President Donald Trump and his administration have called it the “Great American Comeback.” But environmental advocates say the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s reversing course on enforcing air and water pollution laws is more of a throwback — one that will exacerbate health risks for children who live and study in the shadows of petrochemical facilities. The American Lung Association…
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Tundra Swans, Yolo Bypass, Sacramento River Delta. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
At a time when nihilistic bullies glory in doing perverse damage to the environment and to our ability to think and learn about the environment, it is important to remember that there is also a cohort, a community, of scientists and activists whose persistent, principled attention over decades has helped to preserve important remnants of our natural world. Ted Beedy who passed away recently in Nevada City, California was one of those.
Ted was an acclaimed ornithologist. He was part of the team whose close observation of bird life and predation at Mono Lake was the basis for stabilizing the level of the Lake against the depredations of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in the 1980’s. He did some of the original research at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge that identified farm water management and resulting concentration of toxic minerals as a critical factor in bird mortality and population decline. Those practices changed, rooted in good science and careful observation. His long-term observations and research, conducted with his wife Susan Sanders, led to the listing of the tri-colored blackbird as an endangered species in the California Central Valley. His book Birds of the Sierra Nevada, illustrated by his friend Keith Hanson, is the standard reference for birders in that region of California. It is a marvel of attention to detail including behaviors and sounds.
Ted was also a visionary. He was part of the founding of Putah Creek Council, which worked to ultimately turn a dried up and degraded stream in Yolo County California into one of the country’s great restoration stories. This past winter salmon that had been naturally reared within Putah Creek returned to spawn, marking a true restoration of a once extinct salmon run. Through his work with Putah Creek Council Ted and a handful of others saw how the Yolo Basin, a large flood-prone area west of Sacramento, could become a stop-over for migratory waterfowl, leading to the creation of the 17,000-acre Vic Fazio Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area in 1990. He saw that disturbed managed areas could be reclaimed and transformed.
A long-time resident of the Sierra foothills, he wrote habitat conservation plans for Placer County and Nevada County that are still used to contain and manage growth and protect the wild in the Northern Sierras. He was a conscientious steward of the Cedars, the largest remaining area of old-growth in the Northern Sierra at the top of the American River watershed. His children and the children of his friends in the community carry on the vision, the thoughtful approach and the activism, values he expressed through his work and deeds.
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Long before the large-scale Earth Day protests on April 22, 1970 – often credited with spurring significant environmental protection legislation – Native Americans stewarded the environment. As sovereign nations, Native Americans have been able to protect land, water and air, including well beyond their own boundaries.
Their actions laid the groundwork for modern federal law and policy, including national legislation aimed at reducing pollution. Now the Trump administration is seeking to weaken some of those limits and eliminate programs aimed at improving the environments in which marginalized people live and work.
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The landmark youth-led climate lawsuit Juliana v. United States has come to a close without ever seeing a trial. The case, filed in 2015 by Our Children’s Trust on behalf of 21 youth plaintiffs, faced 10 years of opposition from the federal government because it argued that the U.S. government violated young people’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property through its unwavering…
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Custer-Gallatin National Forest next to Yellowstone National Park – photo by Custer-Gallatin National Forest.
The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act will designate approximately 23 million acres of inventoried roadless areas in the Northern Rockies as wilderness. NREPA (Ner-EEpa) will preserve a vital ecosystem and watersheds in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Eastern Washington, and Oregon. It will also preserve biological corridors that are essential for biodiversity of native species.
We are so proud of Senator Whitehouse and Congresswoman Dean for standing up for a climate solution that protects public land, water, and interconnected species ranging from tiny insects, birds, and fish to mammals, plants, bushes, and huge trees with massive root systems that store carbon.
These legislators know that removing the words ‘climate change’ from government studies and documents won’t make the world cooler in any sense of the word. They know that forests are the best carbon storage device in the world. And without NREPA’s protection, the photo below shows what’s been happening in our national forests.
Helena National Forest land owned by all Americans – photo by Vicki Anfinson
NREPA saves the federal government millions of dollars annually by reducing wasteful subsidies to the logging industry. It also closes unintended legal loopholes that have left many of the areas protected by the Clinton Roadless Rule vulnerable to clearcutting and roadbuilding.
By introducing NREPA, Congresswoman Dean and Senator Whitehouse are saying NO to the timber industry executives and others who misinform the public while enriching themselves. And Senator Whitehouse and Congresswoman Dean are saying YES to preserving carbon storage and slowing climate change.
Simply by designating existing roadless areas as Wilderness, NREPA protects the environment, fights climate change, creates jobs, and saves taxpayers millions of dollars in logging subsidies.
It is time to start protecting ecosystems, which will keep species from going extinct.
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Storm-wracked house, coastal Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair
Imagine a world in which a hurricane devastates the Gulf Coast, and the U.S. has no federal agency prepared to quickly send supplies, financial aid and temporary housing assistance.
Could the states manage this catastrophic event on their own?
Normally, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, known as FEMA, is prepared to marshal supplies within hours of a disaster and begin distributing financial aid to residents who need help.
However, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem saying the federal government plans to eliminate FEMA, President Donald Trump suggesting states can take over disaster recovery, and climate change causing more frequent and severe disasters, it’s worth asking how prepared states are to face these growing challenges without help.
What FEMA does
FEMA was created in 1979 with the job of coordinating national responses to disasters, but the federal government has played important roles in disaster relief since the 1800s.
During a disaster, FEMA’s assistance can begin only after a state requests an emergency declaration and the U.S. president approves it. The request has to show that the disaster is so severe that the state can’t handle the response on its own.
FEMA’s role is to support state and local governments by coordinating federal agencies and providing financial aid and recovery assistance that states would otherwise struggle to supply on their own. FEMA doesn’t “take over,” as a misinformation campaign launched during Hurricane Helene claimed. Instead, it pools federal resources to allow states to recover faster from expensive disasters.
During a disaster, FEMA:
+ Coordinates federal resources. For example, during Hurricane Ian in 2022, FEMA coordinated with the U.S. Coast Guard, the Department of Defense and search-and-rescue teams to conduct rescue operations, organized utility crews to begin restoring power and also delivered water and millions of meals.
+ Provides financial assistance. FEMA distributes billions of dollars in disaster relief funds to help individuals, businesses and local governments recover. As of Feb. 3, 2025, FEMA aid from 2024 storms included US$1.04 billion related to Hurricane Milton, $416.1 million for Hurricane Helene and $112.6 million for Hurricane Debby.
+ Provides logistical support. FEMA coordinates with state and local governments, nonprofits such as the American Red Cross and federal agencies to supply cots, blankets and hygiene supplies for emergency shelters. It also works with state and local partners to distribute critical supplies such as food, water and medical aid.
The agency also manages the National Flood Insurance Program, offers disaster preparedness training and helps states develop response plans to improve their overall responses systems.
What FEMA aid looks like in a disaster
When wildfires swept through Maui, Hawaii, in August 2023, FEMA provided emergency grants to cover immediate needs such as food, clothing and essential supplies for survivors.
The agency arranged hotel rooms, rental assistance and financial aid for residents who lost homes or belongings. Its Direct Housing Program has spent $295 million to lease homes for more than 1,200 households. This comprehensive support helped thousands of people begin rebuilding their lives after losing almost everything.
FEMA also helped fund construction of a temporary school to ensure that students whose schools burned could continue their classes. Hawaii, with its relatively small population and limited emergency funds, would have struggled to mount a comparable response on its own.
Larger states often need help, too. When a 2021 winter storm overwhelmed Texas’ power grid and water infrastructure, FEMA coordinated the delivery of essential supplies, including water, fuel, generators and blankets, following the disaster declaration on Feb. 19, 2021. Within days, it awarded more than $2.8 million in grants to help people with temporary housing and home repairs.
Which states would suffer most without FEMA?
Without FEMA or other federal support, states would have to manage the disaster response and recovery on their own.
States prone to frequent disasters, such as Louisiana and Florida, would face expensive recurring challenges that would likely exacerbate recovery delays and reduce their overall resilience.
Smaller, more rural and less wealthy states that lack the financial resources and logistical capabilities to respond effectively would be disproportionately affected.
“States don’t have that capability built to handle a disaster every single year,” Lynn Budd, director of the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security, told Stateline in an interview. Access to FEMA avoids the need for expensive disaster response infrastructure in each state.
States might be able to arrange regional cooperation. But state-led responses and regional models have limitations. The National Guard could assist with supply distribution, but it isn’t designed to provide fast financial aid, housing or long-term recovery options, and the supplies and the recovery effort still come at a cost.
Wealthier states might be better equipped to manage on their own, but poorer states would likely struggle. States with less funding and infrastructure would be left relying on nonprofits and community-based efforts. But these organizations are not capable of providing the scope of services FEMA can.
Any federal funding would also be slow if Congress had to approve aid after each disaster, rather than having FEMA already prepared to respond. States would be at the mercy of congressional infighting.
In the absence of a federal response and coordinating role, recovery would be uneven, with wealthier areas recovering faster and poorer areas likely seeing more prolonged hardships.
What does this mean?
Coordinating disaster response is complex, the paperwork for federal assistance can be frustrating, and the agency does draw criticism. However, it also fills an important role.
As the frequency of natural disasters continues to rise due to climate change, ask yourself: How prepared is your state for a disaster, and could it get by without federal aid?
This article, originally published Feb. 10, 2025, has been updated with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem saying the government plans to eliminate FEMA.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The second of a two-part series on the historic Rongelap evacuation of 300 Marshall islanders from their irradiated atoll with the help of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior crew and the return of Rainbow Warrior III 40 years later on a nuclear justice research mission. Journalist and author David Robie, who was on board, recalls the 1985 voyage.
SPECIAL REPORT: By David Robie
Mejatto, previously uninhabited and handed over to the people of Rongelap by their close relatives on nearby Ebadon Island, was a lot different to their own island. It was beautiful, but it was only three kilometres long and a kilometre wide, with a dry side and a dense tropical side.
A sandspit joined it to another small, uninhabited island. Although lush, Mejatto was uncultivated and already it was apparent there could be a food problem.Out on the shallow reef, fish were plentiful.
Shortly after the Rainbow Warrior arrived on 21 May 1985, several of the men were out wading knee-deep on the coral spearing fish for lunch.
But even the shallowness of the reef caused a problem. It made it dangerous to bring the Warrior any closer than about three kilometres offshore — as two shipwrecks on the reef reminded us.
The cargo of building materials and belongings had to be laboriously unloaded onto a bum bum (small boat), which had also travelled overnight with no navigational aids apart from a Marshallese “wave map’, and the Zodiacs. It took two days to unload the ship with a swell making things difficult at times.
An 18-year-old islander fell into the sea between the bum bum and the Warrior, almost being crushed but escaping with a jammed foot.
Fishing success on the reef
The delayed return to Rongelap for the next load didn’t trouble Davey Edward. In fact, he was celebrating his first fishing success on the reef after almost three months of catching nothing. He finally landed not only a red snapper, but a dozen fish, including a half-metre shark!
Edward was also a good cook and he rustled up dinner — shark montfort, snapper fillets, tuna steaks and salmon pie (made from cans of dumped American aid food salmon the islanders didn’t want).
Returning to Rongelap, the Rainbow Warrior was confronted with a load which seemed double that taken on the first trip. Altogether, about 100 tonnes of building materials and other supplies were shipped to Mejatto. The crew packed as much as they could on deck and left for Mejatto, this time with 114 people on board. It was a rough voyage with almost everybody being seasick.
The journalists were roped in to clean up the ship before returning to Rongelap on the third journey.
‘Our people see no light, only darkness’
Researcher Dr Glenn Alcalay (now an adjunct professor of anthropology at William Paterson University), who spoke Marshallese, was a great help to me interviewing some of the islanders.
“It’s a hard time for us now because we don’t have a lot of food here on Mejatto — like breadfruit, taro and pandanus,” said Rose Keju, who wasn’t actually at Rongelap during the fallout.
“Our people feel extremely depressed. They see no light, only darkness. They’ve been crying a lot.
“We’ve moved because of the poison and the health problems we face. If we have honest scientists to check Rongelap we’ll know whether we can ever return, or we’ll have to stay on Mejatto.”
Kiosang Kios, 46, was 15 years old at the time of Castle Bravo when she was evacuated to “Kwaj”.
“My hair fell out — about half the people’s hair fell out,” she said. “My feet ached and burned. I lost my appetite, had diarrhoea and vomited.”
In 1957, she had her first baby and it was born without bones – “Like this paper, it was flimsy.” A so-called ‘jellyfish baby’, it lived half a day. After that, Kios had several more miscarriages and stillbirths. In 1959, she had a daughter who had problems with her legs and feet and thyroid trouble.
Out on the reef with the bum bums, the islanders had a welcome addition — an unusual hardwood dugout canoe being used for fishing and transport. It travelled 13,000 kilometres on board the Rainbow Warrior and bore the Sandinista legend FSLN on its black-and-red hull. A gift from Bunny McDiarmid and Henk Haazen, it had been bought for $30 from a Nicaraguan fisherman while they were crewing on the Fri. (Bunny and Henk are on board Rainbow Warrior III for the research mission).
“It has come from a small people struggling for their sovereignty against the United States and it has gone to another small people doing the same,” said Haazen.
Animals left behind
Before the 10-day evacuation ended, Haazen was given an outrigger canoe by the islanders. Winched on to the deck of the Warrior, it didn’t quite make a sail-in protest at Moruroa, as Haazen planned, but it has since become a familiar sight on Auckland Harbour.
With the third load of 87 people shipped to Mejatto and one more to go, another problem emerged. What should be done about the scores of pigs and chickens on Rongelap? Pens could be built on the main deck to transport them to Mejatto but was there any fodder left for them?
