No children play on the jungle gym here anymore, and no families bustle in and out of front doors. Last year, after mounting concern from the community over Norlite’s air emissions, the Cohoes Housing Authority began relocating all residents of the 70-unit Saratoga Sites complex. The city now plans to raze the homes. 

For more than 30 years, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, or DEC, has attempted to force Norlite to comply with state environmental laws, issuing the plant hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties. But even dozens of violations dating back to the 1990s have failed to stop Norlite from polluting. Last year, when New York Attorney General Letitia James and the DEC took the extra step of suing the plant, alleging its emissions endangered the health of the surrounding community, many nearby residents welcomed the escalation. But as the lawsuit plays out, the state has allowed Norlite to remain in operation, even as the plant continues to violate environmental laws — a move that many community members see as a capitulation. 

“We should be able to breathe clean air, and we’re not,” said Ed Sokol, 89, who has lived near the plant his entire life and is active with Lights Out Norlite, a group of former Saratoga Sites residents and local advocates. “This has been going on for years, and it’s about time — if they’re violating all these laws, shut them down.”

Now, Lights Out Norlite is turning to a new constitutional provision — dubbed the “Green Amendment” — in the hopes that it will finally help them do just that.

Passed by voters in 2021, the Green Amendment enshrines New Yorkers’ fundamental and inalienable right to clean air, water, and a “healthful environment” in the state constitution. As an addition to the bill of rights, the amendment grants environmental rights the highest constitutional protections, akin to freedom of speech or religion. 

The state, however, has called on the court to dismiss Lights Out Norlite’s Green Amendment claim entirely — and the attorney general is arguing to limit the amendment’s reach.

“We should be able to breathe clean air, and we’re not.”

The showdown between the state and Lights Out Norlite is one of the first tests of New York’s Green Amendment, and the court’s decision could have reverberations around the country. If the court sides with the attorney general, legal scholars and advocates say that interpretation could topple the amendment’s promise. Since New York is only the third state to enshrine a Green Amendment in its bill of rights — and the first to do so in 50 years — the results of these early cases could impact ongoing efforts to pass similar amendments in more than a dozen states across the country.

Attorney Maya K. van Rossum, founder of the national advocacy group Green Amendments For The Generations, said that the DEC and attorney general “are really trying to just diminish their obligations to protect the environmental rights of the people” with an argument that would “render impotent the New York Green Amendment.” 

But if the court sides with Lights Out Norlite, van Rossum added, the outcome would “provide real inspiration and power for other states that are pursuing this pathway.”

Endless Violations

In Cohoes, a working-class city of fewer than 20,000 residents, Norlite’s emissions have long been a source of concern. The DEC has designated several neighborhoods surrounding the plant as “potential environmental justice areas,” meaning nearly a quarter of household incomes are below the federal poverty level or a high proportion of residents are members of minority groups.

The Norlite facility burns hazardous waste, including waste fuels and used building heating oils, in order to create a popular construction material called lightweight aggregate. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, there are 27 plants nationwide that burn hazardous waste, and Norlite is the only one permitted to do so in all of New York.

For decades, the state has found that Norlite’s process has frequently sent dust, including particles of carcinogenic crystalline silica, into the surrounding area. For violating the conditions of its permit as well as the state’s air pollution control law, the DEC has issued nearly $1 million in fines against Norlite.

In 2020, Norlite came under increased scrutiny for burning a toxic firefighting foam that contained a class of industrial chemicals known as PFAS. Those chemicals don’t easily break down in the environment and scientists have found they are associated with numerous health concerns, including cancers and infertility. After the plant was found to have incinerated more than 2 million pounds of the foam through a contract with the Department of Defense, the state banned incinerating the material.

For Joe Ritchie, 23, who grew up at the Saratoga Sites public housing complex, dust from the plant was a part of everyday life. Small specks would regularly settle on homes and cars in clumps. When he took a paper towel to wipe down his windows, it would turn black. 

Ritchie worries that his former neighbors’ health conditions, including frequent nosebleeds and asthma attacks, could have been a result of living next to Norlite. Across the courtyard from his former house, he points out the home of a neighbor who died from lung cancer just a few months ago; he knows state data shows the area has a higher than expected rate of lung cancer, and wonders how much Norlite may have contributed to those conditions.

The DEC’s monitoring of the plant’s emissions in recent years has found that large inhalable dust particles from Norlite reach Saratoga Sites. “Holding Norlite accountable for its environmental violations impacting surrounding communities, including frontline environmental justice neighborhoods, is a top priority for the Department of Environmental Conservation,” a department spokesperson said in a statement about those results earlier this year.

The state health department said it is aware of DEC’s site monitoring data and supports the agency’s effort to regulate Norlite. In a report on cancer rates and health outcomes in the area released in September, the agency said its review could not prove whether “specific exposures,” like Norlite’s emissions, contributed to health conditions.

“I just want there to be justice for the people of Saratoga Sites, who lived here for generations.”

In response to The Intercept’s request for comment, Norlite spokesperson Richard Bamberger pointed to the health department’s recent review. “There is no evidence of any negative health effects from the Norlite facility,” he said. 

Ritchie hopes the case, by invoking the Green Amendment, will finally provide some relief for the community that long lived next door. “I just want there to be justice for the people of Saratoga Sites, who lived here for generations,” he said, “who have been voiceless for forever.” 

Permitting Polluters 

In the months after the state filed its lawsuit, the DEC and Norlite reached an agreement: In exchange for additional monitoring and dust control measures, the plant could continue operating while the lawsuit winds its way through the courts. 

But even after being sued, Norlite has continued to violate state law. In May, emissions of inhalable particles from the site exceeded the state’s air pollution limits and violated the site’s permit. According to the state’s notice of violation, Norlite’s emissions reached levels that the federal government deems “unhealthy,” putting vulnerable groups like children and those with severe health conditions particularly at risk. 

The attorney general’s office said it cannot comment on ongoing litigation and did not respond to questions about how it interprets the Green Amendment. The DEC also declined to comment on the pending litigation. 

Lights Out Norlite has now intervened in the state’s lawsuit, claiming in a legal filing that both Norlite and the DEC are responsible for the incinerator’s ongoing harm to the community. The group alleges that, by permitting the plant to operate and failing to bring it into compliance, the DEC has violated their Green Amendment rights.

So far, the state has vehemently disagreed with Lights Out Norlite’s position. In an August court filing, Attorney General Letitia James argued that the courts cannot order the DEC to enforce applicable laws and regulations against Norlite, even under the Green Amendment. It is solely the DEC’s decision whether and how to enforce the state’s environmental laws — the new amendment does not alter that discretion, the state argued. 

James’s response is not surprising, since it’s the attorney general’s responsibility to protect state agencies, said Nicholas Robinson, a professor of environmental law at Pace University. But, if a judge agrees with the state’s argument, it would be extremely damaging to the amendment’s strength for the people of New York. 

“Once the amendment was passed, the rights of an individual shifted,” Robinson said. He added that the DEC “can no longer permit, under the constitution, an enterprise to cause damage to the environment, or the air quality, or the health of a person.”

The state also argued that the new amendment does not empower courts to compel actions from agencies, such as shutting down the Norlite plant. James said in the filing that though the DEC may ultimately decide to revoke the plant’s permits, the court may not direct it to do so. 

However, legal experts and advocates say the attorney general’s interpretation doesn’t reflect how the courts have interpreted other constitutional rights. For those protections, like freedom of speech or freedom of religion, the state has an obligation not to infringe on them. 

“Yes, the agency has discretion,” said Rachel Spector, a senior attorney with the Northeast office of Earthjustice, an environmental law advocacy organization. “But its discretion has limits. It doesn’t have discretion to violate the state constitution.” 

Already, a separate judge has rejected part of the state’s argument in a previous Green Amendment case. In that case, brought by a group opposing a landfill in western New York, the judge ruled that the amendment could compel the state to take action — and explicitly called out the state’s push to weaken it.

“Indeed, the vigor of the State’s opposition to this lawsuit does not bode well for its enforcement of the Green Amendment,” Judge John Ark wrote in the decision. 

The state has since appealed his ruling.

A National Movement

New York’s attempt to limit the scope of its Green Amendment follows other states, seen as much less environmentally progressive, that have sought to weaken or ignore their own constitutional environmental protections. However, in Pennsylvania and Montana, the only states with similar amendments in their respective bills of rights, recent court rulings have begun to turn that tide. 

Courts have begun to force states to recognize the amendments as meaningful and enforceable, adding momentum to a national movement, said van Rossum, of Green Amendments For the Generations. Most recently, in August, a Montana judge’s landmark ruling found that a state law that prohibited agencies from considering climate impacts when permitting energy projects violated the young plaintiffs’ rights to a “clean and healthful environment” under its Green Amendment. 

Now, 15 other states have proposed similar amendments, according to van Rossum’s count. Though the language of each differs slightly, and their legal interpretations lie with each state’s judges, many are looking to New York to see how its courts interpret the nation’s newest Green Amendment, she said.

“It seems like they’re carving out a position that a change in the constitution doesn’t affect their discretion at all, which is clearly not true.”

The judge is expected to rule on New York’s motion to dismiss Lights Out Norlite’s Green Amendment claims later this year. To those living nearby, the health of the community may hang in the balance. And for others across the country, the decision of New York courts will set an example for how powerful constitutional Green Amendment rights can be — and how strongly states will fight to limit their reach. 

“It seems like they’re carving out a position that a change in the constitution doesn’t affect their discretion at all, which is clearly not true,” said Rebecca Bratspies, founding director of the Center for Urban Environmental Reform at the City University of New York School of Law. “To suggest that their discretion doesn’t need to be rethought and reexamined in light of this profound change in New York law seems to me really misguided.”

The post New Yorkers Voted to Put Environmental Rights in Their Constitution — but the Attorney General Is Fighting Back appeared first on The Intercept.

The petrochemical industry is now pivoting to another solution: “advanced” recycling. The term, also known as chemical recycling, is used to describe a variety of approaches that can supposedly turn even the most hard-to-recycle plastics into “sustainable” fuels or oils and chemicals that can be used in new plastic production.

But a new, 159-page report, released today by Beyond Plastics and the International Pollutants Elimination Network, or IPEN, casts serious doubt on the technology’s ability to make even a modest dent on the world’s growing plastic burden. In the most comprehensive report on chemical recycling facilities in the U.S. to date, researchers looked at the operations of 11 companies across the country to examine the plastic industry’s claim that chemical recycling can significantly help reduce global plastic pollution.

“The science and data currently available do not support this claim and actually point to the conclusion that chemical recycling would support expansion of plastic production, while potentially causing unacceptable levels of environmental and social harm — as well as impacts on human health — through emissions, waste generation, energy consumption, and contaminated outputs,” the report’s authors write.

The 11 facilities have the stated ability to process less than 1.3 percent of America’s annual plastic waste.

Researchers found that, collectively, the 11 facilities have the stated ability to process less than 1.3 percent of America’s annual plastic waste. Additionally, it was unclear if many of the facilities were even operating at their maximum stated capacity.

“For a lot of these plants, how much plastic they’ve actually processed is unknown,” Jennifer Congdon, a report contributor and deputy director of Beyond Plastics, told The Intercept. “There’s no requirement for public disclosure.”

Publicly Subsidized Failure

The lack of transparency surrounding chemical recycling facilities is especially concerning given the fact that five of the 11 plants have received public subsidies in the form of federal grants, state tax abatements, low-interest green bonds, or government loan guarantees.

The Brightmark Energy facility in Ashley, Indiana, for example, has received $4.55 million in grants and tax credits, as well as $185 million in tax-free bonds, according to the report’s findings. However, the plant is still operating in a test phase at one-fiftieth of its publicized capacity, four years after breaking ground.

Despite failing to achieve its production targets, Brightmark attempted to expand to Georgia in 2021 to build what would be the nation’s largest chemical recycling plant. The economic development group of Georgia’s Macon-Bibb County inked a tentative deal to provide $500 million in tax-exempt bonds to finance the construction of the plant, contingent on evidence that Brightmark’s Indiana plant was producing and selling product. Brightmark was unable to provide such evidence, and the project was officially killed in April 2022.

“The Brightmark example is really important, because they were not even fully operating and trying to expand into Georgia,” said Congdon. “Georgia said, ‘You show us that you’re actually making product and selling it, and then we’ll give you this money.’ That didn’t happen. When they’re being held to account to actually prove that they’re viable, in this case with Brightmark, it just didn’t work.”

“The math doesn’t work out.”

At the federal level, various incentives exist that could promote the continued expansion of chemical recycling, including the Department of Energy’s $25 million Strategy for Plastic Innovation, as well as the Inflation Reduction Act, which makes chemical recycling “approaches” eligible for a $10 billion tax credit program, though the report’s authors note that “it is not clear how such approaches are defined.”

“If we’re going to be putting money into projects that are going to address plastic pollution, it should be source reduction strategies,” Congdon said. “I would hope that any public official is doing their due diligence on whether or not they should be using public resources to finance these things. They should actually look into the viability and the pollution before making their choice, and I think the math doesn’t work out.”

A Regulatory Shell Game

Access to public coffers is not the only way the U.S. government has encouraged chemical recycling. Future projects may benefit from a recent spate of state-level laws that have lessened the regulatory burden on so-called advanced recycling. The bills reclassify chemical recycling as manufacturing, which faces less stringent environmental guidelines. The American Chemistry Council, the country’s largest petrochemical industry group, has supported the bills with a lobbying push, claiming that solid waste facility permits are often inapplicable to chemical recycling and the change would simply regulate the facilities more accurately.

“There’s an enormous amount of industry-driven hype around chemical recycling and the main reason for that is they don’t want to see legislation at the state or federal level that restricts the production of plastic,” said Lee Bell, policy adviser to IPEN, a network of more than 600 nongovernmental organizations in over 125 countries. “It’s widely agreed that the only way to reduce plastic pollution in a substantive way is to cut production of plastic itself.”

Indeed, the United States’ support for chemical recycling appears to be an outlier in the international field.

At the 2023 Basel Convention, the leading international decision-making body on the movement and disposal of hazardous waste, delegates rejected the inclusion of chemical recycling in global guidance on plastic waste management.

“During the extended negotiations on the matter, over 50 countries objected to the inclusion of chemical recycling in the guidelines on the basis that there was no available independent data to demonstrate that chemical recycling constituted environmentally sound management of plastic waste,” states the Beyond Plastics report. “Despite 50 years of operation of these technologies, no empirical data was presented to demonstrate they met criteria for environmentally sound management.”

Bell, who was a member of the Basel Convention Working Group on the technical guidelines for environmentally sound management of plastic waste from 2019 to 2023, provided more background in an email to The Intercept.

“The Africa region spoke as a group opposing the inclusion of chemical recycling and they represented 54 countries, mainly on the basis that they did not want to become the destination for these technologies, the hazardous waste they create and the toxic emissions they produce, having already experienced the dumping of other wastes from the global north under the guise of ‘recycling,’” Bell wrote. “They were not alone and several other countries also had serious concerns about the lack of data associated with the industry.”

The data that is available about chemical recycling raises serious concerns for public health and environmental risks. A report from the National Resources Defense Council in February 2022 looked at state-level permit data and found that many chemical recycling facilities are permitted to release hazardous air pollutants and “chemicals known or suspected to cause cancer or other serious health effects like birth defects.”

The Beyond Plastics report also cites scientific literature that has found “emissions of persistent, cancer-causing compounds from the chemical recycling facilities or their fuel products,” including dioxins, volatile organic compounds, and heavy metals. The authors conducted a 5-mile analysis around each of the 11 plants using the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool, which found that “eight of the plants are located in areas with lower-than-average levels of income, compared to either state or national averages; and seven have higher-than-average concentrations of people of color than the rest of the state and country.”

“What data we do have raises red flags about this technology,” said Bell. “If we were to see wide-scale scale-up and build-out, we could foresee very, very significant emission impacts and very little to show for it in terms of recycled plastic production.”

The post Unproven “Advanced Recycling” Facilities Have Received Millions in Public Subsidies appeared first on The Intercept.

William Nordhaus, who turned 82 this year, was the first economist in our time to attempt to quantify the cost of climate change. His climate-modeling wizardry, which won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018, has made him one of the world’s most consequential thinkers. His ideas have been adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, global risk managers, the financial services industry, and universities worldwide that teach climate economics. Nordhaus’s work literally could affect the lives of billions of people. This is because his quantification of the immediate costs of climate action — as balanced against the long-term economic harms of not acting — is the basis of key proposals to mitigate carbon emissions. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the fate of nations and a sizable portion of humanity depends on whether his projections are correct.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has assumed Nordhaus is to be trusted. The integrated assessment models used at the IPCC are based on Nordhausian visions of adaptation to warming that only marginally reduces global gross domestic product. If future GDP is barely affected by rising temperatures, there’s less incentive for world governments to act now to reduce emissions.

Nordhaus’s models tell us that at a temperature rise somewhere between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius, the global economy reaches “optimal” adaptation. What’s optimal in this scenario is that fossil fuels can continue to be burned late into the 21st century, powering economic growth, jobs, and innovation. Humanity, asserts Nordhaus, can adapt to such warming with modest infrastructure investments, gradual social change, and, in wealthy developed countries, little sacrifice. All the while, the world economy expands with the spewing of more carbon.

His models, it turns out, are fatally flawed, and a growing number of Nordhaus’s colleagues are repudiating his work. Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank chief economist and professor of economics at Columbia University, told me recently that Nordhaus’s projections are “wildly wrong.” Stiglitz singled out as especially bizarre the idea that optimization of the world economy would occur at 3.5 C warming, which physical scientists say would produce global chaos and a kind of climate genocide in the poorest and most vulnerable nations.

In a journal article published last year, Stiglitz and co-authors Nicholas Stern and Charlotte Taylor, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, declared that Nordhausian integrated assessment models are “inadequate to capture deep uncertainty and extreme risk.” They fail to incorporate “potential loss of lives and livelihoods on immense scale and fundamental transformation and destruction of our natural environment.”

Climate change is one of the instances, Stiglitz and Stern told me in an email, in which “it is generally agreed there is extreme risk — we know there are some really extreme events that could occur — and we know we cannot pretend (i.e., act as if) we know the probabilities. Nordhaus’s work doesn’t appropriately take into account either extreme risk or deep uncertainty.”

In other words, the economist who has been embraced as a guiding light by the global institution tasked with shepherding humanity through the climate crisis, who has been awarded a Nobel for climate costing, who is widely feted as the doyen of his field, doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Among most scientists, it’s lunacy to discuss optimization of anything anywhere when the globe hits even 2 C warming. Climate researchers Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, in a widely cited 2017 paper, defined 1.5 C warming as “dangerous” and 3 C or greater as “catastrophic,” while above 5 C was “beyond catastrophic,” with consequences that include “existential threats.” The late Will Steffen, a pioneering Earth systems thinker, warned alongside many of his colleagues that 2 C was a critical marker. At 2 C warming, we could “activate other tipping elements in a domino-like cascade that could take the Earth system to even higher temperatures.” Such “tipping cascades” could lead quickly to “conditions that would be inhospitable to current human societies,” a scenario known as hothouse Earth.

But the path to hothouse Earth will be long and tortured. When I interviewed him in 2021, Steffen, who died last January at age 75, was concerned about “near-term collapse” of the global food system. Drought and heat have already reduced global cereal production by as much as 10 percent in recent years, according to Steffen. “Food shocks are likely to get much worse,” he wrote in a 2019 piece co-authored with Aled Jones, director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University. “The risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing, and rises much faster beyond 1.5 C of global heating. … Such shocks pose grave threats — rocketing food prices, civil unrest, major financial losses, starvation, and death.” 

In a 2022 report titled “Climate Endgame: Exploring Catastrophic Climate Change Scenarios,” 11 leading Earth systems and climate scientists, Steffen among them, concluded there is “ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic … at even modest levels of warming.” According to the report:

Climate change could exacerbate vulnerabilities and cause multiple, indirect stresses (such as economic damage, loss of land, and water and food insecurity) that coalesce into system-wide synchronous failures. … It is plausible that a sudden shift in climate could trigger systems failures that unravel societies across the globe.

What these scientists are describing is global civilizational collapse, possibly in the lifetime of a young or even middle-aged reader of this article. 

According to the “Climate Endgame” report, the current trajectory of carbon emissions puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1 C and 3.9 C by 2100. This is a horrific prospect. Earth systems analysts tell us that habitable and cultivable land in a 3 C to 4 C warming regime would be so reduced and ecosystem services so battered that the deaths of billions of people could occur in the next eight decades or less.

Terrible numbers get thrown around. But scientists mean what they say. Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and Uppsala University in Sweden, asserts that “something like 10 percent of the planet’s population — around half a billion people — will survive if global temperatures rise by 4 C.” He notes, with a modicum of hopefulness, that we “will not make all human beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4 C.”

Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a leading researcher on climate tipping points and “safe boundaries” for humanity, projects that in a 4 C warmer world, “it’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that.” Global population today stands at 7.6 billion, with 80 million people added every year.

By contrast, when Nordhaus looked at the effects of 6 C warming, he did not forecast horror. Instead, we should expect “damages” of between 8.5 percent and 12.5 percent of world GDP over the course of the 21st century. Writing in the Economic Journal, Stern set Nordhaus straight in the harshest terms: “We could see deaths on a huge scale, migration of billions of people, and severe conflicts around the world,” he wrote. “It is profoundly implausible that numbers around 10 percent of GDP offer a sensible description of the kind of disruption and catastrophe that 6 C of warming could cause.”

In an email to The Intercept, Nordhaus characterized his colleagues’ critiques as “a distorted and inaccurate description of the work and my views. I have long supported carbon pricing and climate-focused [research and development], which are key to slowing climate change. The proposals in my writings have pointed to targets that are FAR more ambitious than current policies.” He declined to elaborate on any distortions or inaccuracies.

To understand the gap between climate scientists and climate economists, one must first understand that most economists — the folks we call mainstream or neoclassical economists — have little knowledge of or interest in how things really work on planet Earth. The problem of their ecological benightedness starts as a matter of training at university, where a typical undergraduate course in economics prepares students for a lifetime of abject ignorance about the complex underpinnings of the thing called the “market.”

Start with your typical textbook for the dismal science — say, the definitive one by Paul Samuelson, co-written with Nordhaus, titled “Economics.” The book is considered “the standard-bearer” of “modern economics principles.” You’ll find in its pages a circular flow diagram that shows “households” and “firms” exchanging money and goods. This is called the market. Households are the owners of land, labor, and capital, which they sell to firms for the manufacture of goods. Households then buy the goods, enriching firms, which allows the firms to buy more land, labor, and capital, enriching households. The quantity in the flow diagram, in ideal circumstances, is ever expanding: The profits of firms grow and so does the income of households.

A simple, imperturbable closed system that’s also ludicrous, fantastical, a fairy tale. In the circular flow diagram of standard economics, nothing enters from the outside to keep it flowing, and nothing exits as a result of the flow. There are no resource inputs from the environment: no oil, coal, or natural gas, no minerals and metals, no water, soil, or food. There are no outputs into the ecosphere: no garbage, no pollution, no greenhouse gasses. That’s because in the circular flow diagram, there is no ecosphere, no environment. The economy is seen as a self-renewing, perpetual-motion merry-go-round set in a vacuum.

The economy is seen as a self-renewing, perpetual-motion merry-go-round set in a vacuum.

“I taught that foolish little diagram to undergraduates at Louisiana State University for 30 years,” the late Herman Daly, one of the 20th century’s great dissenters from standard economics, told me in an interview before his death at age 84 last year. “I thought it was just great. I was well beyond a Ph.D. before it came crashing in on my head that this is a very bad paradigm.”

In the 1970s, working at the University of Maryland, Daly pioneered the field of ecological economics, which models the biophysical reality that delimits all economies. “The human economy,” wrote Daly, “is a fully contained wholly dependent growing subsystem of the non-growing ecosphere” — a commonsense observation that amounted to heresy in mainstream economics. Daly emphasized that the economy depends on nonrenewable resources that are always subject to depletion and a functioning biosphere whose limits need to be respected. His most important contribution to the literature of this renegade economics was his famous (in some circles, infamous) “steady state” model that accounts for biophysical limits to growth. Daly paid the price of heterodoxy. His fellow economists declared him an apostate.

E.F. Schumacher arrived at similar conclusions about mainstream economics in his 1973 book “Small Is Beautiful,” which became a bestseller. “It is inherent in the methodology of economics to ignore man’s dependence on the natural world,” Schumacher wrote, the emphasis his. Economics, said Schumacher, only touches the “surface of society.” It has no capacity to probe the depths of the systemic interactions between civilization and the planet. Faced with the “pressing problems of the times” — the negative environmental effects of growth — economics acts “as a most effective barrier against the understanding of these problems, owing to its addiction to purely quantitative analysis and its timorous refusal to look into the real nature of things.”

Purely quantitative analysis is the amphetamine of the mainstream economist. The steady dosing keeps his pencil sharp and his eyes blind. It has not gone unnoticed that graduate schools produce a kind of ingenious hollowness in economists who race to the finish on the schools’ assembly line. As early as 1991, a report from a commission on “graduate education in economics” warned that the university system in the United States was churning out “too many idiot savants,” economists “skilled in technique but innocent of real economic issues” — unable, that is, to look into the real nature of things.

By what mathemagical sorcery has Nordhaus, celebrated member of the Ivy League elite, arrived at projections that are so out of line with those of climate scientists?

The answer is in something called DICE, the mother of integrated assessment models for climate costing. It stands for dynamic integrated climate-economy. Nordhaus formulated DICE for the first time in 1992 and updated it most recently last year.

In DICE, the effect of a warmed climate is measured solely as a percentage loss (or gain) in GDP. Growth of GDP is assumed to be “exogenously determined,” in the language of economics theory, meaning it will persist at a set rate over time regardless of climate shocks. Earth systems scientists will tell you that to assume exogenously determined growth is the height of hubristic arrogance. By contrast, Nordhaus assures us in his DICE model that growth continues like a cruising Cadillac on the California coast with an occasional pothole. But the reality is rainstorms, mudslides, earthquakes, and other drivers on the road.

This blithe presumption of constant growth in a climate-damaged future is the first of Nordhaus’s errors, as Stern and Stiglitz point out. “Nordhaus’s model doesn’t fully take into account the fact that if we don’t do more to avert climate change, climate change will affect growth rates,” they told me in an email. “We will have to spend more and more repairing damage, leaving us less and less to spend on growth-enhancing investments.” And, they add, some outcomes arising from weak climate action could profoundly alter what is possible in terms of economic activity. Extreme heat, submergence, desertification, hurricanes, and so on: Such weather events and broad climatic shifts could render large areas of the world low productivity, unproductive, or uninhabitable.

The second of Nordhaus’s errors is the use of reductionist mathematical formulas. He employs something called a quadratic to calculate the relationship between rising temperatures and economic outcomes. Among the properties of a quadratic is that it permits no discontinuities; there are no points at which the relationship implied by the function breaks down. But smooth functions chart smooth progressions, and climate change will be anything but smooth. Such calculations do not account for extreme weather, vector-borne diseases, displacement and migration, international and local conflict, mass morbidity and mortality, biodiversity crash, state fragility, or food, fuel, and water shortages. There’s no measurement of amplifying feedbacks and tipping points such as Arctic sea ice loss, shutdown of vital ocean currents, collapse of the Amazon, and the like.

The third of Nordhaus’s errors is related to similarly simplistic formulas. Nordhaus calculates GDP of a particular location as fundamentally related to the temperature of that place. So, if in 2023 it’s a certain temperature in London, and the GDP in London is such-and-such, it’s reasonable to assume that when latitudes north of London rise in temperature in the future, GDP will rise to be the same as London’s today. Make of this what you will — it’s foolishness on a grand scale, and yet it’s central to the Nordhaus model.

The fourth fatal error Nordhaus makes is the most farcical. In a 1991 paper that became a touchstone for all his later work, he assumed that, because 87 percent of GDP occurs in what he called “carefully controlled environments” — otherwise known as “indoors” — it will not be affected by climate. Nordhaus’s list of the indoor activities free of any effects from climate disruption include manufacturing, mining, transportation, communication, finance, insurance, real estate, trade, private sector services, and government services. Nordhaus appears to be conflating weather with climate. The one can make trouble for outdoor dining plans on your yacht. The other sinks the yacht. 

Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like. Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 percent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” It is unfortunate for his calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97 percent of GDP depends. Without food — strange that one needs to reiterate this — there is no economy, no society, no civilization. Yet Nordhaus treats agriculture as indifferently fungible.

This crude mess of a model is what won him the Nobel. “It shows how little quality control goes into selecting a winner in economics that he was even nominated for the prize,” Steve Keen, a research fellow at University College London and self-described renegade economist, told me. Keen has authored numerous books that question the orthodoxy of mainstream economics. He was an early critic of the integrated assessment models at the IPCC that owe their optimistic sheen to Nordhaus’s methodology. His caustic 2021 essay, “The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change,” delved into the problems of Nordhausian models.

“When it comes to climate, the guy is an idiot: an idiot savant, but still fundamentally an idiot.”

“Any investigative journalist who overcame a fear of equations and simply read Nordhaus’s texts would have known that his work was nonsense,” Keen told me. “Assuming that 87 percent of the economy would be ‘negligibly affected by climate change’ because it takes place in ‘carefully controlled environments’?”

“When it comes to climate,” Keen said, “the guy is an idiot: an idiot savant, but still fundamentally an idiot.”

