Tag: environment

How China Is Censoring Scientific Research Across The Globe

We all know how serious environmental degradation is in China. Its emissions have skyrocketed, air and water quality have plummeted, and critical habitat and ecosystems have disappeared. That’s why unadulterated research on the topic is critical to better informed policy. But my recent experience shows that China’s censorship model is spreading to the West, hindering that research from taking place.

In 2012 I published an academic paper in the journal Environmental Politics coining the term “authoritarian environmentalism” to describe the way that environmental policy is made in China. This year, I was approached by Lu Liao, a professor of urban planning at Renmin University in Beijing, to submit a paper to a special issue on China in Environmental Policy and Governance, a respected journal published by the major academic publisher Wiley, based in New Jersey.

I suggested reviewing what we have learned about “authoritarian environmentalism” since 2012. “The idea of revisiting the 2012 paper sounds very timely and meaningful,” replied Liao, who sits on the editorial board of Environmental Policy and Governance.

That’s when things went awry. The proposal I sent her included a new research question about whether the policy model in China is flawed by design, a form of greenwashing intended to legitimate one-party rule rather than improve the environment.

After a few days, Liao wrote back to report some “intriguing context from my own position,” as she called it. “Due to current sensitivities around ideology and international relations in China, many Chinese universities are quite cautious about discussions involving certain terms, and faculty are prohibited from publish[ing] work on some sensitive topics.”

I was “invited” to withdraw my submission and seek publication elsewhere. China’s censorship regime was being extended to a Western scholar and to a Western academic journal.

I reached out to the journal’s editor, Andy Gouldson, professor of environmental policy at Leeds University, who has done work in China, seeking clarification. He confirmed that “there are sensitivities for the guest editors of the special issue” and invited me to submit the paper as a regular contribution. I’ll decline. I won’t publish in a journal that bends to China’s censorship regime.

Put aside the irony that my research on authoritarianism in China was sidelined by authoritarianism in China. The bigger scandal here is how Western academics and publishers are willing to allow PRC censorship to dictate the terms of their trade.

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Race to mine metals for EV batteries threatens marine paradise

Stark images, captured from a drone by environmental campaigners and shared with the BBC, appear to show how nickel mining has stripped forests and polluted waters in one of the most biodiverse marine habitats on Earth.

The Raja Ampat archipelago – a group of small islands in Indonesia’s Southwest Papua Province – has been dubbed the “Amazon of the Seas”.

But mining for nickel – an ingredient in electric vehicle batteries and in stainless steel – has ramped up there in recent years, according to the organisation Global Witness.

In a move that was welcomed by campaigners, the Indonesian government this week revoked permits for four out of five mining companies operating in the region.

In a statement published online, Indonesia’s Ministry for the Environment said: “Raja Ampat’s biodiversity is a world heritage that must be protected.

“We pay great attention to mining activities that occur in the area.”

But photographs – taken by Global Witness as part of an investigation – appear to show environmental damage already done.

Aerial images show forest loss and sediment run-off into waters that are home to biodiverse coral reefs.

Global Witness told the BBC that land use for mining, across multiple small islands in the archipelago, increased by 500 hectares – equivalent to about 700 football pitches – between 2020 and 2024.

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Trump blocked Biden-era plan to remove Snake River dams, and he may have prevented an eco-disaster

President Donald Trump issued a memorandum last week blocking an effort that was underway during the Biden-Harris administration to remove four hydroelectric dams in the Snake River. 

Trump’s memorandum revokes a directive from the previous administration, which Trump described as an effort by “radical environmentalism” to raise the “equitable treatment for fish” above that of human flourishing. 

“The negative impacts from these reckless acts, if completed, would be devastating for the region, and there would be no viable approach to replace the low-cost, baseload energy supplied,” Trump stated in the memo. 

If the experiences of those in northern California living along the Klamath River are any indication, Trump is right that a dam-removal project on the Snake River would cause serious and lasting impacts. 