The islanders decided they weren’t going to run a risk, no matter how slight, of having contaminated animals with them. They were abandoned on Rongelap — along with three of the five outriggers.
“When you get to New Zealand you’ll be asked have you been on a farm,” warned French journalist Phillipe Chatenay, who had gone there a few weeks before to prepare a Le Point article about the “Land of the Long White Cloud and Nuclear-Free Nuts”.
“Yes, and you’ll be asked to remove your shoes. And if you don’t have shoes, you’ll be asked to remove your feet,” added first mate Martini Gotjé, who was usually barefooted.
The last voyage on May 28 was the most fun. A smaller group of about 40 islanders was transported and there was plenty of time to get to know each other.
Four young men questioned cook Nathalie Mestre: where did she live? Where was Switzerland? Out came an atlas. Then Mestre produced a scrapbook of Fernando Pereira’s photographs of the voyage. The questions were endless.
They asked for a scrap of paper and a pen and wrote in English:
“We, the people of Rongelap, love our homeland. But how can our people live in a place which is dangerous and poisonous. I mean, why didn’t those American people test Bravo in a state capital? Why? Rainbow Warrior, thank you for being so nice to us. Keep up your good work.”
Each one wrote down their name: Balleain Anjain, Ralet Anitak, Kiash Tima and Issac Edmond. They handed the paper to Mestre and she added her name. Anitak grabbed it and wrote as well: “Nathalie Anitak”. They laughed.
Fernando Pereira’s birthday
Thursday, May 30, was Fernando Pereira’s 35th birthday. The evacuation was over and a one-day holiday was declared as we lay anchored off Mejato.
Pereira was on the Pacific voyage almost by chance. Project coordinator Steve Sawyer had been seeking a wire machine for transmitting pictures of the campaign. He phoned Fiona Davies, then heading the Greenpeace photo office in Paris. But he wanted a machine and photographer separately.
“No, no … I’ll get you a wire machine,” replied Davies. ‘But you’ll have to take my photographer with it.” Agreed. The deal would make a saving for the campaign budget.
Sawyer wondered who this guy was, although Gotjé and some of the others knew him. Pereira had fled Portugal about 15 years before while he was serving as a pilot in the armed forces at a time when the country was fighting to retain colonies in Angola and Mozambique. He settled in The Netherlands, the only country which would grant him citizenship.
After first working as a photographer for Anefo press agency, he became concerned with environmental and social issues. Eventually he joined the Amsterdam communist daily De Waarheid and was assigned to cover the activities of Greenpeace. Later he joined Greenpeace.
Although he adopted Dutch ways, his charming Latin temperament and looks betrayed his Portuguese origins. He liked tight Italian-style clothes and fast sports cars. Pereira was always wide-eyed, happy and smiling.
In Hawai`i, he and Sawyer hiked up to the crater at the top of Diamond Head one day. Sawyer took a snapshot of Pereira laughing — a photo later used on the front page of the New Zealand Times after his death with the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by French secret agents.
While most of the crew were taking things quietly and the “press gang” caught up on stories, Sawyer led a mini-expedition in a Zodiac to one of the shipwrecks, the Palauan Trader. With him were Davey Edward, Henk Haazen, Paul Brown and Bunny McDiarmid.
Clambering on board the hulk, Sawyer grabbed hold of a rust-caked railing which collapsed. He plunged 10 metres into a hold. While he lay in pain with a dislocated shoulder and severely lacerated abdomen, his crewmates smashed a hole through the side of the ship. They dragged him through pounding surf into the Zodiac and headed back to the Warrior, three kilometres away.
“Doc” Andy Biedermann, assisted by “nurse” Chatenay, who had received basic medical training during national service in France, treated Sawyer. He took almost two weeks to recover.
But the accident failed to completely dampen celebrations for Pereira, who was presented with a hand-painted t-shirt labelled “Rainbow Warrior Removals Inc”.
Pereira’s birthday was the first of three which strangely coincided with events casting a tragic shadow over the Rainbow Warrior’s last voyage.
Dr David Robie is an environmental and political journalist and author, and editor of Asia Pacific Report. He travelled on board the Rainbow Warrior for almost 11 weeks. This article is adapted from his 1986 book, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior. A new edition is being published in July to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Trees play a crucial role in creating a healthy urban environment. They improve water quality, reduce air pollution, and lower temperatures, while also providing vital habitat for wildlife. But they are experiencing multiple threats, especially in our cities – not least in Haringey.
Gio Lozzi lives in Haringey, North London, a conservation area with a large number of street trees, and says she is saddened by the way they are treated.
Lozzi said:
There’s a war against trees going on. They’re facing multiple threats- being abused by residents, councils, developers and house insurance companies, and new trees are even liable to vandalism. Car is king in the UK, so lots of people moan about trees dropping leaf litter on their vehicles.
There’s also the narrative that trees are dangerous, even though more than 1700 people get killed in car accidents every year, while you only have a 1 in 10 million chance of being killed by a tree- that’s about six people a year. You’ve got more chance of being killed by a wheelie bin. It’s crazy! Trees get a really bad wrap, and are blamed for so many things, even when drivers crash into them.
There was outrage and disbelief when more than 100 trees were indiscriminately felled to build a road-style concrete bridge in Haringey’s local nature reserve, known as Parkway Walk, and the incident led to Lozzi founding Haringey Tree Protectors. The group has been involved in numerous campaigns to try and save mature trees in the area, while also raising public awareness about the threats our urban trees face, and providing advice and support to tree campaigners around the country.
The campaign group has been fighting to save a huge 120-year-old plane tree earmarked to be felled by Haringey council after being implicated in the damage of two nearby Victorian properties, and has brought national attention to the growing problem of home insurance claims against trees – in this case by Aviva and genocide insurers Allianz.
Many houses from this era were built on shallow foundations, which can lead to subsidence, especially in areas with clay soil, such as Haringey. But the insurance industry commonly blames nearby trees for the problem, which causes cracks in walls, door frames that won’t close properly, and sloping floors.
A tree can be felled if it is implicated in the damage of a house, even if evidence is lacking or disputed and, by claiming the tree is responsible for the damage, insurance companies are able to make more money and avoid paying for expensive underpinning work on the affected property, while transferring the costs of this work to cash-strapped councils – who usually cannot, or will not pay.
In 2022 there were more than 200 insurance claims brought against trees in Haringey borough alone, and this figure is only set to increase, as climate change worsens.
Lozzi said that:
Insurers are pitting council and residents against each other, saying a tree is causing damage to a house and the council needs to cut it down. Councils could resist, but ours, like many others, is nearly bankrupt at the moment, so they’re afraid to go to court.
These insurers have billions of pounds and the best lawyers, so it’s unlikely councils will win. We thought enough’s enough. We’re going to stop the council felling this tree. We occupied it, and for the next year and a half it became a battle.
The tree’s still standing. What’s amazing is that while all the other trees on the same road have been pollarded to within an inch of their lives recently, this tree is about to burst into its canopy, and there’s a bird nesting in the tree.
One morning the council decided to send in security at 4am to cover the tree in scaffolding, wrap it in white tarp, and build observation platforms in it:
Balaclava-wearing security guards patrolled around this fortification, just in case campaigners were thinking about climbing the tree again. This lasted a week, with 24-hour security, and cost the council £92,000. The incident outraged the local community, and eventually backfired when the home owner took out an injunction against the council.
Various hearings have taken place, with a judicial review last summer. The judge sided with Haringey council and said the tree should be felled, but the home owner- who does not want the tree to be felled, appealed the decision, but it was refused. It is uncertain what the council will do next, but the tree is now unprotected and at risk of removal.
When left to flourish, trees provide so many benefits, not just for nature but also for our mental health and wellbeing. Trees, unlike humans, get better with age and become more valuable for biodiversity.
Mature trees are also vital in our fight against climate change. Those with a 30 inch diameter have been shown to remove 10 times more air pollution, store up to 90 times more carbon, and possess a leaf area up to 100 times greater than a tree with just a six inch diameter.
But, because the perceived risks posed by bigger trees are very often exaggerated, there is increasing pressure to reduce our big canopy trees, and even carry out unnecessary felling.
For cash-strapped councils, it works in their favour to keep trees small, as less is spent on their maintenance. But trees are being pollarded in tighter and tighter cycles, which never allows the tree to regrow to its former glory.
Lozzi said:
They pollard the trees in our area, but do them at the worst possible time- when they are about to burst into their spring vitality. The tree surgeons just chop them. They know it’s the wrong time of year to do it, which can impact on the health of the tree, but just want the money and say they can’t get all the work done in the winter. There’s a lot of neglect, laziness and inept work that goes on, and some tree surgeons can be real cowboys. Probably the cheapest ones get the work as the council’s trying to save money.
As in other parts of England, topping is also increasingly being used around Haringey as a method of reducing tree size, and involves reducing the whole crown of the tree so all that is left are a few stumps coming out of the trunk.
Topping is one of the most harmful tree pruning practices, and impacts the health of the tree by reducing energy production and increasing risk of disease. This technique also makes a tree more unstable, so councils may unwittingly be making our streets more dangerous:
Although disease is also a threat to our trees, and is becoming much more common because of climate change, it is a very grey area. Depending on the type of disease it has, a tree can live for decades more, or even recover, but the necessary care and attention needs resources, money and proper scrutiny – which councils do not usually have.
Because economic growth is the primary driver of our society, underfunding and understaffing of tree departments are commonplace, as is a lack of ecologists working for councils. This needs to change if we are going to be successful in fighting the nature and climate crises that are taking grip of our planet.
One new piece of legislation which has reluctantly been taken up by councils is the public duty to consult. This gives ‘local people’ the opportunity to express their views before a street tree, which has a stem diameter of at least 8cm, is felled.
Local authorities are duty bound to make the public aware of the consultation by placing a notice on the tree in question, providing contact information, details of the proposed tree works, any other engineering solutions that they have considered, and any proposal for replanting. There must also be a notice available for the public to see, either on the local authority’s website or made available at their offices.
The consultation period must remain open for at least 28 days, and then the local authority is required to publish their response as soon as possible, and not later than 28 days before the proposed felling of the tree.
However, there are certain exemptions- such as dead, diseased or dying trees and, while the Public Duty to Consult allows the public to express their views about what is happening to their street trees, councils still have the final say about the fate of the tree:
Haringey Tree Protectors aims to not only create a fundamental shift in how we view and consider our mature and existing trees, but also influence future decision-making around their protection.
Through Canopy, its new national coalition group of grassroots tree campaigners and campaign groups, the group also encourages and supports those standing up for threatened trees in their community, and provides a wide variety of valuable resources for those taking action.
Lozzi said that:
Uniting people through a campaign, with a wider narrative of protecting trees is a really positive thing, and it’s a passion project that’s taken over my life. If everyone does a little bit it could be a tree revolution. It’s great to see communities getting a bit braver and challenging the many wrongs being done to our trees and, when it comes to insurers, residents and people who pay insurance premiums need to hold them to account.
They’re making a mockery of people, and people can push back and question much more than they do. If you care about nature and the trees on your street, then fight for them. Direct action is really important. People need to get more radicalized, and fight for what they believe in.
Featured image and additional images supplied
By Charlie Jaay
This post was originally published on Canary.
On January 15, a group of utility companies wrote a letter to Lee Zeldin, then president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. “We provide the electricity for millions of homes, businesses, and institutions across the U.S., create thousands of good-paying jobs, and drive economic progress and American prosperity,” the letter stated.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
One of the largest studies ever conducted on biodiversity loss worldwide has revealed that humans are having a severely detrimental impact on global wildlife.
The number of species is declining, as well as the composition of populations.
“Biological diversity is under threat. More and more plant and animal species are disappearing worldwide, and humans are responsible. Until now, however, there has been no synthesis of the extent of human intervention in nature and whether the effects can be found everywhere in the world and in all groups of organisms,” a press release from University of Zurich (UZH) said.
The post Biodiversity Study Highlights Destructive Global Impact Of Humans appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
San Francisco waterfront and Bay Bridge. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
On March 11, 2025, Trump’s appointed head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lee Zeldin, announced the elimination of environmental justice offices throughout the agency. The EPA has already canceled hundreds of grants that supported marginalized, environmentally-impacted communities; meanwhile, in January, Trump rescinded an executive order signed by Bill Clinton in 1994 which directed each federal agency to “make achieving environmental justice part of its mission.”
These and other moves to end environmental justice efforts by the US government will be disastrous to already vulnerable communities, and are compounded by the rollback or elimination of environmental protections more generally. Yet they also throw into relief long-standing questions posed by environmental justice organizers and scholars: Why have state agencies consistently failed to protect marginalized communities from environmental harm, regardless of political party in power, and despite Clinton’s executive order? What are the capacities and limitations of the state in delivering the kinds of justice that vulnerable communities seek? And what other sources or forms of justice or repair do communities envision, beyond what the state has to offer?
These were some of the questions that motivated my book, Toxic City: Redevelopment and Environmental Justice in San
Francisco, based on over a decade of research on environmental justice activism in the city. The book centers on the cleanup and redevelopment of a toxic military base, bordered by the industrialized, historically Black neighborhood of Bayview-Hunters Point, and traces the neighborhood’s multi-generational history of organizing around housing, health, and environmental justice. Today’s environmental justice organizations emerged from long-standing efforts to make the neighborhood a better place to live. In the 1960s, residents organized against the state violence of police killings, substandard housing, and the bulldozers and eviction notices that came with urban renewal. In subsequent decades, many of these same organizers worked to oppose toxic facilities, such as the expansion of a sewage treatment plant in the 1970s, and, in the 1990s, a proposed second power plant in the neighborhood (in the latter instance, they were successful). By the time I began my research in the 2010s, local organizers were struggling for meaningful influence on the military’s cleanup of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, and were increasingly concerned with the harmful levels of dust churned up by large-scale cleanup and redevelopment projects. In other words, the cleanup and redevelopment in Bayview-Hunters Point are not uncomplicated stories of progress and urban improvement. Rather, for many residents, they represent another chapter in the neighborhood’s history of state-sanctioned, racialized toxicity.
