President Obama sips on a tar sands milkshake through a large straw with the words "Clipper Pipeline" neatly painted onto it.  The milkshake asks Obama, "How does it taste?"  He doesn't think it's very yummy.  On the other side of the milkshake stands a hairy, Carbon Bigfoot Prime Minister Harper, who grunts eagerly, in hopes that Obama will drink more of the milkshake.

This morning, I observed the Avaaz Action Factory's street theater about tar sands and the Harper-Obama meeting that occurred this morning at the White House.  Full disclosure: I have several friends in the Action Factory and have been hearing about their actions and skits all summer, and have been somewhat jealous that I could not participate.  I did, however manage to bring pumpkin muffins to them at one of their previous actions-early in the morning after they had spent a night in tents as "climate refugees" in front of the State Department.

They convened at Lafayette Park in front of the White House.  The goals for the day: to create exciting photo ops in hopes that Canadian media would pick up the story and/or pictures of the action, to have Prime Minister Harper see them, and to educate passersby.  I think they succeeded at all of these goals.

The visuals (described in part above) were creative, funny, and engaging.  In addition to the Carbon Bigfoot Harper, Obama, and the larger-than-life tar sands milkshake, there were two people holding signs that asked "climate leaders?"; two people dressed as dying polar bears; several people holding signs with tarry maple leafs that read "Canada Keep Your Dirty Oil!" and passing out flyers about the tar sands; and two people walking around with laptops showing tourists DVDs called Canada's Dirty Oil: Breaking Our Addiction.  While the Prime Minister and media were entering and exiting the White House, they sang:

Oh Canada
Our home and native land
Global climate treaty
Is all that we demand

and chanted:

Harper got on the tar sands train
Canada's future down the drain

Prime Minister Harper looked at them on the way in and the way out.  The Toronto Star included a photo of and paragraph about the action in an article within a few hours.  And I spoke with quite a few people who seemed genuinely interested and concerned about what was going on in the tar sands-enough so that they said they would like to read NRDC's dirty fuels fact sheet, which I gave to them.  I even attempted to tell a French couple about the tar sands-despite my poor French and their poor English, they understood enough to agree that tar sands oil is incredibly destructive to the environment, and has no place in a clean energy future.

Now we just need to make sure that Obama agrees.

For more about how people at NRDC are feeling about the Harper-Obama meeting, and for more about dirty fuels in general, please visit: http://switchboard.nrdc.org/dirtyfuels.php.