Tag: environment

FBI sent several informants to Standing Rock protests, court documents show

Up to 10 informants managed by the FBI were embedded in anti-pipeline resistance camps near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation at the height of mass protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016. The new details about federal law enforcement surveillance of an Indigenous environmental movement were released as part of a legal fight between North Dakota and the federal government over who should pay for policing the pipeline fight. Until now, the existence of only one other federal informant in the camps had been confirmed. 

The FBI also regularly sent agents wearing civilian clothing into the camps, one former agent told Grist in an interview. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA, operated undercover narcotics officers out of the reservation’s Prairie Knights Casino, where many pipeline opponents rented rooms, according to one of the depositions. 

The operations were part of a wider surveillance strategy that included drones, social media monitoring, and radio eavesdropping by an array of state, local, and federal agencies, according to attorneys’ interviews with law enforcement. The FBI infiltration fits into a longer history in the region. In the 1970s, the FBI infiltrated the highest levels of the American Indian Movement, or AIM. 

The Indigenous-led uprising against Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access oil pipeline drew thousands of people seeking to protect water, the climate, and Indigenous sovereignty. For seven months, participants protested to stop construction of the pipeline and were met by militarized law enforcement, at times facing tear gas, rubber bullets, and water hoses in below-freezing weather.

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Germany Begins Felling 120,000 Trees From ‘Fairy Tale’ Forest to Make Way for Wind Turbines

The windmills are spinning golden subsidies in the central German ‘fairy tale’ forest of Reinhardswald, but the payment is the partial destruction of the 1,000 year-old ancient wood itself. Work has started on the clearing of up to 120,000 trees in the forest, the setting for many of the Brothers Grimm mythical stories, to provide access for an initial 18 giant wind turbines around the Sababurg ‘Sleeping Beauty’ castle. Who is opposing this massive destruction of the ancient forest teeming with wildlife with trees over 200 years old? Certainly not the Green party, now in power at national and local level. In fact the project is being led by local Hesse Green Minister Priska Hinz who is reported to have said: “Wind energy makes a decisive contribution to the energy transition and the preservation of nature. It is the only way to preserve forests and important ecosystems.”

There is some local press interest in Germany about the destruction of part of the forest that covers a 200 square kilometre area. Nevertheless, the mainstream media generally keep well away from covering environmental destruction when the Greens are doing it in the claimed cause of saving the planet. The BBC did cover the story under the headline ‘Battle over wind turbines in the land of Sleeping Beauty‘, but that was in 2013 when plans for the industrial development were first announced. It seems that the state-reliant broadcaster is less interested now that the Big Bad Wolf has finally made a meal of Little Red Riding Hood.

Pierre Gosselin, who runs the German-based science site No Tricks Zone, has been covering the outrage felt in a number of German quarters at the plans to destroy some of the Reinhardswald forest in the interest of inferior green technology. He feels the affair shows what an inefficient and costly scam green energy is. “It’s not cost-free, it’s full of corrupt and unresponsive politicians who no longer care about democracy, and it certainly doesn’t make the environment better. It’s a nasty juggernaut of waste, fraud, corruption and ecological degradation – with dead birds, turbine vibration sickness, strobe dizziness and landscape pollution,” he adds.

The Guardian has been curiously silent over the clearing of woodland to build wind turbines in Hesse. In 2020 it was less reticent about reporting on the construction of a 3 km highway in another Hessian forest at Dannenroder. Thousands of climate activists gathered on the site north of Frankfurt, it reported. Dannenroder tree-felling would be a catastrophe, environmental campaigners are reported to have said. “Some parts of this forest are 250 years old,” noted Nicola Uhde of the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (Bund), “and there is simply not much of this kind of woodland around anymore.” At the time, the Guardian noted the fate of Dannenroder was a “litmus test for the Green party” which governed the state as part of a coalition. It seems to have been remiss in not suggesting such a test with the Reinhardswald deforestation. But then it seems none of the usual climate activists have been protesting about the loss of trees and wildlife habitat on this occasion.

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California Man First to be Charged With Smuggling Greenhouse Gases Into US

A San Diego man was arrested Monday for smuggling greenhouse gasses into the United States from Mexico.

Federal prosecutors say this is the first criminal case of its kind in the country.

The indictment alleges Michael Hart, 58, imported hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) – a chemical compound commonly used for refrigeration, air-conditioning and aerosols – from Mexico and then sold them for a profit, which violates regulations created in 2020 ostensibly intended to “slow climate change.”