Over the course of my research, which took place during the Obama administration, I saw how state environmental and health agencies often ignored or dismissed neighborhood concerns, and how enforcement of environmental protections in the neighborhood was uneven, at best. I also witnessed how residents employed strategies both radical and reformist, sometimes working with or through, and sometimes in opposition to or beyond, state institutions—reinforcing the point made by other scholars, such as Jill Harrison, Tracey Perkins, and Erin Goodling, that environmental justice activism has always relied on a diversity of tactics.
Most often, however, state institutions were a poor fit, to put it mildly, for resident’s expansive political goals. One chapter in Toxic City looks at Bayview-Hunters Point resident’s efforts to influence the federal Superfund program and assert a measure of community control over the cleanup, or remediation, of the military shipyard. I argue that their critiques and demands (including economic redistribution, epidemiological studies, and influence over cleanup standards) outlined a project of reparative remediation (similar to concepts of reparative justice) that offered an alternative to the state’s project of risk-based, technocratic remediation. In large part these demands were made through a formal advisory committee which—when it became too contentious—the US Navy simply terminated. Even still—and despite all the barriers, and indeed walls, to participation in the Superfund process—the chapter argues we have much to learn about how residents showed up to meetings and protests year after year, for decades, continuing to articulate the harms they and their families had suffered and the forms of justice they felt they deserved.
What does all this have to do with Trump and current dismantling of the EPA? Although it may be hard to imagine now, in the almost-spring of 2025, there will be a point at which a new political administration takes up the task of rebuilding state agencies and environmental regulations. When that happens, it is important that those with radical political visions are at the table—it’s not enough to return to what a Biden-era EPA had to offer, for example. Those ideas and visions of what a state that pursues and supports environmental justice social movements might look like already exists, honed through decades of struggle, in places like Bayview-Hunters Point.
The post Environmental Justice in San Francisco appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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On a clear day overlooking the inner harbour of Prince Rupert, a northwest British Columbia town home to Canada’s third largest port, chances are you’ll see a spurt of water coming from the surface of the ocean.
“I’ve lived here my whole life and every once in a while, you might get a glimpse of a humpback, but there have been so many humpback whales lately in the harbour, I’ve never witnessed that in my life. It’s a sign that our waters are healthy and abundant,” says Arnie Nagy, a member of the Haida Nation.
Traditionally, Nagy is known as Tlaatsgaa Chiin Kiljuu, or Strong Salmon Voice, because of his years fighting to ensure the survival of the fishing industry and wild salmon on B.C.’s North Coast as a member of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers’ Union.
“I’ve lived here my whole life and every once in a while, you might get a glimpse of a humpback, but there have been so many humpback whales lately in the harbour, I’ve never witnessed that in my life. It’s a sign that our waters are healthy and abundant,” says Arnie Nagy, a member of the Haida Nation.
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The National Institutes of Health will no longer be funding work on the health effects of climate change, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica. The guidance, which was distributed to several staffers last week, comes on the back of multiple new directives to cut off NIH funding to grants that are focused on subjects that are viewed as conflicting with the Trump administration’…
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Although it was too late for him to benefit, Daniel Kinel felt relieved in December when the Environmental Protection Agency finally banned TCE. The compound, which has been used for dry cleaning, manufacturing and degreasing machines, can cause cancer, organ damage and a potentially fatal heart defect in babies, according to independent studies and the EPA. It has also been shown to greatly increase people’s chances of developing Parkinson’s disease.
Kinel and three of his colleagues were diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. They all worked in a law office in Rochester, New York, that sat next to a dry cleaner that had dumped TCE into the soil. Kinel was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative condition at age 43, after working there for seven years. His three colleagues have since died. At least 15 of the firm’s partners developed cancers related to TCE.
“It felt good that we were finally getting rid of this terrible chemical,” said Kinel, whose symptoms now make it impossible to type, write or work as a lawyer. “My children and grandchildren would be protected.”
But his feeling of solace has been short-lived.
The ban has been challenged on multiple fronts since President Donald Trump assumed office for a second time in January. Republicans in the Senate and House introduced resolutions to repeal the ban, which was vulnerable to being overturned through the Congressional Review Act because it was issued shortly before the inauguration. Meanwhile, companies and trade groups have sued to stop the ban in court. A Trump executive order delayed the implementation of the ban until March 21. And last week, the EPA asked a federal appeals court to further delay the ban until the end of May.
TCE, short for trichloroethylene, is one of five toxic substances for which full or partial bans put in place by the EPA under President Joe Biden are now under threat. The Trump administration told the courts that it wants to review all five bans to determine whether they should be rolled back. Those banned substances include a deadly paint stripper called methylene chloride; PCE, a solvent that’s similar to TCE; carbon tetrachloride, which is used as a cleaning fluid; and the cancer-causing mineral asbestos. David Fotouhi, the lawyer Trump nominated to be second-in-command of the agency, tried to overturn the asbestos ban in October, when he was serving as an attorney for a group of car companies. The EPA classifies all of the recently banned chemicals as either carcinogenic or probably carcinogenic to humans.
But the EPA’s ban on TCE is in greater peril than the rest because it has yet to take effect. The prohibition on the chemical was to begin this year for all consumer uses and many industrial and commercial uses. The EPA allowed a more gradual phasing out for more than a dozen industrial uses, such as for some aerospace and defense applications. In those cases, the Biden EPA required employers to provide health protections for workers who come into contact with TCE. The Trump EPA’s recent petition to the federal appeals court to extend the ban’s delay would also mean that employers would not be required to implement the new health protections for workers.
Delaying the ban means that people will continue to be exposed to the chemical, which causes liver cancer, kidney cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, as well as holes in infants’ hearts that can be fatal. While safer alternatives now exist for many of its uses, TCE has seeped into the drinking water of more than 17 million people in the U.S., according to data compiled by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. Dangerous plumes of TCE have been identified in Woburn, Massachusetts; Wichita, Kansas; and Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base in North Carolina, where hundreds of service members developed Parkinson’s disease and cancer. There is another TCE plume on Long Island in New York, in the district abutting the one that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin represented in Congress.
The idea that people will still be exposed to TCE infuriates Jerry Ensminger. This chemical “needs to go away,” said the retired Marine Corps master sergeant who’s an outspoken advocate for military families exposed to TCE. Ensminger’s daughter Janey died from leukemia when she was 9; Ensminger said Janey was conceived at Camp Lejeune and the family lived there during most of the pregnancy’s first trimester, then returned when she was 6. Ensminger recalled seeing workers on the base dip truck engines into vast metal vats of TCE in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Scientists began raising concerns about the toxicity of TCE almost a century ago. The EPA’s work on the chemical proceeded slowly. In 1987, it deemed TCE a “probable human carcinogen.” In 2001, a draft EPA assessment found the chemical to be more toxic than previously thought and highly likely to cause cancer. The conclusion came under attack from some industry and government scientists. The Department of Defense, which is responsible for hundreds of TCE-contaminated sites, criticized the report as based on “junk science.” Two reviews by panels of independent scientists, however, found the assessment was sound. Still, the EPA didn’t begin drafting stricter regulations on TCE until the end of President Barack Obama’s administration.
Those efforts were dealt a blow during Trump’s first term when the EPA weakened a report on TCE’s effects on fetal heart abnormalities and stopped work on the new regulations. Nancy Beck, who before joining the first Trump administration had been a high-level lobbyist for the American Chemistry Council, an industry trade group, presided over the EPA’s chemical program when it pulled back from the TCE ban and, more broadly, retreated from rules that the chemical industry saw as burdensome.
After returning to the private sector, Beck was recently named the principal deputy assistant administrator in the EPA’s office of chemical safety and pollution prevention. She did not respond to requests for comment.
Her appointment has left environmentalists despairing over the fate of the long-awaited TCE ban.
“The same industry lobbyist who was in charge of EPA’s chemical program before is in charge of it again,” said Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “When she was there the first time, she moved heaven and earth to weaken the evaluation of the chemical and downplay the hazard TCE posed to people’s health. That appears to be where this is headed again.”
More than 100 groups representing public health, environment and community interests recently sent a letter to Zeldin urging him to reinstate the TCE ban. Referencing Zeldin’s proclaimed interest in clean water for every American, the letter noted that the EPA estimated its rule would produce $20 million in health benefits from reduced cancer rates and said that “delaying implementation of these rules will lead to preventable death, disease and incapacitation and increase medical costs and hardships to families and communities.” This week, environmental and labor groups filed a court brief opposing the EPA’s efforts to delay implementation of the TCE ban.
The EPA did not respond to questions about the TCE ban. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who introduced the resolution to repeal the TCE ban in the Senate, and Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, and Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., who introduced a resolution for its repeal in the House, also did not respond to inquiries from ProPublica. A spokesperson from the American Chemistry Council referred ProPublica to its press release from December, which acknowledged that the EPA had included “important adjustments” in the TCE ban to provide flexibility to affected industries.
In a press release about his bid to repeal the ban, Kennedy said that the “Biden administration waged war against America’s chemical producers,” and he urged Congress to “move quickly to take off the handcuffs that President Biden placed on Louisiana and U.S. businesses.” In the same release, Harshbarger described the TCE ban as “one of many examples of the Biden Administration’s overregulation.”
In a hearing about chemical regulation in the House in January, Harshbarger said that a company in her district, Microporous, which makes membranes used in lithium-ion batteries, is facing an “existential threat” from the TCE ban. The ban made an exception for the use of TCE for this purpose, allowing the battery industry to continue using it until 2044. Microporous, which has challenged the ban in court, did not respond to a question about why it needed 20 years to find a suitable replacement for TCE.
Since Trump’s inauguration, the EPA has been touting its efforts to roll back environmental protections. Earlier this month, the agency announced the “most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” listing 31 rules it planned to step away from, related to oil and gas, air pollution and greenhouse gases. The agency celebrated the announcement with a 6,500-word press release that included praise from 61 industry leaders, CEOs and Republican politicians.
Still, some who have been focused on TCE were surprised that the Trump administration was delaying and reconsidering the recent ban. “I thought it was a done deal,” said Dr. Sara Whittingham, a retired United States Air Force flight surgeon who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at 46. When she heard that the rule might be repealed, she was aghast. “What the heck, how can nobody care about this?” she said. “This should be a nonpartisan issue.”
Whittingham believes her disease may stem from the two years she spent as an aircraft maintenance officer at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, from 1996 to 1998. Her office was above a shop where workers used TCE to clean engine parts.
Last week, Whittingham teamed up with two friends, both Air Force graduates who were diagnosed with Parkinson’s as women in their 40s, to urge people to pressure Congress to drop the resolutions.
“We signed up to go fight for our country,” she said, but now the attitude seems to be, “‘We don’t care about your health, you’ve already signed on the dotted line.’ It’s a kind of a kick in the face.”
Before being diagnosed with Parkinson’s, Whittingham had hoped that her children would follow her career path. But recently she discouraged her daughter, who is a senior in high school, from joining the military. The health risks, she said, were too high.
This post was originally published on ProPublica.
Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
A few weeks ago, I watched a pack of wolves in Yellowstone National Park with perhaps several dozen other visitors.
Everyone was excited to glimpse one of the Park’s packs. People with scopes and telephoto lenses shared the view. “Here, take a look through my scope,” was a familiar invitation.
The group’s camaraderie reminded me of one of the critical attributes of public lands: Our public lands bring people together.
As we stood watching the wolves, no one was talking about politics. I’m sure there were Republicans and Democrats in the group. There were likely millionaires standing beside folks who struggled to make ends meet each month. People from different races, religions, and ethnicities were together as neighbors, enjoying the public lands. This was democracy in action.
We were all united in our love and passion for public lands. In this time of political discord and divisions, is there anything in our society that brings more people from different backgrounds together than our public lands? Where else do you find people helping each other just because it is the right thing to do?
While we may disagree about how public lands are managed, I think most Americans recognize that they are part of our nation’s heritage.
While we may all recognize that our public lands are valuable as wildlife habitats, recreation areas, water storage, carbon storage, and biodiversity protection, they are also part of America’s democratic traditions.
Any attempts to sell off or transfer public lands to private ownership is an attack on America’s fundamental value of equal opportunity and access for all. We must protect our public lands from all assaults on public ownership so we can continue to share what they preserve and represent as the best features of American culture.
The post Public Lands are an Essential Part of the Nation’s Heritage appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
This federal election is critical for Canada. The world is at a crossroads, and Canadians need to choose which path we are going to walk.
Will Canada elect a government that will turn its back on climate action, reverse course on all the environmental policies that we’ve helped put in place over the past nine years, and gut our scientific institutions, like President Trump has done in the U.S.? Or will we elect to move forward with environmental progress, trust in science, and a national conversation rooted in fact?
This election is about freedom—the freedom for Canada to follow its own course, rather than bend to the will of the leader of the United States.
It’s about freeing ourselves and our nation from the fossil fuel industry that has been misleading Canadians about the climate crisis for decades, and that aims to keep us locked into a dying energy system that is expensive, dangerous, and misguided.
It’s about freedom of information—making sure that Canadians are informed about climate change, biodiversity loss, and other environmental issues, so that we, as a nation, can make informed decisions.
And it’s about safety and security—knowing that we are working towards a future where our children are safe from toxic products, we are fighting the plastic pollution crisis, and we have a strong and secure financial system that is part of the solution to climate change, rather than working against our climate goals.