Bad outcomes of dam removal in the past

Last year, four dams near the Klamath River near the Oregon-California border were removed, and people living in communities along the river tell Just the News that the sediment that flooded the river has turned the Klamath into a muddy waterway. While proponents of dam removal say it helps salmon populations, the Klamath River dam removal has decimated fish populations, ruined fishing tourism, and may impact agriculture. 

The worst part, they say, is that all the problems were known long before the removals were carried out. Opponents of the project fought for years to stop it, but the environmentalists who supported the project had more resources and ultimately succeeded in getting what they wanted. 

“We’re a rural community, and we had to have bake sales and auctions to raise money to fight this. And we just didn’t have the funding to be able to fight people coming from all over the globe, essentially, to make this happen,” Richard Marshall, a resident of Fort Jones, California, told Just the News. 

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Mexican Border State Demands Investigation of SpaceX Due to Beach Pollution

Officials in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas have announced that they will be requesting a federal investigation into SpaceX for polluting Mexican beaches after pieces of the company’s rockets have washed ashore in recent days.

Karina Lizeth Saldivar, the head of the Tamaulipas Secretariat for Urban Development and Environment, recently announced that they would be requesting that federal authorities in Mexico investigate the damages and potential damages that rocket fragments could cause.

According to Saldivar, the rocket pieces could pose a potential danger to locals and claimed that her agency would request a formal investigation by Mexican federal environmental agencies. It remains unclear if Mexico’s government could do anything about the issue.

Just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court shot down a lawsuit against U.S. gun manufacturers filed by Mexico’s government, Breitbart Texas reported. Just one day after the ruling, Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, claimed that her government would be pursuing other lawsuits in an attempt to place the blame for the country’s raging cartel violence on the United States instead of the country’s widespread corruption.

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Supreme Court Unanimously Agrees To Curb Environmental Red Tape That Slows Down Construction Projects

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Utah railroad project on Thursday, setting a precedent that could make it easier to build things in the United States. 

The case at hand—Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County—involved an 88-mile-long railroad track in an oil-rich and rural area of Utah. The project would have connected this area to the national rail network, making it easier and more efficient to transport crude oil extracted in the region to refineries in Gulf Coast states. 

In 2020, a group of seven Utah counties known as the Seven Counties Infrastructure Coalition submitted its application to the federal Surface Transportation Board (STB) for the project. During its review process, the board conducted six public meetings and collected over 1,900 comments to produce an environmental impact statement (EIS)—which is required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—that spanned over 3,600 pages. The board approved the project’s construction in 2021.

Before construction could begin, however, Eagle County, Colorado, and several environmental groups filed suit, challenging the STB’s approval. Specifically, this coalition argued that the STB did not consider the downstream environmental effects of the project—such as increased oil drilling in Utah and refining in the Gulf Coast. The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed with the plaintiffs and vacated the railroad’s construction approval. 

In an 8–0 decision on Thursday (Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case), the Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s ruling. 

In its majority opinion, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the Court clarified that under NEPA the STB “did not need to evaluate potential environmental impacts of the separate upstream and downstream projects.” The Court concluded that the “proper judicial approach for NEPA cases is straightforward: Courts should review an agency’s EIS to check that it addresses the environmental effects of the project at hand. The EIS need not address the effects of separate projects.”

This statement “is particularly significant for infrastructure projects, such as pipelines or transmission lines, and should help reduce NEPA’s burdens (at least at the margins),” wrote Jonathan Adler, a law professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, in The Volokh Conspiracy. “The opinion will also likely hamper any future efforts, perhaps by Democratic administrations, to expand or restore more fulsome (and burdensome) NEPA requirements.”

One recent example is former President Joe Biden, who finalized rules requiring federal agencies to consider a project’s impacts on climate change—a global issue that is incredibly complex and hard to forecast—in their NEPA analyses. The Trump administration recently rescinded this requirement. 

Kavanaugh’s opinion also clarified that courts should “afford substantial deference” to federal agencies in their EIS reviews and “should not micromanage” agency choices “so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness.” 