“This is the first prosecution in the United States to include charges related to the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act of 2020 (AIM Act),” said a press release from the Southern District of California. “The AIM Act prohibits the importation of HFCs, commonly used as refrigerants, without allowances issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).”

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Dam removal in CA to save salmon causes mass fish die-off as eco-activists pursue similar projects

Environmental groups are celebrating extensive efforts to remove dams across the United States, some of which produce carbon-free electricity. According to American Rivers, an anti-dam advocacy group, 65 dams were removed in 2022, and another 80 were removed in 2023.

Groups like American Rivers argue the dams are killing salmon and steelhead trout populations, encroaching on indigenous cultures, and harming water quality for people and wildlife.

Eyes wide open

The largest dam removal project in the history of the U.S. began on Northern California’s Klamath River last summer, with the removal of Copco No. 2, the first of four hydroelectric dams to be removed, also called “breaching” or “drawdowns.”

In January, the state began draining reservoirs behind the three remaining dams. The draining is not going well, especially for the fish the projects are supposed to be protecting.

Large amounts of salmon have been stranded on mud that is also trapping deer, Oregon Public Broadcasting reports. Officials are warning people not to try to walk through it, as it can be very dangerous. According to California Globe, a two mile sediment plume extends into the Pacific Ocean.

“We’ve been told we’re the experiment,” Siskiyou County Supervisor Ray Haupt told Just The News. “Eyes wide open. It’s coming to a neighborhood near you.”

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US-Mexico border: 100 billion gallons of toxic sewage creating a ‘public health crisis’

The U.S.-Mexico border region faces a public health crisis as billions of gallons of contaminated sewage flow from Mexico into San Diego, California, according to a newly released report.

“South San Diego County is in a total state of emergency related to transboundary pollution, and this is a public health ticking time bomb,” Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre told ABC News. “We are living in conditions that nobody in this great nation should be living in.”

The Tijuana River – which has been classified as an impaired water body, according to the U.S. Clean Water Act — flows north for 120 miles from Mexico to California before reaching the Pacific Ocean on the U.S. side of the border in the Imperial Beach, San Ysidro and Coronado coastal areas.

Over the last five years, 100 billion gallons of untreated sewage, industrial waste and urban runoff have been dumped into the Tijuana River, according to the International Boundary and Water Commission.

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Atomic Radius: The legacy of America’s nuclear weapons testing program

Americans are typically told the story of the scientists who built the atomic bomb as an intellectual race for the world’s most powerful weapon during wartime.

More than 100 atmospheric weapons tests were conducted in the U.S. and its territories between 1945 and 1962. It resulted in widespread radioactive fallout across much of the U.S., largely spread by prevailing winds and rain. In addition, contaminated waste was shipped and haphazardly stored across the country, creating new toxic Superfund sites stretching from Colorado to New York.

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State AGs Blast Biden, Wall Street Plan To Sell Rights To America’s Public Lands

The current plan by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to create Natural Asset Companies (NACs), which would buy up land rights throughout America, faced heavy criticism from 25 state attorneys general, who in a Jan. 9 letter urged the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to reject the concept.

“What is happening here is clear,” the AGs wrote. “The Commission and the NYSE are seeking to implement a radical environmental agenda through the rulemaking process (and outside the legislative process).”

“This type of decision, particularly given its vast economic consequences, must be left to Congress and not the Commission or the NYSE,” they stated.

The idea for NACs was developed by an activist eco-organization called the Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG), funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, in partnership with the NYSE. NACs would pool investors’ money from around the world to buy the rights to public and private land in the United States and limit its use to “sustainable” endeavors.

Currently, much of the land under federal control is intended for public use, which includes farming, ranching, hunting, fishing, drilling, mining, hiking, and camping, according to its designation by Congress. In many western states, including Idaho, Alaska, and Utah, more than 60 percent of the land is government owned. About 85 percent of the land in Nevada is government owned.

“On the spectrum of serious ESG threats, this is one of the most concerning, and least understood,” Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, who co-authored the letter, told The Epoch Times. “I don’t think most people in America even know about it; it was done very quietly.