Canada is far from perfect. Our record as a nation is far from perfect when it comes to climate action and on environmental protection on the whole. But we’re making progress, and we must stay the course and keep moving forward. We need to contribute to the global effort to stave off the worst of the climate crisis, and keep this planet livable for generations to come.
We need to do this work with the rest of the international community, rather than isolate ourselves and become a resource play for the United States.
The future of this country, its role in the world, and the state of our natural environment all depend on how we vote in this election.
Authorized by Environmental Defence Canada, environmentaldefence.ca, 1-877-399-2333
The post Your Vote Can be the Difference appeared first on Environmental Defence.
This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
“No more carbon apocalypse-mongering,” Jordan Peterson told an audience of thousands in February at a global conservative conference in London known as the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC).
The crowd applauded loudly.
The world is “certainly not going to hit our 2030 targets” for achieving net-zero on climate change, Peterson claimed, because those targets “were proposed by buffoons and liars.”
“We’re not going to hit our 2050 targets either,” he told the audience, which, according to a leaked attendee list, ranged from fossil fuel executives and Trump administration officials and allies, to climate denial organizations, political leaders from Europe, and right-wing tech billionaires.
The post How Jordan Peterson Became A Global Anti-Net Zero Power Broker appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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For Chris Wright, there may be no simple truths. At his Senate confirmation hearing on Jan. 15, the man poised to take control of the U.S. Department of Energy and its vast apparatus of technological research and development sat behind a walnut desk wearing a gray suit and a crisply knotted red tie. Wright, the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, a $3 billion natural gas fracking company, harkened back to his days as a solar energy researcher and offered lawmakers a vision of open-mindedness and innovation. Climate change is an urgent challenge, he reassured them, and he would address it.
“It is a global issue. It is a real issue. It’s a challenging issue. And the solution to climate change is to evolve our energy system,” he told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. “I am for improving all energy technologies that can better human lives and reduce emissions.”
Since his confirmation as the secretary of energy on Feb. 3, though, Wright has outlined an anti-climate agenda. Speaking to conservative audiences, he is charismatic, animated and far more zealous. Wright dismissed the transition to renewable energy as nonexistent in a Feb. 18 speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, a gathering associated with the podcast host Jordan Peterson, and called global efforts to boost the use of renewables, which he said drive up the price of energy, “lunacy.”
“The world simply runs on hydrocarbons,” he told the group, “and for most of their uses, we don’t have replacements.”
Before Congress, he pledged to listen and learn and then chart his course. Before Peterson’s group, he announced he already had “a nine-point plan” that would more than double the world’s consumption of the very fuels causing the planet to overheat. “Number one is, get out of the way of the production, export and enhancement of our volumes of coal, oil and gas,” he said. Yes, they cause climate change, he has repeatedly acknowledged, but it amounts to an inconvenient complication.
Over the past several weeks, Wright has delivered speeches not just at Peterson’s conference but also at the Conservative Political Action Conference and at CERAWeek, widely seen as the oil industry’s most influential business event, during which he continued to assert that the world’s economy is primarily dependent on the expansion of hydrocarbons and that alternatives like solar and wind have proved both costly and a failure — characterizations that ignore the swiftly falling costs and rapid adoption of both technologies. “I think the agenda might be different here than climate change,” he mused at Peterson’s forum, referring to “the climate-obsessed people” he’s spoken with. Then he hit on a theme that he emphasized again in the weeks that followed: “It’s certainly been a powerful tool used to grow government power, top-down control and shrink human freedom. This is sinister.”
Chris Wright has different answers for different audiences … … on fossil fuel dependenceIn Congress, at the Senate Confirmation Hearing on Jan. 15, 2025, Wright said: “The only pathway to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lift up people’s quality of life is through energy innovation. And America has been a hotbed of that.”
At the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference on Feb. 17, 2025, Wright said: “The world simply runs on hydrocarbons and for most of their uses, we don’t have replacements.”
… on responding to climate changeIn Congress, at the Senate Confirmation Hearing on Jan. 15, 2025, Wright said: “I’ve studied and followed the data and the evolution of climate change for at least 20 years now. It is a global issue. It is a real issue. It’s a challenging issue. And the solution to climate change is to evolve our energy system.”
At CERAWeek on March 10, 2025, Wright said: “I’m honored to play a role in reversing what I believe has been very poor direction in energy policy. The previous administration’s policy was focused myopically on climate change with people as simply collateral damage.”
… on alternative energy sourcesIn Congress, at the Senate Confirmation Hearing on Jan. 15, 2025, Wright said: “I will be an unabashed steward for all sources of affordable, reliable and secure American energy and the infrastructure needed to develop, deliver and secure them.”
At CERAWeek on March 10, 2025, Wright said: “Beyond the obvious scale and cost problems, there is simply no physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas. I haven’t even mentioned oil or coal yet.”
As Wright’s views have become more public, it suggests that he and the rest of Trump’s cabinet will embrace the premise of climate change but downplay its threat, even building a case that it is a benefit to society. The White House is seeking to reverse the legal definition of carbon dioxide as a climate pollutant and undo scores of rules addressing the economic costs of the extreme warming it causes. “Recently I’ve been called a climate denier or climate skeptic,” Wright told attendees at CERAWeek. “This is simply wrong. I am a climate realist.”
“The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world,” he continued. Global life expectancy has soared. Poverty has sharply declined. Modern medicine and telecommunications and airplanes have all resulted. And in the process, “We have indeed raised global atmospheric CO2 concentration by 50%.”
“Everything in life involves trade-offs,” he added. “Everything.”
Such a jarring claim amounts to more than a philosophical difference about the priorities of the world. It is unambiguously dismissive of a climate crisis that the vast majority of global scientists warn will prove devastatingly disruptive. It has given some of the people he addressed in Congress whiplash. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who sits on the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, wrote through a spokesperson in response to questions from ProPublica that Wright stated a willingness to “support all energy sources,” but now that he is prioritizing a fossil fuel agenda, it is “deeply disappointing.”
The one thing it is not, however, is new.
In 2024, Liberty Energy published a little-noticed, 180-page manifesto called “Bettering Human Lives,” connected to the similarly named poverty-alleviation foundation his company created that year to bring cooking fuels to Africa. The document amounts to a spirited moral argument for how energy produced from oil and gas has advanced the developed world and how essential it will be to raise undeveloped countries out of poverty. Wright’s premise is that communities that lack electricity or modern fuels should get the immediate benefit from the cheapest existing energy source available to them. He says that recent climate policies prohibiting U.S. investment in infrastructure that could provide that energy using oil and gas does enormous human harm. But the “Bettering Human Lives” report goes further, suggesting that there is little role for non-hydrocarbon technologies and arguing that if oil and gas production are not expanded globally, billions of people will be held in poverty.
At his senate confirmation, Wright was asked several times to explain his embrace of “all sources” of energy. During one exchange, in which Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., pushed him to expand on what he meant, Wright listed them: wind, nuclear, geothermal, hydropower. “And if I didn’t say solar, it was an oversight.”
The statement is a sharp contrast to what Wright has told his investors in Liberty Energy’s earnings calls, where he has blamed many of those renewables for rising poverty and declining growth and has criticized “the incessant repeating of the simply false term,” referring to “the so-called energy transition.” He argues that for all the years and dollars invested in lowering carbon and subsidizing a transition to cleaner energy, hydrocarbons still fuel roughly the same 85% of global energy supply that they have for decades. Renewables, he says, still account for less than 3%. (The remainder being nuclear and hydroelectric energy, among other sources.)
According to the Energy Institute’s “Statistical Review of World Energy,” the energy industry’s trusted source for global market trends, though, hydrocarbons have dropped to 81.5% of global energy consumption, and renewables now account for roughly 8% of global energy use — more than twice what Wright claims — and are projected to grow sharply over the next few years. Moreover, the report states that solar and wind capacity grew by 67% in 2023, adding more wind and solar capacity than ever before and driving the vast majority of the world’s increase in electricity generation for the year.
Wright, whose office did not respond to a detailed list of questions, has said he rejects similar calculations on methodological grounds.
He also ignores the ways in which the energy transition in the U.S. is already well underway. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the government’s primary energy data office, wind and solar are responsible for substantial growth in American electricity generation while generation from natural gas is forecast to decrease. South Dakota, for example, gets 80% of its electricity from renewables, and Vermont relies on them nearly 100%.
Facts aside, Wright, in his recent remarks, has begun to present his agenda in ideological terms, drawing a straight line between fossil fuel use and conservative fears that Americans’ freedom is under assault. At CPAC, liberated from the necktie he said he’d been compelled to wear since his confirmation hearing, roaming the brightly lit stage with his arms outstretched, he reframed oil and gas not as the cause of climate change the way he’d previously conceded but as a fuel that is patriotic and moral. “Not everyone in the world has access to the liberty and energy we have,” he told the audience. “But in our own country, both of those concepts have been under great threat in the last four years. Maybe that’s why my political career started. Liberty under threat, energy resources under threat.”
It was a whole different message from the one Wright delivered before the Senate.
Amy Westervelt of Drilled contributed research.
This post was originally published on ProPublica.
Nowadays, milk can be made out of most plant-based ingredients (that’s not an exaggeration, even potato milk is a thing). And, while cow’s milk used to be most people’s go-to for cereal, coffee, and smoothies, consumers are embracing the vegan milk revolution. In fact, by 2028, the plant-based dairy market is set to exceed $31 billion in value. And in 2020, research revealed that more than 40 percent of Americans regularly purchase vegan milk.
But is plant-based milk better for the planet? Almond milk, in particular, has a bad reputation when it comes to environmental impact. It’s also one of the most popular milk alternatives on the market. So what do you need to be aware of next time you’re browsing the plant-based milk selection in the grocery store? Should you still grab the almond milk? Let’s dive in.
Almond milk features a mix of ground almonds and water. It is thinner and more watery than other plant-based milks on the market (oat milk, for example, is known for being quite thick and creamy), and, as you might expect, it has quite a nutty flavor. The biggest producer of almond milk is California, which is responsible for around 80 percent of the world’s almonds and 100 percent of those exported inside the US.
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Over the last few years, almond milk has hit the headlines quite a few times, and not all of the coverage has been positive. Many have questioned whether the plant-based alternative is really that good for the environment, and that’s largely because almonds are a very, very thirsty crop.
Just one small almond, grown in California, has a water footprint of around 3.2 gallons, according to one 2017 study. It sounds like a lot (because it is), but it’s not unusual for nuts to need a lot of water to grow. One pistachio, for example, still needs more than a gallon. But one of the biggest issues with almonds specifically is that they are extremely high in demand, and their production is concentrated in one area: California’s Central Valley. In fact, more than 450,000 acres of the San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento Valley are dedicated to almond cultivation.
Having such a thirsty crop in one spot in California is tricky because the state is prone to droughts. According to the National Irregated Drought Information System, more than 33 million Californians are currently affected by droughts.
So to produce almonds, farmers have no choice but to find other sources of water. Like most trees, they will die without it. But this means that California’s groundwater sources are being depleted, according to World Water Reserve. But it’s difficult to estimate just how bad the problem is. “Groundwater volume is notoriously difficult to estimate,” notes the online resource, which is dedicated to helping people learn about water security. “In theory, California could have plenty of groundwater at its disposal, or it could be on the verge of completely running out.”
Another issue with almond cultivation is its impact on the bees. Almond trees rely on cross-pollination, which requires pollinators, namely bees. But the fertilizer used on the crops is extremely toxic to the insects. “The bees in the almond groves are being exploited and disrespected,” one organic beekeeper, called Patrick Pynes, told The Guardian in 2020. “They are in severe decline because our human relationship to them has become so destructive.”
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All of this paints quite a bleak picture of a humble glass of almond milk. But it’s not all bad. When it comes to emissions, this plant-based beverage actually has one of the smallest footprints of the whole alternative milk industry. This is because like all trees, almond trees sequester carbon as they grow. According to the Yale School of the Environment, one kilogram of almonds emits less than one kilogram of carbon emissions.
“Almond orchards capture and store a significant amount of carbon both above and below the surface over their 25-year lifecycle,” said Alissa Kendall, who worked on the research, which was published in Yale’s Journal of Industrial Ecology in 2015. “This carbon storage provides a climate benefit not considered in conventional carbon footprints.”
Almonds have their issues, there is no denying it. But if you choose almond milk over dairy in the grocery store, you’re still making a better choice for the environment. And that’s because all plant-based milks, almond included, are better for the planet than cow’s milk. In fact, one glass of dairy milk produces three times more greenhouse house gasses than any plant-based milk, and requires nine times more land. To sustain one dairy cow for one day, it also takes between 30 to 50 gallons of milk.
In 2018, the biggest-ever food production analysis, conducted at Oxford University, concluded that giving up dairy and meat was the single biggest way a person could reduce their impact on the environment. Doing so would reduce global farmland use by 75 percent.
“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gasses, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use, and water use,” lead researcher Joseph Poore told The Guardian at the time. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car.”
“Agriculture is a sector that spans a multitude of environmental problems. Really it is animal products that are responsible for so much of this. Avoiding consumption of animal products delivers far better environmental benefits than trying to purchase sustainable meat and dairy,” he added.
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If you really love almond milk, there are ways to improve your consumption. B Corp certifications, for example, are proof that a brand meets high standards of social and environmental performance. Colorado-based vegan milk brand Silk, for example, has also received a B Corp certification.
Another option is to rotate the milk you buy, so you’re not opting for almond milk every time. Consider switching up your grocery store shop every few weeks to include oat milk, for example, which requires less water than many other plant-based milks on the market. Soy milk is another option, as it also has a lower water footprint.
But you also don’t have to buy into the almond milk market at all. If you’ve got the time, the energy, and the means, you could source some organic almonds, and make your own almond milk at home. If this sounds appealing, we’ve got the best (and easiest) almond milk recipe here.
This post was originally published on VegNews.com.