This point could reduce one of the largest delays caused by NEPA: litigation. Since its passage in 1969, NEPA has been weaponized by environmental groups to stunt disfavored projects—which has disproportionately impacted clean energy projects. On average, these challenges delay a permitted project’s start time by 4.2 years, according to The Breakthrough Institute.

The increased threat of litigation has forced federal agencies to better cover their bases, leading to longer and more expensive environmental reviews. With courts deferring more to agency decisions, litigation could be settled more quickly.  

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‘Green Energy’ Is Quietly Polluting A Landfill Near You

While green advocates commonly use the terms renewable, sustainable, and net zero to describe their efforts, the dirty little secret is that much of the waste from solar panels and wind turbines is ending up in landfills. 

The current amounts of fiberglass, resins, aluminum and other chemicals — not to mention propeller blades from giant wind turbines — pose no threat currently to local town dumps, but this largely ignored problem will become more of a challenge in the years ahead as the 500 million solar panels and the 73,000 wind turbines now operating in the U.S. are decommissioned and replaced.

Greens insist that reductions in carbon emissions will more than compensate for increased levels of potentially toxic garbage; others fret that renewable energy advocates have not been forthright about their lack of eco-friendly plans and the technology to handle the waste.

“Nobody planned on this, nobody had a plan to get rid of them, nobody planned for closure,” said Dwight Clark, whose company, Solar eWaste Solutions, recycles solar panels. “Nobody thought this through.”

The discussion about what to do with worn-out solar and wind equipment is another topic usually elided in net zero blueprints, which often focus on the claimed benefits of projects while discounting or ignoring the costs. As RealClearInvestigations previously reported regarding the lack of plans for acquiring the massive amounts of land for solar and wind farms needed to achieve net zero, the math can get fuzzy, and the numbers cited most frequently are those rosiest for renewables.

“They’ve been either silent, or incoherent — or just hand-wave that we should recycle all this stuff without telling us how,” said Mark Mills, executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics. In the headlong effort to make solar and wind seem as inexpensive as possible, they have not included fees that address the eventual cost of disposal, which could leave taxpayers holding the bag.

Some renewable supporters acknowledge Mills’ point. The Alliance for Affordable Energy, which supports government-funded research on recycling panels and turbines, said the “circular economy” Mills referred to has yet to materialize.

“With the existing energy infrastructure, a lot of end-of-life questions have never been addressed,” the Alliance’s executive director, Logan Burke, told RCI. “It may be that those costs have to be embedded in the front-end, but somehow we need to make the market circular. How do we find that market at the end of their useful life?”

Just how many panels the U.S. will dispose of or retire each year is also unclear. No clearing house keeps track of national figures, according to Meng Tao, an energy engineering professor at Arizona State University and a consultant on renewable waste issues.

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Eco-Fascism – 2026 Ballot Measure Seeks “End Of Farming” In Colorado

The Trump administration, focused on delivering economic growth and food production in the U.S., is attracting the opposition of zealots and degrowth monied interests alike. 

To wit; two radically authoritarian ballot measures – which have the support of initiatives and frameworks of International Governmental Organizations (IGOs) – ask Colorado and Oregon voters to give up the family dog and hand over their private property rights in what some have called “the end of farming and ranching” in the Mile High state.

The first measure, Colorado ballot initiative 2025-2026#82, reads like a dictator’s manifesto – and is essentially a carbon copy of the CCP-backed Convention on Biological Diversity’s wildlands project.

The eight-page “Colorado Wildlife and Biodiversity Protection Act” seeks to create the Wildlife and Ecosystem Conservation Commission (WECC). 

Astonishingly, the WECC would consist of nine appointed members, with the petition strictly stipulating that no member can have any financial ties to agriculture, energy, or development. The petition then goes on to (laughably) assert that these supposed “elite” members – without “financial ties” – will be appointed by universities, environmental groups, and policy institutes. Naturally,  this commission will have total control over agriculture, energy, and all future development in Colorado. 