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A Strange Plastic Rock Has Ominously Invaded 5 Continents

By now, many of us have seen the disturbing photos of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where the vortex forces of the world’s biggest ocean has created two massive patches of plastic waste and other maritime trash that litters our watery globe. But plastics aren’t happy just remaining in the form of a discarded shopping bag or McDonald’s straw—plastics tend to get everywhere. In fact, plastics are so ubiquitous, they reside in your body right now.

Plastics are now also infecting the Earth’s geology—so much that experts are now calling to formally recognize a new kind of sedimentary rock: plastistone. Deyi Hou, an associate professor at Tsinghua University in China, and his colleague Liuwei Wang recently wrote a paper about the emergence of this new plastic-rock fusion.

“Sedimentary rocks are the dominant rock type found on the Earth’s surface, and they are highly susceptible to influence by human activities,” the paper reads. “We contend that these novel plastic forms meet the criteria of a sedimentary rock…we propose the adoption of an existing term ‘plastistone’ with a revised definition to collectively describe these novel plastic forms.”

This past March, geologist Fernanda Avelar Santos reported evidence of a “disturbing” find on a remote island of Trindade, which is about a four-day boat trip from Brazil. It was in this seemingly untouched paradise that geologists discovered stones effectively fused with plastic trash that formed a new type of rock.

And this wasn’t the first example.

Ten years prior, geologists first spotted these hybrid rock specimens on the coast of Hawaii. And since then, these stones have been found across five continents and 11 countries, according to Hou and Wang. Although some experts call these stones plastiglomerate, plastitar, plasticrust, or anthropoquinas, this paper puts forward the term “plastistone”—first coined in 2022—to keep nomenclature aligned with other sedimentary rock, such as limestone, dolostone, sandstone, and mudstone.

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‘I’ve never seen anything like this’: Japan says reason behind 1,200 tonnes of fish washing ashore is unknown

Officials in Japan have admitted they are struggling to determine why hundreds of tonnes of fish have washed ashore in recent days.

Earlier this month, an estimated 1,200 tonnes of sardines and mackerel were found floating on the surface of the sea off the fishing port of Hakodate in Hokkaido, forming a silver blanket stretching for more than a kilometre.

On Wednesday, officials in Nakiri, a town on the Pacific coast hundreds of miles south of Hokkaido, were confronted with 30 to 40 tonnes of Japanese scaled sardines, or sappa, which had been observed in the area a couple of days earlier.

Local fishers scrambled to collect the fish, fearing their carcasses would lower the oxygen content of the water as they decompose and damage the marine environment.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” a fisher who has worked in the area for 25 years told the Mainichi Shimbun. “It was only around last year that we began to catch sappa in Nakiri. It makes me wonder if the marine ecosystem is changing.”

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ESG, DEI, and the Rise of Fake Reporting

We know that the modern West has developed a jaw-dropping degree of totalitarianism, wherein the bureaucracies of the state and the corporate sector coordinate together to cripple humans outside their power networks and media channels. But what are the mechanics of this coordination? To understand one of the games they play, consider the rise of measures and standards associated with DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) – both occupants of a highly abstract thought dimension and the latter an especially incomprehensible word salad.

ESG as a phrase was coined in a 2006 United Nations report, gradually gaining adoption by private companies like BlackRock via the production of annual ESG reports. Governments then started supporting these voluntary efforts, and eventually began making them mandatory. Since early 2023, corporations in the EU have been compelled to report on ESG. Many US companies with subsidiaries in the EU must observe both US and European rules, and those in the Asia-Pacific region too are starting to follow the ESG reporting pantomime.

In brief, ESG originated at the level of the international and intellectual stratosphere and then grew, unchecked by tedious real-world constraints like scarcity and tradeoffs, as a kind of malignant joint venture between large government bureaucracies and large corporations.

This JV is a serious industry, offering lucrative money-making opportunities for consulting companies, fund managers, and assorted professionals who ‘help’ companies comply. Bahar Gidwani, co-founder of a company called CSRHub, a compiler and provider of ESG company ratings, estimates that the collection of ESG data alone is already costing companies $20 billion worldwide.

It is an expanding industry too, since the reporting requirements keep increasing: according to recent reports, the head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission estimates that the cost of ESG reporting by the companies it oversees could quadruple to $8.4 billion this year, primarily due to the introduction of more ESG requirements. And that’s just in the US.

Large reporting costs are easier for large companies to bear, which offers a clue to why they’re interested: this sort of burden, particularly when made compulsory by the state, helps them dominate their smaller competitors.

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