And it’s not just Nordhaus. Climate economists have followed dutifully in his footsteps and come up with cost models that appear to have no relationship with known laws of physics, the dynamics of climate, or the complexities of Earth systems.

A 2016 study by economists David Anthoff of University of California, Berkeley; Francisco Estrada of the Institute for Environmental Studies in Amsterdam; and Richard Tol of the University of Sussex offers one of the more egregious examples of Nordhausian nonsense. (Tol is one of Nordhaus’s protégés, and Nordhaus is listed as a reviewer of the paper.) The three academics boldly assert that shutdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC — a pivotally important Earth system that loops warm equatorial water toward the Arctic and cold water back south — could have beneficial effects on the European economy.

Over the last several thousand years, the AMOC, also known as the thermohaline circulation, has functioned to keep Europe relatively warm in winter because of the warm water it draws northward from the equator. The slowing and eventual shutdown of this system could plunge Europe and broad parts of the Northern Hemisphere into extreme cold. Such a shutdown is a growing likelihood as glacial melt pours into the North Atlantic and alters the delicate balance of salt water and fresh water that drives the looping current. 

For Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, however, collapse of one of the Earth systems that undergirds the climatic stability of the Holocene might be a good thing. “If the [AMOC] slows down a little, the global impact is a positive 0.2-0.3 percent of income,” they concluded. “This goes up to 1.3 percent for a more pronounced slowdown.” They argued that while climate heating cooks the rest of the world, European countries will benefit from a cooling effect of the current’s collapse.

This sunny assessment comes as a surprise to James Hansen, father of climate science, who has calculated that a massive temperature differential between the poles and the equator would occur with an AMOC shutdown, producing superstorms of immense fury across the Atlantic Ocean. According to Hansen, the last time Earth experienced those kinds of temperature differentials, during the interglacial Eemian era roughly 120,000 years ago, raging tempests deposited house-sized boulders on coastlines in Europe and the Caribbean. Waves from the storms were estimated to have surged inland to 40 meters above sea level.

Under these extreme conditions, what would happen to shipping lanes, coastal cities and ports, and trans-Atlantic traffic of all kinds? For the climate simpletons Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, the question doesn’t come up. “It will be a helluva lot stormier on the North Atlantic, especially for Europeans,” Hansen told me in an email. His study team concluded that shutdown of AMOC “is in the cards this century, possibly by mid-century, with continued high emissions.”

It gets worse. Simon Dietz, at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and his fellow economists James Rising, Thomas Stoerk, and Gernot Wagner have offered some of the most ignorant visions of our climate future, using Nordhausian math models. They examined the consequences to GDP of hitting eight Earth system tipping points that climate scientists have identified as existential threats to industrial civilization. The tipping points are as familiar as a funeral litany to anybody schooled in climate literature: loss of Arctic summer ice; loss of the Amazon rainforest; loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets; release of ocean methane hydrates; release of carbon in permafrost; collapse of the AMOC; and collapse of the Indian monsoon.

Dietz and friends came to the astounding conclusion that if all eight were tipped, the economic cost by 2100 would amount to an additional 1.4 percent of lost GDP on top of the roughly 8 to 12 percent that Nordhaus projected.

Think of this projection in commonsense terms: A negligible effect on world affairs when the Arctic during summer is deep blue rather than white; when the jungle of the Amazon is no longer green but brown savannah or desert; when in Greenland and the West Antarctic, white ice is barren rock. A transformation of immense proportions on the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere, and in terrestrial biotic communities. Ocean methane hydrates have an energy content that exceeds that of all other fossil fuel deposits. Permafrost holds an amount of carbon roughly twice the current carbon content of the atmosphere. With the weakening or collapse of the AMOC, Europe could be plunged into conditions akin to the Little Ice Age, with drastic reduction of the land area suitable for wheat and corn farming. Increased variability of the Indian monsoon would jeopardize the lives of over a billion people.

“The claim that these changes would have effectively zero impact upon the human economy is extraordinary,” wrote Keen. The reality is that if all eight Earth system tipping points were reached, humanity would be in terrible trouble.

An uncharitable view of the work of climate economists in the Nordhaus school is that they offer a kind of sociopathy as policy prescription. Nordhaus estimates that as economic activity heads poleward with warming, the massive reduction in GDP in the tropics will be offset by optimal adaptation in the Global North. “Massive reduction in GDP,” of course, is not explicitly understood by Nordhaus as food system collapse across the equator, followed by social collapse, mass death, wars, and biblical exoduses that produce cascading nonlinear effects drawing the world into a nexus of unknowns.

Nothing to worry about, assures Nordhaus: The violent extinction of low-GDP nations will hardly affect the outlook for economic growth because things will improve in the cold Global North. This is an embrace of imagined silver linings in a climate genocide.

This is an embrace of imagined silver linings in a climate genocide.

Do governments, policymakers, and the public have any clue that the message from climate economist elites is unhinged? So far, we have followed along in the belief that all is well. One of the better indicators of this lemming-like fealty to a narrative of delusory optimism is in the financial sector.

Keen authored a report for investors this year in which he noted that pension funds have swallowed whole the Nordhausian projections of our sunny future as the climate system collapses. “Following the advice of investment consultants, pension funds have informed their members that global warming of 2-4.3 C will have only a minimal impact upon their portfolios,” Keen wrote. “This results in a huge disconnect between what scientists expect from global warming, and what pensioners/investors/financial systems are prepared for.” Keen does not expect things to end well for investors.

When I asked him what needed to be done to alter policy at the IPCC, Keen replied, “We need everyone to be as angry as I am.” Negligence by economists like Nordhaus, he said, “will end up killing billions of people.”

Andrew Glikson, who teaches at Australian National University in Canberra and advises the IPCC, has written about the coming era of mass human death, what he calls the Plutocene, the natural successor to the Anthropocene. Global governments, he charges, are “criminals” for ushering in the Plutocene in pursuit of short-term political and economic gain. I first reached out to him during the black summer of bushfires that raged across Australia in 2020. Glikson’s mood was foul then, and it has not gotten better since.

“The governing classes have given up on the survival of numerous species and future generations,” he told me, “and their inaction constitutes the ultimate crime against life on Earth.” Part of the reason for inaction is the false cheer that Nordhaus has spread with his math-genius, climate-idiot models.

The post When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics appeared first on The Intercept.

Al Jaber wore a sage green kandura, round glasses, and a white headdress. He spoke slowly and deliberately, laying out his vision for COP28, which will be held in the UAE in December. But his assured manner belied the barrage of criticism he was facing in the press.

Al Jaber is not just this year’s COP president. He also heads the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, known as Adnoc. It is the first time any CEO, let alone one from the fossil fuel industry, has been COP president. The announcement was met with fury from climate activists. Kerry, meanwhile, the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, appeared nonplussed.

During his speech at the Global Energy Forum — an event the Atlantic Council, an American think tank, has hosted in the UAE for the past six years — Al Jaber said that when the time comes, the oil-rich nation will celebrate “the last barrel of oil.” He spoke about his time leading the UAE’s state-owned renewable energy company Masdar and called for “practical solutions” to the climate crisis at COP28.

What he didn’t say was that as CEO of Adnoc, he is currently overseeing a major expansion of the company’s oil and gas output. And the oil company’s staff has played a critical role in shaping the summit. At least a dozen Adnoc employees have been appointed to roles on the hosting team, including two staffers designated as negotiators for the UAE. The fossil fuel industry has been deeply involved in the annual COPs since they began in the 1990s, sending hundreds of lobbyists each year, as The Intercept previously reported. But this year, the industry is closer than ever to one of the most important international climate forums.

When he left the stage, Al Jaber returned to the vacant seat next to Kerry, who stood to shake his hand. Kerry has met with Al Jaber more than a dozen times since taking up the role of U.S. climate envoy in 2021, more than he has met with almost any other foreign official. A few days after the Global Energy Forum, Kerry described Al Jaber as a “terrific choice” to lead the summit.

Al Jaber’s first speech as COP28 president had many of the hallmarks of his closely choreographed public appearances: an event organized by a respected international institution; foreign dignitaries in the audience; no questions afterward. It was followed by a press release sent out to scores of journalists by Edelman, a major U.S. public relations firm.

Al Jaber’s reputation has been shaped by some of the world’s most influential PR agencies, which have used his roles as CEO and chair of the UAE’s renewable energy company and visionary behind the futuristic Masdar City to make him the face of the country’s fight against climate change.

The Centre for Climate Reporting and Drilled, in collaboration with The Intercept, reviewed hundreds of pages of U.S. Justice Department filings and internal communications strategy documents that reveal the careful curation of Al Jaber’s image over the years. We also interviewed a number of Al Jaber’s former colleagues and advisers, who asked that their names be withheld for fear of professional repercussions. Despite stalled progress on Al Jaber’s acclaimed eco-city and questions over his green credentials as he ramps up oil and gas production, PR agencies and consultants secured him the support of global leaders and institutions and placed him at the helm of COP28.

The Fixer

Al Jaber wears many hats. In addition to being a Cabinet minister and chair of Masdar, he has spent the past three years serving as both an oil boss and the UAE’s special envoy for climate change — positions that many would see as diametrically opposed. His supporters point to this as an asset, reflecting an ability to bridge the gap between the fossil fuel industry and the climate movement. But even before his presidency was announced, Al Jaber was wary of what the media might say.

Most of the major news outlets in the UAE are state-owned or controlled by press groups with ties to the government. Al Jaber is more comfortable than most with the local press; he previously served as chair of the National Media Council. The international press poses an entirely different challenge. Without the ability to control what he’s asked or how he’s portrayed, Al Jaber has relied on the help of highly paid consultants to manage his image.

They have built Al Jaber a reputation as a dependable technocrat, a “fixer.” One of the UAE’s “objectives” for COP28 has been to position Al Jaber as a “climate action leader” and “consensus-enabler,” an internal document from the office of the UAE’s climate envoy shows.

But behind closed doors, Al Jaber is said to be an exacting boss with a domineering approach. Two former COP28 team members claimed Al Jaber once threw a laptop at a wall in a fit of anger; one of them said he had a reputation as a “bully.” COP staff and the PR agencies he’s hired to help with the summit have been expected work around the clock, and morale has hit rock bottom, according to three sources who worked with the COP team.

Al Jaber declined to be interviewed for this story and did not respond to questions about his behavior toward staff members.

The COP presidency is supposed to be impartial, and critics are concerned that the person with the power to shape summit negotiations will not be able to separate himself from his duties as CEO of an oil company undertaking a major expansion. Al Jaber has rebuffed calls to step down from Adnoc, insisting there is no conflict of interest. But the line between the oil company and COP28 has “blurred,” one former summit staffer said. At one point, the COP team was working out of Adnoc headquarters.

Concerned about crossover, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international body that oversees the COP process, sent questions to the team in January to ensure a firewall was in place, querying whether staff from the oil company had access to COP28 strategic documents. Yet Adnoc employees were still being consulted on how to respond to media inquiries about the summit as recently as June, according to reporting by The Guardian.

One of Al Jaber’s advisers at Adnoc was signing off on communications leaving the COP28 team while still employed at the oil company, according to people who worked with him. While attending a U.N. conference in June, Oliver Phillips registered as a representative of Adnoc. But according to two sources who worked on COP28 communications, Phillips had already played a key role in steering PR efforts for the summit.

Phillips doesn’t declare any affiliation with the oil company on his LinkedIn account, which states that the former CNN and MSNBC producer has been a senior adviser at the UAE’s climate envoy office and the ministry Al Jaber oversees since 2015. But multiple sources said that until recently, Phillips was an employee of Adnoc.

COP28 spokesperson Alan VanderMolen said that Phillips is “now working full-time” on the summit. He did not respond to questions about when Phillips’s employment with the oil company ended. Neither Phillips nor Adnoc responded to requests for comment.

VanderMolen defended Al Jaber’s qualifications to lead the climate summit. “It is in our common interest to have someone with deep experience across the entire energy value chain in this role,” VanderMolen said. “His experience as a climate diplomat, serving two terms as the UAE’s climate envoy and attending over 10 previous COPs, makes him ideally suited to lead a consensus-driven process.”

“The COP28 presidency has its own independent office, staff, and a standalone IT system,” VanderMolen added. “The COP28 staff are separate from any other entity and operate in coordination with the UNFCCC.”

Since the UAE began its bid to host the summit, major players in the PR industry have also been involved in handling communications for the COP28 team, including APCO, Burson Cohn & Wolfe, Edelman, and Teneo. Even the agencies have struggled to see the line between COP28 and Al Jaber’s other roles. Some agencies acting on behalf of COP28 were engaged by Adnoc and Masdar rather than the COP team, according to sources with direct knowledge and filings with the U.S. Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which requires U.S. companies to report their dealings with foreign governments.

Lindsay Clifton, former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee and deputy press secretary for President Donald Trump, was recently included on a list of Edelman staff working on Al Jaber’s COP team, according to an internal communications strategy document. At the White House, she defended Trump’s stance on climate change as his administration rolled back policies intended to help abate global heating. Clifton has been working at Edelman since 2019 and is now managing director of its global advisory arm. She was listed as Al Jaber’s direct “media support” during the U.N. General Assembly in September, the strategy document indicates. Clifton did not respond to requests for comment.

It’s not the first time a COP summit has been held in a petrostate; Qatar, another Middle Eastern nation, hosted in 2012. But Al Jaber’s role as both summit president and Adnoc CEO is unprecedented. Amnesty International labeled it a conflict of interest and said Al Jaber was “unfit” to lead the climate talks, while activists have compared his appointment to putting a tobacco company in charge of an anti-smoking campaign. Former Vice President Al Gore characterized his presidency as a sign that the fossil fuel industry has “brazenly seized control” of the COP process. In May, 130 U.S. and EU lawmakers signed a letter calling for Al Jaber to be removed from his post.

“It’s very clear by now that when companies set their own targets and create their own rules, the outcome spells disaster.”

Melissa Aronczyk, media studies professor at Rutgers University and co-author of “A Strategic Nature,” a book about the history of environmental PR, said the increased fossil fuel presence at COP is part of the industry’s decadeslong attempt to avoid regulation. “Working with U.S. PR firms, oil and gas companies, car companies, and petrochemical companies all conspired 30 years ago to create campaigns and programs around ‘sustainability’ with the goal of telling the world that the fossil fuel industry was helping to ‘solve’ the problem of environmental degradation and climate change,” Aronczyk said. “It’s very clear by now that when companies set their own targets and create their own rules, the outcome spells disaster.”

Al Jaber has never seen his green credentials so publicly questioned. But ever since he emerged as the UAE’s climate advocate, he has been searching for a solution to a difficult puzzle: How do you convince the world that a petrostate is genuinely interested in addressing climate change?

The COP28 team has already parted ways with three major PR firms, including Edelman, whose contract was abruptly terminated in April. In August, the UAE brought in reinforcements, hiring a small New Jersey-based strategic communications firm called First International Resources to “counteract all negative press and media reports,” according to FARA filings first reported by the Washington Post. “The consultant must not allow negative impressions to take hold, especially in the runup to COP28,” the contract states. COP28 confirmed that Teneo and Edelman, which was recently rehired, are currently working on the summit. APCO and Burson Cohn & Wolfe, whose contracts were terminated, did not respond to requests for comment.

For Kerry, Al Jaber’s sensitivity to criticism is a plus point. “If he can’t get this done, if oil and gas won’t show up and do something real here, then the UAE will look really bad, and he knows it,” Kerry said. “They’re going to have to fight a little bit, but if they do, they could be the all-time catalyst.”

“Amazing, Isn’t It?”

In a nation where power is typically held by a select group of royal families, Al Jaber was not destined for leadership. After a brief stint as an engineer for Adnoc, he was tapped to work for the energy platform of one of the UAE’s sovereign wealth funds, Mubadala. In 2006, he was promoted to CEO of the program and his rise in public life began — just as the country’s rulers reeled from an international PR disaster.

The government-owned Dubai Ports World had been set to spend billions of dollars to take over the management of several major American ports. But a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers, led by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., argued the purchase threatened national security. Their campaign effectively killed the deal.

“This was a transformational moment for the UAE. … They were completely blindsided,” said Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London. “It was a wake-up call for everyone in Abu Dhabi to actually say, ‘Look, we need to invest more into influence and shaping perception.’”

In his early 30s, Al Jaber was chosen to be the first CEO of Masdar, the renewable energy company funded by the UAE government. He fit the mold of a new type of Emirati statesman, which had been shaped by the embarrassment of the ports affair. He had studied in the United Kingdom and the United States and represented to the world that the authoritarian UAE was in fact a modern meritocracy.

Masdar was the first step in a long-term plan that was supposed to lead the oil-rich country away from fossil fuels. The company promised to plow billions of dollars into clean energy. But Krieg believes Masdar had a more covert purpose. “It’s a tool of economic statecraft,” he said. “It’s about pouring money into a country to gain strategic leverage in the long run.”

“It’s about pouring money into a country to gain strategic leverage in the long run.”

A year after Al Jaber became CEO, Masdar inked a lucrative contract with Edelman to help promote one of its flagship projects: Masdar City, a proposed zero-carbon “city of the future” in the Abu Dhabi desert.

With plans drawn up by a top British architectural firm, Masdar City would be built on 6 square kilometers of scrubland not far from the Abu Dhabi airport. General Electric announced that it would open the world’s first Ecomagination Center there to showcase next-generation technologies, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched the MIT and Masdar Institute Cooperative Program, focused on innovation in alternative energy.

The money Al Jaber spent on Edelman paid off. The agency managed to convince White House staff to add a visit to review plans for Masdar City to George W. Bush’s final foreign trip as president.

“Amazing, isn’t it? This country has gotten its wealth from the ground and is now reinvesting in alternative forms of energy,” Bush remarked as he and Al Jaber stood before the media. “I hope that my visit shines a spotlight on the Middle East … and shows people the truth about what life is like here in the UAE.”

When Al Jaber was invited to speak in front of a congressional select committee in 2008, Sen. Ed Markey (who was recently among the lawmakers calling for Al Jaber’s removal as COP28 president) heaped praise on Masdar City, saying it represented “the future of green communities.”

“Make no mistake, Masdar is our new Sputnik. It should be a wake-up call to America and a challenge to each of us,” the Massachusetts senator said.

In 2009, Al Jaber faced the first true test of his international PR campaign. He announced that the UAE would “aggressively pursue” a bid to host the headquarters of the International Renewable Energy Agency, or IRENA, at Masdar City. The campaign was officially overseen by the country’s then-minister of foreign affairs, but Al Jaber was managing day-to-day operations, according to a person involved in the campaign. Little would be left to chance. He brought on heavyweight Democratic campaigner Jim Margolis and his strategic communications firm GMMB, which had just helped Barack Obama take the White House.

GMMB and Edelman worked in concert to run an enormous global campaign. Edelman tracked how each member country might vote on a “whip grid” and researched how much aid the UAE was sending those countries. When a country said they would vote for the UAE, Edelman sent personalized thank you notes.

GMMB handled the marketing materials, which included promotional videos, a glossy pitch book, speeches, and presentations. When the date of the vote finally arrived and delegates arrived in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, GMMB arranged for a video promoting Masdar City to be played in their hotel rooms. The UAE reportedly offered twice as much money to help run IRENA as its closest rival, Germany. Included in the UAE’s funding was a $1 million contract for Edelman to work with the agency, according to FARA filings. The UAE won the vote.

As Edelman built Masdar’s reputation, the energy company promised to deliver on more and more renewable projects. It pledged to invest $2 billion into thin-film photovoltaics manufacturing for solar panels, and when Shell announced that it was pulling out of the London Array project in the U.K. — one of the world’s largest offshore wind farms — Masdar stepped in and purchased a 20 percent stake.

Al Jaber was founding CEO of Masdar and became chair — the position he still holds — in 2014. He was also CEO of the energy platform for Mubadala, the UAE’s strategic investment arm, making him the person most responsible for building out renewable energy in the UAE for more than a decade. In 2015, Masdar was part of an IRENA-led group that committed to doubling global renewable energy capacity by 2030. The same year, the UAE government pledged that 24 percent of its entire energy mix would come from renewables and nuclear energy by 2021.

According to the Energy Information Administration and the International Energy Agency, only 2 percent of the UAE’s total energy mix was derived from renewables and nuclear by 2021. Masdar, on the other hand, made slow but steady progress. From 2006 to August 2020, the company was involved with projects delivering around 5 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity worldwide. As 2020 came to a close and the campaign to secure COP hosting rights began, that number suddenly doubled in press statements, although there were no project announcements that accounted for the sudden increase. In late 2022, in the months leading up to Al Jaber’s appointment as COP28 president, Masdar’s claimed renewable energy capacity doubled again, this time to more than 20 GW.

The company declined to explain these numbers, but its 2021 sustainability report sheds some light on Masdar’s rapid growth. More than half comes not from developing new projects, which would add to global renewable energy capacity, but from acquiring stakes in existing projects, and from a strategic partnership the company inked with Mubadala, Adnoc, and the UAE’s power and water utility. In his chair statement for the report, Al Jaber wrote that this partnership, finalized in 2022, would allow Masdar to “almost double its renewable energy capacity overnight.”

Masdar noted that the partnership would “have a combined current, committed, and exclusive capacity of over 23 GW of renewable energy.” But moving capacity numbers from one balance sheet to another is not building new renewable energy capacity.

When asked what he thought of Masdar’s and the UAE’s progress on renewables, Kerry responded only, “Ugh, I know.”

Al Jaber’s supporters have pointed to his work with Masdar and Masdar City as proof of what he might do for COP: map a pathway for a profitable transition off fossil fuels that the industry can get behind. But if Masdar City is the exemplar, climate advocates are right to be concerned about Al Jaber’s ability to deliver real emissions reductions.

According to Federico Cugurullo, a geography professor at Trinity College, Dublin, who focuses on urban sustainability and has conducted extensive research in Masdar City, the goal of the project is to generate revenue for the UAE via the development and sale of clean-tech products, so “when environmental or social goals are at odds with those profits, they are quickly abandoned.”

The city was initially planned to be car-free and fully reliant on an electrified personal rapid transit system. But because most people who work in Masdar City opt to live in Abu Dhabi, and because Masdar has partnered with various automotive companies interested in conducting electric vehicle research, the car-free idea was scrapped and the PRT proposal scaled back.

“Masdar City stopped being a laboratory for alternative transport and embraced a traditional car-friendly layout to support partnerships with automakers,” Cugurullo said. In his case study, he quoted a Masdar Initiative manager on that decision: “The PRT costs a fortune and Masdar City is not an environmental crusade.” Plans for the city to be zero-carbon and zero-waste were also scaled back to cut costs.

“The podium at the core of the city remains car-free, and visitors can use several shared electric transportation options,” Amy Robertson, communications manager for Masdar City, said. “The rest of the UAE is still largely dependent on private vehicles, however, and Masdar City’s master plan takes those social norms into account.”

“A ‘green’ city is not truly sustainable if it does not meet community needs, and if it is not financially viable,” Robertson added.

“It’s not wrong to take into account the economics of sustainable developments,” Cugurullo said. “But it is wrong if that is the only focus of your projects, and that was the case with Masdar City.”

Al Jaber’s green pedigree continued to grow, even after he took over the national oil company in 2016 — the same year that Masdar City was supposed to have been completed. Instead, the government had downgraded its commitments and announced that the project would be completed by 2030. Maybe.

Friends in High Places

Following the announcement of his COP28 presidency, Al Jaber set off across the globe on a monthslong “listening tour.” He met with politicians, business leaders, and public figures, including King Charles III, Emmanuel Macron, Michael Bloomberg, and of course, Kerry.

Al Jaber has long recognized the importance of surrounding himself with credible allies; engaging “thought leaders” was a key task for Edelman during its early work on the Masdar account. Masdar’s money put Al Jaber into partnerships with the likes of GE, Siemens, and Mitsubishi, and Edelman’s Rolodex put him into rooms with the elite of Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C.

By 2010, Al Jaber was the UAE’s special envoy on climate change and attending COP16 in Cancun, where he met Kerry, then Massachusetts senator. The two have since been photographed together innumerable times. Their seemingly close relationship is part of a broader collaboration on climate change: Last year, the U.S. and the UAE launched the Partnership for Accelerating Clean Energy, which promised to mobilize $100 billion in funding for renewable energy. Kerry was among the first to come out in defense of Al Jaber’s COP presidency.

“I think he and his team are committed to bringing other oil and gas interests to the table in a real way and I think we need that,” Kerry said.

During the U.N. General Assembly in September, Edelman worked with the COP28 team to find influential figures to voice their support for the UAE’s efforts on the summit, according to an internal communications strategy document. Dubbed “validators,” the targets included Bill Gates, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, and German climate envoy and former Greenpeace head Jennifer Morgan.

Other prominent acquaintances who have endorsed Al Jaber include former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose government consultancy firm has a long track record of working for the UAE. Bloomberg, the U.N. special envoy for climate ambition and solutions, took to the pages of his eponymous publication to scold those criticizing the appointment and point to Al Jaber’s time as CEO of Masdar as proof that he was the right man for the job.

Bloomberg has also attached his philanthropic arm, Bloomberg Philanthropies, to Al Jaber’s presidency and is partnering with Al Jaber on an initiative to include mayors and local priorities in the COP28 agenda. Bloomberg Philanthropies staffers and campaigners, who asked that their names be withheld, said many people in the organization, which has a major focus on climate, think it’s a conflict of interest to support an oil boss as the head of COP.

Meanwhile, the head of the Atlantic Council, Fred Kempe, who introduced Al Jaber to the Global Energy Forum stage, wrote an op-ed for CNBC that described him as “the ideal person” to lead the summit. Kempe failed to declare that his organization had received millions of dollars in funding from the UAE, and that Adnoc and Masdar are both sponsors of the think tank’s energy forum. The op-ed was later amended with a note stating that “the obvious conflict of interest” was not disclosed to CNBC prior to publication.

Adnoc Becomes an Oil Major

As the Masdar City project ground to a snail’s pace, the UAE’s crown prince set Al Jaber a new challenge: modernize one of the country’s most important assets, the national oil company. By this point, Al Jaber had become “one of the most powerful men in the country,” according to Krieg, the security studies lecturer.

His appointment as Adnoc CEO came at a time of shifting narratives in the fossil fuel industry: Oil and gas companies were pitching themselves as allies in the fight against climate change, a trend that had largely bypassed the state-owned players.

Al Jaber hired Adnoc’s first communications team, bringing on Omar Zaafrani, the man he’d tasked with forging international partnerships at Masdar. By the end of 2017, the oil company had contracted three external PR firms — Burson Cohn & Wolfe, APCO, and Teneo, all of which would later work on COP28 — to show the world that Adnoc was no longer “a sleeping giant” but an efficient, responsive operation ripe for investment.

In essence, Al Jaber wanted Adnoc to act less like a state-owned behemoth and more like an oil major. “It is a bold, new, and ambitious approach,” he said at the time. “One that will allow Adnoc to compete, lead, and thrive in the new energy era.” He is currently overseeing a $150 billion expansion plan centered around ramping up Adnoc’s oil and gas production. The company began drilling in partnership with international oil companies for the first time in 2018 and accelerated its timeline in 2022. By last month, it had hit 4.5 million barrels per day, making it the third largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and the seventh largest in the world.

Adnoc considered dropping the word “oil” from its name as part of a green rebrand ahead of COP28.

Despite this, under Al Jaber’s leadership, Adnoc has pushed its credentials as “one of the least carbon-intensive oil and gas companies in the world.” Last year, it even considered dropping the word “oil” from its name as part of a green rebrand ahead of COP28. Adnoc has plans to reach net-zero operational emissions by 2045. The plans depend heavily on carbon capture, where the greenhouse gas is collected and stored instead of being released into the atmosphere, meaning the burning of oil would not need to be phased out as quickly. But the technology has not yet been scaled to meaningful levels, and the need to phase out fossil fuels is increasingly urgent.

In 2021, when Al Jaber spearheaded the bid to host COP28, the UAE again turned to GMMB. At a summit in Abu Dhabi that April with representatives from across the Middle East, Kerry allegedly urged the participating countries to support the UAE’s bid and sang the praises of the country’s efforts in sustainable development “via big communications operations organized by GMMB,” according to a report by Intelligence Online, which cited anonymous sources. The same month, Adnoc hired APCO for “strategic communications and media relations services within the United States to represent the UAE’s climate envoy,” according to FARA filings.

Al Jaber’s COP28 presidency has become emblematic of a deeper rift among those involved in international climate diplomacy. The Adnoc CEO’s supporters maintain that oil companies are a necessary partner for a successful transition to clean energy. But after decades of lobbying, spin, and deceit, some now question whether the fossil fuel industry can ever be an ally in the fight against the climate crisis.

Christiana Figueres, longtime executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and architect of the Paris climate accord, has publicly revoked her support of the industry. “When I saw them making record profits in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I thought, ‘Terrific, now they have plenty of capital to invest in the energy transition,’” she said. “But instead, they dug in their heels and doubled down on fossil fuel growth.”

“When companies want a seat at the table where climate policy is at stake, it’s primarily so they can control what happens,” Aronczyk, the media studies professor, said. “Having the head of an oil company presiding over COP28 represents the culmination of 30-plus years of capitulation to the power and money of the fossil fuel industry.”

To date only about 2 of the planned 6 square kilometers of Masdar City have been built. Masdar’s chief operating officer has admitted that “the plug was more or less quietly pulled” on the idea of 6 square kilometers as early as 2008, after the financial crash — before Edelman and GMMB had even begun to promote Masdar City as “the world’s most ambitious sustainable development.” Less than half of the promised $22 billion investment has been spent.