A new discovery of methane leaks in Antarctica could be a game-changer and potential near-term threat that’s difficult to characterize without sounding overly negative. Of course, situations like this that appear threatening to civilization, or life as we know it, are difficult to believe and accept as something the will really happen, which is understandable because nothing in human history compares to the risk attendant to the dreaded runaway greenhouse effect. So, there’s nothing in human history to compare it to.
Nevertheless, there are scientists who believe we are living on borrowed time because of massive changes happening at the top and at the bottom of the planet where only scientists and indigenous people hang out. Now, this new discovery serves to emphasize their concerns of a climate monster capable of altering everything, lurking in the background.
The threat is explained in a YouTube video: Immense Methane Leaks in Antarctica: A Hidden Climate Theat Unveiled by Phantom Ecology, which is headed by Milton Muldrow, Ph.D. asst. professor at Wilmington University and Chair/College of Arts & Sciences.
As a prelude to this new information, it’s important to note that Russian scientists have been monitoring the risks of methane breakouts in the High Arctic for a couple of decades and have voiced concern about the risks of a sudden burst as undersea methane clathrates increasingly melt, bubbling to surface in ever-larger diameters, which they have measured. As it happens, methane (CH4) is many times more potent than CO2 at trapping excessive global heat.
Additionally, the risk of a methane breakout is mentioned by Peter Wadhams, emeritus professor, Ocean Physics, University of Cambridge, in his celebrated, brilliant interview: The Future of Sea Level Rise: “Russian scientists working the region believe a huge pulse of methane could erupt.” This could crank up global temperatures to ultra-dangerous levels in as little as 2-3 years. The consequences would be unspeakable. And with Antarctica joining, the game changes.
As a science researcher/writer of over 400 articles, this new development is extraordinarily spooky and difficult to accept because the consequences feel way too close for comfort. Stated at the opening of the Phantom Ecology video: “Deep beneath the icy plains of Antarctica, a slumbering giant is beginning to stir. Scientists have made a startling discovery. Vast reservoirs of methane hydrates locked away for millennia are showing signs of instability.”
The finding sent ripples of concern throughout the world of science. The consequences for the planet could be quite dangerous, maybe sooner rather than later. Rising plumes of methane (CH4) near the Antarctic Peninsula raises a major concern that trapped methane will be released into the atmosphere, exacerbating an already dire situation of accelerating global temperatures. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Maginot line of 1.5C above pre-industrial not to be exceeded as framed at the Paris 2015 climate conference by nearly all the nations of the world is kaput. To date, global temperatures have been exceeding that level for nearly two years running.
Meanwhile, world famous climate scientist James Hansen (Earth Institute, Columbia University) says 2C is on the horizon. “The pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated, according to renowned climate scientist Prof James Hansen, who said the international 2C target is “dead” (“Climate Change Target of 2C is ‘Dead’ Says Renonwed Climate Scientist,” Guardian, Feb. 4, 2025). It’s a huge understatement to say this would be horrendous for Antarctic methane leaks, Arctic methane leaks, including Siberian methane leaks and Alaskan methane leaks, as well as Glacial methane leaks (see below “Methane Double Trouble” for another disturbing new discovery).
The volume of methane locked away in Antarctic ice is estimated to be more carbon than all other fuel deposits combined for the planet. A small fraction of this escaping into the atmosphere could have catastrophic consequences for the climate system “in the not-too-distant future.” (Muldrow)
A Climate Time Bomb
Methane hydrates consist of methane molecules trapped within a crystalline lattice of water molecules. This forms an ice substance that can ignite if brought to surface and lit with a match. According to the video: “Release of methane from these hydrates is a frightening prospect. Such a release could trigger a runaway greenhouse effect leading to rapid and catastrophic climate change.” Rapid onset of methane would bring sea levels rising at unprecedented rates, extreme weather events more frequently, and widespread disruptions/destruction to global ecosystems.
Muldrow’s analysis of the first time that large-scale CH4 emissions have been detected in Antarctica is confirmed by Polar Journal, March 2025: “Large Methane Leaks Discovered in Antarctica”:
A research team led by the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC) and the Spanish Geological and Mining Institute (IGME-CSIC) undertook an expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula as part of the ICEFLAME project. The researchers returned on February 17 and have now reported the discovery of large methane leaks on the sea floor in an ICM publication. For the first time, they were able to observe that large quantities of methane are released from the seabed in a gaseous state where methane hydrates occur.
Additionally, according to an article in Rapusia.org, March 14, 2025, “Massive Methane Leaks Detected in Antarctica, Posing Serious Climate Risks”: “A team aboard the Sarmiento de Gamboa research vessel observed large columns of gas escaping from the ocean floor, with some extending up to 700 meters (2,300 feet) long and 70 meters (230 feet) wide.”
Methane Double Trouble
In addition to massive CH4 leaks discovered in Antarctica, up north in the Arctic scientists recently discovered Arctic glaciers leaking “significant amounts of methane,” revealed for the first time. As explained: “Glacial melt rivers and groundwater springs are transporting large volumes of methane from beneath the ice to the atmosphere. This previously unrecognized process could contribute to Arctic climate feedback, accelerating global warming.” (“‘Glacial Fracking’: A Hidden Source of Arctic Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” ScienceDaily, Feb. 19, 2025)
As a result, scientists now need to reassess methane budgets, incorporating glacial emissions alongside permafrost thaw and wetland methane fluxes. The complexities of multiple dangers of global warming continue to expand and merge in time. It now appears that both ends of the planet have turned dicey, risky, subject to sudden change all too soon for comfort and all together at the same time. This could get very ugly; an article in Space.com deals with the issue of runaway global warming: “How The Runaway Greenhouse Gas Effect Can Destroy a Planet’s Habitability — Including Earth’s,” Space.com, December 19, 2023. Here’s the storyline: “Using advanced computer simulations, scientists have shown how easily a runaway greenhouse effect can rapidly transform a habitable planet into a hellish world inhospitable to life.”
Alas, as explained many times in prior articles, corporations, oil and gas operations, countries are all failing to honor commitments to mitigate climate change even before the U.S. reversed course on combating climate change under the Trump administration. This becomes infectious as Germany recently announced an intention to lessen its commitments. The timing could not be worse. The WMO State of the Climate 2024 Update once again issued a Red Alert at the sheer pace of climate change in a single generation, turbo-charged by ever-increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. 2015-2024 will be the warmest ten years on record; the loss of ice from glaciers, sea-level rise and ocean heating are accelerating; and extreme weather is wreaking havoc on communities and economies across the world. (World Meteorological Organization)
Making matters more unnerving yet, according to Copernicus Global Climate Highlights 2024: “Each month from January to June 2024 was warmer than the corresponding month in any previous year. August 2024 equaled the record warmth of August 2023 and the remaining months from July to December were each the second warmest for the time of year, after the corresponding months in 2023.”
With a strong dose of humility, it’s suggested that the world’s leadership undertake all available efforts to confront this real, already started, threat to life on the planet via a super-duper Marshall Plan for the world. Alas, it’s almost assured that this suggestion will go unheeded, especially with consideration of the following headline in the prestigious science publication Nature, Feb. 25, 2025: “Trump 2.0: An Assault on Science Anywhere is an Assault on Science Everywhere.”
The climate system is not going to ring a bell before all hell breaks loose. It’ll happen out of the blue, temperatures relentlessly climbing month by month by month to intolerable levels, possibly already started, observed by Copernicus as stated above. Nobody has ever theorized, or even suggested, that it’s impossible for humanity to exterminate itself.
The post Discovery of Immense Methane Leaks in Antarctica first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
In December 1984, Bhopal witnessed a harrowing industrial disaster with the leak of methyl isocyanate gas from Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) which has left a legacy of hazardous waste. Rishabh Mehta discusses the complicated policy solutions enacted following this tragedy and delineates a way forward.
In December 1984, Bhopal witnessed one of the most harrowing industrial disasters in history. The leak of methyl isocyanate gas from the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) plant claimed thousands of lives overnight and left a horror of health and environmental crises. Four decades later, the disaster’s toxic legacy lingers as hazardous waste contaminates the soil and groundwater.
As Pandora’s box unleashed its evils upon the world, so too does Bhopal’s toxic legacy, which remains an enduring reminder of human hubris and the cost of negligence. But unlike Pandora’s tale, hope cannot be our sole salvation, rather accountability and action must guide us forward.
On January 1 2025, the Indian government transported 337 metric tonnes of toxic waste from the UCIL site in Bhopal to Pithampur, Indore, for incineration. While touted as a major step in addressing the environmental aftermath, this decision has re-ignited debates over its effectiveness, safety, and timing. Questions about the adequacy of policy responses and long-term solutions remain unresolved. This article critically examines the policy decisions shaping this waste transfer and its implications for environmental justice and public health.
The Bhopal disaster’s immediate aftermath saw the enactment of the “Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster Act” and a $470 million settlement with Union Carbide in 1989. However, these measures proved insufficient in addressing the magnitude of the crisis. Successive governments formed task forces and commissioned studies to assess contamination, yet substantive remediation efforts remained elusive. As confirmed by multiple studies, groundwater contamination in 42 nearby areas contains carcinogenic chemicals exceeding safe limits by 50 times. The lack of effective policies to mitigate such contamination has left affected communities vulnerable, perpetuating environmental and public health risks.
Unfortunately, the bureaucratic response to the disaster has been marred by delays and avoidance of corporate accountability. Union Carbide’s now parent company, Dow Chemicals, has consistently distanced itself from responsibility, leaving the burden of remediation on the Indian government. This has resulted in taxpayers shouldering the costs of waste disposal, which many argue should have been funded by the corporation responsible for the tragedy.
The recent transfer of 337 metric tonnes of pre-stored toxic waste to Pithampur has been carried out to comply with judicial mandates under the directives of the Supreme Court and the Madhya Pradesh High Court in Alok Pratap Singh (Deceased) In Rem vs the Union Of India. However, critics argue that the operation carried out covertly at midnight, focuses on less harmful waste stored since 2005, while larger issues like groundwater contamination and toxic residues at the factory site remain unaddressed.
Over the years, various locations, including Ankleshwar in Gujarat and Taloja in Maharashtra, were considered for incinerating the waste. However, public protests and concerns about technical inadequacies derailed these plans. Even Pithampur, designated as the current disposal site, has faced scrutiny. Trial runs in 2015 reportedly resulted in toxic emissions, raising fears about long-term exposure to harmful by-products such as dioxins and furans. These chemicals, known for their long-term health impacts, have raised concerns among environmental experts and local communities. Activists have called the move a “slow-motion Bhopal” in the making and warned of the potential for secondary environmental disasters in Pithampur.
The timing of the transfer, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the tragedy, has led many to view it as a public relations exercise. A 2010 government-commissioned study highlighted that over 11 lakh tonnes of contaminated soil and other toxic substances remain untreated at the UCIL premises. Activists have questioned the rationale behind incinerating 337 tonnes that had already been securely stored when the broader environmental crisis remains unsolved. According to a technical presentation by the Ministry of Environment & Forests on the incineration of Union Carbide’s hazardous waste, the process is expected to generate 900 tonnes of residue. The recent decision to incinerate the waste at Indore is a 180-degree pivot from the state government’s previous stance, as officials from the state had opposed incineration in multiple official meetings.
The communication surrounding the risks of incineration at Pithampur has raised concerns about transparency. Limited engagement with local communities has led to apprehension, as residents worry about potential health impacts such as respiratory issues. Several petitions have highlighted these concerns, reflecting the need for a more inclusive approach to policymaking, incorporating community voices and comprehensively addressing their apprehensions.
The current approach to disposing of Bhopal’s toxic waste has faced significant criticism, highlighting the need for more robust, globally aligned solutions. One viable alternative is secure containment. Hazardous materials can be stored in stainless steel drums with advanced sealing technology to prevent leakage. This method is widely used in nuclear waste management, where containment over decades ensures minimal environmental impact. For instance, the US Department of Energy uses this technique to manage nuclear waste at the Hanford Site, reducing risks to surrounding communities.
Another critical alternative is deploying closed-loop incineration technology, significantly reducing emissions and toxic residues. Germany, known for its stringent environmental standards, employs such technologies in facilities like Remondis, ensuring waste is incinerated with minimal harm to air quality. India could collaborate with countries like Germany to adopt or import such advanced systems.
A more sustainable approach involves enforcing corporate accountability. Companies responsible for hazardous waste should fund its disposal or repatriate it to countries with the infrastructure to handle such materials safely. A notable precedent is Unilever’s mercury waste, which was repatriated to the USA for safe disposal after contamination at a thermometer factory in Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu. This aligns with the “polluter pays” principle, a cornerstone of environmental jurisprudence globally.
By adopting these alternatives, India can move beyond temporary fixes and implement sustainable solutions prioritising public health, environmental integrity, and global best practices.
The midnight waste transfer from Bhopal to Pithampur epitomises the dangers of greenwashing in environmental policy. While the recent waste transfer is presented as progress, it fails to address contamination and corporate accountability. India must adopt a comprehensive approach grounded in global best practices and prioritise community engagement to resolve this toxic legacy. Only then can the lessons of Bhopal truly inform a sustainable and just environmental policy framework.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the Department of Sociology, LSE Human Rights, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Rishabh Mehta
Image credit: Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA.
The post Bhopal toxic waste transfer to Indore: four decades of policy and environmental dilemmas first appeared on LSE Human Rights.
This post was originally published on LSE Human Rights.
Every spring, summer, and fall, Jimmy Draeger would walk the length of his 11-acre property with a hand sprayer and a tub of Roundup. He’d mist around the flower beds, the patio, the fence line, diluting the concentrated herbicide with water as the label directed.
