Paying the piper-updated

After being arrested for causing trouble at a coal plant, alarmist whines about being put on a watch list

Since 2001, I have devoted my life entirely to the peaceful promotion of windmills and solar panels to solve global warming. Apparently not everyone liked my work, however. Believe it or not, the Maryland State Police - your state police - put my name in their criminal intelligence database as a “suspected terrorist” as part of their larger program of collecting information about political activists in 2005-2006. I was on this outrageous “watch” list apparently because of a single act of peaceful civil disobedience I participated in outside a coal-fired power plant in 2004. CCAN’s former deputy director Josh Tulkin was also put in the database as was another former CCAN staffer who has chosen to remain anonymous. Neither of these people has ever been arrested for anything in their entire lives. (See background below)
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Help end forever these police abuses in Maryland that threaten our climate/clean energy movement, and our right to organize for causes we believe in. Why has our state wasted precious resources creating a “terrorist” watch list of innocent people instead of devoting maximum resources to solving real environmental problems? The REAL terror in Maryland is the threat of 20 feet of sea-level rise. The REAL violence is the burning of coal to create electricity while wrecking the climate.

With your help we can end ALL of these abuses.

Sincerely,

Mike Tidwell
Executive Director, Chesapeake Climate Action Network

2004: Pollution Protest At Md. Plant Ends in Arrests (washingtonpost.com)

Police arrested six protesters yesterday and charged them with blocking the entrance to a coal-burning power plant in upper Montgomery County.

The protesters lay down across a road leading to the Dickerson Generating Station, owned by Atlanta-based Mirant Corp. They were charged with disorderly conduct and blocking a public right of way, and they received citations, said Montgomery County police spokeswoman Lucille Baur.
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Mike Tidwell, director of Chesapeake Climate Action Network and one of those arrested yesterday, said the group wants Mirant to support the proposed Maryland legislation. "Mirant is not only a major source of harmful pollutants in our area but has shown very little desire to do something about it," Tidwell said.

Update: If Tidwell doesn't want any hassles from "The Man", he should probably stop doing stuff like this:

The entrance to a major federal agency, one whose politically appointed leadership has been widely condemned for suppressing scientific climate reports, was effectively occupied.

For the rest of the day, the occupation was major news in the nation's capital. The main NPR station broadcast hourly live updates of the ensuing standoff with police, repeating the activists' call for open science and clean energy. A Fox News helicopter hovered overhead, filming everything. And more than 150 newspapers picked up the Associated Press story about this day of principled activism in the face of politicized science.

As director of the U.S. Climate Emergency Council, I was one of the chief organizers of this event and played the role of main negotiator with the dozens of police and Homeland Security officials who eventually arrived to try to coax the activists off the ledge. My motivation for acting was simple. Those of us within the emerging global-warming movement in America routinely use the words "emergency" and "crisis" and "impending catastrophe" to describe -- accurately -- the runaway heating now afflicting our planet. Wildfires are off the charts. The Greenland ice sheet is imploding. Hurricanes are unrecognizable in their fury. And NASA's James Hansen says we have less than 10 years to profoundly alter our use of fossil fuels.

"Emergency, crisis, catastrophe," we say.