Yet the site is still used as a shining example of the UAE’s transformation. APCO says it has facilitated visits for Ban Ki-moon, Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Narendra Modi, and Joe Biden. Last year, the Atlantic Council paid for U.S. congressional aides to travel there.

Once touted by Al Jaber as “a blueprint for cities around the world striving for sustainability,” Masdar City risks becoming a ghost town. Fifteen thousand people currently work and live there, according to Robertson, the communications manager, who did not clarify how many live in the development versus commute. At best, that’s 25,000 below the goal that was announced in 2008. GE shuttered the Ecomagination Center in 2018. And while Masdar City boasts plenty of solar panels, the city’s planners say it won’t be fully renewable until construction is complete. Far from being a zero-carbon, car-free eco-utopia, Masdar City is fossil fuel-dependent and car-centric.

“Masdar City is not built on sand, it is built on oil,” Cugurullo, the urban sustainability expert, said. “Black is the color that sustains this supposedly green city.”

Al Jaber’s critics worry the same will be true of the UAE’s climate summit.

The post Inside the Campaign That Put an Oil Boss in Charge of a Climate Summit appeared first on The Intercept.

Head south on state Highway 96, past a stretch of soybean crops and tobacco fields, and you’ll arrive in Zebulon, North Carolina, population 8,665. There, on a quiet stretch of Industrial Drive, sits a nondescript commercial building. It’s easy to miss; the name on the front door is barely legible. But atop that humble three-acre lot lies a leading solution to the global plastic pollution crisis — well, according to the plastic industry.

The facility is home to the 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week operations of Braven Environmental, a company that says it can recycle nearly 90 percent of plastic waste through a form of chemical recycling called pyrolysis. Traditional recycling is able to process only about 8.7 percent of America’s plastic waste; pyrolysis uses high temperatures and low-oxygen conditions to break down the remaining plastics, like films and Styrofoam, ideally turning them into feedstock oil for new plastic production.

The American Chemistry Council, the country’s leading petrochemical industry trade group, claims that chemical recycling will create a “circular economy” for the bulk of the world’s plastic, diverting it from oceans and landfills. Plastic giants have gone so far as to dub the process “advanced recycling,” but environmentalists say this is a misnomer because the majority of the plastic processed at such facilities is not recycled at all. In fact, researchers have found that the process uses more energy and has a worse overall environmental impact than virgin plastic production. Numerous companies have tried and failed to prove that chemical recycling is commercially viable.

Despite these challenges, lawmakers nationwide are now embracing the technology, thanks to a massive lobbying push from the ACC and other petrochemical groups. As of September, 24 states have passed industry-backed bills that reclassify chemical recycling as manufacturing. The change effectively deregulates the process, since manufacturing facilities tend to face less stringent guidelines than waste incinerators.

As one of only seven commercial facilities currently operating in the United States, Braven Environmental is at the vanguard of the growing chemical recycling boom. An Intercept investigation, however, found numerous issues at its Zebulon facility.

A review of meeting minutes, permit applications, and compliance documents reveals that Braven misled the public about the risks of its pyrolysis operation and has potentially endangered human health and the environment through “significant noncompliance” with hazardous waste management regulations. While the ACC has touted Braven as a sustainable success story, documents also show that much of the company’s pyrolysis oil was not converted into useful plastic or fuel — it was disposed of as highly toxic waste.

“Chemical recycling is really a greenwashing technique for burning up a bunch of petrochemicals in a new way, and it’s releasing tons of air pollutants into the environment,” said Alexis Luckey, executive director of Toxic Free NC, in an interview. “What we’re talking about is incinerating carcinogens and neurotoxicants in a community.”

“Hazardous Items, We Have None”

On April 8, 2019, the Zebulon Board of Commissioners held a joint public hearing with the town planning board to gather community feedback on several proposed construction projects. One of the developments on the docket was from a company called Golden Renewable Energy, based in Yonkers, New York. 

Golden Renewable — which changed its name to Braven Environmental in the North Carolina business registry in 2021 — was requesting a special use permit to “locate a refinery and the storage of flammable liquids” on a parcel of land zoned for heavy industry.

According to minutes from the hearing, Meade Bradshaw, former assistant planning director for Zebulon, explained that Braven must show the proposed development “will not materially endanger the public health, safety, or welfare” in order to be granted a special use permit. In response, Ross Sloane, Braven’s business development director, made a series of promises to this effect, painting the company as a safe, family-run operation.

“We’ve never had an incidence in an operation that’s been operating up in New York now for seven years,” Sloane said. “My entire family operates the machine, so I don’t want to lose sleep.”

While Sloane pointed to Braven’s operations in Yonkers as evidence of the company’s safety record, The Intercept’s review of New York State Department of Environmental Conservation records found no indication that the company’s facility in Yonkers has ever been legally permitted to conduct plastic pyrolysis activities.

An air quality permit completed on February 22, 2013, states that the facility’s function was the conversion of vegetable oil to biofuels — a far cry from advanced thermal decomposition of plastic waste. In July 2014, inspectors from the DEC visited the facility and observed plastic waste being accepted and processed without authorization. The company agreed to resolve the violations, pay civil fines, and apply for a modified permit to accept recycled plastics, but the permit was never completed. DEC staff inspected the site again in 2021 and confirmed that Golden Renewable had moved its processing equipment out of state. DEC public records did not contain any additional permit information, and the Yonkers operation is Braven’s only other facility.

Public hearing meeting minutes also show Sloane told the town that Braven does not handle any hazardous materials. “Any kind of material trash, landfill items, hazardous items, we have none,” he said. “We do not contain any kind of hazardous materials. We have nothing that goes into a drain. … It’s all biodegradable.”

This turned out to be false. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act database, Braven’s Zebulon facility generated and shipped 9.6 tons of hazardous ignitable waste and benzene in 2021 alone. In March of that year, Braven registered with the EPA as a large quantity generator: a facility that generates at least 1,000 kilograms per month of hazardous waste.

One list of warnings in a Braven air permit application reads like a toxicologist’s worst nightmare: The pyrolysis oil may cause cancer and genetic defects, as well as damage to organs, fertility, and unborn children. Other hazards included being “extremely flammable” and “very toxic to aquatic life” with “long lasting effects.”

Stephanie Hall, a parent of students at a nearby K-12 charter school, voiced concerns about air emissions during the hearing in Zebulon. She pointed out that the Braven lot would be adjacent to a community college and a public housing community, as well as only 780 feet from the charter school.

Sloane offered reassurance that Braven would “have no smells or emissions that are emitted to the air.” But when a planning board member asked for more information, he backtracked.

“It’s not a zero-emission process,” he clarified. “We do have an emission of CO2. It’s the exact same CO2 that comes through in your gas logs at your home.”

In response to The Intercept’s request for comment, Michael Moreno, Braven’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, wrote, “Braven strives to operate its Zebulon facility safely, responsibly and in compliance with its permits and regulatory requirements. Any discrepancies found are proactively resolved with the agencies involved.”

Braven’s special use permit application notes that the facility will have an exhaust stack but still characterizes the operation as a “closed loop process where all by products are fully contained without being discharged into the atmosphere.” An emissions test report prepared for Braven in March 2020 contradicts this claim, revealing that, in addition to CO2, the company’s plastic pyrolysis emits air pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter. The report also found that Braven would emit an estimated 5.14 tons of volatile organic compounds per year. It did not specify which VOCs were present, though known human carcinogens like benzene and styrene are commonly found in emissions from petrochemical operations. On the day that I visited the Braven facility and adjacent lots, a faint acrid scent — like burning plastic — was detectable as far as 700 feet away.

On the day that I visited the Braven facility and adjacent lots, a faint acrid scent — like burning plastic — was detectable as far as 700 feet away.

Certain industrial facilities must annually report their chemical emissions for inclusion in the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory. Since pyrolysis facilities are classified by the EPA as waste incinerators, they’re required to meet Clean Air Act guidelines but are excluded from TRI reporting requirements. This makes it difficult to assess the full health risks that Braven and other plastic pyrolysis units could pose to surrounding communities. In April, more than 300 environmental and public health organizations filed a petition with the EPA for the inclusion of waste incinerators in the database.

Ilona Jaspers, director of the Center for Environmental Medicine, Asthma, and Lung Biology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, has studied emissions generated from the burning of plastic waste. She called the TRI’s lack of pyrolysis and waste incineration data “a giant loophole.”

“I am all for finding good ways to make plastics into something usable, but the danger of generating air toxics in the process is considerable,” she said. “When we looked at the list of chemicals generated in the emissions of the plastics, a lot of it is not good. It’s kind of terrifying what gets generated when you burn plastics.”

In addition to air pollutants, residents raised the risk of potential water contamination. Hall, a professional engineer with a background in water resources, noted during the public meeting in Zebulon that the building slated to house Braven’s operations was built in 1994, so the lot would not have established stormwater control measures to treat any potential runoff. “You may want to include some sort of sand filter or proprietary stormwater device to help with any incidental spills,” she suggested, since the lot lies near a Federal Emergency Management Agency floodplain.

“When that industrial park was developed, there were no regulations for stormwater control,” Bradshaw, the former assistant planning director, told The Intercept. “Because they’re just occupying an existing building … from a site standpoint, it did not need to meet current regulations. But the commissioners, as part of the special use permit, could’ve made that a condition if they wanted to.”

At a subsequent session, the planning board unanimously recommended denial of the permit, based on “lack of evidence and testimony” showing Braven would not endanger public health and safety. But the planning board’s decision was “just a recommendation,” Bradshaw noted, and did not dictate the final decision. The Board of Commissioners unanimously voted to approve the special use permit on May 6, 2019, under the sole condition that masonry screening be conducted around the fuel tanks.

Braven was up and running by March 2020. Four months in, one major company had already bet big on the nascent operation’s long-term success: To further its “corporate responsibility” goals, Sonoco agreed to deliver its waste plastics to Braven for the next 20 years.

Significant Noncomplier

As part of an unannounced hazardous waste compliance inspection, an environmental specialist from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, visited Braven’s Zebulon facility on September 26, 2022. The details of the resulting compliance report paint an alarming picture of a business operating in stark contrast to the health and safety promises made to Zebulon residents three years prior.

Inspectors cited Braven for numerous regulatory violations, including accumulating more than 400 containers of hazardous waste without a permit over the course of two years, as well as failing to “manage waste material in a manner to prevent it from discharging to the ground and storm drain system.”

The report details one incident in April 2022, when Braven sent 31,080 gallons of hazardous waste to a rented warehouse facility about one mile down the road. The transfer was conducted by a local trucking company, not a licensed hazardous waste transporter, and the warehouse was not permitted to receive such waste. The containers, which contained toxic chemicals like toluene and ethylbenzene, were then disposed of by a waste management service, though the transportation manifests for the disposal contained numerous inaccuracies.

The report also states that Braven generates light, medium, and heavy cut oils through plastic pyrolysis but has been unable to find a buyer for the heavy cut oils. As a result, the oil accumulated in a tank until it was eventually discarded as hazardous waste — twice. “The facility has been unable to demonstrate that it has been or can be legitimately used or recycled,” inspectors wrote.

“It’s an open question for a number of these facilities what it is they’re actually producing and what it’s used for.”

“There’s very little actual monitoring data from these facilities that are doing plastic pyrolysis,” Veena Singla, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The Intercept. “It’s an open question for a number of these facilities what it is they’re actually producing and what it’s used for.”

Even Braven’s purportedly recyclable products pose substantial risks. In June 2021, Braven announced a “long-term agreement” to supply pyrolysis-derived oils to Chevron Phillips Chemical. The press release did not state outright what the oil will be used as feedstock for, stating only that it will help Chevron “achieve its circularity goals.” However, ProPublica reported in February that one Chevron refinery in Mississippi is turning pyrolysis oil into jet fuel; according to EPA documents, air pollution from the fuel production process could subject nearby residents to a colossal 1 in 4 cancer risk.

The Intercept confirmed that some of the pyrolysis oil at this Chevron facility is indeed supplied by Braven: The chemical name and unique registry number listed in an EPA record obtained by ProPublica matches the details of Braven’s pyrolysis oils found in a North Carolina air quality permit exemption application. Additionally, in July 2022, the EPA published notice in the Federal Register of several new pyrolysis oils manufactured by Braven, including the same one on the EPA record.

Some residents within one mile of Braven were already at an increased risk for environmental carcinogens before the business moved in: One nearby census tract has worse particulate matter and ozone exposure, hazardous waste proximity, and air toxics cancer risk than over 90 percent of the country.

During the town hearing, Sloane had emphasized Braven’s “proactive” safety features; the special use permit application promised “daily inspections.” The compliance investigation, however, noted numerous deficiencies in emergency preparedness, including the absence of a fire extinguisher in the main room where containers of flammable waste were accumulating, some of which were left open and unlabeled.

According to the report, Braven staff admitted that personnel had not conducted weekly inspections, and they were unable to provide documentation that an engineer’s certification had been completed for a hazardous waste tank. Neither safety data sheets for the pyrolysis oils nor an emergency contingency plan had been completed with all required information, and the plan had not been distributed to local emergency authorities.

Additionally, inspectors observed during the visit that oil-contaminated stormwater was being pumped from a containment pit into a storage tote, but the connecting hose was leaking and “dark staining was evident” on the paved area between the pit and the storm drain.

Christopher Serrati, Braven’s manager of operations, told inspectors at the time that the concrete surrounding the storm drain had been “power washed in the past to remove staining.” The report noted an absorbent sock had been placed around the storm drain, and dark staining was present on soil adjacent to the property’s stormwater outfall, indicating hazardous waste may have been discharged to the ground.

Following an assessment period, the North Carolina DEQ cited Braven as a “significant noncomplier” and issued the company an “initial imminent and substantial endangerment order” on April 28, 2023. Braven has not received any state or federal penalties.

“This is an ongoing state lead enforcement matter, and EPA is currently not involved. EPA cannot further comment regarding the facility’s compliance or enforcement activities,” wrote an EPA spokesperson.

As part of a spill remediation plan, the DEQ required that Braven test both stormwater and soil from the contamination sites. Four of the contaminated stormwater samples tested positive for high concentrations of benzene, according to a report submitted to the agency in January. The report notes, however, that Braven believes the high benzene levels can be attributed to oils that were left in the sampling totes.

Top/Left: Braven Environmental received a special use permit to store flammable liquids on Industrial Drive in Zebulon, N.C. Bottom/Right: Birds sit atop a water tower in downtown Zebulon, N.C. Photos: Schuyler Mitchell/The Intercept

“In the past, all waste including dike water was shipped as hazardous waste and therefore, our crew did not realize the new operations and they inadvertently used the old empty oil totes for dike stormwater storage,” wrote Braven. The report states that going forward, “Braven will use only clean totes to store dike stormwater, if any, to avoid any potential hazardous waste conditions for the stormwater totes.” Braven has also installed an oil/water separator for stormwater discharge.

However, Braven’s claim that contaminated stormwater had previously been disposed of as hazardous waste appears to contradict notes in the initial compliance investigation. “Records dated April 2022 documenting shipment of rainwater … were provided after the inspection and document the material was previously disposed of as non-hazardous,” inspectors wrote.

Singla, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the storm drain discharge a “big concern.”

“We know that when there’s spills or leaks from industrial facilities, benzene can contaminate surface water, groundwater especially,” Singla said. “If there’s any built environment over that groundwater, the benzene can migrate up through the soil into indoor spaces and then contaminate the air, and people can be exposed that way.”

Related

How the Plastics Industry Is Fighting to Keep Polluting the World

Another report submitted by Braven in June notes “site-specific groundwater investigations have not been conducted,” though a contractor completed a reconnaissance survey of potential “wells, springs, surface-water intakes, and sources of potable water” within 1,500 feet of the facility and did not observe any apparent water supply wells. The contractor said it also contacted the county for more information on potential water sources in the area but did not receive a response.

In late August, a new remedial action oversight report was posted to the DEQ’s public records database. A state chemist’s review of Braven’s soil samples found “evidence of elevated hexavalent chromium and arsenic” in the site’s underlying soil. The state’s report attributes these findings to “a release of waste,” since the results were above the levels found in background samples. Both arsenic and chromium are considered occupational carcinogens by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The state offered Braven two remediation options: complete additional sampling and remove the contaminated soil, or close the impacted areas as a landfill. According to Melody Foote, a public information officer from the DEQ’s Division of Waste Management, Braven completed the additional sampling in late September. The DEQ is waiting for the sampling results and findings report, which is expected in three to four weeks.

Zebulon Commissioner Shannon Baxter called the noncompliance report “extremely disturbing” and noted that the public hearing testimony given in 2019 “appears to be in conflict with how Braven is actually operating.” Baxter was previously a member of the planning board and recommended denial of Braven’s permit in 2019. She noted that her views should not be interpreted as representative of the entire Board of Commissioners.

“I had my concerns as a member of the Planning Board, which is why we voted to recommend denial of the Special Use Permit,” Baxter wrote in a message to The Intercept. “Now, as a Commissioner, I am troubled about how these violations will affect the safety of our Community, especially the students attending school down the road from the Braven facility.”

Aggressive Expansion

A troubled record hasn’t deterred the petrochemical industry from throwing its weight behind Braven in recent months. The company has announced three major executive hires since April, including a chief operating officer, development director, and president and CEO. Heath DePriest, the new COO, previously served in leadership positions at Phillips 66, a petroleum company. A press release notes that CEO and President Jim Simon held roles at the refinery subsidiary of Koch Industries.

In June, Braven announced a new “strategic framework agreement” with another Koch Industries subsidiary, Koch Project Solutions, to “support Braven’s aggressive expansion plans.” The press release cited a new project to be built in the Gulf Coast region, which will allegedly produce 50 million gallons of pyrolysis oil per year.

Braven’s past expansion plans, however, have not materialized. In 2020, the company was the subject of a number of splashy headlines for its plans to invest $32 million in Cumberland County, Virginia, a rural region west of Richmond. Promising the creation of more than 80 new jobs, the project marked the first economic development opportunity for the county since 2009. Braven was slated to break ground in late 2021, but the year quietly came and went, until a sole public update arrived via an article in a Cumberland County newspaper: “Braven No Longer Coming.” The article, published in January 2022, did not explain why Braven had pulled out, and the company declined to comment at the time.

Braven has also been the subject of several legal actions. In 2015, sisters Joan Prentice Andrews and Jane Prentice Goff filed a lawsuit against Golden Renewable in New York, which also named four executives, including co-founders Moreno and Nicholas Canosa, as defendants. The suit claims that the sisters had collectively invested a total of $650,000 in Golden Renewable’s “bio-energy business” after Canosa had given the false impression that the company was “imminently signing a contract” to sell its biofuels to the Pentagon. The suit’s charges included wire fraud, mail fraud, and violations under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The case was settled out of court and voluntarily dismissed less than one month after the defendants were summoned.

The following year, a New York court ruled that Golden Renewable owed a different plaintiff over $10,000 in a civil debt lawsuit. The company was also released from a New York state tax warrant in 2018 after paying an outstanding balance of $16,522. In January 2020, Moreno was released from another New York tax warrant along with his wife, totaling over $300,000. After stepping down as Braven’s CEO in April, Canosa remains on the company’s board of managers. Moreno currently still serves as Braven’s chief commercial officer.

In April, Braven announced it had completed a financing round led by institutional investors Fortistar, Arosa Capital, and Avenue Capital, where Moreno also serves as senior managing director. While Fortistar and Arosa have investments in the energy sector, Avenue backs businesses in financial distress — or as it calls them, “good companies with bad balance sheets.”

But any bad balance sheets that Braven might have are unlikely to dissuade the numerous major petrochemical companies now banking on chemical recycling. Last year marked the ACC’s highest lobbying spend on record, up to nearly $20 million. That same year, the group shelled out more than $265,000 for Facebook and Twitter ads focused on promoting chemical recycling. One ACC ad effort included the sponsorship of a promotional video specifically for Braven, which features Canosa and Moreno alongside the ACC’s associate director of plastics sustainability.

Dow, Shell, and Chevron have all invested in developing their own plastic pyrolysis technology, while Exxon Mobil launched one of the largest chemical recycling plants in North America earlier this year, the first of 13 facilities it says it will launch by the end of 2026. Worldwide, the advanced recycling market is projected to grow by 3,233 percent in less than a decade, from $270 million in 2022 to more than $9 billion by 2031.

As chemical recycling spreads, we know from existing studies that the facilities are most likely to harm communities that are already vulnerable and marginalized.

“We found that these facilities are commonly sited in places where the surrounding community is disproportionately low income, or disproportionately people of color, or both.”

“We found that these facilities are commonly sited in places where the surrounding community is disproportionately low income, or disproportionately people of color, or both,” said Singla, who authored a report for the Natural Resources Defense Council on the environmental justice impact of chemical recycling.

Meanwhile, North Carolina could soon become the 25th state to take up the reclassification of chemical recycling. In April, three Republican state Senators introduced Senate Bill 725, which would amend the state’s waste management laws to explicitly note “solid waste management does not include advanced recycling.”

Braven, the only advanced recycling facility in North Carolina, was already exempt from obtaining a solid waste permit, according to Foote, the public information officer. Foote told The Intercept that since Braven processes “recovered material” — defined in state laws as “material that has known recycling potential, can be feasibly recycled, and has been diverted or removed from the solid waste stream” — it is not regulated as “solid waste.”

There has been one recent development that could slow chemical recycling down. In June, the EPA unveiled new proposed rules under the Toxic Substances Control Act that would establish reporting requirements for 18 substances derived from plastic pyrolysis. The agency would require companies to submit their chemical feedstocks for review so the agency can screen them for “impurities,” including PFAS, dioxins, heavy metals, bisphenols, and flame retardants.

The public comment period ended on August 19. The EPA is currently reviewing responses and is targeting early next year for follow-up action, according to a spokesperson.

The ACC, American Petroleum Institute, and Dow were among those who submitted comments urging the EPA to withdraw the proposed new rules.

“The ACC would welcome the opportunity to meet with EPA leadership to clarify misconceptions about advanced recycling,” the ACC wrote, “and invite Agency officials to an advanced recycling facility for a first-hand sense of their operations.”

In response to The Intercept’s request for comment, Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers from the ACC’s Plastics Division, wrote in a statement, “Progress towards a circular economy can only be achieved with smart, cohesive approaches that avoid inconsistent and conflicting approaches by regulators. … ACC remains committed to working with EPA as a constructive stakeholder in the development of effective, practical, and responsible policies.”

Braven already appears to be pulling from the ACC’s playbook in its efforts to curry favor with state lawmakers. Democrat Deborah Ross, who represents the North Carolina congressional district that includes Zebulon, made a trip to Braven’s facility on August 25.

“I enjoyed meeting and learning from Braven’s innovative leaders and employees this morning in Zebulon,” Ross is quoted as saying in a Braven press release. “I look forward to applying the insights and information I gained during my visit to the important discussions in Congress about advanced recycling technologies.”

The Intercept emailed the compliance report to Ross’s office and asked whether Braven had mentioned the inspection and ongoing remediation efforts before, during, or after the representative’s visit.

“Congresswoman Ross does her best to accommodate invitations she receives from constituents and visits dozens of businesses in her district every year — these tours and constituent meetings should never be interpreted as expressing support for any particular company’s policy positions or business practices,” wrote a spokesperson. “She was not aware of this investigation before touring Braven, nor was it discussed during or after her visit. As a vocal supporter of environmental protections, she takes these allegations seriously and strongly supports NC DEQ’s work to hold companies in our state accountable for harmful waste or activities that threaten our people and our environment.”

The post They Promised “Advanced Recycling” for Plastics and Delivered Toxic Waste appeared first on The Intercept.

That was all it took.

With a tremendous roar, the two-foot-wide Delhi pipeline ruptured, blowing a 40-foot crater into the side of a slope. A cool fog drifted downhill from the blast site and rolled across the highway into the tiny town.

Jerry Briggs, fire coordinator for neighboring Warren County, was quickly on the scene. He assumed the pipe was spewing natural gas; such pipelines crisscross the region. But as his team rushed to help the victims, what they saw didn’t make sense.

People were acting like “zombies,” dazed and walking in circles or gazing back blankly as responders yelled for them to evacuate. Others convulsed, drooling, as panic-stricken family members called 911.

In the end, 49 people were hospitalized. Some still have symptoms and struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder.

It wasn’t until about an hour after the February 2020 explosion that the pipeline operator, Denbury Inc., informed first responders what the pipeline carried: highly compressed carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is nontoxic, but it can be dangerous in dense concentrations. As the plume spread through town, it had displaced oxygen, causing mass asphyxiation.

As the plume spread through town, it had displaced oxygen, causing mass asphyxiation.

Now the specter of the Satartia leak looms large for the 130,000 residents of Ascension Parish, Louisiana, as they brace for a tremendous buildout of similar carbon pipelines. After President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law last year, developers are sprinting for billions of dollars of federal tax credits for carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS: a process in which industrial plants capture a portion of the carbon dioxide emitted from their smokestacks and then inject it deep underground for storage.

CCS technology has never worked as intended at commercial scale, but that hasn’t slowed the carbon capture boom, particularly in Louisiana, now home to roughly a third of the country’s planned CCS projects. Of those, about a third will be built in Ascension Parish, including what would be the world’s largest. Air Products, a Pennsylvania-based industrial gases and chemical company, is investing $4.5 billion to capture millions of tons of highly compressed carbon dioxide from an ammonia plant in Darrow, Louisiana, pipe it about 35 miles east, and inject it underneath Lake Maurepas.

The project has been met with widespread resistance from Ascension Parish residents and sparked alarm from pipeline safety experts, who say that development has rushed ahead of federal regulations, posing major health risks for front-line communities. And while proponents of CCS have framed the technology as part of the solution to the climate crisis, critics caution that it is a way for corporations to greenwash their image and receive taxpayer funds, all while continuing to extract and burn fossil fuels.

The battle currently playing out in Ascension Parish is a microcosm of issues only set to intensify as an increasing number of legislators embrace carbon capture’s unproven promises.

“We’re already facing devastating climate impacts,” said Jane Patton, a senior campaigner with the Center for International Environmental Law. “What we are facing if we give into the myth and the distraction of carbon capture and storage is more devastation and catastrophe.”

“A Precious Resource”

In an effort to help other first responders prepare for the influx of carbon pipelines, Briggs visited Ascension Parish in April. Kaitlyn Joshua, an Ascension Parish resident, had organized a meeting between Briggs and several local fire chiefs. Joshua also organizes for environmental and racial justice with Earthworks, a nonprofit that advocates for clean energy transitions and opposes the Air Products CCS project.

As one of the only fire chiefs in the country with firsthand experience responding to a CO2 pipeline leak, Briggs has critical knowledge absent from most standard safety training.

He anticipated sharing recommendations based on his experience with the Satartia blast, including the purchase of certain equipment, like gas meters that measure CO2.

But shortly before the meeting, Ascension Parish Safety Director James LeBlanc canceled it.

”We don’t use Parish-owned volunteer fire departments for political functions,” LeBlanc wrote in an email to The Intercept. He did not respond to questions about why he categorized the public safety meeting as political.

Briggs was taken aback by local officials’ resistance. “My role is training and education,” he said in a phone interview. “I’m not coming to bash a pipeline. I’m coming to educate your fire department on what we encountered.” He said such public safety sessions between different fire stations are common, and he’s never encountered similar interference.

The meeting was eventually held at Joshua’s father-in-law’s restaurant, where just one chief attended. The chief who did attend, Briggs recalled, expressed appreciation for his counsel — his station didn’t own a gas meter that could detect CO2.

Bill Caram, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, expressed alarm that public safety officials would brush off Briggs’s efforts, given the risks and hazards particular to carbon pipelines and their current underregulation.

“That is the opposite of what we should be doing,” Caram stressed. “Those first responders in Satartia, they’re not activists. They are heroes. … That is a precious resource, to have that direct experience.”

Mark Harrell, director of the office of homeland security and emergency preparedness in neighboring Livingston Parish, said their emergency responders are holding off on seeking safety training and preparation until Air Products has finalized the specifics of their plans. His office has been in contact with Air Products, he said, and he plans to ask the company to donate any necessary equipment.

“Once we begin preparing for operations, Air Products will work closely with applicable emergency response agencies to help ensure proper training and implementation,” Air Products spokesperson Arthur George wrote in an email to The Intercept.

Most pipelines run through rural areas, where fire stations receive less funding and are frequently short staffed or all volunteer. It’s not uncommon for budget-strapped stations in rural regions to depend on chemical industry donations to be sufficiently equipped.

Industry and government are tightly intertwined in Ascension Parish, where officials have said the chemical industry comprises “almost half” of the budget. Air Products has been granted tens of millions of dollars in tax exemptions for the Ascension Parish plant, as well as a grant of up to $5 million from the state.

One video from the Ascension Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit primarily funded by public appropriations, purports to highlight the oil and gas industry’s “commitment to sustainability.” It features LeBlanc alongside Ascension Parish Council Chair Chase Melancon, who tells viewers that the chemical industry goes “above and beyond to preserve our paradise.” The video cites a 71 percent reduction in emissions in the state; industrial greenhouse gas emissions have actually increased over the last two decades.

Melancon is himself an employee of OxyChem, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, which is building a CCS hub in Livingston Parish. According to 2022 financial disclosure filings, Melancon received an annual salary of more than $100,000 as a production supervisor at OxyChem’s Ascension Parish plant — at least five times his councilmember salary.