Nestled deep in the woods of the Missouri Ozarks, Draeger was used to seeing an explosion of weeds and shrubs in the warm months at the home he’s shared with his wife, Brenda, for more than 30 years. He didn’t think much of using Roundup to keep them at bay.
Then he was diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin lymphoma. According to a lawsuit filed by the Draegers in 2022, Jimmy had a chemotherapy port installed in his chest, developed neuropathy in his hands and feet, and lost control of his bowels, coordination, and sexual function. He became clinically depressed, vision-impaired, and unable to bathe without Brenda’s help.
Monsanto, the agrochemical company behind Roundup, was to blame for Jimmy’s lymphoma, the Draegers contended. In November 2023, a jury agreed. Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, was ordered to pay the Draegers and two other plaintiffs a combined $1.56 billion in damages. (A judge later cut the payout for punitive damages, reducing the total awards to $611 million.)
The Draegers’ case is one of more than 160,000 Roundup lawsuits filed against Monsanto or Bayer since 2015, when the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate, a key ingredient in Roundup, as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
Most of the lawsuits hinged on failure-to-warn claims: the allegation that Monsanto, and later Bayer, failed to adequately notify customers of glyphosate’s potential cancer risk. Bayer has paid roughly $11 billion to settle these claims while denying any wrongdoing.
Now, the Environmental Protection Agency is considering a Bayer-backed rule that could significantly curtail the lawsuits.
Unlike the WHO, the EPA — which, headed by Trump appointee Lee Zeldin, has already announced massive regulatory rollbacks — does not consider glyphosate to be a likely human carcinogen.
“EPA’s cancer classification is consistent with most other international expert panels and regulatory authorities,” EPA Associate Administrator for Public Affairs Molly Vaseliou said in a statement to The Intercept. “EPA does not agree with IARC’s conclusion that glyphosate is ‘probably carcinogenic to humans.’”
Last August, 11 industry-friendly red states, led by Nebraska and Iowa, submitted a 436-page petition asking the agency to amend its labeling rules under the Federal Insecticide, Rodenticide, and Fungicide Act, or FIFRA. The proposed rule change would explicitly prohibit states from labeling pesticides and herbicides with warnings about cancer, birth defects, and reproductive harm if those notices contradict the EPA’s risk assessment.
The states made clear that their ultimate goal is to thwart future lawsuits against pesticide manufacturers. Their petition argued that recent court rulings have created a “gap in FIFRA’s regulatory framework” that the proposed rule change would plug.
“It’s telling of the lengths that pesticide manufacturers will go to make sure that nothing interferes with their profit margins.”
In January, in a move initiated by the Biden administration, the EPA took a first step of accepting public comment on the rule-making petition, with a deadline of March 24 — though this step is exploratory and does not mean a new rule will be issued. Still, the EPA’s decision could have disastrous consequences if Donald Trump’s second administration is as friendly to the chemical industry as it was in his first.
“It’s telling of the lengths that pesticide manufacturers will go to make sure that nothing interferes with their profit margins,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s a reality that the industry itself generates much of the data, and they say it’s safe, and then EPA approves that determination.”
“If we’re not limited to the industry-created data set,” he said, “they see it as a larger threat to their ability to control the universe of science and data that go into the pesticide regulatory review process.”
The EPA petition follows in the path of other efforts at both the state and federal level to shield Bayer from civil liability.
Last year, state legislatures in Florida, Idaho, Iowa, and Missouri introduced bills that would make pesticide manufacturers immune to failure-to-warn lawsuits if their product labels match EPA assessments. And House Republicans introduced similar language in the discussion draft of the 2024 Farm Bill.
Though all the bills failed, allies of the chemical industry are expected to redouble their efforts this year. Advocates expect at least 21 states to introduce pesticide immunity legislation in 2025. The Florida Senate already has.
Bayer itself bankrolled the push, spending nearly $8.5 million to lobby the federal government in 2024, including to advocate for the “uniformity of pesticide labeling” under FIFRA.
FIFRA already prohibits the sale of “misbranded” pesticides, which includes requiring state health warnings to conform with EPA-approved labels.
“We are very pleased to see the EPA and several state Attorneys General take this step to reinforce that any state labeling requirements inconsistent with EPA’s own findings and conclusions regarding human health, such as a pesticide’s likelihood to cause cancer, constitute misbranding,” Bayer said in a statement to The Intercept. “It reinforces the urgent need for a solution to this issue created by the litigation industry.”
The raft of litigation over Roundup, however, has not always ended badly for Bayer. Federal appeals courts disagree on whether the FIFRA misbranding statute trumps state laws that may require manufacturers to go farther in adequately warning consumers about their products.
The 9th and 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled in plaintiffs’ favor in recent years, finding that failure-to-warn claims against Bayer in state courts are consistent with FIFRA’s intent; the 3rd Circuit, meanwhile, found the opposite. The split could set the stage for a Supreme Court battle.
The EPA rule change proposed in the states’ petition aims to remedy the circuit split by explicitly classifying labels as “misbranded” if they include health warnings that exceed the EPA’s risk assessment.
The agency’s position on glyphosate has been mired in controversy for decades. In 1991, the EPA mysteriously changed its classification from “suggestive evidence” of glyphosate’s carcinogenic potential to “no evidence.”
Since then, documents released in Roundup litigation have shown Monsanto cozying up to EPA regulators, ghostwriting scientific papers on glyphosate’s safety, and actively working to discredit journalists and WHO.
In 2015 — the same year the international body’s cancer bureau classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen — The Intercept reported that the EPA had overwhelmingly used Monsanto’s own research to conclude that glyphosate was not an endocrine disruptor.
In 2016, an internal EPA analysis noted an association between glyphosate exposure and an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in four epidemiological studies, The Intercept reported. The EPA analysis was never made public. Instead, the agency drew from industry-backed studies in 2016 to conclude that glyphosate was “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”
“The industry itself generates and pays for much of this data, so that is very different of course than peer-reviewed, hypothesis-based, independent science,” said Hartl, of the Center for Biological Diversity. “That creates an inherent tension and conflict of interest.”
“EPA’s long-standing practice is to seek input from a variety of stakeholders and use the best available science,” said Vaseliou, the EPA public affairs official. “EPA evaluates information from all kinds of sources — pesticide companies, other governments, academia, and the published scientific literature.”
In 2020, during the periodic pesticide review process mandated by FIFRA, the EPA issued an interim decision to reregister glyphosate with a risk assessment that did not identify “any human health risks of concern.” But in June 2022, in a separate case from the FIFRA ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the EPA’s assessment, noting the decision had been made without following the agency’s own cancer guidelines, and ordered the EPA to reevaluate its findings.
The new analysis is still forthcoming.
“In accordance with the court’s decision related to human health, EPA is currently updating its evaluation of the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate to better explain its findings and include the current relevant scientific information,” said Vaseliou. “EPA’s underlying scientific findings regarding glyphosate, including its finding that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, remain the same.”
How the EPA decides to proceed with the glyphosate petition will in many ways be a canary in the coal mine for this administration’s approach to chemical regulation.
While Trump’s first term was marked by severe deference to industry, his recent rhetoric has promoted Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, agenda.
In a February executive order, the president pledged to eliminate “undue industry influence” and “establish a framework for transparency and ethics review in industry-funded projects” — the same reforms that advocates have long said would strengthen the EPA’s glyphosate review.
Kennedy is a longtime critic of the pesticide industry; in an October YouTube video, he railed against the country’s agriculture policy for “tilting the playing field in favor of more chemicals, more herbicides, more insecticides” and promised to “ban the worst agricultural chemicals that are already prohibited in other countries.” As a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading nonprofit environmental law group, he took Monsanto to task, helping secure a multimillion-dollar settlement in a Roundup cancer lawsuit in 2018.
There are indications, of course, that the MAHA promise is a smokescreen.
In 2017, Trump’s EPA rejected a proposed ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to increased cancer risk. He appointed former American Chemistry Council executive Nancy Beck to oversee toxic chemical regulation. Beck is once again slated to take a senior EPA position; Lynn Dekleva, another ACC lobbyist who fought the EPA’s efforts to regulate formaldehyde, will now run the agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.
Vaseliou said, “Your questions regarding Dr. Beck and Dr. Dekleva are insulting and unfounded. This is yet another question based on false accusations that left propaganda also known as media take as gospel. President Trump made a fantastic choice in selecting Dr. Beck and Dr. Dekleva to work at EPA.”
On March 12, Zeldin, Trump’s EPA chief, announced the agency would begin rolling back 31 environmental regulations — “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” he said — including rules aimed at preventing disasters at hazardous chemical facilities and restricting the industrial pollution of mercury.
“It strikes me that there’s a very significant tension between what the president has promised relating to the overuse of pesticides in this country versus the other elements of his own administration that reflexively do what industry wants no matter what,” said Hartl. “He’s going to have to decide who he’s going to let down: whether it’s his own supporters that believe in his MAHA agenda or his industry benefactors.”
The post Trump EPA’s Next Move: Making It Harder to Sue for Getting Cancer from Roundup appeared first on The Intercept.
This post was originally published on The Intercept.
Image by Nina Zeynep Güle.
“We need clean air, not another billionaire!”
The words slip naturally from my lips, repeated by the crowd outside the Tesla showroom in Manhattan. It’s a go-to chant for Planet Over Profit, the climate justice group I organize with. We want clean air, not wealth inequality, and the two are incompatible.
The action we co-organized on March 8 – in which 6 were arrested for chanting inside the store while over 300 rallied outside – is part of the national #TeslaTakedown campaign, aiming to disrupt Elon Musk’s profits while he guts the federal government in his unelected role leading the new Department of Government Efficiency.
Our action quickly went viral across social media platforms and particularly on X, where dozens of right-wing accounts had a field day with the fact that environmental groups were protesting an electric vehicle company. Many of these comments reaffirmed Musk’s own proclamation that he is doing “more for the environment than any single human on Earth.”
Scrolling through these comments, I was reminded of my family’s own history with Tesla. My father was one of the first thousand people to buy a Model S in the “signature red” exclusive to early buyers. I remember my parents bringing my three siblings and me to a test drive: my mother gasped when my father slammed the gas – no, pedal – and the car shot from 0 to 60 in less than two seconds. The interior was sleek and modern. It was electric.
Like my own family, many wealthy American liberals jumped at the opportunity to buy Teslas and become visible proponents of the clean energy transition. Musk was a darling in Big Tech – after selling PayPal in 2002, he didn’t sit back and enjoy his profits. He kept going, determined to innovate, boasting about his 120-hour work weeks. He seemed like a billionaire who truly cared, who was going to lead us into a green future.
And then, slowly but surely, the great Musk went “crazy,” as so many bumper stickers on Teslas now claim. His biographers debate whether it was stress, mental illness, or rampant drug use driving him mad. Nevertheless, when Musk cozied up to Trump’s side, he was clearly no longer the generous billionaire who would save the planet.
“It was capitalism after all,” Kara Swisher wrote in a March 9 essay for The Atlantic, adapted from her epilogue in Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. She says that Musk and other tech leaders “revealed themselves” in their support of Trump during the 2024 presidential election to want to “reign like kings not just over tech, but over everything everywhere, and all at once.”
But did Musk really “reveal” himself when he came out in support of Trump? The billionaire has behaved like a billionaire for decades: indulging in an environmentally disastrous lifestyle, skirting the law, and clawing for more power. Musk may have been the face of the first electric vehicle company, but he’s done so for profit and power – not our planet.
Musk did not start Tesla; he seized it with money and strong-arm tactics. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning started Tesla in 2003, and invented the technology behind it – they just needed money. Musk was a risk-taking investor who caught their interest, and subsequently became Tesla’s chairman. But Musk quickly stacked the board with people who shared his belief that innovation should take priority over labor and environmental regulations. In 2007, they voted CEO Eberhard out, who said his ousting felt like “a brick to the side of my head.”
Over the years, Tesla has been fined for violating dozens of labor and environmental regulations, according to a comprehensive report from the Revolving Door Project. From 2014-2018, Tesla accumulated ten times more OSHA violations than its top ten competitors combined, and infamously forced factory employees to return to work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tesla has settled many lawsuits from employees for severe racial harassment, and Musk is an outspoken critic of workplace unionization.
For a supposedly green company, Tesla’s environmental record is abysmal. Tesla ranks fifth among companies producing the most toxic air pollution nationally. The company’s factory in Fremont, CA, was fined in 2019 for multiple hazardous waste violations and air pollution, and the Austin, TX factory is under criminal investigation for dumping toxic chemicals into the city’s sewers and the nearby Colorado River. Furthermore, the rare minerals required for electric vehicle batteries, including cobalt and lithium, are tied to severe environmental and human rights violations globally.
Musk was never going to save the planet – and neither will any other billionaire. While Musk encourages Americans to buy Teslas, he jets around the world on a private plane. He has claimed climate change alarm is “exaggerated.” He partnered with a coal mining billionaire to elect Trump, and is now working with the latter to gut federal environmental regulations.
Like other billionaires, Musk’s fortune has come at the expense of everyday people, from abusing his employees to calling his opponents criminals. His billions could fund public transportation, housing, healthcare, and education. Instead, he’s taking a chainsaw to all of the government departments which provide those essential services.
That’s why environmentalists are protesting at Tesla – and will continue to do so.
The post Take Telsa Down: A Billionaire Was Never Going to Stop Climate Change appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
The recent blaze that destroyed much of Altadena, California was an urban fire ignited by wind-driven embers. Photo by George Wuerthner
A new report from Headwaters Economics concludes that 1,100 communities scattered across the country are vulnerable to urban wildfires, such as the recent Altadena and Pacific Palisades blazes in California.
While the origins of these blazes were on public lands, wind-tossed embers soon ignited homes, setting up an uncontrollable chain reaction in which one burning home ignited adjacent homes, which overwhelmed firefighting capabilities.
