Audio by artist andrew_sidesinger

Andrew Sidesinger and about two dozen other activists were on Cleveland Avenue chanting and holding signs to remind President Obama he has the authority to reject the Keystone XL Pipeline plan.

Sidesinger said tar sands oil extraction violates the rights of indigenous people in Canada, and that it has an enormous amount of green house gas emissions.

"The tar sands is an incredibly dirty project. It destroys a beautiful pristine forest in Canada. It destroys, for every one gallon of gasoline made, 20 gallons of water."

As for why such an environmentally destructive plan is even being considered in the first place, Sidesinger said, "There are a lot of heavily invested oil companies and pipeline companies and people who want to make more money...Everybody drives cars and everybody wants more oil. They want cheap oil."

But this project won't lower oil or gas prices, Sidesinger said.

"Demand is skyrocketing. We need to find ways to reduce our usage, not continue these insane projects. There has to be a limit to what we as a society thinks is reasonable for ways to get our energy. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel, which you saw with BP and the Gulf of Mexico disaster. We're now in the Arctic drilling, where there are no resources to clean up a spill, and we're destroying a beautiful forest and turning it into a moonscape."

Sidesinger said there are better options for getting our energy.