Relying on the chemical industry for accurate information and adequate safety preparations is a risky game, as evidenced by the events of the Satartia leak. A Department of Transportation investigation found that Denbury’s failure to inform first responders about the “nature of the unique safety risks of the CO2 pipeline” hindered the emergency response, leaving first responders to “guess the nature of the risk.”

In a 2021 statement to HuffPost, a Denbury spokesperson wrote, “Denbury has cooperated fully with all federal, state, and local agencies who responded to the incident. The federal agency charged with regulating the pipeline continues its review and investigation of the incident, and Denbury continues to cooperate fully with their efforts.” This April, after concluding the investigation, the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration issued the second-largest fine in the agency’s history against Denbury, noting that Denbury’s most critical shortcoming was the failure to train, advise, or notify emergency responders.

The Department of Transportation report stressed the need to ensure emergency responders are briefed on best practices in the event another CO2 release occurs — just as Briggs aimed to do.

Briggs stressed that his sole concern was public safety. He isn’t a “treehugger,” he said, nor an environmental activist. “I’m an activist for human life.”

“Tickled to Death”

Public officials have strong financial incentives for bulldozing forward with CCS projects in Louisiana, where chemical companies are investing a staggering $80 billion in pending projects, almost a third of the state’s gross domestic product.

The Air Products CCS project in particular has been met with broad public opposition, and several bills aimed at stopping or slowing CCS projects were introduced in Louisiana’s spring legislative session.

“They said, ‘We’re going to sell the second-largest lake in Louisiana over a Zoom call.’”

During a hearing over one of the bills, a resident pointed out that the one public hearing for the Air Products project was held over Zoom just weeks after 2021’s devastating Hurricane Ida, when many residents were still displaced. Caleb Atwell of the Lake Maurepas Preservation Society testified, “They said, ‘We’re going to sell the second-largest lake in Louisiana over a Zoom call.’”

Some of the bills aimed to simply slow the pace of the project and uncover more public information: One, for example, would’ve required an environmental impact statement before using the Maurepas Swamp Wildlife Management Area to sequester carbon. Another would’ve required that parishes hold a local referendum in order to approve CCS projects.

Industry groups met the opposition with an enormous lobbying campaign. Air Products alone hired 25 lobbyists, paying up to $625,000 for the eight-week legislative session.

None of the bills passed.

In June, the Environmental Protection Agency held hearings regarding Louisiana’s application to take over regulatory authority for carbon injection wells, which would allow the state to approve companies’ CCS permit applications much faster. During the session, Ascension Parish resident Ashley Gaignard expressed concern over one private equity firm’s plans to develop carbon storage in her hometown of Donaldsonville, Louisiana, which is predominantly Black and rural. By using the area as a testing ground for CCS tech, she said, “we’re going back to the sharecropper days” of treating Black communities as disposable.

Ascension Parish sits in the infamous corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known as “Cancer Alley,” the largest hotspot of cancer-causing air in the country. The Air Products plant is being built on the site of a former plantation, raising concerns that it will disrupt the graves of enslaved people, whose descendants still live in Ascension Parish.

“Air Products conducted an extensive archaeological survey and historical research,” wrote George, the company spokesperson. “Air Products understands it has a moral duty to investigate and protect key cultural resource sites, and it fully intends to do so.”

Without legal protection, residents have little power to stop projects going up in their own backyard. In 2009, Louisiana quietly ratified model legislation proposed by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission that allows private land to be seized for CCS infrastructure via eminent domain. A 2023 bill that would’ve revoked this authority failed to pass.

During a May legislative committee meeting, Louisiana state Rep. R. Dewith Carrier said he was “tickled to death” about the influx of CCS projects. “I trust these people. … I believe in Occidental Chemical,” he continued. “I’m sure it’s been studied over and over.”

OxyChem is eyeing his small parish of Allen for a $21.5 million carbon sequestration hub.

A Larger Casualty Event?

As CCS projects appear poised to surge across the country, environmental justice advocates allege greenwashing, while experts ring alarm bells over public safety.

Patton, of the Center for International Environmental Law, characterized the development as “a huge onslaught of new projects.”

“Carbon capture is a technology that, while expensive, would allow these companies to continue to pollute,” she said.

Patton added that CCS does not remove other greenhouse gasses, like methane, from emissions, and every CCS effort to date has captured significantly less CO2 than projected. A 2020 legislative audit showed that companies have received hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars based on the amount of carbon they have told the IRS they’re sequestering — even when those companies simultaneously report different sequestration amounts to the Environmental Protection Agency.

David Schlissel, a director with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said he is “extremely skeptical about the ability of these projects to capture enough CO2 over the years to make a big dent.”

One study found that projects that produce hydrogen with CCS, like the Air Products venture, emit 20 percent more greenhouse gases than coal.

One study found that projects that produce hydrogen with CCS, like the Air Products venture, emit 20 percent more greenhouse gases than coal.

George said the study’s underlying assumptions were “flawed,” and the new facility will achieve its projected capture rate of 95 percent. This is frequently touted as the capture rate for CCS, but it hasn’t been reliably achieved at scale. Air Products’ previous foray into carbon capture — a demo project built with government funding — achieved an average onsite carbon capture rate of just 36 percent.

Additionally, Caram, of the Pipeline Safety Trust, and other experts warn that development is outpacing federal pipeline regulations, partly because there has been very little CO2 pipeline infrastructure before now.

For example, the steel used in natural gas pipelines is not strong enough to safely transport liquid CO2, posing an increased risk of violent rupture if companies repurpose the pipelines for CCS projects — as at least one company in Ascension Parish plans to do.

“I see the potential with a CO2 pipeline of a larger casualty event that you really don’t see with hydrocarbon pipelines,” Caram said.

At the state level, the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources is tasked with establishing safety requirements and approving pipelines. But skeptics point out that the department already fails to keep up with monitoring and plugging thousands of abandoned oil wells across the state and worry they aren’t prepared for this unprecedented buildout.

Air Products is currently conducting tests to determine whether Lake Maurepas is suitable for carbon sequestration; officials from a neighboring parish say this testing has already caused a groundwater well to implode. Earlier this month, Air Products installed a large drilling rig on the lake. If the company proceeds with the permitting process, the project would be the first time carbon is permanently sequestered under a shallow body of water. According to Alex Kolker, a coastal geologist at Louisiana University’s Marine Consortium, the project runs the risk of contaminating aquifers, as sequestered CO2 could leach toxic metals out of the surrounding rocks and into the drinking water.

Those metals could include things like copper, strontium, and “sometimes even radioactive elements like uranium,” explained Kolker. Last month, a study revealed serious issues at two Norway hubs previously touted as success stories for underwater carbon sequestration.

Kolker also worries that natural shifts in the ground could cause Louisiana’s pipelines to rupture, as was the case in Satartia. “We’re still at the very infancy of studying the issue of geohazard risks associated with CCS,” he warned.

Despite these concerns, an oil-backed study from Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative has proposed a 68,000 mile network of CO2 pipelines spidering across the country. The nationwide infrastructure, referenced in the White House’s net-zero strategy plan, would rely on industrial, four-foot-wide pipelines — double the size of the pipe responsible for the Satartia blast.

Richard Kuprewicz, a pipeline regulatory adviser who has testified before Congress, voiced grave concerns about these plans.

“Folks, we’re getting ahead of the curve here,” he told The Intercept. “I understand we want to save the world, but, Jesus. Do you have any idea what a rupture force is for something that big? It’d be huge. You’re going to be doing body counts.”

Correction: August 28, 2023
A previous version of this article said that the photo of the hydrochloric acid tanks was taken on the Air Products site, when in fact the tanks were adjacent to the property.

The post Louisiana Rushes Buildout of Carbon Pipelines, Adding to Dangers Plaguing Cancer Alley appeared first on The Intercept.

Wildfires in Hawaii killing over 100 people. Antarctic sea ice hitting record lows. This past July breaking records as the hottest month in known history.

All these purported “events” and more have been drilled into the heads of every American. Except — none of it is actually happening. Nothing about global warming has ever happened. It is all a hoax concocted by China.

Many people, when forced to confront these facts, will respond “wrong” or “no” or “Do you consume enough iodized salt to prevent ‘brain collapse’?”

Let’s take a quick look at the evidence that Donald Trump was right about this all along — and that in fact the Chinese government has been fooling us for the past 160 years. 

1863

The Civil War was raging in the United States; Abraham Lincoln was president. And the Irish physicist John Tyndall proposed in a paper for the the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science that variations in atmospheric composition could cause changes in the climate.

China was then ruled by Emperor Muzong of the Qing Dynasty. In 1863, he was a devious, far-sighted 7-year-old. A message from him to Tyndall leaked from the Chinese imperial archives shows him directing Tyndall to concoct a false theory about weather — but to be sure to “make it sound science-y.”

In a separate memo, Muzong wrote a note in his own hand that roughly translates to “I adore climate misinformation and look forward to deceiving the West for 100 more years in collaboration with our Occidental lackeys, the Biden Crime Family.”

1896

At the end of the 19th century, the same publication, the Philosophical Magazine, ran a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius titled “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature on the Ground.” Except Arrhenius never existed: He and his paper were entirely fabricated by the Qing Dynasty, then in its final dotage.

In retrospect, it’s obvious they were yanking our chain, since Svante Arrhenius is not a real name. Then in 1903, “he” won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, illustrating just how deep this rabbit hole goes.

1912

After an extremely hot year, Popular Mechanics published an article in 1912 titled “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate — What Scientists Predict for the Future.” It stated that the effect of burning coal on the temperature “may be considerable in a few centuries.”

But who then owned Popular Mechanics? Would you be surprised to learn it was China? Perhaps you would, because there’s absolutely no evidence for this. But come on: The Republic of China had just been established following the Xinhai Revolution, and Job No. 1 for them as they consolidated power across a vast territory would obviously be undermining the industrial development of the United States.

Also, consider that the Chinese mandarins carrying out this plot would probably think that Americans had small heads and were asleep and easy to deceive. Chillingly enough, “Popular Mechanics” is an anagram for “Microcephalus Nap.”

1956

The Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass published a paper sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research titled “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change.”

Several years previously, the Chinese Communist Party had won the country’s civil war and established the People’s Republic of China. The little-noticed Chapter 2, Section VII of the new Chinese Constitution reads: “All aspects of society shall be continuously revolutionized, except like all previous Chinese governments, we’ll keep hoaxing Americans about global warming. One good way to do this is via our control of the U.S. Navy.” Then it says, “Don’t put this part on the internet.”

1969

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then serving in the Nixon administration, wrote a memo for his superiors warning about global warming. It could, he stated, cause “apocalyptic change. … [It] could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York.”

By then, China was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, following Mao Zedong’s May 16 Notification. A top secret annex to the document reads, “The objective of this great struggle is to obliterate representatives of the anti-Party and anti-Socialist bourgeoisie. But maybe we can make an exception for the ones like Moynihan. He does such great work.”

1977 – 2003

For a period of 26 years starting in the 1970s, scientists at Exxon Mobil produced internal studies that purport to estimate the impact of fossil fuels on global warming.

However, an examination of Exxon’s corporate archives shows repeated references by top executives to “those graphs and math stuff we fabricated at the behest of our natural ideological allies at the Chinese Communist Party. By doing this we will please our masters in Peking [Beijing] and also make this company less profitable. So a double win.”

Today

That brings us to now, and a new front launched by the Chinese government. Recently, homeowners have reported Ring security camera footage of legions of Chinese citizens sneaking into their homes at night. Meanwhile, high-resolution photographs taken by U.S. spy satellites show billions of intentionally defective thermometers being pumped out of factories in Sichuan. Put it together and you’ll realize they’re secretly replacing your red-white-and-blue thermometers with these CCP thermometers that look exactly the same, except they make us think it’s 20 degrees hotter than it actually is.

What can one do in the face of this monstrous Marxist fraud?

First, do your own research. Remember that all human institutions are corrupt, and thus you should only trust long, barely coherent threads by anonymous strangers on Twitter. 

Second, gather together with the like-minded, ideally at a remote location that could be referred to as a “compound.” Become conscious of the many traitors in your midst, and begin plotting to eliminate them.

Third, look into the moon landing. Did it really happen, or did China pay Stanley Kubrick to film it on a soundstage? Did Kubrick also direct the following moon landings, or were they done by journeymen and Kubrick just executive produced?

Fourth and finally, consider unloading that seaside timeshare, just in case Trump and Sen. Marsha Blackburn turn out to be wrong.

The post A Brief History of China’s Global Warming Hoax, From 1863 to Right Now appeared first on The Intercept.

With its sweeping mountain view, the hill was Canyon’s refuge. His 3-year-old yellow lab, Kasey, was his constant companion there.

The two set off as usual that afternoon. Kasey was thrashing one of his toys when Canyon spotted a sprinkler-like object protruding from the ground. He ran a finger along the device. Suddenly, he heard a pop, and an orange cloud burst forth. Canyon lunged back as the front of his body was doused in chemicals. The burning began immediately.

As Canyon grasped for snow to irrigate his eyes, he heard Kasey grunting near the device. He called to him, but he didn’t come. He stopped what he was doing and ran to him. Dropping to his knees, Canyon watched as Kasey writhed in spasms. Frothing at the mouth, the dog’s eyes turned glossy. The boy didn’t want to leave, but he knew he needed help. He sprinted down the hill for his mother.

Canyon’s father, Mark Mansfield, a family doctor, was at work when the boy called for help. He raced home as fast as he could. Pulling into the property, Mansfield rushed to Kasey and positioned himself above the dog, prepared to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Canyon stopped him. It’s poison, Canyon said.

Kasey was dead, and Canyon’s head was pounding like never before. Toggling between his training as a physician and his horror as a parent, Mansfield struggled to sort out his son’s symptoms from the trauma he’d just experienced. He told Canyon to get into the shower immediately.

While his son cleaned up, Mansfield called the Bannock County Sheriff’s Office. A bomb and hazmat team were dispatched. Longtime Sheriff Lorin Nielsen was at a loss, trying to answer what felt like an absurd question: Who would plant a bomb in Pocatello?

Cyanide Bombs

Across the American West lies an untold number of potent chemical weapons, tucked away and waiting to go off. There could be one on your favorite hiking trail, or on the loop where you walk your dog, or in the woods where your kids play. Packed with sodium cyanide, these spring-loaded devices blast clouds of poison gas five feet into the air. Once inhaled, the lethal toxins mount a multidirectional attack on your cardiovascular, pulmonary, and central nervous system. Death can come in a matter of minutes.

The weapons, known as M-44s, are placed by an under-the-radar federal agency called Wildlife Services. The agency was created to protect the livestock industry’s bottom line by killing off the competition: namely, wild predators. The so-called cyanide bombs do kill predators, but they can also kill anyone else unlucky enough to stumble upon them. And they have a hair trigger.

Wildlife Services, which falls under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is well known in conservationist circles. Most people, however, have never heard of it. For the uninitiated, a glimpse into the taxpayer-funded killing machine can be jarring.

In the past eight years, Wildlife Services killed nearly 21 million animals as part of its mission to oversee “the eradication and control” of species “injurious” to human endeavors, particularly ranching. While agents’ preferred means of killing is by air, with gunmen in helicopters and planes, M-44s were used to intentionally kill more than 88,000 animals from 2014 through 2022 — the period for which the agency has data available online. The total amounts to roughly 30 poisonings a day for much of the past decade.

M-44s are part of “a broad strategy that also uses non-lethal methods, and that is informed by ongoing wildlife biology research,” Wildlife Services spokesperson Ed Curlett said in an emailed statement to The Intercept. Curlett added that 98 percent of the agency’s poison devices are placed on private lands and “only when the private, municipal, state, or federal landowner or manager requests assistance and enters a written cooperative agreement.”

According to Wildlife Service’s data, an additional 2,200 animals were killed unintentionally over the 2014 through 2022 period, including endangered species, domestic livestock, and pets like the Mansfields’ dog.

After losing Kasey, the Mansfields went on the offensive, suing Wildlife Services and traveling to Washington to spearhead legislation banning the use of M-44s. The hill behind the family’s home is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, an agency of the Department of the Interior. Idaho, at the time of Canyon’s poisoning, had banned M-44s on public land, but they remained legal on private land and on public lands throughout much of the rest of the country.

Surely, thought Mark Mansfield, the near-death of his child would motivate lawmakers to stop government agents from planting poison bombs everywhere. He was wrong.

The 2019 introduction of “Canyon’s Law” — a bill prohibiting M-44s on public land nationwide — went nowhere. “I don’t care if you’re red, blue, purple. I don’t care if you’re rural or urban. It just seems like a no-brainer,” Mansfield told me. “But somehow this still goes on. I’m shocked. I thought it would be a done deal within months. Call me naïve.”

Four years after it was written, Canyon’s Law was reintroduced last month by Reps. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., and Steve Cohen, D-Tenn. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., introduced companion legislation in the Senate.

“This is remarkable. They weren’t prompted. We didn’t have a clue that they even knew this hearing was going on.”

After years of setbacks, advocates in the Mansfields’ corner believe the tide may finally be turning against M-44s — thanks to the emergence of an unexpected but critical ally. During a congressional hearing on Canyon’s Law last summer, the Department of the Interior submitted a statement outlining its M-44s position. “The Department is concerned that these devices pose a risk of injury or death to unintended targets, including humans, pets, and threatened and endangered species,” the statement said. The Department had “no technical objections” with the proposed bill “and would work to implement the legislation, if enacted.”

Brooks Fahy, the executive director of Predator Defense, a national wildlife advocacy group, was shocked. While the Department of Agriculture manages 193 million acres of public land in the U.S., the Department of Interior manages 245 million. The scale alone made the statement highly significant. That the largest land management agency in the country would take a critical position on the issue was unprecedented. “This is remarkable,” Fahy told me. “They weren’t prompted. We didn’t have a clue that they even knew this hearing was going on.”

Sensing an opportunity, Predator Defense and the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity rallied organizations focused on wildlife preservation in the West. With more than 70 allied groups joining them, the groups filed a formal petition last month, on the heels of the reintroduction of Canyon’s Law, calling on the Department of Interior to ban the use of M-44s on its lands.

Success won’t come easy though. Behind the M-44 lies a well-connected industry that’s influenced the government’s predator killing program for generations, one that’s unlikely to relinquish its bombs without a fight.

The M-44 cyanide canister that killed the Mansfield’s dog, Kasey, in Pocatello, Idaho, in March 2017.

Years of Hell

Mark Mansfield had to figure out two things after his son was poisoned: What was the toxin, and who was responsible?

Luckily, one of the sheriff’s deputies had worked as a federal trapper. He suggested contacting Wildlife Services. Nielsen, the sheriff, had never heard of the agency and had no idea that it was mining his county with spring-loaded poison sprayers.

Mansfield, too, was puzzled. He was even more taken aback when Todd Sullivan, the Wildlife Services supervisor who planted the device, showed up at his house.

“He killed my dog and he had nearly killed my child,” Mansfield said. “At that point in time, there was a lot of stress. It was very difficult for me not to, you know — whatever.”

The family was kept inside while Sullivan escorted law enforcement up the hill. Unbeknownst to the sheriff’s department, Wildlife Services had planted 18 cyanide bombs throughout Bannock County. Sullivan had placed the M-44 that poisoned Canyon and killed Kasey in plain view of the Mansfields’ backyard, a second device 60 feet from the first, and two more elsewhere in the neighborhood.

The public land behind the Mansfields’ home abutted private property, where a local sheep producer had leased an allotment to raise his stock. In an interview with a Bannock County detective, Sullivan said he meant to plant his bombs on private land, in accordance with Idaho law, and while he had the means to differentiate between jurisdictions, he didn’t. The Wildlife Services supervisor also admitted that there had been no livestock predation cases in the area. He was simply trying to “get a jump on the season” by poisoning any coyotes that might pass through.

“It was three years of hell for his parents and more so for him.”

In his thousands of hours in the emergency room, Mark Mansfield had never dealt with a sodium cyanide poisoning. He called specialists around the country to gather as much information as he could. It did not look good. As one toxicologist explained in a 2019 interview, sodium cyanide’s effects on the human body are similar to those of sarin gas, an internationally banned chemical weapon used in war zones.

Canyon’s pounding headache worsened with admission to the ER. He experienced nausea and vomiting on a near-daily basis. His hands and feet went numb. The worst of it lasted more than a month, but the long-term effects, from migraines to mood changes, lingered for years.

“Finally, about 2020, he was back to his baseline,” Mansfield said. “It was three years of hell for his parents and more so for him.”

A Family Fights Back

In the days after Canyon was poisoned, his father received an unsolicited call from Fahy, the Predator Defense executive director. “A lot of people helped us,” Mansfield said. “But he was the one who explained it to us.”

Fahy’s first encounters with Wildlife Services began in the 1970s, when the agency was still known as Animal Damage Control. Working as an investigator for the Humane Society in Oregon, he encountered the mummified remains of snared coyotes and orphaned pups at dens in rural areas throughout the state. He started Predator Defense a decade later as an animal hospital before transitioning into advocacy.

Fahy had witnessed the physical damage Wildlife Services’ traps can do but found the agency’s arsenal of poisons more unsettling. “You can’t remove it,” he said. “That poison is in their system and watching an animal die slowly, whether it be from sodium cyanide or strychnine or compound 1080, is extraordinarily disturbing.”

Fahy can rattle off cases going back years. There was the Wildlife Services trapper who scattered M-44s around a Christmas tree farm. And the one who hanged coyote carcasses on a family’s fence after killing their dog. And then there was Dennis Slaugh.

A heavy equipment operator from Vernal, Utah, Slaugh had little in the way of money but took great pride in the work he did for the county. That ended following his brush with an M-44 in 2003. Plagued with daily vomiting, diminished breathing, and soaring blood pressure, the 61-year-old was forced to quit his job. Wildlife Services denied any fault in the matter and claimed that Slaugh exceeded the statute of limitations to file a claim of wrongdoing. Unable to work, the medical bills piled up as Slaugh’s health deteriorated.

“They took my life away,” Slaugh said in a 2020 documentary. “And now I can’t hardly change a light bulb. It’s all from this cyanide. It just took everything away from me.”

As the years went by, Fahy collected case after case of M-44s killing pets and harming people across the West. Never once, he said, did he encounter an incident in which Wildlife Services, per the M-44 use restrictions required by the Environmental Protection Agency, contacted local medical providers to inform them of devices planted in their area. Signage was another problem. A trapper may place a single sign at one entrance on a large plot with several entry points, or they might not place one at all. Both were common in the investigations Fahy undertook.

Fahy had never seen a case quite like the Mansfields’ where a child came so close to death. He shared everything he knew with the family. In June 2018, the Mansfields filed suit against Wildlife Services, accusing Sullivan of failing to follow a slew of regulations meant to govern the placement of M-44s, including the placement of warning signs.

The Justice Department initially responded by blaming Canyon and his parents for what happened, before admitting Wildlife Services’ negligence and agreeing to pay the Mansfields $38,500 to settle the case in 2020.

Thick as Pudding

Despite the national coverage the Mansfield case received, Wildlife Services has clung to M-44s as “an effective and environmentally sound wildlife damage management tool.”

In the wake of Canyon’s poisoning, the agency published a brochure justifying the devices’ use. “Our use of M 44 devices strictly follows EPA label instructions, directions, and use-restrictions; applicable Federal, State, and local laws and regulations; and agency and program directives and policies,” it said. “Our personnel do not use M-44s on any property unless the land’s owner or manager requests and agrees to our assistance. We must have a valid written cooperative agreement, agreement for control, Memoranda of Agreement, or other applicable document signed by the landowner or authorized representative to place any M-44s.”

After years of bad press, Wildlife Services is acutely aware of its reputation as the “hired gun of the livestock industry.” The source of the oft-repeated description is Carter Niemeyer, formerly one of the agency’s most productive trappers and today one of its sharpest critics.

“Their lobbying power makes or breaks Wildlife Services.”

Niemeyer is the author of “Wolfer,” an account of his quarter century as a Wildlife Services supervisor in Montana from 1975 to 2000. The veteran trapper believes the agency has important elements to its portfolio, and that many of its East Coast operations are quite professional. But in the West, he argues, existential ties to the livestock industry still reign. Unwillingness to relinquish M-44, he says, is an artifact of that bond.

“The very existence of Wildlife Services is dependent upon the livestock industry and all of the cooperators,” Niemeyer told me. “Their lobbying power makes or breaks Wildlife Services. If the cattlemen and sheep men lost their faith in Wildlife Services and didn’t do this insistent, persistent, powerful lobbying that they do, Wildlife Services would be dead in the water and probably disappeared.”

One of the starkest examples of that power came in 1998, when then-Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., introduced a bill to cut Wildlife Services’ budget from $50 to $10 million by taking an axe to its predator killing program. DeFazio was a longtime critic of the program, often telling reporters that Wildlife Services was more secretive than the intelligence agencies he worked with on the House Homeland Security Committee. His bill passed, but in a highly unusual turn of events, it was subjected to revote less than 24 hours later. The American Farm Bureau was in a fury. Overnight, agriculture lobbyists convinced 38 members of Congress to change their minds. The proposal died the following day.

“They were against the ropes, and it was all over,” Niemeyer said. “And in the last minute of the last hour of the last second, the livestock industry lobbyists somehow got to enough congressmen to turn the whole thing around and get that budget back when we’d pretty much heard that it was a done deal.”

Niemeyer never used M-44s and didn’t like them. The trappers who worked for him mostly felt the same. They were dangerous, required lots of paperwork, and trappers had plenty of other tools to do their jobs. “I was not disappointed if a guy didn’t want to use him,” Niemeyer said. “I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have either if I was in their shoes.”

There was one problem.

“My walking orders as a supervisor was to make sure the men used them,” Niemeyer said. “There was a real push from higher levels of the livestock industry to push for their registration and push for their use. Some of the sheep men, some of the notorious ones I remember, they figured that if you got snares, put ’em out. You got traps. Put ’em out. And for God’s sake, if there’s M-44s and you got a bunch sitting there in your cabinet, put ’em out.”

In its 2019 brochure on M-44s, Wildlife Services pointed to tens of millions of dollars lost every year by ranchers due to livestock killed by predators. Those numbers, Niemeyer pointed out, reflect survey data, self-reported by ranchers. They are not independently verified.

Though Niemeyer’s Wildlife Services tenure ended more than 20 years ago, the livestock industry’s continued support for M-44s is evident today on the webpage of the American Sheep Industry Association, which represents more 100,000 sheep producers nationwide. The site features a dedicated “Fact versus Fiction” page on the issue of M-44s. Among the fictions listed is the notion that cyanide bombs present a risk to the public. 

At this point, Niemeyer argued, clinging to M-44s is as much about symbolism as anything else. “Kinda like the old give ’em an inch, they take a foot,” he said. “If they take our M-44s, next year they’ll take our snares, and then the year after they’ll take our traps.”

There’s a material angle as well. In addition to federal funding, Wildlife Services relies on the financial support of “cooperators” to keep the lights on. In the case of its predator program, the cooperators are often agricultural interests.

“They’re thick as pudding,” Niemeyer said. “That lobbying power of the ag industry is what keeps Wildlife Services afloat. I wouldn’t call it a criminal, but they’re buddies. They needed us and we needed them, and that’s how it keeps going on to this day.”

For Dennis

Six years on, it’s impossible to measure the full impact that the poisoning had on Canyon, said Mansfield. “You’re not really going to have a control group on kids nearly killed by cyanide,” he said. “So anything and everything that ever happens to him, mentally and or physically, you say, ‘Oh, I wonder if cyanide has anything to do with that?’ It’s a haunting thought that comes up every single time.”

The family’s goal remains the same: getting Canyon’s Law passed. They are hopeful that the latest round of efforts will be the final push they have been waiting for.

Following Canyon’s poisoning, Idaho issued a statewide prohibition on the use of M-44s pending an environmental assessment that remains in effect today. Fahy, the Predator Defense advocate, had little time to celebrate.

“It literally ripped my guts out, the whole thing, what they got away with.”

In February 2018, he picked up the phone to learn that Dennis Slaugh passed away. The official cause was an acute myocardial infarction. Listed among his “conditions contributing to death” was “Cyanide Poisoning/Exposure From M44 Device 2003.” The words on Slaugh’s death certificate contradicted a claim on Wildlife Services’ brochure the following year — repeated on American Sheep Industry Association’s fact versus fiction page — which read: “No human fatalities have been associated with Wildlife Services’ use of M-44s.” When asked about the death certificate, Wildlife Services pointed to a 2008 federal investigation that purportedly cleared the agency of any culpability in Slaugh’s death.

Fahy was devastated. He, Slaugh, and Slaugh’s wife Dorothy had traveled to Washington together a decade before, urging lawmakers to act on M-44s before somebody was killed. Slaugh had never visited a city like D.C. before. He didn’t know what to expect, and he didn’t know what was happening inside his body — why, for example, he needed to pause periodically to vomit as he passed through the halls of the Capitol.

Looking back at a photo from the visit, Fahy notes the way Slaugh held Dorothy’s hand, squeezing it tightly. “He was scared,” Fahy said. He watched Slaugh’s slow and agonizing deterioration in the years that followed. His death was the outcome Fahy had dedicated his life to preventing.