While most people tend to believe wildfire risk is greatest in the West, the new analysis concluded that 52% of the communities vulnerable to such blazes are outside the West, with Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama having some of the highest risk of urban blazes.
One interesting statistic that calls into question current Forest Service policies of extensive logging as a measure to protect communities is that many of the most destructive wildfires have occurred in non-forested areas with shrubs or grasslands. The Marshall Fire in Colorado, the Maui Fire in Hawaii, the Smokehouse Fire in Texas, and many of the recent blazes in California were all ignited in non-forested vegetation.
A recent analysis found that the annual burned area was higher on non-forest lands than on forest lands for 14 out of the past 21 years across the conterminous U.S. The total burned area in non-forests was 18,412,462 ha, and for forest lands, it was 15,536,655 ha.
Florida, in particular, is very at risk due to frequent droughts and some of the highest lightning strikes in the country.
Of course, the continued construction of homes in areas with high fire risk is a contributing factor to urban wildfire risk.
You can look up individual community risk here.
As fire researcher Jack Cohen has repeatedly said, “Uncontrollable extreme wildfires are inevitable. ” Five years ago, he wrote, “However, by reducing home ignition potential … we can create ignition-resistant homes and communities.”
The threat of urban wildfire again emphasizes the importance of home hardening. Working from the home outward, treating the area immediately around the house can significantly reduce the vulnerability to wildfire.
Given that climate warming is propelling the increase in wildfires, with 2024 the warmest in recent history, we must begin to rethink home construction. Replacing wood with steel, brick, rock, cement and other non-flammable materials can also reduce home flammability.
Builder Mike Roddy has written to me numerous times advocating for a transition to non-flammable materials. He writes:“ I’m a retired builder specializing in light gauge steel framing. “In addition to metal, we avoid flammable materials, such as lumber, flammable insulation, wood soffits, and plywood.” Roddy says wood framing is illegal in many parts of Europe.
The conclusions are clear: unless we make significant changes in our home construction, address climate warming, and reduce building structures in fire-prone landscapes, we will inevitably see more urban fire disasters like Altadena and Pacific Palisades. The sad part of all this is that it doesn’t have to be this way if communities work to expedite fire-safe practices.
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Pinyon Jay. Public domain.
BLM leaders never had the desire or will to do what it takes to preserve Sage-grouse populations. Sage-grouse plans make major concessions to industries, and especially to the great destroyer of sagebrush habitat across the West, the public lands livestock industry. They chickened out rather than risk the buzzsaw of cattlemen resistance and western politician anger that comes with any effort to rein in livestock impacts on public lands.
As Sage-grouse ESA listing was coming to a head in the 2010s, BLM and the Forest Service went into overdrive scapegoating Pinyon Juniper (PJ) forests as a major cause of Sage-grouse declines. Their Forever War on PJ was cranked up to overdrive, to make it appear like something significant was being done. Ranchers predictably ranted about the onerous burden of the toothless grazing elements of the Sage-grouse plans, but cheered forest destruction. Politician press releases bragged about funding doled out to ostensibly save the bird, much of which captured agencies used to kill trees, often with great violence. Nonstop scheming to eliminate PJ forests continues up to the present.
Land grant school range departments, BLM staff and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) already had a handy tree hate vocabulary ready to use – trees are encroaching, invading, water-sucking weeds, hazardous fuels, undesirable, uncharacteristic. TNC has been deeply involved in the public land treatment-industrial complex, receiving countless lucrative federal contracts. BLM brandished concocted forest “Phase” categories, contracted TNC reports and modeling based on ridiculously short fire return intervals. BLM slathered NEPA documents with fire hysteria to justify deforestation, ignored forest ecology and recovery in historic forested land areas in the aftermath of White settler colonization clearing, the 1800s mining boom fueled by wood, uncontrolled stockmen burning, and decades of past agency forest eradication projects plainly stated to be done for cattle forage. BLM ignored that PJ forests are less likely to burn than sage and grass, so the PJ projects increase fire risk.
Plunging Pinyon Jay Populations
Meanwhile, Pinyon Jays have been declining at breakneck speed, faster than Sage-grouse. They’re down by 85% in the past 50 years and predicted to continue crashing. Defenders of Wildlife petitioned the Pinyon Jay for ESA listing in 2022. In response, USFWS issued a positive 90-day finding determining that the birds may warrant ESA listing, but then acted to kick the can down the road.
The great tragedy of sacrificing biodiverse PJ forests under claims of saving Sage-grouse is the foreseeable extinction of the Pinyon Jay, coupled with declines in other forest avifauna – Black-throated Gray Warbler, Juniper Titmouse, Gray Vireo, Ferruginous Hawk, Clark’s Nutcracker (already reeling from whitebark pine loss), and cavity nesters like Mountain Bluebird and Ash-throated Flycatcher. The magical rolling and swirling flocks and exuberant calls of Pinyon Jays may vanish – and along with them, the pinyon pine tree that relies on animal seed dispersers and especially Pinyon Jay seed caching.
I encourage anyone, including Musk’s Dogies, to figure out how much taxpayers have spent on these Pinyon Jay extinction projects conducted by the BLM, Forest Service, NRCS and state agencies in the past 20 years, including through contracting intermediaries like Pheasants Forever and through funding TNC and others to churn out forest-dooming vegetation models, reports, propaganda and now even burning crews. In 2023, the Forest Service obligated $45 million to TNC to push fire. This seems similar to USAID grants given to NGOs operating in foreign countries to push the US government’s agenda, which has stirred up a lot of recent controversy. National Forests across the Intermountain region (from the Dixie to the Caribou-Targhee) have just completed huge acreage generalized Fire EAs, like the Manti-La Sal Forest burning project challenged by Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Native Ecosystems Council, Council on Fish and Wildlife and WildLands Defense. The Forest Service plans to convert Pinyon Jay habitat and other forest types to ashes and wood chips year-round. These EAs treat PJ forest, where present, as disposable weeds – both inside and outside current Sage-grouse range.
In 2023, BLM ladled out $161 million of IRA funds for restoration landscapes, and portions of this funding are likely to be used to target PJ. BLM recently gave $24 million in IRA funds to Utah’s Watershed Restoration Initiative, a program that’s been laying waste to Pinyon Jay habitat for almost 20 years, converting biodiverse forests to forage seedings, often while claiming to save Sage-grouse. The Utah Initiative has funded many TNC reports and mapping projects used by agencies to destroy both forests and sagebrush. Their Utah Dugout Ranch cattle grazing helps gain favor with cattle ranching feel-good stories. Web searches will turn up many more recent federal allocations, with TNC often getting a piece of the action.
Despite clear evidence of past forest cover, project NEPA documents claim landscapes occupied by PJ should be nearly all sagebrush (never dense though, but well-behaved sparse shrubs flush with forage grass). Pinyon Jays use all “Phases” of the forest, and especially those that agencies target most. Many major authorized projects aren’t yet completed. Hundreds of millions of dollars have flowed to the treatment-industrial complex for PJ killing. We should be swimming in Sage-grouse, right? Despite major regional deforestation, that’s not the case.
These Pinyon Jay extinction projects are continuing seamlessly between administrations. New Trump 2.0 projects include Ely BLM’s Illipah Watershed White Pine Range project. This uses SNPLMA “conservation” funds from disposal sale of public land for Las Vegas sprawl for PJ killing and sprucing up decrepit cattle fences and water developments.
Photos of a previous Illipah Pinyon Jay extinction project.
Last month, Cedar City BLM released a proposed 860 square mile Indian Peak project in the Wah Wah and Needles Ranges and Pine and Hamlin Valleys on the Nevada border, where both Pinyon Jay and Sage-grouse habitats have already been ravaged by past BLM and Utah Watershed Initiative projects. The Indian Peak project incorporates more TNC voodoo vegetation modeling, as BLM states
“To better understand current ecological conditions, forecast future trends, and develop conservation strategies, BLM partnered with the Nature Conservancy to conduct a landscape-scale ecological assessment”.
BLM refused to release the TNC Indian Peak reports when I requested them during scoping, but I found them elsewhere, and they’re full of masticating, bulldozer chaining, chainsawing, burning and spraying including use of Tebuthiuron to kill sage and trees.
Nevada BLM Director Jon Raby is Trump’s acting BLM head until oil lobbyist Kathleen Sgamma gets confirmed. He was a Trump 1.0 appointee kept on by Tracy Stone-Manning. Raby’s overseen the Mojave solar development ecocide, nonstop mutilation of Nevada PJ forests, and pushed through abusive “targeted grazing” and livestock facility sprawl while doing nothing to effectively deal with grazing degradation.
O’NEIL PROJECT CASE EXAMPLE
It’s hard to keep track of all the threats to Nevada wild lands right now. Wells BLM’s O’Neil project was scoped in 2016 based on a Sally Jewell-era FIAT forest and sage radical landscape manipulation scheme. It languished during Trump 1.0, but the Biden BLM brought it back from the dead. Stretching over 2.4 million acres in Elko County, it encompasses much of northeastern Nevada – Jackpot south to Wells, east to Montello and west to the Jarbidge Forest. BLM targets “undesirable vegetation components” in 12 restoration units of 150 square miles and 15 conifer units with 136 square miles of deforestation. Cooling, carbon sequestering PJ forests that take several hundred years to develop are undesirable in BLM’s cattle-centered eyes, fit only to be masticated, chained, cut down and burned up. In addition, there are to be 400+ miles of fuel breaks with sage mowed to 2-inch height. The resulting hot, dry, windy, deforested, denuded and constantly grazed land will become cheatgrass expansion zones. But never fear – BLM plans to spray the destroyed PJ sites, fuel breaks, restoration zones, and other unknown areas across 2.4 million acres with herbicide mixtures, and specifically authorizes use of all the weed- killers in the agency arsenal. BLM has been ramping up toxics use in recent years, despite lack of effectiveness in grazed lands. The restoration part of the project is to try to get sage to grow in cheatgrass-infested areas, while ignoring that chronic livestock disturbance causes cheatgrass.
BLM tries to soften public perception of its attack on forest avifauna by saying that heavy equipment masticators, D-9 bulldozer chaining, chainsaws, and pile burns will “feather” the forest. This feathering, just like the agency’s long-time forest butchery phrase “creating a mosaic”, means new habitat loss and fragmentation for the birds. BLM says it will leave some older trees, ignoring that sap from cut and wounded pinyon attracts beetles that infest remaining patches. One day soon there won’t be any trees left.
Nevada BLM Plans Pinyon Jay Extinction Projects as Offsets in Development-Threatened Landscape
The O’Neil project EA analysis states: “The conifer reduction and herbicide treatments … would help offset losses or degradation of sagebrush-steppe habitat” and refers to a table with acres of foreseeable mining, right-of-way, land exchange and other unidentified new development acres listed. This sure seems to be saying that Pinyon Jay habitat is to be feathered and wiped out so BLM can pretend to mitigate for authorizing new developments in Sage-grouse habitat.
Surge Battery Metals and other Lithium Boomers
A month after signing the O’Neil decision in late 2024, BLM released the Surge Battery Metals Nevada North lithium exploration draft EA, in the midst of the O’Neil project area. Surge plans 250 acres of disturbance across 12 square miles. Mining disturbance is defined as bulldozed or smashed vegetation acres, not the activity’s full footprint. There are no specific bulldozed road and drill pad sites identified, no bore hole numbers and depth information, and no disclosure of proximity to springs and drainages provided for nearly all the exploration work. Details will be decided after drilling begins. BLM calls this veiled drilling scheme a “Phased” approach, not to be confused with the agency’s PJ killing “Phase” terminology. Other lithium hopefuls, despite a current global price slump, include Grid Battery Metals, Peloton Minerals, Sienna Resources, and Red Mountain Mining. All have publicized staking lithium claims near the Surge site. This landscape was supposed to have been withdrawn from mineral entry under the 2015 BLM Sage-grouse plans, but that never happened.
BLM Surge lithium exploration EA cover photo.
Surge’s project lies east of the Granite Range by Texas Springs. It straddles the watershed divide between the Great Basin and the Interior Columbia where pre-dam Salmon once spawned in Nevada headwaters. O’Neil project fuel breaks run right by the exploration block, and it’s surrounded by several PJ killing zones. Surge’s sagebrush drilling damage is to be mitigated with a convoluted conservation credit system through the state Sagebrush Ecosystem Council (SEC):
“… a debit assessment using the Habitat Quantification Tool (HQT) to determine effects on GRSG [Sage-grouse] habitat …. Surge would purchase credits to offset the calculated debits ahead of any land disturbance”.
This credit system is an elaborate calculation scheme developed as part of the state’s Sage-grouse plan. That plan resulted from a process greatly influenced by gold mines and ranchers, with TNC often providing spun science. Many SEC projects are a mitigation façade and consist of typical government hand-outs to ranchers.
Last year, I asked Winnemucca BLM about the status of Lithium Americas Thacker Pass mine EIS Sage-grouse mitigation promises. BLM said it was out of their hands, go ask the SEC. I did, and was told:
“Thacker Pass offset 1/3 of their mitigation obligation by purchasing credits through one of our private credit projects in Washoe Valley [Estill Ranch], which is a project that conserves quality greater sage-grouse habitat and locks it away from development. I believe they are also working on meadow restoration and grazing improvements on this credit project. The remainder of Thacker Pass’ mitigation obligation is to be purchased by 2031.
Sage-grouse habitat loss at Thacker Pass is being mitigated, years after the gaping mine pit obliterated sagebrush in the McDermitt Caldera, with ranch projects 100 miles distant. You don’t have to be a biologist to see how worthless this is.
