing in Ohio’s Wayne National Forest, which Keep-It-In-The-Ground activists disrupted and tried to shut down.  While that meeting was underway in Ohio, fringe Keep-It-In-The-Ground extremists stormed a union construction site for the Dakota Access pipeline, intimidating men and women who were just trying to do their jobs. Why? Because the Keep-It-In-The-Ground movement is driven by “self-righteous” anti-fracking activists who are “not beyond performing acts of public disobedience to attain their goals.”

In Ohio and across the country, unions and landowners are speaking out. Just today, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said,

“We believe that community involvement in decisions about constructing and locating pipelines is important and necessary, particularly in sensitive situations like those involving places of significance to Native Americans. However, once these processes have been completed, it is fundamentally unfair to hold union members’ livelihoods and their families’ financial security hostage to endless delay. The Dakota Access Pipeline is providing over 4,500 high-quality, family supporting jobs.

Furthermore, trying to make climate policy by attacking individual construction projects is neither effective nor fair to the workers involved.  The AFL-CIO calls on the Obama Administration to allow construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline to continue.” (emphasis added)

The Laborers International Union of North America (LUNA), representing half a million men and women across the country, recently explained that “Extremists Target Dakota Access Pipeline Construction.” According to their View Full Article