“It literally ripped my guts out, the whole thing, what they got away with,” Fahy said. Approaching 70, Fahy has had his own health scares — a consequence, he believes, of internalizing decades of secondhand trauma. With Slaugh’s death, however, he vowed to continue their fight. Unlike Canyon’s poisoning, where at least there was some measure of accountability at the local level, he said, “with Dennis, Wildlife Services got away with it.”

“I find it unbelievable that there are people that could have treated him like that,” Fahy said. “Nobody stood up for him. They just walked right over him.”

The post Secretive Federal Agency’s Days of Killing Pets With Poison Bombs May Finally Be Ending appeared first on The Intercept.

Since 1992, Mayfield has led an environmental justice group called Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living. She formed the group to address local concerns about the concentration of waste disposal facilities throughout the city, most notably incineration and waste treatment plants. Chester is home to one of the country’s biggest incinerators, a waste-to-energy facility owned by the Covanta corporation, which burns trash from up and down the East Coast.

The facilities, Mayfield said, were sickening residents in Chester, an overwhelmingly Black and low-income community. Over the years, Mayfield helped lead several campaigns to stop new incineration and waste treatment plants from setting up shop in Chester. So she was disturbed when she learned about a proposal for a new $6.4 billion liquefied natural gas, or LNG, facility in her backyard. Mayfield, who is deeply enmeshed in the community’s environmental health scene, had heard nothing about it until her group received a press inquiry.

“We learned about it last year by way of a reporter calling us up for a quote,” Mayfield told The Intercept. “It had not even been on our radar. We knew nothing about it, even though they had been secretly moving around in the city and throughout the state trying to get political support to bring it here.” 

An energy company called Penn America had been shopping the plan around to local and state officials for years with no notice to the community, WHYY reported last June. The LNG facility, which would pipe in natural gas, then liquify it for export, seemed to have already attracted bipartisan buy-in.

Democrats in Pennsylvania had promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but former Gov. Tom Wolf and members of his administration met with Penn America Energy to help shepherd its plans as early as 2016. Republican lawmakers, for their part, formed the Philadelphia LNG Export Task Force in November 2022 to study plans for the proposed facility. The task force is stacked with industry executives, including one from the American Petroleum Institute, which launched a global campaign to promote liquefied natural gas as “clean” energy in 2020.

Once the plan for the LNG facility became public, community members, including Mayfield, were barred from testifying at public hearings. Instead, the task force hosted presentations by industry players, including former Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, who now co-chairs an industry-funded nonprofit advocacy group that pushes for natural gas.

The proposed facility could have terrifying consequences for a city already burdened with intense health and economic disparities brought on in part by other energy facilities like the Covanta incinerator, Mayfield said. “This thing is so scary to me,” she said of the LNG proposal. “Out of all the things we’ve ever fought outside of the incinerator, the safety issue for this thing is dangerous to me.”

With President Joe Biden intensifying the quest to make the U.S. the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas, similar scenes are playing out in old industry towns across the nation. Residents in Florida’s North Port St. Joe were surprised last year when they learned that their efforts to restore the community were running up against secret plans by officials and energy executives to build a new liquefied natural gas facility. Environmental groups failed to stop another liquefied natural gas facility in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans. And community organizers in Gibbstown, New Jersey, across the river from Chester, have been fighting another proposed liquefied natural gas export terminal since 2019; the project is currently on hold after a federal agency declined to renew its permit earlier this year.

The Biden administration has amplified calls to expand the production of liquefied natural gas to ease a shortage in Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Republican lawmaker who started the task force to explore the proposed liquefied natural gas plan in Chester said she did so after the Russian invasion with hopes that Pennsylvania could help fill the void. Some environmental groups, though, have described the Ukraine war as a false pretense to ramp up fossil fuel production. The groups criticized Biden for echoing calls to boost liquefied natural gas production made by former President Donald Trump and leaving Trump-era regulatory rollbacks in place.

Biden’s stance on liquefied natural gas production has chafed climate groups that had been hopeful about his ambitious climate platform in the 2020 presidential campaign. As a candidate, Biden promised to put $2 trillion in climate investments to move the country toward net-zero emissions, fix crumbling public infrastructure, and create an office in the Department of Justice to address the disparate impacts of climate change. Instead, Biden has pushed for major carveouts for the fossil fuel industry in the Inflation Reduction Act’s $370 billion clean energy subsidies.

His latest calls to expand production have frustrated some environmental groups and members of Congress, who have pointed to the potential for adverse effects on minority communities and poor neighborhoods. “This will only be exacerbated with the addition of the proposed projects,” more than 40 members of Congress wrote in a May 8 letter to the White House Council on Environmental Quality. 

“It’s definitely not a clean energy alternative,” said Itai Vardi, the research and communications manager at the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility and fossil fuel watchdog. “Those living near LNG facilities are front-line communities that suffer the direct impact of this LNG boom that is backed by the current administration.”

Biden’s push to increase liquefied natural gas exports runs counter to his climate policy, Vardi added. Increased liquefied natural gas exports have also been shown to raise the overall price of gas for domestic customers, contributing to higher gas utility bills.

“Increasing and encouraging LNG exports runs counter to the very nice talk of decarbonizing the U.S. economy and supposedly helping other countries in their efforts to decarbonize,” Vardi said. “At the same time, boosting LNG for export is a very stark contradiction.”

For some climate advocates, it’s been difficult not to notice that controversial projects like the proposed Chester LNG export facility tend to get plopped down in communities struggling with legacies of industrial pollution.

“Many of these projects are sited in and have disproportionate impacts on environmental justice communities and communities that already face disproportionate burdens with industry,” Morgan Johnson, staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The Intercept. “It’s certainly problematic, given the administration’s expressed goals on climate and environmental justice, when these projects have impacts that are so significant on those fronts.”

Climate and Pollution Concerns

While four major environmental groups endorsed Biden last month, there’s been little evidence of major change in places like Chester. Once a major hub for shipbuilding and industry, Chester has been in receivership since 2020, filed for bankruptcy late last year, and is currently at risk of disincorporation, meaning its government would be dissolved and its boundaries erased. The city has a high poverty rate and one of the country’s worst pension underfunding crises.

And the Covanta incinerator emits more pollutants in parts per million than any similar plant in the country, according to a New School study. The federal government has documented disproportionately high levels of cancer and asthma for decades.

Mayfield and environmental advocates fighting LNG expansion in other nearby towns say Chester’s health and economic issues will only worsen if plans to construct the facility proceed.

Left/top: Founded before Philadelphia, Chester, Pa., is a historic town that was settled in 1644. Right/bottom: 1.7 miles from the Covanta incineration facility, the Trainer Refinery contributes to the air quality concerns of the surrounding towns all within a few mile stretch along the Delaware River. Photos: Emily Whitney for The Intercept

“It just carries forward this environmental racism and institutional bias towards dumping everything on the community that they think they can get away with dumping it on,” said Tracy Carluccio, deputy director of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, which fought to stop the liquefied natural gas facility in Gibbstown and has worked with Mayfield’s Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living to get more information about the Chester proposal. “But they can’t get away with doing it in Chester.”

The company shopping plans for an LNG facility in Chester, Penn America Energy, isn’t based in Pennsylvania at all; the firm’s headquarters is in New York City. Franc James, the CEO, started the firm in 2015 “to find new ways of unlocking more value from Pennsylvania’s vast Marcellus and Utica natural gas resources,” according to his LinkedIn.

The project would require the construction of a new gas pipeline to ship natural gas to the site for liquefaction. (Texas Eastern, a division of pipeline giant Enbridge, told The Intercept it has abandoned a plan to expand pipelines in greater Philadelphia.) Production, storage, and shipping of liquefied natural gas is more carbon intensive and increases risk for fossil fuel leaks. While liquefied natural gas gives off less carbon dioxide than both coal and oil, it still produces methane, another greenhouse gas that’s more potent than carbon dioxide.

Producing and transporting the liquified gas can create up to 10 times the carbon emissions of moving the fuel in gaseous form through a pipeline. While James has said the Chester plant would run on as much renewable power as possible, most LNG plants also use a portion of natural gas for on-site power. One environmental advocate told WHYY the proposed plant would be the largest new source of air pollution in southeast Pennsylvania.

Chester Mayor Thaddeus Kirkland and former Mayor John Linder have met numerous times with Penn America officials and said they support the LNG project in Chester because it would bring economic investment and job opportunities.

“As Mayor I feel that it is important to explore every possible avenue that would lead to more businesses and jobs coming to the City of Chester,” Kirkland said in a statement to The Intercept. Asked about his meetings with the company, Kirkland said, “I won’t address any meeting dates, but I can say that before any decisions are made I would consider the environmental impact on the Residents of Chester.”

Chester City Council Member Stefan Roots said he won’t take a position on the proposal until he sees “more than a few artists sketches.” Roots told The Intercept, “There is no comprehensive LNG proposal to evaluate, review or consider.”

In service of its plan to ship liquefied natural gas to Europe, Asia, and Latin America, Penn America has reportedly eyed a privately owned 60-acre site on the Chester waterfront. The site’s owner, Michael Gerace, told the Philadelphia Inquirer last year he didn’t want to sell the plot and was using it for business. (Gerace did not respond to a request for comment.)

The facility’s potential proximity to Delaware River, an interstate waterway, could raise issues for other states to consider, said Carluccio of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network. Delaware state law has prohibited LNG facilities anywhere along its coastal zone since 1971 because the risks of environmental pollution are considered too dangerous. That zone includes the Delaware River where the proposed Chester site sits.

“It’s even more insidious when you realize it’s going to affect New Jersey,” Carluccio said, “and it’s going to affect Delaware.”

“Dog and Pony Shows”

The Philadelphia LNG Export Task Force is led by state Rep. Martina White, a Republican who represents parts of far northeast Philadelphia and is secretary for the state House Republican Caucus. Other members of the group include natural gas industry executives from American Petroleum Institute Pennsylvania and EQT Corporation, the country’s largest natural gas producer. Philadelphia Gas Works, the city’s gas utility; the Port of Philadelphia, the city’s powerful building trades; and two state environmental and economic agencies are also represented on the task force. Two Democrats and one Republican from the state’s general assembly are members.

Testimony at the first two task force meetings in April and May came from fossil fuel industry leaders and lobbyists at the American Petroleum Institute, a drilling industry trade group called the Marcellus Shale Coalition, and the corporate law firm K&L Gates. Representatives for the fossil fuel transport industry also testified in support of expanding LNG exports. Former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chair Neil Chatterjee and a local labor leader also testified.

During his introduction at the April meeting, Pennsylvania state House Rep. Joseph Hohenstein, one of the Democrats on the task force, said White had rejected all of his recommendations for witnesses from environmental justice groups. “Perhaps we should all be concerned with answering hard truths from the communities that you’ve excluded today,” Hohenstein said. White responded that all organizations who requested to participate were allowed to submit testimony.

Democratic state Rep. Carol Kazeem, who represents Chester but is not on the task force, testified against the plan at the May hearing. Kazeem noted that despite the task force being named for Philadelphia, Chester is the prime candidate for the facility. She said the city was at risk of repeating the mistakes of its industrial history that had saddled the community with health issues.

“My community, where I still reside along with my children and family, has been promised economic salvation each time an industrial plant is proposed,” Kazeem said, mentioning Chester’s incinerator and its old paper plant. “It has happened a dozen subsequent times.”

What Chester did get, Kazeem said, was a 27 percent childhood asthma rate, a 19.3 percent infant mortality rate, an increase in health risks and illness among seniors, and loss of jobs and corporate investment. “What we didn’t get was the promise of permanent jobs, and also financial emancipation,” she said.

Despite efforts to site the project in Chester, hearings for the proposed facility have been mostly held in Philadelphia and surrounding areas. Mayfield said the location of the hearings, the task force name, and the obstruction of testimony from those opposed to the project are designed to keep Chester residents out of the loop.

“This whole thing is deceptive,” Mayfield said. “Everybody knows that they’re trying to bring it to the city of Chester. Chester has never been part of Philadelphia in any stretch of the imagination. Now we’re including it.”

The project won’t move forward until the task force finishes its hearings and submits its recommendations to the new Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, with the report expected by November. The plan would have to clear several layers of permitting and approval at the federal and state level before construction could begin. (Shapiro’s office declined to comment.)

With community members like those in Mayfield’s group opposed to the proposed plant and barred from testifying at public hearings, Carluccio said she expects the task force to recommend that the plant move forward.

According to a Penn America project plan reported last year by WHYY, the company had originally projected a four-phase timeline, with development between 2016 and 2019, construction between 2019 and 2023, pipeline construction from 2022 to 2023, and operations from November 2023 to December 2043. People associated with Penn America, including its lobbying firm, Malady & Wooten, have contributed to campaigns for White since 2016 and Kirkland, Chester’s pro-LNG mayor, since 2018. “Penn America was greasing their wheels for building their facility in Chester,” Carluccio said. “They got outed by the fourth estate, and now they’ve slowed down their ambitious schedule that they announced right after they were outed, while this LNG Task Force carries out a year’s worth of basically holding dog and pony shows.”

The post Energy Company Plotted Gas Plant in Small Pennsylvania Town — But No One Told Residents appeared first on The Intercept.

At its core, ESG is about information: When companies report on their environmental, social, and governance risks, which can range from high greenhouse gas emissions to particular hiring practices, investors use that information to determine whether they think a company is a good investment.

The Republican-led House isn’t the only entity that’s become obsessed with ESG investing over the past two years. From political advocacy organizations like the Texas Public Policy Foundation to state treasurers, the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Republican Attorneys General Association, the right wing has been on fire about this issue since the Securities and Exchange Commission made what seemed like a pretty boring announcement back in 2021: The SEC was going to help provide some stability in the ESG space by laying out parameters for how companies could disclose climate risk to investors that care about such things.

Absent those proposed guidelines, due to be finalized this year, it’s doubtful that an anti-ESG movement would exist. It only emerged after the SEC made its intentions known, despite the fact that ESG investing has been around for more than 20 years.

In fact, the same polluting industries and pro-industry politicians screaming about ESG as “woke capital” today previously embraced the idea. It was a handy greenwashing tool that also helped unlock easy capital for corporations that could lay claim, however spurious, to reducing emissions or improving the diversity of their workforce. The SEC’s suggestion that companies should disclose their Scope 3 emissions — the emissions associated with the entire supply chain of their product, including its ultimate use — set off the current frenzy.

To date, fossil fuel companies have preferred to report only on Scope 2 emissions — those associated with their own operations — which account for less than 10 percent of their overall emissions. Scope 3 reporting would require a full accounting, from upstream to downstream, with no way to distract from a company’s actual climate impact.

The ESG backlash has included the introduction of 165 anti-ESG bills across 37 states in 2023 alone, according to a report from Pleiades Strategy; a coordinated push by Republican state treasurers to kick investment firms that consider ESG factors out of state finances; and a legal strategy that has Republican attorneys general alleging that ESG investors are “colluding” against the fossil fuel industry. Now Congress has gotten in on the action, with the House Oversight Committee hosting two hearings on ESG in May and June, Finance Committee hearings expected in July, and proposed legislation in the works.

Just as remarkable as the speed with which this coordinated movement came together is the lack of support for it among Republican voters. According to a poll conducted by Penn State’s Center for the Business of Sustainability and the communications firm ROKK Solutions, Republican voters are even more opposed to limiting ESG investing than Democrats are. The Pleiades report found that out of the 165 anti-ESG bills proposed this year, only 22 were approved by state governments.

That hasn’t stopped GOP allies from ramping up the fight as the SEC inches closer to finalizing its climate risk disclosure guidelines. In the Oversight Committee hearing last month, Jason Isaac, who focuses on energy for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an industry-funded conservative think tank, opened his testimony with the claim that has become central to the anti-ESG agenda: ESG investing violates antitrust laws.

It’s a legal strategy to derail ESG investing that Isaac helped create and has successfully imparted to some heavy hitters in the conservative policy space: the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which brings state legislators together with corporate executives to craft legislation that limits regulation; the Republican Attorneys General Association; the Heritage Foundation; and Consumers’ Research, a political group funded by former Federalist Society President Leonard Leo. The argument is that financial firms considering ESG factors are “colluding” to boycott polluting companies, which amounts to an antitrust violation.

The watchdog group Documented shared audio with The Intercept from two ALEC planning sessions focused on ESG. “These companies are coordinating their activities,” Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, said during a panel conversation with Isaac at an ALEC meeting in July 2022. “They talk about how they’re going to set a policy across the market. Now, it’s been a while since I was in law school, but when I was there, that was antitrust 101.”

At another ALEC meeting, in June 2021, Isaac pointed to an investigation by the Texas Legislature’s state affairs committee as a key step in the legal strategy to combat ESG investing. “We anticipate truckloads of documents being delivered,” he said. “We believe that there is corporate collusion, liability risk for the ESG agenda to charge higher fees and rig the market. We believe that there’s antitrust violations. So I hope our committee gets a ton of paper back from these large financial institutions and they get hammered in the courts. And our attorneys general around the country file antitrust violations.”

At the Oversight Committee hearing in May, it was clear that Republican attorneys general planned to do exactly that. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall and Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes took up Isaac’s antitrust argument, focusing on groups like the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, a global coalition of financial institutions that came together at the Glasgow climate conference in 2022 and committed to decarbonizing the economy.

“These alliances also hurt consumers through anti-competitive conduct,” Marshall testified. “Alliance members appear to be conspiring to restrain trade and commerce by colluding with other members to reduce competition among themselves and coordinating restricted investment in action toward specific companies unless ESG policy objectives are implemented. And let’s be clear, ESG activity is subject to antitrust laws.”

Marshall also noted that the Republican Attorneys General Association was aggressively pursuing the antitrust legal strategy. “Republican attorneys general have been active on the investigative side using both our consumer protection laws as well as the antitrust laws,” he said. “Multiple investigations are now pending.”

At the June Oversight Committee hearing, Isaac himself testified. “Today, I want to discuss with you the detrimental effects the collusory ESG agenda is having on American energy producers and why Congress must do everything in its power to stop this overreach into what is supposed to be a free market,” he said. “ESG investing isn’t just harmful to our economy and energy industry — it could violate antitrust laws.”

Isaac first introduced the antitrust legal strategy at the ALEC meeting in 2021. Soon afterward, several state attorneys general began acting on the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s advice. In March 2022, then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich launched an investigation into “this potentially unlawful market manipulation,” warning that climate disclosure might be “the biggest antitrust violation in history.” The following month, Utah’s Sean Reyes, alongside the state’s treasurer and congressional delegation, sent a letter to S&P objecting to the use of climate-related disclosures and warning that “state antitrust” statutes might be relevant. Missouri AG Eric Schmitt and Louisiana AG Jeff Landry also sent letters warning that ESG conflicted with “securities law.” In August 2022, a month after the second ALEC panel, 19 Republican state attorneys general signed onto a letter to the investment firm BlackRock alleging potential “antitrust violations” related to climate disclosures.

Far from “ensuring a free market,” as Isaac claims, regulations banning ESG considerations will limit investors’ access to information. The Democrats’ witness at the May Oversight Committee hearing, Illinois State Treasurer Michael Frerichs, pointed to the opioid investigations as a good example. “ESG is about looking at a wider range of risks and value opportunities that can have a material financial impact on investment performance,” he said. “If you’re investing in a pharmaceutical company, it’s thinking about whether that company has exposure to massive lawsuits because of its role in the opioid epidemic.”

“Making recommendations about which sectors to invest in — including expressing negative views about the risks of investing in a dying industry like coal, for example, or giving opinions about the benefits of investments, for example investing early in the transition to cleaner energy — does not violate the terms of the Sherman Act, the Clayton Act, or the FTC Act,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research, who formerly served as a legal adviser to all three branches of government. Such recommendations, she added, are “what investment groups have been hired to do on a daily basis for decades.”

According to Graves, sweeping anti-ESG legislation like the bill Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed into law is a violation of the First Amendment. “It’s actually dangerous for our society when officials use their public offices to try to chill freedom of speech and the sharing of vital knowledge and expertise,” she said.

The politicization of ESG investing and the threat of antitrust suits has already had a chilling effect. Earlier this year, BlackRock President Larry Fink estimated that the ESG backlash had cost BlackRock $4 billion. In April, Munich Re, the largest reinsurer in the world, left the insurers subgroup of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, citing the “material legal risks” of continued membership. BlackRock’s top competitor, Vanguard, left another group targeted by the anti-ESG movement — Net Zero Asset Managers — and sent its CEO Tim Buckley on an apology tour. “It would be hubris to presume that we know the right strategy for the thousands of companies that Vanguard invests in,” Buckley told the Financial Times, adding that Vanguard was “not in the game of politics.”

Meanwhile, the SEC has delayed the finalization of its climate risk disclosure guidelines. Although the agency has not confirmed that the delay has anything to do with the threat of legal action, the parallel timing is hard to ignore.

“We won’t really know how successful that pressure has been until these rules come out,” said Jesse Coleman, a researcher with Documented who’s been following the ESG backlash since it began. “But the thing that we can predict is that they’re gonna get sued. And there’s going to be a lot of legal wrangling around these rules once they’re published.”

The post The Right’s Desperate Push to Tank ESG and Avoid Disclosing Climate Risks appeared first on The Intercept.

Birds chirped as the 76-year-old traced the 75,000 acres of mining claims on the edge of her community with her finger. She wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with a fearsome wolf hovering above a rugged mountain range. The wolf is the calling card of the Patagonia Area Resource Alliance, or PARA. The local group monitors industrialized mining in the Patagonia Mountains, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. Schafer is president of the board.

“This is our new logo,” she said, picking up a pamphlet with the wolf on the front. The old mascot — a cute cartoon dog — no longer matched the moment. A vigilant pack animal sent a more appropriate message.

“We think of ourselves as local watchdogs,” Schafer told me. “We pay attention to what’s going on with the companies and the agencies, and then we bark really loudly to the big dogs, who have the staff, the knowledge, and the experience to do what is necessary.”

The big dogs, Shafer and her allies believe, are needed now more than ever. Last month, the Biden administration announced the “first-ever” inclusion of a mine in a federal program that expedites permitting for high-priority projects. In this case, it was the extraction of minerals from the Patagonia Mountains to support the president’s green energy agenda — manganese and zinc, specifically, for producing electric vehicle batteries and fortifying renewable energy installations, among other purposes. In the weeks since the announcement, the Forest Service has issued permits advancing large-scale drilling in the area.

The operation is the Hermosa project, which encroaches on the Coronado National Forest, an hour southeast of Tucson. The company is South32, an Australian spin-off from global mining giant, BHP Billiton. The program, FAST-41, was created in 2015 to streamline the federal permitting process. The Permitting Council, an agency with a nearly $100 billion portfolio in government infrastructure projects, oversees the program.

The administration’s support for the mine follows President Joe Biden’s 2022 determination invoking the Defense Production Act, which ordered an increase in domestic mining of “critical” materials sufficient to create a large-scale battery supply chain and move the nation away from fossil fuels and foreign production lines. Manganese was singled out as critical. Congressional passage of the Inflation Reduction Act also called for increased domestic mining in the name of green energy.

With an initial estimated outlay of $1.7 billion, South32 anticipates a lifespan of 22 years for Hermosa’s zinc deposit and 60 years for its manganese deposit. Full production is slated to begin in 2026 or 2027. Company executives celebrated their FAST-41 inclusion with the Permitting Council’s director in a press call last month. Hermosa project President Pat Risner drew a direct line between Washington’s goals and his company’s aims.

“These policies pave the way for a vast domestic expansion in electric vehicles, batteries, and renewable power production,” he said. “South 32’s Hermosa project is the only advanced mine development project in the U.S. currently that could produce two federally designated critical minerals as its primary products, those being manganese and zinc.”

Shafer was blindsided by the news. “That really wasn’t on our radar screen at all,” she said the first time we spoke. In the month that followed, PARA cranked up its advocacy like never before, organizing with larger NGOs and telling any reporter who would listen about the project’s extraordinary ecological stakes.

PARA’s Lawsuit

Last Tuesday, the calls for help became a call for action. PARA, with support from the nonprofit advocates of Earthjustice and the Western Mining Action Project, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the U.S. Forest Service and the supervisor of the Coronado National Forest, where the mining activity is concentrated. Several of the region’s environmental organizations — and its most experienced litigators — joined as co-plaintiffs, including the Center for Biological Diversity, the Tucson Audubon Society, and Earthworks.

The groups alleged a series of Forest Service violations of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, resulting in the rushed release of two permits for exploratory drilling projects in the Patagonias last month. One of the projects is overseen by South32 in conjunction with the high-priority Hermosa project. According to the lawsuit, the permits impede recovery of the threatened Mexican spotted owl and the yellow-billed cuckoo, as well as disrupt federally protected migration corridors for endangered jaguars and ocelots. (The Forest Service declined to comment on the pending litigation.)

“Drilling could begin at any time.”

Hermosa project at South32 is not named in the lawsuit. In an email, Risner suggested PARA’s ecological concerns were overstated.

“With a surface footprint of just 600 acres, the Hermosa project is a fraction of the size of most mining projects and keeps sustainability at the core of our approach,” he said before the lawsuit was filed. “Hermosa has also had in place for more than a decade a robust biological monitoring program.”

PARA and its supporters called on the court to declare that the Forest Service broke the law and quash the agency’s authorizations. The moment demands urgency, they argued: “Drilling could begin at any time.”

A Sky Island

The weekend before PARA and its allies filed their lawsuit, Shafer and her partner, Robert Gay, an architect and journalist, invited me on a bumpy drive deep into the mountains to survey the Patagonias’ rivers and canyons and offered their take on current fight and its wider implications.

The Patagonias are an iconic member of the “sky islands,” a network of mountain ranges that rise up out of the desert of southern Arizona and northern Mexico. Home to an estimated 100 endangered or threatened species, the mountains contain the largest cluster of mammal species anywhere north of Mexico, more than 500 species of birds, the highest density of breeding raptors on the planet, the most reptile and ant species in North America, and the most bee species on Earth.

The virtually unmatched biodiversity has made the town of Patagonia — with a population of around 900 residents — a world-class birding and wildlife research destination for generations. The town is also a launching point for the famed Arizona Trail, an 800-mile hike that traverses the state from north to south. More recently, it’s become home to a growing gravel bike scene, with riders pedaling through the mountains to reach the stunning San Rafael Valley, one of the last unbroken stretches of grassland ecosystems in the American Southwest.

Together with the unique abundance of flora and fauna, outdoor recreation has made Patagonia a hub in the “nature-based restorative economy” of Santa Cruz County. According to a 2021 University of Arizona study that PARA and other conservation groups in the area helped produce, the attractions generate tens of millions of dollars for local businesses and residents.

Though the battle over mining in the Patagonias goes back generations, this latest iteration is frustrating activists on the ground for reasons particular to the present moment.

Shafer and Gay are both diehard environmentalists. An “Earth Day is every day” flag hangs outside their home. They are deeply concerned about the climate crisis and would never say otherwise, but they are just as concerned about biodiversity loss and the planet’s unfolding sixth extinction. For them, a mine that would accelerate one cataclysm in the name of combatting another is unacceptable.

The minerals needed for a green energy revolution can be found elsewhere in the world, Shafer argued: “There’s no other place to go for Mexican spotted owl. Yellow-billed cuckoo. Jaguar. Ocelot.” The frustration in her voice rose as she ticked off the names.

Wild West

In the U.S., mining is governed by a law President Ulysses Grant signed in 1872. With scant regulations, the Wild West-era statute has undergone little substantive change in the century and a half since. Technology, however, has changed. The lone Civil War veteran busting his back hoping to strike it rich in a national forest has been replaced by multibillion-dollar corporations with the most advanced extraction tools money can buy.

In the Patagonias, the main hub of activity centers around an old mine water treatment site run by the American Smelting and Refining Company, or ASARCO. In the 1960s, the endeavor collapsed in a storm of bankruptcy and environmental damages, including pollution of Patagonia’s water.

Decades later, Arizona Mining Inc., owned by billionaire mining tycoon Richard Warke, purchased the land. South32 bought out Arizona Mining in 2018, in a $2 billion sale that marked one of the biggest mining deals of the year.

The area surrounding the old ASARCO site is largely national forest land, which South32 is actively exploring, as well as ranches and other parcels of private property. The privately held land is shrinking though, with South32 buying up properties one by one in recent years.

“It’s very, very active out here right now,” Shafer said. “These mountains, unfortunately, are chalked full of valuable minerals.”

For Shafer, the heart of the matter is water. Patagonia relies on the mountains entirely for its water, but the range’s hydrological significance doesn’t stop there. The mountains are the headwater of Sonoita Creek, which flows into the Santa Cruz River that provides water for more than a million people.

“The community’s concern is: What is this going to do to that ecosystem?”

When ASARCO was running its mine in the 1960s, the company’s chief problem was water; it would fill the mine’s shaft and the company lacked the technology to keep it out. Facing the same challenge today, South32 has received permission from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to run up to 4,500 gallons of water per minute through one of its two water treatment plants, then dump that water into Harshaw Creek, a tributary to Sonoita Creek. At max capacity, Shafer noted, that would mean more than 6.4 million gallons of water flowing into the Harshaw on a potentially daily basis.

“We don’t know how much water they’re taking out and using on site, but that’s how much they are permitted to discharge into the Harshaw Creek,” Shafer said. “The community’s concern is: What is this going to do to that ecosystem?”

“Desiccate and Saturate”

A small stretch of the Harshaw has perennial water. Monsoon season aside, the water tends to lap around a person’s ankles. The rest of the creek is typically dry. What 6.6 million gallons of water a day would do — and more when the heavy rains of late summer hit — is difficult to fathom.