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Montana Governor Signs Bill Directing Marijuana Tax Revenue Toward Environmental Conservation And Wildlife

Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) announced on Friday that he had recently signed House Bill 932, a proposal that would expand uses for the conservation-dedicated tax revenues the state collects on recreational marijuana sales.

Under HB 932, the scope of wildlife habitat protection and improvement supported with marijuana taxes will broaden to include projects implemented on private land. The law is slated to take effect July 1.

Before the latest legislative reform, Habitat Montana was the sole beneficiary of the roughly $10 million of habitat-conservation-dedicated funding that marijuana revenues support. In recent years, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) has used Habitat Montana to purchase new Wildlife Management Areas and secure both perpetual conservation easements and 40-year conservation leases.

With HB 932 in play this summer, that $10 million of conservation funding will all go into a new account: the “habitat legacy account.”

From there, it will be further divided into three separate funding buckets.

Most of the money, 75 percent, will support Habitat Montana and state water projects. Roughly 20 percent of the remainder will be funneled into an existing program called the Wildlife Habitat Improvement Program, or WHIP, and 5 percent will be directed toward the newly established wildlife crossings account that seeks to reduce the wildlife-vehicle collisions that plague the state’s highways and interstates.

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Why has an eco-extremist been given a royal seal of approval?

King Charles has pulled off an impressive PR rehabilitation since his Coronation in 2023. The British public now hears little about the aristocratic indulgences he was famed for as a prince, from his insistence on wearing ironed shoelaces to his portable loo seat. Nor do we hear a great deal about the quixotic beliefs of this self-confessed eco-nut who used to hold conversations with his plants. But sometimes the mask slips.

This week’s announcement by the King’s Foundation was one such moment. Charles’s private charity, which he established in 1990 to advance his ‘philosophy of harmony’, has named 35 of its favourite ‘changemakers’ under the age of 35 to celebrate the charity’s 35th year. They were identified, we are told, after an ‘exhaustive search’ across the UK and selected on the basis of their ability to advocate for the ‘change we want to see in the world’.

Of course, the ‘we’ in that sentence probably means Charles. At the very least, his underlings will have chosen figures likely to chime with his sensibilities. As such, these choices offer an alarming insight into the curious priorities of the reigning monarch.

One of the ’changemakers’ is environmentalist Jack Harries, who was arrested in 2019 at an Extinction Rebellion (XR) protest. Harries, making what he presumably believed was a brave stand against the evils of the fossil-fuel industry, glued his hands to the door of a hotel that was hosting a petroleum conference.

Although XR has been edged aside recently by other eco-groups like Just Stop Oil and Youth Demand, it pioneered the use of disruptive stunts and street theatre to draw attention to its mad demands. Its members would often paint their faces white and dress in red cloaks, performing choreographed dances in public, incanting about the impending climate apocalypse.

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Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ken Pax­ton Pro­tects Texas Envi­ron­ment and Secures $60 Mil­lion Judg­ment Against Recy­cling Com­pa­ny Dump­ing Chem­i­cals into River

Attorney General Ken Paxton has secured a judgment of more than $60 million against David Polston and his companies, Inland Environmental and Remediation, Inland Recycling, and Boundary Ventures, for illegally dumping pollutants in Texas waterways and lands. 

In 2019, a tributary of the Colorado River called Skull Creek turned black with chemical pollution, killing fish and wildlife. Additionally, unpermitted pits of petroleum and chemical-laden earth and leaking chemical containers were discovered nearby, in violation of Texas law. The source was a sham recycling facility owned by Polston. Attorney General Paxton immediately sued to stop the pollution and spearheaded years of litigation that achieved an agreed final judgment penalizing Polston and his companies for their extensive environmental misconduct. When Attorney General Paxton learned the owner of the polluted site had been paid for waste disposal on his property, he successfully pursued a court order requiring the landowner to restore the polluted property.

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