Daryl Hannah participated in the first White House Keystone arrests in 2011. | M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO RFK Jr., Hannah arrested at W.H.

Robert Kennedy Jr., actress Daryl Hannah, civil rights leader Julian Bond and dozens of other activists attached themselves to the White House gates Wednesday in the latest attention-getting protest against the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Police arrested 48 protesters, who notably included Sierra Club President Allison Chin and Executive Director Michael Brune. That made Wednesday’s event the first officially sanctioned act of civil disobedience allowed in the environmental group’s 120-year history.


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Activists said it showed that the protests against the Keystone pipeline have come a long way. The Canada-to-Texas protests also sponsored mass sit-ins and arrests outside the White House in late 2011, shortly before the Obama administration postponed a decision on the pipeline until after the presidential election.

“This is our lunch counter moment for the 21st century,” the Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. of the Hip Hop Caucus told the crowd of protesters and reporters in Lafayette Square. “This pipeline is our Birmingham.”

Moments later, the 48 activists attached themselves to the gates with plastic zip ties and refused to move when officers told them to move. The protesters included ranchers, farmers and Native Americans from along the pipeline route.

( PHOTOS: Keystone XL protest)

Kennedy said he was participating because he believes there are better sources of energy than the Canadian oil sands.

“This is the dirtiest possible source and most expensive for the energy consumer and for future generations who will have to pay the price,” said Kennedy, an environmentalist who works with the Waterkeeper Alliance and the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This is a boondoggle. It’s a giant criminal enterprise that has subverted democracy and will enrich a few billionaires and impoverish all of humanity by threatening civilization as we know it.”

Brune said the tactics matched the importance of the Keystone issue.

“If you look at American history, civil disobedience has been used at very important times in our country’s history,” Brune said. “It helped secure for women the right to vote, to protect the old growth forests on the West Coast, helped end discrimination against gays and lesbians. It helped to end segregation. We know the president believes climate change is a moral threat to our country. We’re here to make sure his ambition meets the scale of this challenge.”

But American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerard said he thinks many more Americans welcome the pipeline and the fuel and jobs it would provide.

“While there might be a few, a small handful of people that object, there’s 20,000 Americans out there right now who are anxious. Some are desperate to have these opportunities to feed their families, to heat their homes, to prepare for their future, to send their kids to school, etc.,” Gerard said. He added, “There’s hundreds of thousands of Americans that are very supportive of this, and we hope the president does the right thing by approving the pipeline.”

Media cameras and reporters outnumbered participants during the protest — a far cry from the 2011 protests.

“It feels odd to be back,” said Bill McKibben of the climate activist group 350.org, who had organized the earlier sit-ins. “Eighteen months ago, no one knew about the Keystone XL pipeline. I spent all of my time just explaining what it was. The other day, Daniel Yergin, the noted energy historian, said this was the most famous pipeline in history, and it hasn’t even been built yet. So in that way, we did our job if nothing else.”

For all the raised awareness about Keystone, President Barack Obama has stayed mum on the pipeline proposal, which is being reviewed by the State Department. Secretary of State John Kerry — known as a climate hawk during his years in the Senate — has refused to tip his hand since taking the helm at State, vowing only to follow the review process put in place under his predecessor, Hillary Clinton.

Obama didn’t mention the pipeline during his State of the Union address Tuesday evening, but he spoke extensively about the responsibility to do more to combat global warming.

The tough talk seemed to warm some hearts and puzzle others at the rally.

“Nobody talked about climate change in the campaign, so it was good to hear him say it,” said Bond, the NAACP’s chairman emeritus. “But now we want to see some action. We want to see him do something about the things he talked about so eloquently.”

Bond said the NAACP got involved because climate change isn’t just an environmental issue — it’s also a racial and human rights issue because minority communities are “mostly the victims of bad environmental policies.”

The protest is Bond’s fifth arrest in connection with civil rights, he said.

Hannah participated in the first White House Keystone arrests in 2011 and has also been arrested in Texas for protesting the pipeline.

“Unfortunately, because we haven’t responded to the crisis with the type of attention and action that we should have, we’re here again,” she said.

Protesters wearing “No KXL” buttons chanted, “Hey, Obama, we don’t want no climate drama” and “Barack Obama, yes you can stop the dirty pipeline plan” as they watched the other activists being arrested. Obama couldn’t hear the chants — he was in North Carolina visiting a factory.

Activists have kicked their efforts into high gear this week. On Monday, climate activists read and delivered an open letter and two petitions signed by roughly 280,000 people urging Obama to lay out a plan to tackle climate change. Many of the activists will return to Washington to participate in Sunday’s Presidents Day weekend rally to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. Activists from the Sierra Club, 350.org and the Hip Hop Caucus, among others, will march from the Washington Monument to the White House. That rally is projected to bring 30,000 people to the area, organizers have said.

Darius Dixon contributed to this report.