To put the town at ease, South32 released a video last year. The minerals the U.S. government seeks lie below the water table under the Patagonia Mountains, the company explained. South32 would drop the table by pumping water out. The water would then pass through a treatment plant before being dumped into the Harshaw. This would create “a cone of depression” around the well site, allowing safe underground work.

“Most of the discharged water will soak back into the ground. Some will evaporate or be used by vegetation, but most will recharge the aquifer without ever reaching the town of Patagonia,” the company said. Even in the event of a 100-year, 24-hour flood, the increase would not have an “adverse effect” on the hamlet, South 32 said, nor did the company “expect that wildlife would be negatively affected.”

PARA consulted with hydrological experts and responded with a video of its own. Noting that South32 planned to pump “the equivalent of 10 Olympic-size swimming pools per day” into the Harshaw every day for up five years, the experts predicted the creek would quickly go from almost entirely dry to constantly flowing, carrying any undetected contaminants from the mine wherever it ran and heightening flood risks during monsoon season.

As we prepared to head out for our drive into the mountains, Gay pulled out a poster he made, detailing the expanse of water South32 expects the town of Patagonia to receive in the event of the 100-year flood — and how it would cover the town’s properties. “When you look at that closely,” he said, “it’s 70 percent of the lots now.”

In Patagonia, the problem would be too much water. In the mountains, it would be the opposite. “My fear is it’s going to dewater the mountain,” Shafer said. “If it dewaters the mountain, it kills the plant life. If it kills the plant life, there’s no place for this incredible biological diversity to survive. That’s my bottom line, but that’s not speaking as the organization. That’s speaking as Grandmother Carolyn.”

“It’s feast or famine,” Gay added. “I call it desiccate and saturate.”

Hoping for a Miracle

Patagonia’s paved roads disappeared in the rear-view mirror. Gay’s beat-up 4Runner crept slowly over the rough terrain. Approaching the old ASARCO site from the north, we passed abandoned mining tunnels from decades before, ranches that had been sold to the mining company, and others that soon might be.

“It is a patchwork of extreme complexity,” Gay said, leaning forward on the wheel. “Just a snarl, between the bumpiness of the land and the irregularity of the property lines.”

At a town council meeting last month, South32 presented its plan for managing the convoys of trucks that would run these roads, hauling minerals for green energy out of the mountains. In the early stages, it would be 62 heavy trucks, 26 buses, and 139 passenger vehicles daily. The flow would increase as the project became fully operational, at which point more than 200 heavy-duty trucks — in addition to the buses and passenger vehicles — would come through.

Given the landscape, traffic at that scale would require significant road work and with it, the obliteration of the mountains’ otherwise serene quiet. Like the water in Harshaw Creek, the change was difficult to imagine.

“Patagonia in 10 or 15 years won’t be recognizable anymore,” Patagonia Vice Mayor Michael Stabile said in an interview in the Patagonia Regional Times. Stabile was a founding member of PARA, though he no longer works with the organization. “They’re going to flood us with water,” he said. “And they’re going to flood us with trucks.”

“Patagonia in 10 or 15 years won’t be recognizable anymore.”

Days before we met up, Shafer had a similar moment of unsettling clarity. “I just realized I have shifted into grief about what is happening here,” she said. “Because of the realization of how special this is to me and that I will not be able to come out here for at least seven years, and when I do get to return, what will it be like?”

South32’s assurances about safeguarding the ecological systems were cold comfort for Shafer. “There’s nothing legally we can do to stop it. What we can legally do is mitigate the potential damage. That’s what we’re working very hard to do,” she said. “But unless something under the definition of miracle happens, there will be destruction by industrialized mining in these mountains.”

“The disaster of that,” Shafer said, “is that this is one of the regions of the world most in need of protection for species survival.”

The Cathedral

There was little to see at the old ASARCO site. A locked gate. A handful of “no trespassing” signs. We turned around and headed west into Humboldt Canyon, where work is currently overseen by Barksdale Capital Corp., a Canadian company specializing in mineral exploration — the kind that precedes a company like South32.

“I am in a stronger relationship with the natural world in this canyon than I am in any other canyon,” Shafer said, as we passed under a majestic spire of twisted rock. “This is a spiritual experience for me — full of experiences of dear friends of mine.”

Years back, Shafer officiated her friends’ wedding in the canyon. The couple was among PARA’s original founders. The groom was Glen Goodwin, an old-school Arizona cowboy who, in 2014, detected extensive water contamination stemming from the Patagonias’ old mine sites — including sites that are revving back up again today. Goodwin died last year. His ashes were spread in Humboldt Canyon.

The road twisted deeper into the mountains until coming to a stop in a clearing. Shafer got out and leaned against a tall pine tree, listening to the birds. “For me,” she said, “this meets the classic definition of a cathedral.”

On our way off the mountain, we stopped to watch mule deer grazing in a field. We dropped Gay off in town before leaving for the tour’s final destination: the perennially flowing stretch of Harshaw Creek.

Willow trees lined the way, along with massive Arizona sycamores. We walked down to a particularly beautiful bend in the creek. Shafer mentioned a paper she recently heard about discussing the mental health benefits of birdsongs.

“When you live with something all the time, you don’t think much about it,” she said. “But I have birdsong all day long, and it is something I do appreciate.”

Shafer is the last of PARA’s original core still living and working in Patagonia. “Two are now dead, two have moved out of country,” she said. She knows that stopping the mine is next to impossible, but then, the same could be said of her.

Shafer’s mission now is making the cost of doing business in the Patagonias match the value of the place. “I’m sorry if you’re not going to get a 25 percent profit margin,” she said. “If you have to live with 5 percent to honor what is here and you don’t like that, then go away.”

She leaned forward, smiling, and added in a whisper, “It wouldn’t hurt me if you left.”

The post Biden Fast-Tracked a Green Energy Mine in One of Earth’s Rarest Ecosystems. Arizona Locals Took It to Court. appeared first on The Intercept.

Last year, before the lease was activated, a line in Alito’s financial disclosures labeled “mineral interests” was valued between $100,001 and $250,000. If extraction on the plot proves fruitful, the lease dictates that Citizen Energy will pay Alito’s wife 3/16ths of all the money it makes from oil and gas sales.

In the past, Alito has often recused himself from cases that pose potential conflicts of interest with his vast investment portfolio. Many of these recusals were born from an inheritance of stocks after the death of Alito’s father-in-law, Bobby Gene Bomgardner. Because Citizen Energy III isn’t implicated in any cases before the Supreme Court, Alito’s holding in Oklahoma doesn’t appear to pose any direct conflicts of interest. But it does add context to a political outlook that has alarmed environmentalists since Alito’s confirmation hearing in 2006 — and cast recent decisions that embolden the oil and gas industry in a damning light. 

“There need not be a specific case involving the drilling rights associated with a specific plot of land for Alito to understand what outcomes in environmental cases would buttress his family’s net wealth,” Jeff Hauser, founder and director of the Revolving Door Project, told The Intercept. “Alito does not have to come across like a drunken Paul Thomas Anderson character gleefully confessing to drinking our collective milkshakes in order to be a real life, run-of-the-mill political villain.”

In May, Alito penned a majority decision in Sackett v. EPA which radically scaled back the Clean Water Act, reducing its mandate by tens of millions of acres. According to a statement released by President Joe Biden, the ruling “puts our nation’s wetlands — and the rivers, streams, lakes and ponds connected to them — at risk of pollution and destruction, jeopardizing the sources of clean water that millions of American families, farmers and businesses rely on.” The plaintiffs’ position in the case was backed by the American Gas Association, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association.

Prior to targeting the Clean Water Act, Alito joined the courts’ other conservative justices in attacking another set of EPA powers under the Clean Air Act in West Virginia v. EPA. The 2022 ruling gutted the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. 

A spokesperson for Alito did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

Since his appointment in 2006, Alito has operated as a judicial firebrand, making high-profile appearances at Federalist Society events to excoriate liberal doctrine. He drafted the historic opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade, lashing out in public after the decision was leaked early to the press. 

Unlike other federal courts, the Supreme Court does not have a legally binding ethics code. While justices are required to file financial disclosures under the Ethics in Government Act, the choice of whether or not to recuse from cases involving a conflict of interest is entirely self-enforced.

This loophole caught the public’s attention in April, when a ProPublica report detailed the lavish, undisclosed gifts and financial support Justice Clarence Thomas and his family received from billionaire GOP megadonor Harlan Crow. Since then, other justices’ financial dealings have been called into question, including Neil Gorsuch for an undisclosed property sale to a lawyer with business before the court, and John Roberts, whose wife’s employment as a legal recruiter for Supreme Court-bound lawyers raised a host of ethics questions.

Alito now finds himself in a position similar to Thomas, after another ProPublica report from last week described a fishing trip and private jet ride the justice took with conservative operative Leonard Leo and billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer, valued at over $100,000. While pictures from the trip suggest that Alito personally appreciates the bounty of America’s dwindling unpolluted landscape, his rulings in environmental cases suggest that politically he does not. 

Before publishing its investigation into Alito’s relationship with Singer — whose business model is organized around using the courts, including the Supreme Court, to extract payments from distressed bond issuers — ProPublica reached out to Alito with a list of questions. Alito responded by penning a defensive essay in the Wall Street Journal, which published the response before ProPublica had even published its story. 

“What makes political figures who violate ethics laws so exceptional is how much obviously unethical behavior is legal under our current overly permissive rules,” Hauser said. “Our current ethics regime assumes that a person’s financial interests need to be extremely specific in order to influence their behavior, a worldview that ignores the foresight rich people and corporations regularly demonstrate.”

Prior to the lease, Alito ruled on cases with the potential to impact gas and oil prices, both nationally and in Oklahoma. In Oneok, Inc. v. Learjet, Inc., decided in 2015, Alito ruled with the majority to head off an attempt to block state antitrust laws from being applied to natural gas companies under the Natural Gas Act. Oneok, the largest supplier of natural gas in Oklahoma, runs an active natural gas pipeline through the Alito plot. 

In 2017, Alito delivered an address at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, that further clarified his position on fossil fuels’ role in climate change. “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Carbon dioxide is not harmful to ordinary things, to human beings, or to animals, or to plants.” Alito said. “It’s actually needed for plant growth. All of us are exhaling carbon dioxide right now. So, if it’s a pollutant, we’re all polluting.”

In 2021, Alito joined the majority in PennEast Pipeline Co. v. New Jersey to protect the right for companies with federal backing to exercise eminent domain in the seizure of state property. PennEast Pipeline, a natural gas distributor, sought to maintain its ability to seize land in the construction of a pipeline, and thanks to the Supreme Court ruling, it was able to preserve a tactic for pipeline construction, which, if overturned, would have significantly impacted the ability for the natural gas industry to expand pipelines and production.

Over the past two years, Citizen Energy has launched a buying spree of wells and land rights, positioning itself as one of the top private producers in Oklahoma. It operates over 200 miles of natural gas-gathering pipelines and over 700 wells, and produces over 80,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. It is financially backed by the private equity behemoth Warburg Pincus.

The post Samuel Alito’s Wife Leased Land to an Oil and Gas Firm While the Justice Fought the EPA appeared first on The Intercept.

The case was brought on behalf of two Guyanese citizens, Frederick Collins and Godfrey Whyte. They accused the EPA of failing to enforce the requirements of its own permits by never securing a guarantee from Exxon or its subsidiary, Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, that the company would cover all costs related to a possible oil spill.

“Guyana taxpayers are currently exposed,” Tom Sanzillo, director of financial analysis for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said. “The potential consequences for Guyana are catastrophic.”

That’s because Exxon’s drilling project in Guyana is the riskiest kind: deep-water offshore drilling, which involves intense pressure bearing down on complex equipment. The conditions are similar to those that preceded the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010, which spewed oil and gas throughout the Gulf of Mexico, costing BP $69 billion.

Exxon’s own environmental impact assessments indicate that such a disaster in Guyana could send oil to the beaches of 14 different Caribbean islands, most of which depend on fishing and tourism — and all of which could hold Guyana liable for damages. The costs would be astronomical, which is why the permits for offshore drilling in Guyana require not only an independent liability insurance policy from Esso, but also an unlimited financial guarantee from its parent company to cover costs that exceed those covered by insurance.

Esso joined the case with the EPA, arguing that the plaintiffs were misinterpreting the law, that a deal had been worked out between the company and the agency, and that Guyanese citizens didn’t have standing to bring these sorts of cases anyway. Justice Sandil Kissoon ruled in favor of Collins and Whyte across the board, concluding that the insurance and guarantee requirements were clearly stated in Esso’s permit, the EPA failed to secure those assurances, and Guyanese citizens had every reason to question that failure.

“The EPA has relegated itself to a state of laxity of enforcement … putting this nation and its people in grave potential danger of calamitous disaster,” Kissoon wrote in a blistering 56-page ruling that called Esso “disingenuous and deceptive” and the EPA “derelict, pliant, and submissive.” Taking aim at the government and Exxon Mobil at the same time is a bold move that has some in the country worried for Kissoon’s safety, but advocates point to the ruling as confirmation that Guyana’s courts, at least, have not been captured by the oil business.

In Guyana, it’s become hard to distinguish where the oil company ends and the government begins. Exxon executives join the Guyanese president in his suite at cricket matches, and the vice president regularly hosts press conferences to defend the oil company. Vincent Adams, a Guyanese petroleum engineer and former head of the country’s EPA, has been one of the agency’s harshest critics.

“When I was working in the United States, we always had people at the offshore site 24/7 with the oil companies,” said Adams, who spent decades at the U.S. Department of Energy. “Because 99 percent of the time what they tell you is happening out there is not what is happening.” When Adams was tapped to run Guyana’s EPA, he planned to have monitors on board Exxon’s floating production vessels. “That’s all been canceled. Even Exxon’s files and permits, which used to be in the document center with everyone else’s, are under lock and key in the director’s office,” he said. “There’s no oversight happening because Exxon does not want oversight.”

“There’s no oversight happening because Exxon does not want oversight.”

“We have complied with all applicable laws at every step of the exploration, appraisal, development, and production stages,” said Meghan Macdonald, who handles media and communications for Exxon Mobil in Guyana. “We are committed to responsibly developing the resources offshore Guyana to maximize value for all stakeholders, including the government and people of Guyana.”

Nonetheless, Kissoon ordered the EPA to issue an immediate enforcement action against Esso, requiring that it provide an unlimited financial guarantee from ExxonMobil and proof of sufficient liability insurance, or its drilling permit would be suspended. The EPA appealed, and on June 8, an appeals court judge temporarily stayed the order until the appeal is heard but required Exxon to put up a $2 billion guarantee in the meantime. It’s a significant pumping of the brakes on Exxon’s operation in Guyana, which the company has projected could outpace the Texas Permian Basin, making Guyana Exxon’s top oil-producing region, responsible for more than a quarter of the company’s global output, within five years.

The local attorney on the case, Melinda Janki, has been working to stop oil drilling in her home country for more than a decade. For Janki, the ruling is significant no matter the outcome of the appeals process. “The top line is that two ordinary citizens in this little country, which most people can’t find on the map, have gone to court and they’ve beaten the EPA, but they’ve also beaten Exxon Mobil, and this is really a victory for the people, by the people.”

Janki said the ruling should send a message to people on the ground that they have the power to oppose projects like these. “Justice Kissoon put the rule of law above the interests of Exxon Mobil, and that’s massive,” Janki said. “That’s what every judge in every country should be doing, and I think this decision sets the standard for judges everywhere, not just in Guyana.”

What’s been happening over the past five years in Guyana is emblematic of a broader wave of extractive colonialism playing out in countries across the Global South. As Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law, put it, “Countries that don’t have a history or any significant history of oil and gas development or oil and gas dependence are being pushed into that at the very moment when the world knows we need to be phasing out fossil fuels.”

Right to a Healthy Environment

In 2015, when Exxon Mobil announced it had found oil — lots of it — off the coast of Guyana, only a handful of people there knew what that news really meant. One of them was Janki. “My heart just sank,” she said. “Because I know oil is a disaster, and it’s the worst possible thing that could have happened to Guyana.”

Janki came to her conclusions about oil in a somewhat surprising way: working for BP in the U.K. Janki grew up in Guyana, but her family left when she was around 12 due to political turmoil kicked off by U.S. and U.K. concerns that Guyana was becoming a “new Cuba.” Infiltrating various political groups and stoking racial tensions, the CIA and its allies in Britain successfully destabilized the country and installed a leader who suited them. Janki’s family moved to Zambia and then Trinidad. Eventually, Janki made her way to the University of Oxford. She went to law school and, after a few years working at a corporate firm in London, started looking for a new challenge.

“At the time, it seemed like BP was a good place to go,” she said. Janki negotiated deals and traveled all over Europe for BP, learning some key lessons along the way. “I think sometimes people don’t realize that the purpose of an oil company is to make money, and they have no other purpose,” she said. “They’re not there to promote human rights. They’re not there to protect the environment. They’re there to put the share price up and to give big, fat dividends to their shareholders. … They’re very good at what they do, and they’re very good at telling people a story about how beneficial they are for the world.”

When the appeal of working for BP wore off and political tensions back home had cooled, Janki returned to Guyana, moving back to the capital, Georgetown. At the time, Guyana was just beginning to build an independent democracy. In 1992, the country had its first completely free elections, and Cheddi Jagan — the candidate the CIA had spent decades trying to defeat — was elected president. His government made two significant moves: It proposed major reforms to the constitution and passed a comprehensive Environmental Protection Act that established Guyana’s EPA. Although she was still working in the corporate sphere at the time, Janki had a keen interest in environmental law.

The government began drafting the Environmental Protection Act in 1994. “There was a meeting at the Pegasus Hotel, which is this big hotel in Georgetown,” Janki said. “I had no way to go because I was just this completely unimportant individual.” But a friend helped her score an invite.

“It was interminably boring, but in the break, I was able to talk to one of the government officials and say to him that I had looked at their draft environmental act and I thought that it was inadequate.”

It wasn’t the sort of thing that a “completely unimportant individual” would generally say, but the official didn’t brush her off. “He said, ‘Well, send me something about it,’ and maybe that was a brush-off, but I saw it as a really exciting opportunity,” Janki said. “So I wrote a paper explaining why I thought this act was inadequate.”

The official asked Janki if she’d like to work as a consultant on drafting the act, and she jumped at the chance. “I put in all the stuff on the environmental impact assessments,” she said. “I put in the impact on the climate, the impact on the atmosphere, and I put in principles of environmental management, so things like the polluter pays and the precautionary principle and principles of natural capital.”

Janki’s version of the act was ratified by Jagan’s government in 1996. Just a few years later, the country signed its first contract with an oil company: a partnership between Exxon Mobil and Shell. The contract granted the partnership the right to explore for oil in Guyana, but for several years, the companies didn’t do much with their permits. Oil was plentiful and easier to get in other South American countries, so Guyana wasn’t a priority.

Meanwhile, Janki began lobbying Guyana’s Constitutional Reform Commission to add an amendment protecting the human right to a healthy environment. “I looked at constitutions around the world that, at that time, had the right to a healthy environment written into them. And then I put forward the arguments for having it in Guyana’s constitution.”

Once again, it worked. The right to a healthy environment for current and future generations was ratified as part of Guyana’s constitution in 2003.

The Boom

It wasn’t until 2008, a few months after Venezuela nationalized oil and booted out most of the foreign oil majors, that the companies began exploring the waters offshore Guyana in earnest. Still, they came up empty. Shell left the partnership in 2014, while Exxon brought on two new partners: Hess Corporation, an independent American oil company best known as an early mover in the fracking boom, and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. The very next year, Exxon announced it had found oil, more than 10 billion barrels of it. And not just any oil: It was light, sweet crude, the oil that’s easiest to refine, commanding the highest price on the global market.

“Suddenly, in 2015, Exxon announced that they had found oil, and people were going crazy talking about oil wealth,” Janki said.

It wasn’t just people talking about oil wealth. Exxon was pushing this idea, and so was the government. The company moved quickly to capture the hearts and minds not only of state officials, but also other members of civil society. One of Exxon’s first big public investments in Guyana was to sponsor the Caribbean Premier League, a popular regional cricket tournament, and the country’s cricket team, the Amazon Warriors. Players have Exxon Mobil emblazoned across the front of their uniforms. The company also helped get cricket games broadcast on TV.

“When you walked in the streets, you would hear every Guyanese saying, ‘Thank God for Exxon!’”

“When you walked in the streets, you would hear every Guyanese saying, ‘Thank God for Exxon! If it wasn’t for Exxon, we would’ve never been able to see cricket live on television,’” Glenn Lall, the publisher of a local newspaper, Kaieteur News, said. “You see how dangerous that is?”

The company and the government hired journalists working on the oil and gas beat away from the country’s papers and into corporate public relations and state-run newsrooms. One such journalist, who asked that their name be withheld to avoid retaliation, said the standard offer included a big pay bump, a lofty title, and a free car.

“I had some journalists that used to work with me, and the government tried to steal them with big pay. And it worked — they left,” Lall said. “A few of them after a while said, ‘No man, I can’t do what you want me to do,’ so they left there too, but none of them are doing journalism anymore.”

As a consequence, Lall said, there are few journalists left who report on oil drilling with a critical eye. Of the six reporters who once covered oil and gas for Kaieteur News, only one remains.

Since Exxon shipped its first barrel of oil in 2019, Janki has filed seven separate lawsuits against the Guyanese government asking it to do one thing: enforce the environmental laws she helped draft.

She had an early win in 2020 when the government reduced Exxon’s drilling permit from 23 years, as it was originally issued, to five years, the maximum allowed by law. And the recent insurance ruling, if it stands, will require the EPA to follow the country’s environmental and permitting laws. The rest of Janki’s cases are still making their way through the Guyanese courts. One argues that the offshore drilling project violates citizens’ constitutional right to a healthy environment. Others urge the government to do something about the constant burning of excess gas from Exxon’s offshore production platforms, a practice called flaring.

Janki said she’s struggled to find lawyers and clerks to work with her. Given how many firms Exxon and its partners, subsidiaries, and suppliers have contracted with in Guyana, it’s hard to find someone who’s not conflicted out. “I couldn’t get anybody to help with cases until a senior counsel who was based in Trinidad agreed to do it with me,” she said. “We had no clerk. I had to go and line up at the court registry with the documents and wait my turn.”

Exxon has also funded conservation organizations that might object to oil drilling in the country, including the Iwokrama International Center for Rain Forest Conservation and Development, Guyana’s crown jewel of conservation and a global leader on sustainable forestry.

“Yes, the obvious question is, you know, should we be taking money from the oil company?” Iwokrama CEO Dane Gobin said. “And my answer to that is, OK, oil will be there. We are not advocates. We run a rainforest. We don’t get involved in politics. But we have to take care of our people. And if somebody is saying, ‘Here’s a grant. You can do capacity building and training. You could improve the livelihoods of Guyanese. You could do all kinds of things, mangroves, all of that.’ Why should we say no?”

For Janki, the reason is simple: If you’re taking the oil companies’ money, you’re helping them deceive the public.

“I think it’s disingenuous to be claiming to be a conservation organization and at the same time trying to make allowances for the fossil fuel sector.”

“The oil industry always tells you how good it is for you,” Janki said. “And that has a way of removing every other narrative. … They say, ‘Well, we power the world. We are the energy that keeps the economy going. We heat your homes, we enable you to cook.’ And people say, ‘Oh yes, that’s wonderful.’ The companies don’t say, ‘We’re frying the planet so that we can make money, and we are going to make sure that renewable energy doesn’t get anywhere because that will put us out of business.’”

Whenever it can, Exxon reminds the public of its cricket sponsorship and conservation efforts. A marketing video the company released last year to address controversy around its contract with Guyana is a perfect example. Even the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, traditionally conservative and pro-oil, have described the deal as unfair to Guyana. So Exxon’s marketing team put together a Facebook video that starts — where else? — at the national cricket stadium. The first minute and a half focuses on the company’s investments in cricket before Exxon’s public relations lead takes to the streets, picking people “at random” to talk to about the contract. And then back to the cricket stadium for a recap.

It’s a master class in building social license. And the cricket sponsorship must be paying off because in March, Exxon increased its investment in Guyanese cricket in a big way, announcing funding for a new stadium in the easternmost part of the country, near the border of Suriname. The Greater Guyana Initiative, a local nonprofit funded by Exxon and its partners in Guyana, is paying $17.7 million to build the state-of-the-art facility, which will host sporting events and concerts in a region that will soon be home to a major oil and gas export port.

“If they didn’t give, they’d be knocked for not giving something back,” Gobin said. Since 2017, his organization has received $7 million from the Exxon Mobil Foundation.

“I think it’s disingenuous to be claiming to be a conservation organization and at the same time trying to make allowances for the fossil fuel sector,” Janki said.

But it’s an approach the government has taken as well. Guyana’s vice president, Bharrat Jagdeo, often talks about how the oil project will fund climate adaptation — and how the country needs to get the oil extracted and sold before anyone has to make good on their net-zero commitments. “We support the vision of a fast-paced development of the resources offshore, particularly in the context of net zero,” he told a crowd of oil executives at the annual CERAWeek conference. “We believe it’s a wise strategy to do as much exploration as possible now, prove the resources, and then have them removed and transferred into financial assets to transform the country.”

The trillion-dollar question is whether Guyana can get rich off oil before it suffers a catastrophic spill, the bottom falls out of the oil market, or the country’s coast — where 90 percent of the population lives — is swallowed by the sea, which is predicted to happen by 2030.

The Resource Curse

Throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, the fossil fuel industry is very busy telling the story of fossil fuels as the solution to poverty. As more and more Global North countries pass laws regulating emissions or incentivizing a shift away from fossil fuels, the race is on for the industry to sell as much oil and gas as possible before they have to strand assets. No one wants to be the company left with the most untapped, unmonetized oil and gas reserves dragging down their balance sheets.

In the Global South, the message is simple: Having your own fossil fuel industry means everyone will have access to energy and your country will get rich. Only that story hasn’t panned out for any Global South country in decades. Even when it comes to solving energy poverty — a term that describes inadequate access to energy for basic needs like cooking, lights, and temperature control — the industry has not delivered on its promises. Nigeria, which has been in the oil business for more than 50 years, has the lowest access to electricity globally; about 92 million of the country’s 200 million people lack access to power.

Janki knows that Guyana needs money to lift its people out of poverty. She just doesn’t think another cycle of what development economists call “the resource curse” — the phenomenon of countries with an abundance of natural resources winding up with less economic growth, democracy, or development — is going to do that. “Where is the money from the gold? Where is the money from the bauxite? Where is the money from the diamonds? Where is the money from the sugar? Where is the money from the agriculture? Where is the money from the fishing, etc.? The list is almost endless because we are so full of wealth,” she said. “And yet the people in this country are poor.”

She’s in favor of Guyana monetizing its value to the world as a carbon sink, although she doesn’t endorse the government’s recent move to sell $750 million worth of carbon credits to Exxon’s partner, Hess Corporation. Critics of carbon credits argue that they should only be used to offset the emissions of “difficult to abate” sectors — industries or processes for which there are no alternatives — not continued fossil fuel expansion.

Ultimately, Janki said she’d like to see those in the Global North take some responsibility for hundreds of years of colonialism and step up to prevent companies from leading yet another round of it.

“I think it’s really important that people stop thinking of Guyana as a developing country that needs to be helped and start looking at us and saying, ‘Wow, these guys are a carbon sink, and they are under threat because of Exxon Mobil and other oil companies,” Janki said. “And we have a responsibility to rein in those oil companies because those are oil companies coming from the Global North.”

Meanwhile, the outcome of her insurance case could set a precedent that changes the math entirely for drilling in Latin America and the Caribbean. If the ruling is overturned, the case could be taken up by the Caribbean Court of Justice, which sets legal precedents for the entire region. The industry will be watching to see whether bets placed not just in Guyana, but also in Suriname, Trinidad, Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia will suddenly become a whole lot riskier. Whether the ruling sticks or not, the case is likely to inspire similar legal action, according to Muffett of the Center for International Environmental Law.

“Lawyers from around the world who are fighting oil and gas — off the coasts of southern Africa, off the coast of Mozambique, and in other places in the Caribbean — are going to be looking at this decision,” he said, “paying close attention to whether the financial guarantees being provided in other oil and gas exploration and development permits are at an equivalent level.”

Additional reporting: Kiana Wilburg

The post How Exxon Captured a Country Without Firing a Shot appeared first on The Intercept.

Hours before dawn on Tuesday, eight animal liberation activists entered the Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse facility in Sonoma County, California, disguised as workers, with the aim of rescuing as many chickens as possible.

Meanwhile, approximately 175 protesters gathered outside the property, where up to 49,000 chickens are killed every day, and where animal rights activists allege animal abuses and risks to public health are rampant. Some of the demonstrators joined those who had entered the property to assist in the planned “open rescue” action: a tactic by which activists publicly remove ailing animals from factory farms and bring them to animal sanctuaries, while highlighting the harms of the meat and animal products industry.

By 3 a.m. PT, as partly captured in a video shared exclusively with The Intercept, activists had removed 11 chickens from trucks that had transported thousands of chickens onto the slaughterhouse property, packed together as tightly as physically possible. Seven more birds were rescued soon after from a truck on its way to the facility.

Tuesday’s rescue and demonstration, organized by activists affiliated with animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, coincided with the release of a report from the group Tuesday morning. Shared with The Intercept and disseminated to regulatory agencies, the report alleges that Petaluma Poultry, a subsidiary of agribusiness giant Perdue Farms, is routinely violating animal cruelty laws and exposing the public to major health risks — including the possibility of future zoonotic disease pandemics — through brutal and negligent treatment of birds marketed as “free range” and “organic.”

The new report is based on undercover investigations at the slaughterhouse and a half dozen of Petaluma’s supplier farms, including whistleblower reports, firsthand observations, and hidden camera footage, alongside findings from veterinary medicine experts and infectious disease specialists who carried out fecal tests and examined animals — some sick, some already dead — brought to them from Petaluma facilities by DxE activists. (Petaluma Poultry and Perdue Farms did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment on Tuesday morning’s report release and rescue.)

The very same animals that are cheerily packaged and sold in grocery stores nationwide under the personalizing brand names “Rocky” and “Rosie” — “Rosie” was the first chicken line in the United States to carry a certified organic label — are processed in a slaughterhouse where undercover investigator Raven Deerbrook said she found animals that were tortured and sick and where workers labored in dangerous conditions.

Deerbrook’s account and materials formed the basis of parts of the new DxE report, which the group sent to local, state, and federal authorities to request official investigations. DxE sent its report to USDA Farm Service Agency California Executive Director Blong Xiong; California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta; Sonoma County Animal Services, District Attorney Carla Rodriguez, Sheriff Eddie Engram, and Administrator Christina Rivera; and a host of other officials and agencies from nearby counties.

“Hundreds are discovered to be so diseased that they are condemned after being slaughtered.”

“I am seeing sick birds being crowded onto trucks by the thousands. Dozens are dying on the way to the slaughterhouse,” Deerbrook, who entered the slaughterhouse undetected in a worker’s uniform, photographed internal documents, and set up hidden cameras, alleged over Signal message. “Hundreds are discovered to be so diseased that they are condemned after being slaughtered.”

Deerbrook, who worked for months gathering materials for the DxE report, said that she saw chickens injured while being hung on the slaughter line; she photographed company reports about bruised birds, which is a sign of abuse; she saw evidence of birds missing the “stun bath”: an electrical water bath in which birds’ heads are dipped to stun them unconscious before slaughter. She added that she saw “birds trying to escape and being cut-into while they were conscious, and I see evidence of them being boiled alive.” She also charged that she saw workers performing “one of the most dangerous tasks (live hanging) in pitch darkness, and many are suffering with pain and injuries.”

None of the local, state, and federal officials and agencies that received the report responded immediately to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Over 1,000 animals were “condemned” — disqualified from the food supply — on a single day in April 2023 after being slaughtered, according to documents from the slaughterhouse obtained by Deerbrook over a three-month period. Hundreds of them were condemned due to septicaemia, a form of bacterial blood poisoning, and toxemia. The investigation included lab reports from veterinarians that found dangerous pathogens in several birds. The slaughterhouse was also found to have unusually high rates of salmonella and campylobacter, two bacteria that cause widespread illnesses in humans, according to a local press report citing government data.

While Covid-19 was not transmitted to humans through factory farming, the deadliest pandemic in U.S. history should have prompted a reckoning over how we think about zoonotic disease spread and the undeniable future pandemic risks of intensive animal produce industry. Like so many ostensible pandemic reckonings, the dangerously concentrated — not to mention torturous — mass production of meat and animal products continues unfettered.

“Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) investigators made repeated visits to six Petaluma Poultry-supplying factory farms in Northern California,” the report says. “They documented routine violations of California’s animal cruelty laws, including birds collapsed on the floor or stuck on their backs and unable to walk to food or water, left to slowly starve to death, as well as infectious diseases that threaten public health. Yet, despite dozens of reports to county and state authorities, the government still refuses to hold the company accountable.”

DxE has been making allegations about cruelty and neglect at Petaluma Poultry since at least 2018, when, following investigations into widespread animal cruelty at its facilities, the animal rights group’s activists carried out a previous mass rescue action at Petaluma supplier, McCoy’s Poultry. After examining birds retrieved from the farm, Sonoma County’s own Animal Services Department referred McCoy’s to the sheriff’s office as a suspect in an animal cruelty case. The facility was shuttered, but no such charges materialized.

Meanwhile, 58 activists were arrested on felony charges for their involvement in the attempted rescue that drew attention to these systematic abuses. Many of these cases have since been dropped or resolved through diversions or plea deals. Four people involved in nonviolent protest actions against factory farms are currently still facing criminal charges in Sonoma County, including a total of 12 felony charges.

“The diseases and bacteria that we found are pretty shocking.”

“Following the 2018 rescue effort at McCoy’s Poultry, that facility closed down, but the cruelty we found there was not an isolated incident,” said Zoe Rosenberg, a DxE activist who participated in Tuesday’s rescue effort. “We have continued to investigate Petaluma Poultry farms across Northern California and we have repeatedly found sick, injured, collapsed, and starving animals.”

Rosenberg said that “the diseases and bacteria that we found are pretty shocking.” The pathogen Clostridium perfringens, which was found in the necropsy report carried out by the California Animal Health and Food Safety Lab at the University of California, Davis of a chicken from the farm, according to the DxE report, can cause necrotic enteritis in humans: a bowel disease that kills up to 50 percent of humans who contract it and is responsible for 8 percent neonatal intensive care unit admissions. “This industry is hurting all of us, especially those who are immunocompromised like I am,” Rosenberg, who has a chronic illness, told me.

“75% of new or emerging infectious diseases in humans come from animals,” the DxE report says. “We see the perfect breeding ground for such new diseases to emerge in the filthy, crowded, and disease-ridden conditions at Petaluma Poultry factory farms, particularly given the company’s inability to keep these diseases out of the slaughterhouse and the food supply.”

Police were called to the Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse in response to Tuesday’s action, but all the activists on the property had left with the rescued chickens by the time cops entered the facility. None of the rescue participants on Tuesday morning have been arrested at the time of writing.

Previous rescues have led to numerous arrests and charges, but DxE has a strong record when it comes to winning cases in court. In March, two DxE activists, Alicia Santurio and Alexandra Paul, were acquitted in California of theft charges over the rescue of two chickens from Foster Farms.

Paul’s attorney and DxE co-founder Wayne Hsiung, who has himself successfully defeated felony charges for previous animal rescues, said in a statement that the jury decision in the Foster Farms case “should be a clarion call for animal-abusing corporations that if you are going to hurt animals, people will intervene and stop you, and they will be defended by our community and by American citizens.” DxE members have been consistently willing to see their cases go to court, risking years in prison to establish legal precedents for the “right to rescue.”

Legal scholars have also argued that a so-called necessity defense, which in certain circumstances would allow for a person to, for example, break into a stranger’s car with legal justification to save a suffocating dog, could apply in cases like DxE’s. For the animal rescuers, the logic is the same, with the only difference lying in the power of the agriculture industry. Rosenberg, the participant in Tuesday’s action, told me that she believes a necessity defense could apply in these cases. (Up until now, acquittals in DxE cases have not relied on a necessity defense, so the precedent remains unestablished.)

“We believe the necessity defense does apply to animals. And we’ve been advised on that by a lawyer, who also believes the necessity defense does apply in this situation,” Rosenberg told me. “While what we are doing is right, there might be repercussions because unfortunately Petaluma Poultry has great sway in Sonoma County.”

DxE’s investigation makes explicit the all-too-cozy relationship between the Sonoma County sheriff, prosecutors, and major agribusiness in the area. In recent years, the Sonoma County Farm Bureau hosted an event on how the farming companies can “prepare for and manage activists.” An assistant sheriff was slated to give a presentation.

“They might try to prosecute people, they might try to put us in prison just for helping animals,” Rosenberg said. “But we completely believe in what we’re doing and we hope that other people will, too.”

Correction: June 13, 2023, 12:15 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct the number of chickens removed by activists from the trucks. They removed 11, not 10.

The post Dangerous Pathogens and Cruelty Law Violations at Perdue Subsidiary, Animal Rights Report Alleges appeared first on The Intercept.

For industry operatives like Milloy, air pollution, especially the regulation of particulate matter, has long been a greater concern than climate policy. Regulations on PM2.5 — fine inhalable particles generally smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter — would require many of the same reductions in the combustion of fossil fuels that climate policy would, but without any of the politicization that has obstructed climate action for decades. It’s never been easy for politicians to publicly fight against clean air and water, and it’s doubly hard when the country’s largest city is wrapped in smoke. So Milloy took to the conservative airways to dismiss concerns about wildfire smoke, which peer-reviewed public health research has linked to higher rates of heart attacks, strokes, and emergency respiratory and immune responses.

That research means little to Milloy, who claims that the peer-review process is biased against corporate interests. Although he has a degree in biostatistics from Johns Hopkins, Milloy is not, even by his own account, a medical expert. Nor is he an epidemiologist. But while it might be easy to dismiss him, Milloy has a knack for accessing power and attention. His recent media tour is a good predictor of where we’re likely to see conservatives headed should they regain control of the government in 2024. Spoiler alert: He’d like to see the Environmental Protection Agency go away.

In early 2020, Milloy was basking in the glory of multiple wins under President Donald Trump, posting pictures with his pals inside the EPA and bragging about “eating the greens’ lunch.”

Trump’s EPA declined to tighten air pollution standards, rolled back mercury regulations, and disbanded the Particulate Matter Review Panel, or as Milloy put it: “blowing out that particulate matter sub-panel, another huge win.” Plus he finally got to introduce an idea he’d been trying to get into the EPA regulatory framework since the 1990s: the so-called secret science proposal. It would lend more weight to studies that make data available to the government and other researchers, which sounds good but would have the effect of discrediting most epidemiological studies because they include human test subjects and are subject to privacy laws. “I’ve got huge wins under my belt,” Milloy told me in a 2020 interview. “It’s been tremendously satisfying for me.”

That’s a lot of policy shifts coming from someone whose ideas have often been considered fringe by his fellow conservatives. As the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Milloy called public health officials “COVID creeps” and likened quarantine to communism. He criticizes oil companies for pandering to climate activists, whom he calls “bedwetters” or “watermelons”: green on the outside but “red” on the inside. In a 2017 presentation at the annual Heartland Institute climate conference, he compared the EPA to Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.

But the Trump EPA normalized a lot of previously fringe ideas, and Milloy was an adviser on the transition team. “I was the only person on the team with a background in EPA science, so I was brought on to write the science part of the transition plan,” he said. That meant he had real influence on environmental policy. And that influence is likely to grow if Republicans retake control of the government. In the meantime, Milloy works for Energy & Environment Legal Institute, a nonprofit law firm leading the charge against renewable energy projects and regulation of fossil fuels. Ultimately, the secret science proposal didn’t make it through the final approval process before Trump left office. When I asked Milloy if he thought a Republican-led EPA would take up the proposal again, he replied, “That is on my agenda.”

Also on the agenda: defunding the EPA and handing environmental regulation over to the states. But most of all, reclaiming his Trump-era wins on air pollution, particularly stalling or rolling back regulations on PM2.5. Those regulations are all the more critical to the climate fight today given the legal attack on the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Particulate matter and greenhouse gas emissions are mostly generated by the same activity — the combustion of fossil fuels — so if the agency can’t regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, it can accomplish similar goals by tightening restrictions on particulate matter, something Milloy has been pointing out to conservatives for decades.

After Trump left office, the EPA’s disbanded Particulate Matter Review Panel went ahead and published their work in the New England Journal of Medicine. “We unequivocally and unanimously concluded that the current PM2.5 standards do not adequately protect public health,” they wrote. Under President Joe Biden, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee agreed, and the EPA is in the process of strengthening the standards.

“It’s hard to attack clean air and clean water, they don’t want to do that, so they suggest the science is flawed.”

Milloy is hoping a lawsuit before the D.C. District Court will roll those efforts back. His latest battle against air pollution regulations is happening amid not only an endless respiratory health pandemic, but also a steady stream of studies pointing to the millions of people around the world still dying early thanks to air pollution. According to Milloy, it’s all fraud.

“What I think the right wing has done is try to saw the legs off the infrastructure that holds up environmental decision-making,” Eric Schaeffer, an EPA employee-turned-whistleblower and executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project, said. “It’s hard to attack clean air and clean water, they don’t want to do that, so they suggest the science is flawed. … We’re seeing right now the impacts of a decades-long campaign to undermine science.”

From Tobacco to Wildfire Smoke

Like many of the folks who went on to battle climate regulation, Milloy got his start working for the tobacco industry in the 1990s, particularly dealing with the issue of secondhand smoke. He ran the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, or TASSC, a front group for Philip Morris that worked to counteract efforts to regulate air pollution. Memos outlining the creation of TASCC could pass as mission statements for Milloy’s enterprise today.

TASCC operated under the principle that if an economic argument can’t keep regulation at bay, the next best move is to undermine the science that regulation is based on. Almost as soon as he started working on air pollution, Milloy had new science to contend with: a 1993 epidemiological study that looked at 8,000 people across six American cities and found that exposure to fine particulate matter — PM2.5, or soot — was correlated to reduced life expectancy. Not what you want to hear when the companies you work for sell the products that produce PM2.5: cigarettes, cars, coal, oil.

Milloy started by picking apart the methodology: The subject group was too small, researchers hadn’t controlled for other factors, and epidemiology’s reliance on observational data made it suspect. He manufactured controversy around the researchers keeping their data private, producing a paper that would become the basis for the secret science proposal. And he targeted the scientists themselves, particularly lead researcher Steven Dockery and one of the statisticians involved, C. Arden Pope.

But it’s hard to discredit scientists who are cautious about the implications of their own findings. “It was a bit bigger than we expected, and we were a bit concerned about it,” Pope said of the correlation between exposure to PM2.5 and premature death. That led the scientists to ask the American Cancer Society to rerun the analysis with an independently collected cohort of subjects. The cancer society got similar results, as did the Health Effects Institute, an organization half-funded by the EPA and half-funded by the automotive industry. Milloy kept fighting, but nothing worked. In 1997, the EPA passed its first regulation on particulate matter. It tightened those regulations every eight years or so right up until Scott Pruitt became administrator of the agency under Trump. Milloy said he put the old secret science paper “in the transition plan and talked with Pruitt about it.”

It wasn’t new science or a new strategy that handed Milloy a win after 25 years; it was just access. Being on Trump’s EPA transition team enabled him to smuggle in all sorts of ideas from his pals, including James Enstrom, a tobacco industry-funded scientist who published one of the few studies contradicting the Six Cities data. While Milloy points to Enstrom’s study as proof that Pope et al. are peddlers of “junk science,” Pope points to the 25 years’ worth of additional studies that have consistently replicated the Six Cities result.

The obscure journal that put out Enstrom’s paper in 2017 is published by another friend of Milloy’s, toxicologist Ed Calabrese, whose research focuses on the idea that a little bit of pollution and radiation are actually good for you. When Pruitt announced in 2018 that the EPA would not strengthen the regulations on particulate matter, he cited Enstrom’s study as evidence that the science on PM2.5 was “too uncertain” to act upon.

Regulating Air Pollution

Almost as soon as the U.S. government began to mandate quarantine in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Milloy took to Twitter to take aim at one of his favorite scientific targets, epidemiology, and warn that Covid lockdown would lead to climate lockdown. Aside from political ideology, there’s also a PM2.5 connection with Covid. Studies have found that both chronic exposure to particulate matter and short-term exposure are Covid-19 risk factors.

Milloy’s wins on PM2.5 under Trump illustrate just how much of the U.S. regulatory apparatus the administration was able to dismantle in a short amount of time, but they’re an indicator of something else too: a willingness to go further than conservatives ever have in the battle against environmental regulation, to actually attack clean air and water. Why? In a word, climate. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, the EPA’s hands are somewhat tied when it comes to regulating the emissions of power plants. One of the few remaining ways the agency can target CO2 is by regulating particulate matter, since both are emitted via fossil fuel combustion. As Milloy put it to me recently: “PM2.5 is the most important backdoor science scheme for regulating fossil fuel emissions.”

As New York and D.C. residents choked on wildfire smoke from Canada, many saw in the apocalyptic landscape a window into a climate-changed future. The link between climate change and wildfire is nuanced: Climate change doesn’t “cause” wildfires, but it does create the low-moisture, high-heat conditions that make fires more likely and keeps them burning longer. Irregular plant growth driven by climate change can also result in excess fuel for those fires, but forest management and building development choices matter too. The data is unclear on which of these factors played the largest role in Canada’s fires, but it is very clear that climate change will bring bigger fires more frequently in the future.

For Milloy, though, no matter what the data says, there can be no lines drawn between climate change and fire or smoke and respiratory illness. Such a connection would make his clients liable for tens of millions of dollars in health costs, and then they couldn’t afford to fund him anymore.

The post The Right-Wing War on Clean Air appeared first on The Intercept.

When the sun goes down, the wall’s ecological footprint expands up and out, with lights reaching into the sky and illuminating cross-border habitats. Most of that illumination is concentrated near population centers and ports of entry, but with the flip of a switch, that could easily change.

According to a new survey, federal contractors have placed nearly 2,000 stadium-style lights in southern Arizona alone in recent years, imperiling some of the most ecologically complex and celebrated public lands in the United States.

In a report published Tuesday, the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based environmental organization, revealed the placement of more than 1,800 lights on federal land in the Sonoran Desert between 2019 and 2021, including wildlife preserves that are home to at least 16 threatened or endangered species. The new lights are not yet in use, and according to the report’s authors, they never should be.

“The scientific record clearly shows that artificial light at night can have costly, even deadly effects on a wide variety of species including amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, insects and plants,” the group said. “High-intensity lighting in these priority conservation areas would be devastating to the rich biodiversity of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico.”

The Center for Biological Diversity documented the placement of lighting in several of the most famed ecosystems of the American Southwest, including the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, and the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge.

Together, the four parcels provide a habitat for hundreds of species of birds and an astonishing number of ecosystem-sustaining insects, while also featuring some of the only U.S.-Mexico jaguar migration corridors on the planet, all of which depend on dark skies to survive and thrive.

“The entire purpose of the wildlife refuges where these lights are is contradicted by the actions of CBP.”

The Center for Biological Diversity’s findings mark the latest example of the mission of the Department of Homeland Security — especially Customs and Border Protection — colliding with that of federal agencies mandated to protect public lands and wildlife. Those collisions have been particularly acute in Arizona, where CBP has blown apart national monuments and wildlife refuges and desecrated sacred Native American heritage sites to make way for wall construction.

“The entire purpose of the wildlife refuges where these lights are is contradicted by the actions of CBP,” Russ McSpadden, the Center for Biological Diversity’s borderlands advocate and lead author of the report, told The Intercept. “It’s outrageous that they built these. These are some of the most important conservation lands in North America.”

The expansion of Arizona’s border wall lighting began in 2019 under former President Donald Trump. The additions created a major hurdle for officials at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, who were in the middle of applying for certification with the International Dark-Sky Association for recognition of the monument’s unique lack of light of pollution.

Monument Superintendent Scott Stonum, in a statement to Arizona Luminaria, a Tucson-based news outlet, said the National Park Service “provided comments at the request of CBP concerning potential impacts and suggested mitigations” at the time of the expansion. The service’s “concerns included potential impacts to natural and cultural resources: disturbance of archeological sites, disruption of wildlife corridors, wilderness values, scenic vistas, night-sky, and others.”

In a call with reporters last year, CBP officials outlined a series of construction projects related to the border wall, from repairing gates and roads to filling gaps. New lighting was not included in the contracts for the “remediation” work, officials said in September, adding that the agency was “currently evaluating the operational requirements for lighting across the southwest border” and “looking at the technology available that may help reduce the need for light.”

Whether CBP’s position holds 10 months later is unclear; the agency did not respond to a request for comment by publication. The Center for Biological Diversity’s report, however, shows that whether new lighting goes up or not, the infrastructure is already in place in southern Arizona to do significant environmental harm.

“If they ever switch the lights on, you’d be able to see this huge linear line of lights from space.”

The group’s investigation began after McSpadden called several of Arizona’s federal land management offices and learned that they had no idea how many lights CBP had placed in their jurisdictions. He began making trips to the border and counting lights on the wall, then cross-checked those counts with public records requests and follow-up calls with federal officials.

“The biodiversity in these regions is off the hook and they built it right across federally designated critical habitat, habitat for at least 16 endangered species,” McSpadden said. “If they ever switch the lights on, you’d be able to see this huge linear line of lights from space.”

Contrary to the desolate desert images of the popular imagination, the ecosystems of southern Arizona are among the most vibrant on the planet.

“Half of all breeding bird species in North America are known to use the San Pedro River corridor,” the Center for Biological Diversity noted, “along with 82 species of mammals and 43 species of reptiles and amphibians.”

A single game camera along the river documented more than 1,100 instances of wildlife crossing through the borderlands in a three-year period. The travelers included badgers, bobcats, javelina, mountain lions, raccoons, and multiple species of skunk and deer.

Additionally, the report added, “the borderlands between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, contain some of the highest diversity of insects in the world.” According to one study cited by the group, “the highest diversity of bee species anywhere on Earth exists within just six square miles of San Bernardino Valley, including the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge.”

“Turning on the existing border lighting infrastructure at Organ Pipe and Cabeza Prieta would be devastating for lesser long-nosed bats.”

The insects provide food for the area’s world-famous bird and bat populations. Lesser long-nosed bats in particular, which migrate by the thousands over the border wall each summer, are key pollinators for Arizona’s iconic saguaro cacti. They are also prone to significant behavioral disruptions when confronted with giant beams of light.

“Turning on the existing border lighting infrastructure at Organ Pipe and Cabeza Prieta would be devastating for lesser long-nosed bats, shooting a massive wall of light into the sky stretching dozens of miles,” the Center for Biological Diversity reported.

The danger was one of many cited in the report. Others manifested in aquatic habitats, such as the famed Quitobaquito Springs on Organ Pipe, where threatened and endangered species like the Sonoyta turtle and the Quitobaquito pupfish are barely clinging to existence.

The impacts on the desert’s smallest creatures would have cascading effects on the ecosystem’s largest and most iconic animals, the report added, including endangered populations of jaguar and ocelot that still roam the borderlands: “Exposure to artificial lighting has been demonstrated to substantially change behavior patterns of rodents and prey species, thereby altering predator-prey relationships and diminishing hunting opportunities for carnivores.”

Lighting up the borderlands “would worsen the already devastating harm caused by border walls,” the report argued, “further altering behavior patterns and degrading habitat.”

The post The Feds Have Thousands of Stadium Lights on the Border. Switching Them On Would Devastate Desert Ecosystems. appeared first on The Intercept.

“We had to leave because of the drought and the conflict,” said Ebow, 25, referring to the current offensive by the Somali government against the terrorist group al-Shabab. “We had no food. Our livestock is dead.” Their first night at the camp, Ebow and three of her children slept in a makeshift shelter. When we spoke on May 10, they were waiting for their own small wood-and-plastic-tarp bivouac there.

The Horn of Africa is experiencing a historic drought, one of the worst in six decades. A drought and famine in 2011 and 2012 killed a quarter million people here. Somalia, with the help of international donors, has averted a famine this year, but the current drought is of the same magnitude or worse than 2011, Mohamed Moalim, an adviser with the Somali Disaster Management Agency, told The Intercept. Most of the country is still facing acute food insecurity, while the risk of famine stalks rural areas and internally displaced people, or IDP, camps like this one.

The drought is compounded, ironically, by catastrophic flooding. Almost the entire population of the central Somali town of Beledweyne was displaced due to flash floods this month. Twelve days later, the water had still not receded, leaving critical infrastructure inundated and roads impassable and delaying the arrival of humanitarian aid.

A long-running conflict against al-Shabab involving the Somali government and a host of international military forces, including the United States, Turkey, and the African Union, has also led to widespread displacement. The Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies found that, in 2022, al-Shabab attacks increased by 23 percent and fatalities caused by militant Islamists spiked 133 percent, a record level exceeding the total in 2020 and 2021 combined. From January through mid-March, when Ebow was driven from her home, there were at least 630 acts of conflict-related violence in Somalia, with more than 230 reported fatalities in Lower Shabelle, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

Last Friday, al-Shabab fighters attacked an outpost of the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia in Bulamarer, about 80 miles southwest of Mogadishu. Al-Shabab claimed that the coordinated assault, including suicide bombs, killed 137 Ugandan troops. The African Union acknowledged the attack but did not comment on its losses. U.S. Africa Command was drawn into the fighting and, according to a press release, “conducted an airstrike against militants in the vicinity of the ATMIS forward operating base” that reportedly “destroyed weapons and equipment unlawfully taken by al Shabaab fighters.”

The combination of conflict, drought, and floods drove more than one million people from their homes between January 1 and May 10.

The combination of conflict, drought, and floods drove more than one million people from their homes between January 1 and May 10, a record rate of displacement for the nation. “These are alarming figures of some of the most vulnerable people forced to abandon the little that they had to head for the unknown,” said the Norwegian Refugee Council’s country director Mohamed Abdi.

All of these overlapping crises have left Somalia in a desperate situation. In 2011, four million Somalis were in need of food; by last year, that number had risen to 6.7 million, more than one-third of its total population of 18 million. This year, roughly the same number are facing acute food insecurity, while about 6.4 million are unable to access sufficient water for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. Some 5.1 million children require humanitarian assistance, out of 8.3 million Somalis in need. Last year, drought killed about 43,000 people in Somalia. United Nations and Somali government projections place the potential death toll between January and June of this year at 135 people per day.

Ebow and her children are among 3.9 million people who are now homeless within the country’s borders, while another 700,000 Somalis are displaced abroad. With insecurity rising and the drought killing off livestock, Ebow said, people were streaming out of her village. The Intercept heard the same from more than a dozen other recently arrived IDPs in the camp. Narifa Hussein Mohamed, an administrator who oversees al-Hidaya, said 400 people arrived in the first week of May. When I visited, they were doubled up with neighbors, sometimes eight or 10 people — mostly women and children — in rickety shelters that look fit for no more than two or three. 

As IDP camps go, al-Hidaya is better than many in countries marred by conflict. It is laid out in a coherent fashion and has potable water and an open-air school for children. But privation is still the rule here; accessing water is a challenge, and nourishment, like hope, is in short supply. “These people need food, clothes, mattresses, shelter from the rain,” said Mohamed. “They also need work or some training so that they can make money, have an income.” Al-Hidaya is just one of hundreds of makeshift sites on the outskirts of Mogadishu where exhausted people on the run from war, want, and withering weather have found meager shelter.

Ebow — scrunched up on the dusty ground, cradling her baby — said her family is now divided. Her husband and four other children were too sick and weak to travel, so she had to leave them behind. She hoped to find some work to help pay their way to join her, but the sum involved — perhaps as much as $100 — is so far out of reach as to be impossible. Most Somalis live on less than $2 per day.

Women and children in IDP camps in Mogadishu and the town of Baidoa, about 140 miles northwest of the capital, have turned to begging in the streets, housecleaning, shining shoes, or selling khat — a leaf that, when chewed, offers psychotropic effects — to support their families. Nearly 90 percent of respondents to a recent U.N. survey on how the drought is affecting children said that kids are engaged in hazardous work, with about 18 percent involved in sex work.

Amina Sidow, 40, arrived at al-Hidaya from Lower Shabelle with her five children just days before we talked. She said this year’s drought was the worst she had ever experienced. “In 2011, there was some assistance. The cows got very skinny, but they didn’t die,” she told The Intercept, sitting outside her tiny, jury-rigged home: several scraps of frayed plastic tarp, layered and stretched taut over a frame of bent tree branches. “Now all our animals are dead. We’ve lost everything.”

Water shortages have led to increased disease among livestock — even among camels and goats, which are usually more resilient than cows — low birth rates, decreased milk production, and deaths. This leads to a lack of vital nutrition, such as milk and protein, especially for children. Even when livestock aren’t dying, their decreased health and weight have led to reduced value at market, hurting household incomes. Herds often take five years or more to rebuild after catastrophic shocks, and many pastoralist and farmer households had yet to recover from a drought in 2016 and 2017 when the current one began in October 2020. Numerous IDPs at al-Hidaya said they had lost all their animals to the drought or had sold them off, suggesting extremely lean years to come for many of the displaced.

“Climate change is causing chaos,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres on a visit to Somalia in April, noting that the country has experienced an unprecedented run of five consecutive insufficient rainy seasons. “Poor and vulnerable communities are pushed by the drought to the brink of starvation, and the situation can get worse.”

“We want to help ourselves. But right now, we need someone to help us.”

For Sidow, whose husband died six months ago, “worse” is hard to imagine. “We have no means to build a proper shelter. No materials,” she said, raising her hands and then dropping them in her lap. “We need water. We need food. We want to work, to be productive, but what can we do? We want to help ourselves. But right now, we need someone to help us.”

The post Climate Change and Conflict Are Wreaking Havoc in Somalia appeared first on The Intercept.

The case was filed by a wealthy Idaho couple, Michael and Chantell Sackett, who were annoyed that they were required to get a special permit from the Environmental Protection Agency to build on their land because of its proximity to Priest Lake. The Sacketts’ land contains wetlands, but because the wetlands are separated from the lake by a road, they argued the permit was unnecessary. It’s almost certain they would have gotten the permit had they applied, but they opted to sue instead. The court took the Sacketts’ case as an opportunity to open up a broader discussion about what exactly the Clean Water Act is meant to protect, changing the law completely and removing protections from any wetland not immediately connected to a body of water.

Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who broke with his conservative colleagues, accused the majority of having effectively “rewritten” the Clean Water Act, which was originally passed in 1972 and updated in 1977.

“Since 1977, when Congress explicitly included ‘adjacent’ wetlands within the act’s coverage, the Army Corps has adopted a variety of interpretations of its authority over those wetlands — some more expansive and others less expansive,” Kavanaugh wrote. “But throughout those 45 years and across all eight presidential administrations, the Army Corps has always included in the definition of ‘adjacent wetlands’ not only wetlands adjoining covered waters but also those wetlands that are separated from covered waters by a man-made dike or barrier, natural river berm, beach dune, or the like.”

In the majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court applied a new interpretation of the word “adjacent,” removing protections for any wetlands that are not immediately adjoining lakes, streams, rivers, or oceans, which will have a profound impact on coastal communities around the country. “Wetlands are essential for protecting disadvantaged communities, which are often in low-lying areas, from flooding,” Nick Torrey, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said. Torrey added that wetlands are also critical to the many fishing businesses in the southeast, where he practices. “We have a saying: No wetlands, no seafood,” he said.

“The court’s approach today was to disregard several decades’ worth of precedent interpreting the Clean Water Act,” Sam Sankar, senior vice president at Earthjustice, said. For the past 40 years, the court has interpreted the word “adjacent” to mean what it does to everyone else; in this ruling, five justices said “well actually” adjacent means adjoining, so if there is anything in between a wetland and the water, that wetland doesn’t need to be protected.

It’s not a decision underpinned by science, but rather a legal invention known as the “clear statement rule,” a term the justices use when they want to assert their power to ignore Congress’s wishes and interpret the law solely as written. “The court is increasingly using the clear statement rule to narrow laws written years ago by Congresses that sought to create environmental protections like the Clean Water Act,” Sankar said.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the majority used the clear statement rule as a “thumb on the scale for property owners — no matter that the Clean Water Act is all about stopping property owners from polluting.” Referring to conservative justices’ reliance on the rule to weaken environmental regulations, Kagan added, “These pop-up ‘clear statement’ rules give the court a way to cabin the anti-pollution actions Congress thought appropriate by appointing itself as the national decision-maker on environmental policy.”

The clear statement rule is a close cousin of the “major questions doctrine,” another bit of legalcraft that the court has increasingly used to gut regulations on industry. “The Supreme Court maybe invoked it only five times in its whole history before 2021, in cases that were actually quite exceptional,” Richard Revesz, dean emeritus at New York University School of Law and administrator of information and regulatory affairs at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, said. “But in the last couple of years, it’s a doctrine that’s been invoked promiscuously by opponents of regulation and the court has shown great interest in embracing it. It basically says if an agency decision is going to have vast economic or political significance, it needs to be authorized explicitly by Congress.”

The court invoked the major questions doctrine last year in West Virginia v. EPA to curtail the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Now in Sackett v. EPA, it has invoked the clear statement rule to apply a narrower interpretation of the Clean Water Act than Congress intended. It’s an interpretation that benefits not only the wealthy couple who brought the case, but also polluting industries. “Mining, oil and gas, development, anyone that pollutes, and a whole lot of them joined or sent in separate briefs in support of the Sacketts,” Jon Devine, director of federal water policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said.

Organizations representing industries ranging from animal and industrial agriculture to mining, timber, residential development, and fossil fuel filed briefs in support of the Sacketts. Dark-money-funded anti-regulatory organizations like the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Atlantic Legal Foundation also weighed in on the couple’s behalf. Supporters of the case cheered the ruling as a “win for property owners.” The Sacketts were represented by the libertarian law firm Pacific Legal Foundation, which counts the Koch-funded Donors Capital Fund as well as Searle Freedom Trust, Exxon Mobil, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation among its donors.

According to Sankar, the ruling represents an end run around the legislative process; these interests have been trying to weaken the Clean Water Act for years. “This ruling is the result of a decades-long push by many of these industries,” he said. “They couldn’t cut back on the Clean Water Act by persuading Congress. They tried and failed. … But they succeeded in building a judiciary willing to take this kind of action to rewrite the laws when they’re not able to do so legislatively. What the court has done is rewrite the law in an extraordinarily aggressive way, going beyond even what the Trump administration would have done.”

The Trump administration’s proposed “Waters of the United States” rule would have stripped protection from about half as many wetlands as the Supreme Court’s Sackett ruling did.

In the wake of the decision, environmental advocates are calling on Congress to make explicit that these wetlands are covered by the Clean Water Act. “The court has spoken and now we need to look at ways to restore these protections,” Jim Murphy, director of legal advocacy for the National Wildlife Federation, said. “The primary way is to go back to Congress and have them make clear through legislation that these protections are in place as they were intended to be.”

Murphy said that shouldn’t be a hard sell, as clean water tends to be popular with voters. “Seventy-five percent or so of Americans support strengthening the Clean Water Act across the board,” he said.

States can also act to safeguard wetlands within their borders, thus protecting clean drinking water and improving flood protection for residents. “States are already authorized by federal law to protect more than the limited number of wetlands that the Supreme Court now allows,” Devine said. But nearly half of U.S. states have opted instead to follow the Clean Water Act, so wetlands that are no longer protected due to the Sackett ruling are not protected by those state governments either. Those laws can be changed, but it will take time. “We’re going to need to engage in that fight,” Devine said. “We can’t take as acceptable the gross loss that this opinion would allow.”

The post In a Gift to Polluting Industries, Supreme Court Rolls Back Clean Water Act Protections appeared first on The Intercept.

Lahey has had bladder cancer twice, 15 years apart; her husband is wracked with illnesses including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease even though he never smoked. She believes that proximity to the river is to blame for their health problems, and she’s not alone: The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, warns that the river’s polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, are likely to cause cancer in humans, and a Massachusetts Department of Public Health study on the cancer link is scheduled to be released this year.

“Why don’t we just move away?” Lahey asked. “Well, because he’s 85 and I’m 82, and we want to finish out our lives here.”

Lee is a working-class town in the heart of the Berkshires, a rural region near the New York border known for its scenic beauty. It’s also known, among locals, as a place polluted by PCBs, dangerous industrial chemicals manufactured by Monsanto and used by General Electric in the electric transformers the company manufactured and serviced. GE ran a plant in the county’s largest city, Pittsfield, and dumped PCBs into the local Housatonic River from 1932 to 1977, when Monsanto ceased production. In 1979, the EPA made PCBs illegal.

After decades of efforts by local and state leaders and federal agencies like the EPA, GE in 2000 began cleaning the river and nearby areas. But the latest round of dredging, expected to begin in the next few years, would put a dump site in Lee. Residents of the town as well as local leaders — including the Housatonic Environmental Action League and the Housatonic River Initiative, who are challenging the plan in the First Circuit Court of Appeals — are resisting the decision. 

The town has filed a lawsuit against Monsanto as part of an attempt to find an alternative site outside of the region. 

The lawsuit is asking for compensatory and natural resource damages and for a court order “that will require Monsanto to deposit funds awarded by a jury into an escrow account so that Lee has the funds to move the 2,000,000 tons of PCB soil and mud projected to be dumped in Lee to an out of state location.” Lee Select Board chair Bob Jones told The Intercept that the town doesn’t have a specific site in mind, “although there are certainly licensed sites in existence.”

“We’re hoping if we can show that Monsanto produced these toxic items, cancer-causing PCBs, that if we can come up with enough money to have that, we can then leverage GE taking the stuff out of the area and not having a waste dump in the town of Lee,” Jones said. “That’s really what we’re looking for.”

Bayer, the pharmaceutical giant that bought Monsanto in 2018, rejects the lawsuit completely. The company’s director of U.S. external communications, Nicole Hayes, told The Intercept in an emailed comment that Bayer believes the lawsuit “is meritless.” 

“There is no legal basis for imposing liability on Monsanto for the lawful sale of PCBs into the stream of commerce more than four decades ago, over which Monsanto had no control,” Hayes said. “Furthermore, Monsanto ceased its lawful production of PCBs more than 45 years ago and never disposed of PCBs in or near the Town.” The lawsuit does not accuse Monsanto of dumping PCBs, only of manufacturing them, and makes clear that GE was the offending party for the chemical disposal.

Despite Monsanto’s claims, a memo published by the Poison Papers project in 2017 shows that the company was aware of the problems posed by PCBs at least as early as 1969, eight years before it stopped producing the chemicals. The memo shows that Monsanto knew that PCBs could have detrimental effects on people’s health and that the evidence for its persistence in the environment was “beyond questioning.” A series of potential solutions was offered, including immediate cessation of PCB production; the company, apparently, chose the “do nothing” option.

Lee isn’t the first municipality to take Monsanto to court over its production of PCBs that other companies later dumped. Similar efforts in Washington state, California, Missouri, and elsewhere have had varied levels of success: Some cases have been settled, some have resulted in the company being ordered to pay restitution, and others have been found in Monsanto’s favor. 

“I feel like we have a good chance of winning because this is so clearly unjust,” Lahey said.

In 2016, the EPA made an agreement with GE and other nearby towns that GE would dredge the river and remove the contaminated soil out of the county. No sooner was the agreement made, Jones said, than GE went to court to change the parameters. That led to a mediated agreement, done in private with representatives from the affected towns — Lee, Pittsfield, Lenox, Great Barrington, and Sheffield — the EPA, GE, and environmental groups including the Berkshire Environmental Action Team, or BEAT, that resulted in the dump site being placed in Lee. 

Jones and Lahey are among the Berkshire residents in and outside of Lee who feel that what they see as the secrecy of the process — former Select Board member Patricia Carlino was the town’s representative — did a disservice to the people of the town. 

“To mediate, negotiate, and seal a deal without any knowledge or input from the general public is a failure of representative government,” Jones told The Intercept. 

The agreement was signed by the Select Board after 18 months of closed-door sessions and without consulting the rest of the town, something that still angers anti-dump residents. Under the agreement with GE and the EPA, Lee will get $25 million from GE in exchange for the dump site. If the town rejects the site, the funding is off the table. 

“A PCB dump was imposed on a town of only about 5,500 people, plus or minus, without their knowledge,” Jones said.

Jane Winn, BEAT executive director, agrees that Monsanto should be held responsible for its role in producing PCBs. She remembers a time when the river and surrounding wetlands were in far worse shape than they are today, due to the chemical’s corrosive damage. The river used to change color and catch fire, she said.

Despite Winn’s support for the lawsuit, she doesn’t think it’s likely to succeed. Winn, as BEAT executive director, was a signatory to the consent decree putting the dump in Lee. She told The Intercept that while she’d like to see a more permanent remedial solution, “the site they’ve chosen, if it has to be in the Berkshires, is a reasonable site.” 

Winn said that the dump in Lee is a “downside” to the cleanup but that the trade-off of having low-level contaminant soil put in the town site is the compromise in order to get to that point. She understands that Lee feels it’s been treated unfairly but urged perspective: “They’re getting more sediment out of the river in Lee because of it.”

There’s some outright local opposition to Lee’s lawsuit. The Berkshire Eagle, in an opinion piece taking issue with Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s written support for the Lee effort, questioned what the next move would be if the dump were stopped and endorsed the site as an imperfect but ultimately necessary solution to the river’s pollution. 

“While the dump disproportionately affects Lee (and Lenox Dale), the fate of a comprehensive Housatonic cleanup plan matters to a much broader part of the Berkshire community,” the paper’s editorial board wrote in the unsigned opinion piece. “Whatever the intensity of the understandable hard feelings in Lee, it’s reasonable to ask what the procedural limits of reflexive opposition are here.”

It’s not lost on Jones that the site is in the poorest town of the towns involved in the discussions. “It’s a working-class town,” Jones said. “It was a mill town, but the mills are gone.”

“We’re the ones who have to bear the burden of it,” he added.

The post A Massachusetts Town Is Suing Monsanto for Its Cancer-Causing PCBs appeared first on The Intercept.

Native leaders and activists, calling themselves water protectors, wanted to show the newly elected President Donald Trump that they would continue to fight for their treaty rights to lands including the pipeline route. The march would be called “Native Nations Rise.”

Law enforcement was getting ready too — and discussing plans with Energy Transfer, the parent company of the Dakota Access pipeline. Throughout much of the uprising against the pipeline, the National Sheriffs’ Association talked routinely with TigerSwan, Energy Transfer’s lead security firm on the project, working hand in hand to craft pro-pipeline messaging. A top official with the sheriffs’ PR contractor, Off the Record Strategies, floated a plan to TigerSwan’s lead propagandist, a man named Robert Rice.

“Thoughts on a crew or a news reporter — or someone pretending to be — with a camera and microphone to report from the main rally on the Friday, ask questions about pipeline and slice together [sic]?” Off the Record CEO Mark Pfeifle suggested over email.

A security firm led by a former member of the U.S. military’s shadowy Special Forces, TigerSwan was no stranger to such deception. The company had, in fact, used fake reporters before — including Rice himself — to spread its message and to spy on pipeline opponents. The National Sheriffs’ Association’s involvement in advocating for a similar disinformation campaign against the anti-pipeline movement has not been previously reported.

The email from the National Sheriffs’ Association PR shop was among the more than 55,000 internal TigerSwan documents obtained by The Intercept and Grist through a public records request. The documents, released by the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board, reveal how TigerSwan and the sheriffs’ group worked together to twist the story in the media so that it aligned with the oil company’s interests, seeking to pollute the public’s perception of the water protectors.

The documents also outline details of previously unreported collaborations on the ground between TigerSwan and police forces. During the uprising at Standing Rock, TigerSwan provided law enforcement support with helicopter flights, medics, and security guards. The private security firm pushed for the purchase, by Energy Transfer, of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of radios for the cops. TigerSwan also placed an order for a catalog of so-called less-lethal weapons for police use, including tear gas. The security contractor even planned to facilitate an exchange where Energy Transfer and police could share purported evidence of illegal activity.

Meanwhile, communications firms working for Energy Transfer and the National Sheriffs’ Association worked together to write newsletters, plant pro-pipeline articles in the media, and circulate “wanted”-style posters of particular protesters, the documents show. And the heads of both the National Sheriffs’ Association and TigerSwan engaged in discussions on strategy to counter the anti-pipeline movement, with propaganda becoming a priority for both the police and private security.

“It is extremely dangerous to have private interests dictating and coloring the flow of administrative justice,” said Chase Iron Eyes, director of the media organization Last Real Indians and a member of the Oceti Sakowin people. Iron Eyes was active at Standing Rock and mentioned in TigerSwan’s files. “We learned at Standing Rock, law and order serves capital and property.”

Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, whose jurisdiction in Morton County, North Dakota, abuts the Standing Rock reservation, said collaboration with pipeline security was limited. “We had a cooperation with them in reference to the pipeline workers’ safety while conducting their business,” he said in an email. “TigerSwan was not to be involved in any law enforcement detail.” (TigerSwan, Energy Transfer, and the National Sheriffs’ Association did not respond to requests for comment.)

Rice, the TigerSwan propagandist, had posed as a news anchor for anti-protester segments posted on a Facebook page he created to sway the local community against the Standing Rock protests. But when Pfeifle, the sheriff group’s PR man, suggested pretending to be a reporter at the Native Nations Rise protest, Rice was unavailable. (Off the Record did not respond to a request for comment.) Pfeifle found another way to tell the pipeline and police’s story: a far-right news website founded by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Pfeifle wrote to Rice: “We did get Daily Caller to cover event yesterday.”

Law Enforcement Collaboration

The idea of working with police was baked into Energy Transfer’s arrangement with TigerSwan. The firm’s contract for the Dakota Access pipeline specifically assigned TigerSwan to “take the lead with various law enforcement agencies per state, county, state National Guard and the federal interagency if required.”

Cooperation between Energy Transfer’s security operation and law enforcement agencies, however, began even before TigerSwan arrived on the scene. A PowerPoint presentation from Silverton, another contractor hired by Energy Transfer, described its relationship with law enforcement as a “public private partnership.” The September 2016 presentation said that a private intelligence cell was “coordinating with LE” — law enforcement — “and helping develop Person of Interest packets specifically designed to aid in LE prosecution.”

Multiple documents make clear that part of the purpose of Energy Transfer’s intelligence collection was to support law enforcement prosecutions. A September 2016 document describing TigerSwan’s early priorities said, “Continue to collect information of an evidentiary level in order to further the DAPL Security effort and assist Law Enforcement with information to aid in prosecution.” 

The collaboration extended to materiel. TigerSwan operatives realized soon after they arrived that local law enforcement officials lacked encrypted radios and could not communicate with state or municipal law enforcement agencies — or with Dakota Access pipeline security, according to emails. Energy Transfer purchased 100 radios, for $391,347, with plans to lease a number of them to law enforcement officers.

”We want them to go to LEO as a gift which represents DAPL’s concern for public safety,” wrote Tom Siguaw, a senior director at Energy Transfer, in an email.

During large protest events, TigerSwan and police worked together to keep water protectors from interfering with construction. On one day in late October 2016, the day of the protests’ largest mass arrest, Energy Transfer’s security personnel “held law enforcement’s east flank” and supported sheriffs’ deputies and National Guard members with seven medical personnel and two helicopters, named Valkyrie and Saber.

After the incident, TigerSwan planned to set up a shared drive, where law enforcement officials could upload crime reports and charging documents, and TigerSwan could share photographs and pipeline opponents’ social media. Documents show other instances in which TigerSwan set up online exchanges with law enforcement. In a February 2017 PowerPoint presentation, TigerSwan described plans to use another shared drive to post security personnel’s videos and photographs, taken both aerially and on the ground during a different mass arrest.

A Dakota Access Pipeline helicopter also supported law enforcement officials during one of the most notorious nights of the crackdown, in November 2016, when police unleashed water hoses on water protectors in below-freezing temperatures. By morning, police were in danger of running out of less-lethal weapons — which can still be deadly but are designed to incapacitate their targets. TigerSwan and Energy Transfer again stepped in.

TigerSwan founder James Reese, a former commander in the elite Army Special Operations unit Delta Force, reached out to a contact at the North Carolina State Highway Patrol. North Carolina had recently used TigerSwan’s GuardianAngel mapping tool to respond to uprisings in Charlotte, in the aftermath of the 2016 police killing of Keith Scott. (A spokesperson from the North Carolina Department of Public Safety said the agency does not currently have a relationship with TigerSwan.)

Reese sent a list of weaponry sought by North Dakota law enforcement to an officer from the Highway Patrol. The list included tear gas, pepper spray, bean bag rounds, and foam rounds. The official referred Reese to a contact at Safariland, which manufactures the gear.

“We will purchase the items, and gift them to LE,” Reese told the Safariland representative. “We need a nation wide push if you can help?”

Meanwhile, another TigerSwan team member sent the Minnesota-based police supply store Streicher’s an even longer list of less-lethal weapons and ammunition. “Please confirm availability of the following price and ship immediately with overnight delivery,” TigerSwan’s Phil Rehak wrote. 

“I would be given an order by either somebody from TigerSwan or maybe even law enforcement, being like, ‘Hey, can you find these supplies?’”

Rehak told The Intercept and Grist that his job was to procure equipment — including for law enforcement. “I would be given an order by either somebody from TigerSwan or maybe even law enforcement, being like, ‘Hey, can you find these supplies?’” He said he doesn’t know if the less-lethal weaponry was ultimately delivered to the sheriffs.

“I am not aware of any radios for Morton County or any less lethal weapons from Tiger Swan,” Kirchmeier, the Morton County sheriff, told The Intercept and Grist in an email. “I dealt with ND DES for resources.” (Two other sheriffs involved with the multiagency law enforcement response did not answer requests for comment. Eric Jensen, a spokesperson for the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services, said the agency had no arrangement with TigerSwan or Energy Transfer to provide less-lethal weapons, and that they wouldn’t have knowledge of any arrangements between law enforcement and the companies.)

The “partnership” went both ways, with TigerSwan sometimes viewing law enforcement weapons as potential assets. In mid-October 2016, as senior Energy Transfer personnel prepared to join state officials for a government archeological survey to examine the pipeline route, three law enforcement “snipers” agreed to be on standby with an air team, according to a memo by another security company, RGT, that was working under TigerSwan’s management. A Predator drone was listed among “friendly assets” in the memo.

TigerSwan routinely shared what it learned about the protest movement with local police, but most of what the documents describe in the way of reciprocal sharing — from law enforcement to TigerSwan — came from the National Sheriffs’ Association.

In March 2017, the sheriffs’ group helped the South Dakota Legislature pass a law to prevent future Standing Rock-style pipeline uprisings, the documents say. To support the effort, the Morton County Sheriff’s Office sent along a “law enforcement sensitive” state operational update from the North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center. National Sheriffs’ Association head Jonathan Thompson forwarded the document to TigerSwan executive Shawn Sweeney. Thompson recommended Sweeney look at the last page, which included a list of anti-pipeline camps across the U.S.

TigerSwan also recruited at least one law enforcement officer with whom it worked on the ground. In November 2016, Reese requested a phone call with Maj. Chad McGinty of the Ohio State Highway Patrol, who had acted as commander of a team from Ohio sent to assist police in North Dakota. By February 1, McGinty, who declined to comment for this story, was working for TigerSwan as a law enforcement liaison, earning more than $440 a day.

Spreading Stories

TigerSwan’s contract also mandated that the firm help Energy Transfer with telling its story. The firm was expected “to help turn the page on the story that we are being overwhelmed with over the past few weeks,” according to a document from mid-September 2016.

Energy Transfer’s image was in trouble early on. Critical media coverage of Standing Rock grew dramatically in early September after private security guards hired by the company unleashed guard dogs on protesters. A flood of reporters arrived on the ground to cover the protests. Social media posts routinely went viral. The narrative that took hold portrayed the pipeline company as instigating violence against peaceful protesters.

Energy Transfer recruited third parties to spread its messaging and counter the unfavorable storyline. At least two additional contractors — DCI and MarketLeverage — joined TigerSwan in trying to burnish Energy Transfer’s image. TigerSwan recruited retired Maj. Gen. James “Spider” Marks, who led intelligence efforts for the Army during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and served on TigerSwan’s advisory board, to write favorable op-eds and deliver commentary. (Marks did not respond to a request for comment.) With its veneer of law enforcement authority, the National Sheriffs’ Association would become Energy Transfer’s most powerful third-party voice.

Together, TigerSwan, the National Sheriffs’ Association, and the public relations contractors formed a powerful public relations machine, monitoring social media closely, convincing outside groups to promote pro-pipeline messaging, and planting stories.

Off the Record Strategies, the public relations firm working for the National Sheriffs’ Association, coordinated with the opposition research firm Delve to track activists’ social media pages, arrest records, and funding sources. The companies sought to paint the protesters as violent, professional, billionaire-funded, out-of-state agitators whose camps represented the true ecological disaster, as well as to identify movement infighting that might be exploited. Both companies were led by Bush administration alumni. (Delve did not respond to a request for comment.)

Framing water protectors as criminals was a key National Sheriffs’ Association strategy. ”Let’s start drumbeat of the worst of the worst this week?” Pfeifle, Off the Record’s CEO, suggested to the head of the sheriffs’ group in one email. “One or two a day? Move them out through social media…The out of state wife beaters, child abusers and thieves first… Mugshot, ND arrest date, rap sheet and other data wrapped in and easy to share?”

The result was “wanted”-style posters — called “Professional Protestors with Dangerous Criminal Histories” — featuring pipeline opponents’ photos and criminal records, which Pfeifle’s team circulated online and routinely shared with TigerSwan. The National Sheriffs’ Association repeatedly asked TigerSwan to help “move” its criminal record research on social media, and TigerSwan repurposed the sheriffs’ group arrest research for its own propaganda products.

Pfeifle also made summary statistics of protesters’ arrest records and a map of where they were from. The color-coded map came with a running tally of the number of protesters. The details collected by Pfeifle then began showing up in blogs and remarks by police to reporters. One piece by KXMB-TV, a television station in Bismarck, North Dakota, repeated almost verbatim statistics summarizing the number of protesters arrested and their criminal histories, noting that “just 8 percent are from North Dakota.”

“They make it harder for people to engage in peaceful protest. People are arrested and they say, ‘See, those people are criminals.’”

Naomi Oreskes, a science historian who has researched the fossil fuel industry’s communications strategies, said the attempt to frame environmental defenders as criminals was consistent with the long trend of attempts to discredit activists. However, it was also “particularly noxious,” she said, because the energy industry has pushed for stronger penalties against trespass and other anti-protest laws. “They make it harder for people to engage in peaceful protest,” said Oreskes. “People are arrested and they say, ‘See, those people are criminals.’”

DCI, which got its start “doing the dirty work of the tobacco industry” and helped found the tea party movement, was also a key player influencing media coverage, placing and distributing op-eds. In one exchange between DCI partner Megan Bloomgren, who would later become a top Trump administration official, and Reese, Bloomgren sent a list of 14 articles “we’ve placed that we’ve been pushing over social media.” The articles ranged from opinion pieces in support of the pipeline in local newspapers to posts on right-wing blogs.

Oreskes said using opinion articles in this way is a common strategy pioneered by the tobacco industry, among others. “You push that out into social media to make it seem as if there’s broad grassroots support for the pipeline,” said Oreskes. ”The reader doesn’t know that this is part of a coordinated strategy by the industry.”

MarketLeverage, another Energy Transfer contractor, also spent a considerable amount of its resources tracking social media and boosting pro-pipeline messages. In the weeks following the dog attacks, for instance, Shane Hackett, a top official with MarketLeverage, suggested highlighting a Facebook post by Archie Fool Bear, a Standing Rock tribal member who was critical of the NoDAPL movement. “We need to exploit that shit immediately while we have a chance,” a TigerSwan operative wrote in response to an email from their colleague Rice, the chief propagandist. (Neither DCI nor Market Leverage responded to requests for comment.)

Hackett suggested creating a graphic out of the tribal member’s post and having “other accounts share his post with the same hashtags.” Rice provided the social media text and hashtags, including, “Respected Tribe Members Call Attention to Standing Rock Leadership Lies and Failures #TribeLiesMatter #NoDAPL #SiouxTruth.” Obscure social media accounts then repeated the exact language.

“These people who are trained to use whatever publicity they can for their advantage, they’re going to do what they want anyway,” Fool Bear told The Intercept and Grist. “They don’t live in my shoes, and they don’t believe in what my beliefs are. If they’re going to take what I say and manipulate it, I can’t stop them.”

Sheriffs vs. Indigenous and Environmental Justice

Off the Record Strategies and the National Sheriffs’ Association didn’t just focus on issues of law-breaking. The association parroted some of the same messages that TigerSwan — as well as climate change deniers in Congress — were trafficking. Notable among them was a right-wing conspiracy theory that the environmental movement was “directed and controlled” by a club of billionaires.

The National Sheriffs’ Association also tried to undermine the credibility of well-known advocates Bill McKibben and Jane Kleeb, who founded the environmental organizations 350.org and Bold Alliance, respectively. Pfeifle circulated memos on the two movement leaders. “McKibben is a radical liberal determined to ‘bankrupt’ energy producers,” said one, adding, “McKibben will join any protest because he enjoys the fanfare.” Another memo said, “Kleeb admitted her pipeline opposition was about political organization and opportunity, not the environment.”

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Kleeb and McKibben expressed bemusement at TigerSwan and the sheriffs’ association’s fixation on their work. “It’s all pretty creepy,” McKibben, a former Grist board member, said in an email. “I live in a county with a sheriff, and it seems okay if he tracks the speed of my car down Rte 116, but tracking every word I write seems like… not his job.”

The sheriffs’ group also listed the nonprofit organizations Center for Biological Diversity, Rainforest Action Network, and Food & Water Watch as “Extremist Environmental Groups” — a pejorative used by some authoritarian government officials, including from the Trump administration.

“Campaigning against corporations driving our climate crisis and human rights violations is not extremist,” said Rainforest Action Network Executive Director Ginger Cassady. Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the association’s flyer contained “categorically false” information about the organization — a sentiment repeated by others mentioned throughout TigerSwan’s other records.

“We would urge the Sheriffs’ Association to focus on its own responsibilities instead of attempting to undermine well-meaning organizations like ours,” added Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch’s executive director.

Both the National Sheriffs’ Association and TigerSwan took pride in meddling in tribal affairs. Reese enthusiastically encouraged his personnel to spread a story that the Prairie Knights Casino, run by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, was discharging sewage into the Missouri River watershed. Meanwhile, the sheriffs’ association worked with TigerSwan to push a story about a drop in revenue at the casino. In an email to TigerSwan’s Rice, Pfeifle noted that the issue had been raised at a recent Standing Rock tribal council meeting.

“We moved this story on front page of Sunday Bismarck Tribune and in SAB blog Friday, playing perfectly into the ‘get-out’ narrative going into next week,” Pfeifle wrote to Rice a few days later, referring to the conservative Say Anything Blog. “Please help echo and amplify, if possible.”

Using newsletters and news-like web sites to discredit pipeline opponents’ concerns as “fake news” was a top tactic for both TigerSwan and the National Sheriffs’ Association. The irony of the strategy was not lost on its protagonists.

Over WhatsApp, in June 2017, Rice, the propagandist, chatted with Wesley Fricks, TigerSwan’s director of external affairs, about a possible response to a Facebook video in which an unnamed reporter described recently published news reports on TigerSwan’s tactics. They would post it on one of the astroturf sites Rice created and describe it as “fake news.”

“That will cause a few people’s brains to explode,” Rice wrote in a WhatsApp message. “fake news calling fake news fake which is calling other news fake?”

Frick replied, “One big circle.”

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