The O’Neil EA identified PJ eradication and herbicide spraying as offsets. I can only wonder if BLM resurrected the O’Neil project to provide sham mitigation opportunities if lithium mining, phosphate mining, and other pending development pan out. Pinyon Jay habitat destruction has been used by the SEC for mine mitigation in the past. SEC projects are done on private land, and the O’Neil EA oddly includes anticipated deforestation of 20,000 acres of private lands, primarily in the Winecup Ranch’s domain.
The Biden BLM Public Lands Rule opened up public lands West-wide for mining and energy mitigation leasing schemes that would help facilitate what was termed “thoughtful development”, stating:
“Restoration leases provide greater clarity for the BLM to work with appropriate partners to restore degraded lands. Mitigation leases will provide a clear and consistent mechanism for developers to offset their impacts …”.
Besides the scramble for lithium, O’Neil lands includes SWIP North, a new transmission line planned to tear through from Ely to Twin Falls. In addition, the Biden BLM Solar EIS 31-million acres industry land grab allocated a diagonal north-south swath through O’Neil from I-80 to the Idaho border for potential development. Potential geothermal development is lurking, too.
Grazing Degradation
Both the O’Neil and Surge analyses were silent on the background level of livestock damage to Sage-grouse habitat. The lithium exploration project lies within the quarter million-acre Salmon River allotment where BLM has stacked sheep grazing on top of cattle use, claiming sheep would eat larkspur that was killing cows on the depleted land. This worsened watershed impacts because sheep now trample and strip steep slopes. The poor conditions prompted a long-ago field trip by Bob Abbey, Nevada BLM Director at the time. I recall a caravan of agency staff and ranchers, with Range magazine writers along to spin the trip for the stockmen, lumbering through the Granite Range and peering into gullied Trout Creek. The upshot was BLM built more pipelines and Sage-grouse killing fences, and tweaked livestock rotations. This made little difference, other than expanding weeds and depleting springs gutted for pipelines.
Major O’Neil PJ projects are slated for the nearly million-acre Winecup-Gamble allotment complex, where grazing is dominated by billionaire Stan Kroenke’s Winecup Ranch herds, with over 50,000 AUMs permitted to his operation. Several years ago, BLM issued an “Outcome-based” grazing decision for Winecup. It was so outrageous that the Office of Hearings and Appeals stayed the decision after WildLands Defense appealed. They ruled that BLM’s analysis actively misled the public by claiming illusory grazing reductions. BLM said cattle and sheep were being reduced in alternatives, when in fact, lands were to be stocked well above the actual use AUM grazing levels that BLM had documented to cause land health violations in the first place. Besides building more pipelines, wells and fences harming Sage-grouse– the Winecup Ranch sought to add in goat grazing to gnaw down anything in sight.
Mother of All Land Exchanges
In 2023, Kroenke proposed a controversial land exchange to transfer the ownership of 84,000 acres of private land to obtain 230,000 acres of public lands. The Nevada Independent reported:
“Billionaire Stan Kroenke, owner of the Winecup Gamble Ranch, as well as the Denver Nuggets and Los Angeles Rams and estimated by Forbes to be worth $14.6 billion, is proposing a potential land transfer with the federal government that would consolidate a substantial chunk of the checkerboarded land in northeastern Nevada”.
The 2025 USA Today Land report lists Kroenke as the 4th largest landowner in the US, holding 1,762,000 private acres. He is reported to have married a Walton heiress, built a real estate empire (including strip malls anchored by Walmarts), and bought sports teams in the US and beyond. Arsenal is part of his empire. News of the Kroenke land exchange proposal provoked public outrage. It’s now gone quiet. The uproar may have killed it, or it may surface again in modified form. Who knows what development schemes may be behind a swap of this magnitude.
Billionaire public lands ranchers like Kroenke enjoy the privilege of taxpayer subsidized nearly free grazing on public lands – paying the public $1.35 a month per AUM to graze one cow or five sheep. BLM’s Winecup grazing EA analysis misled the public to benefit a billionaire’s welfare ranching operation. Now BLM has authorized the O’Neil project, a major deforestation subsidy for Winecup, that will replace native forests with seeded grass and shrubs that the billionaire’s livestock can eat.
I was up in the Toano Range in 2020, just east of the O’Neil area, looking south into the Pequops Range while on a separate BLM PJ killing proposal field trip, and heard booms. That’s not wildfire smoke – it’s Nevada Gold Mines (Barrick and Newmont combo) dynamiting PJ forest and sage to smithereens for their Long Canyon gold mine. That mine has now shut down. There’s no water available in the aquifer without causing grave harm to the region’s springs. With lax BLM and state oversight, and Nevada’s anti-environmental politicians serving as lackeys of foreign mines embracing loss of public lands, slipshod analysis of major projects is routine.
To the BLM, destroying native forests and wiping out a wonderful caching corvid is seen as a positive offset. I doubt that the Trump Interior Department will bother much with offset flimflam. It’s the kind of false absolution for environmental sins that the Obama and Biden Interior gang loved. The Trumpers, busy breaking things, are unlikely to make any excuses for environmental harm. Pinyon-Juniper ecosystem destruction is now baked into federal and state policies, and western land grant school dogma. This has been aided by conservation organizations bending science and constructing narratives to favor industry exploitation of public lands. These twisted policies are pushing both Pinyon Jay and Sage-grouse closer to extinction.
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Thousands of acres of rainforest is being cleared to produce palm oil, used in popular Nestlé and Mondelēz brands
West Papua’s Indigenous people have called for a boycott of KitKat, Smarties and Aero chocolate, Oreo biscuits and Ritz crackers, and the cosmetics brands Pantene and Herbal Essences, over alleged ecocide in their territory.
All are products that contain palm oil and are made, say the campaigners, by companies that source the ingredient directly from West Papua, which has been under Indonesian control since 1963 and where thousands of acres of rainforest are being cleared for agriculture.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Mt Hood Wilderness, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
In the final hours of the 118th Congress, the Senate took up and passed the EXPLORE Act, which former President Biden signed into law on January 6. Some of our members reached out, confused after seeing other conservation nonprofits urging support for this bill, even as Wilderness Watch opposed it. News articles covering the EXPLORE Act suggested it could be a blueprint for conservation moving forward. But the EXPLORE Act has stirred fundamental questions about conservation, specifically, whether public lands like Wilderness should be protected for their own intrinsic value, or if their value lies solely in what we can extract from them.
As Howard Zahniser, author of the Wilderness Act, said, “The purpose of the Wilderness Act is to preserve the wilderness character of the areas to be included in the wilderness system, not to establish any particular use.” Wilderness is a priceless place to recreate—it provides us solitude, a chance for reflection, and an opportunity to experience a world we don’t manipulate and control. But, as John Muir once said, “Nothing dollarable is safe.” This includes Wilderness.
Consumptive activities include mining, logging, grazing, drilling, and, yes, recreating. While logging litters stumps and slash piles across clearcuts, and mining strips away soil, recreation consumes the space and security of plants and animals. Recreation can destroy habitat, and displace or habituate wildlife. Human presence can drive wildlife to ecologically inferior habitats where food may be in short supply and predator risk is higher. It can also physiologically stress animals, making them more susceptible to disease. High-use and concentrated recreation areas, such as climbing spots, can decrease the nesting success of birds. To top it off, recreation contributes to the introduction and spread of invasive species. These pressures influence whether individual animals produce offspring, affecting broader population levels. For these reasons, we must consider limits and restraint on our recreation impacts.
Some conservation groups supported the EXPLORE Act because of provisions aimed at expanding access to public lands, especially for broader socioeconomic groups. While that’s a worthy goal, the bill gives the National Park Service discretion to install cell towers in backcountry throughout the National Park system, including within designated, potential, recommended, or eligible Wilderness. The EXPLORE Act also increases mechanized and motorized access on public lands; upgrades cabins, campgrounds, and resorts; loosens restrictions on commercial filming; and reduces the public’s ability to review outfitter impacts to wild places on all public lands, including Wilderness.
Alarmingly, the EXPLORE Act makes the first ever exception for a nonconforming recreation activity in Wilderness by allowing climbers to hammer fixed anchors into rock faces. Wilderness cliffs of gneiss and quartzite, limestone and slate, once untarnished by evidence of recreation, can now bear permanent proof of human presence. Moreover, the installation of permanent, fixed anchors will inevitably draw more climbers to what were once quiet wilderness cliffs.
Politicians driving the EXPLORE Act didn’t attempt to veil its purpose. Bringing the bill to the floor for a vote, Senator Joe Manchin—who caucused with the Democrats—said, “We have made a focus of supporting our public lands and the outdoor recreation economy, which is the fastest growing element of our economy in every state.” His Republican colleague, Senator John Barasso, said, “It is a first-of-its-kind recreation package, and it will boost our nation’s outdoor economy…Outdoor recreation added over $1 trillion to our national economy in 2023—$1.2 trillion. That is 2.3 percent of our entire gross domestic product…This is a big deal.”
Yes, this is a big deal, but one where humans aren’t paying the price. Dwindling populations of flora and fauna foot the bill through increasing habitat destruction and biodiversity loss. And contrary to Senator Barasso’s claims, the EXPLORE Act is not “a first-of-its-kind recreation package.” It’s only the latest in a long line of bipartisan legislation that has conflated recreation with conservation—slowly chipping away at protections for the wild. Before the EXPLORE Act, it was the 2023 Outdoor Recreation Act. Before that was the 2019 John Dingell Act. Maybe next year we’ll be fighting the Wealth and Income Landscape Development Act—the WILD Act—because America’s leaders can’t resist a quippy acronym when weakening environmental protections for profit.
By design, the EXPLORE Act is human-centered and extractive—what can nature do for us? But anthropocentric utility was never the reason for protecting Wilderness. This reality is at the core of why Wilderness Watch and our members—who sent thousands of messages to Congress—so strongly opposed the bill. Conflating recreation with conservation causes untold harm to the wild. Perhaps this conflation is based on the myth that recreationists are, by default, conservationists—though there is little evidence linking these qualities, and emerging research suggests the opposite. Anecdotally, we’ve just observed a vocal subset of the climbing community lobby for recreation over preserving Wilderness. More so than individuals, however, capitalism fuels this conflation.
In an economic system where industry is controlled by private ownership, where self-interests and me-firsts feature prominently, and where gains are measured in dollars, it’s not surprising that the common value assigned to public lands extends only so far as who can profit from them. The bipartisan introduction the EXPLORE Act received on the Senate floor wasn’t rooted in equity—it was rooted in money that the recreation industry can generate if turned loose on public lands. Even if recreationists are the foot soldiers, at the end of the day, those who provide goods and services will profit the most from the EXPLORE Act. It’s certainly not groups of veterans or disadvantaged youth who profit financially from constructing cell phone towers, modernizing cabins, or selling bikes, climbing hardware, and ATVs.
Whale Creek, Clackamas Wilderness, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
With less than 3 percent of the Lower 48 designated as Wilderness, does capitalism not consume enough space already? If you drive through the endless agricultural development of the Midwest—essentially clearcuts of the native prairie—you become acutely aware of how much “progress” has shaped and terraformed our corner of the planet. In the urban sprawl of American cities and their suburbs, you have to wonder if there is any space we don’t feel entitled to, despite the history of overconsumption and ecological destruction that feeds civilization. Or, perhaps we’re suffering from a collective cultural amnesia—we’ve forgotten that these places used to be wild and can’t imagine what they once were like.
Upon witnessing how rapidly industrialization was chewing through the wild over a half-century ago, a few visionary women and men—with the help of an overwhelming majority of Congress—laid the groundwork for a more ecologically ethical future. In the Wilderness Act, they developed a new idea to counter the threat of expanding settlement and growing mechanization. That new idea was Wilderness, and Wilderness offered something invaluable in the face of unprecedented and unrelenting development—it offered domains of respite for the natural world.
Conflating recreation with conservation completely fails to preserve Wilderness. A mountain goat and her kids crossing the steep terrain of the Northern Rockies, as goats have done for eight million years, will never generate profit like the climbing industry. The wilderness idea means protecting the intrinsic value of Wilderness and all of the life it safeguards, regardless of utility to humans or profit capacity. While recreation was always meant to be a part of Wilderness, elevating it to an all-consuming priority will trammel the natural world. Only when we step back and allow space for the more-than-human will we see the wilderness idea fully realized.
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The Pallisades. Photo: Michael Hoyt,
Thanks to our threat to sue the Forest Service over using a categorical exclusion to avoid analyzing impacts on bull trout, grizzly bears, and lynx, a massive deforestation project in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley has been halted.
The Forest Service’s Eastside Project authorized 15,000-45,000 acres of tree cutting and burning per year for 20 years and the 500,000-acre project covers almost the entire east side of the Bitterroot National Forest from Stevensville to over 50 miles south in the Sapphire Mountains.
The Forest Service illegally authorized this massive project through the use of a categorical exclusion, which was intended for projects that would have no impact on the environment such as painting an outhouse or building a shed at a Ranger station.
But now the project has been halted since the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Center for Biological Diversity, Fiends of the Bitterroot and other conservation groups sent the government a 60-day Notice of Intent to Sue for violating the Endangered Species Act. We notified the Forest Service that they failed comply with the Endangered Species act in a number of ways including failing consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the project’s effect on bull trout and grizzly bears — both of which are listed as threatened species — in violation of the Endangered Species Act.
Congress included the 60-day notice requirement in the citizens’ enforcement provision of the Endangered Species Act specifically to give the government that much time to correct their illegal activity before facing a lawsuit.
Normally the Forest Service responds to our 60-day notices with a letter telling us to go jump in a lake. Then we sue the agency — and have won in court over 80 percent of the time. But this time, undoubtedly realizing they were fighting a losing battle, the Forest Service agreed to halt actions to implement the tree cutting and burning until they followed the law.
It would be great to think the Forest Service has all of a sudden became a law-abiding agency, but unfortunately, they are still violating other laws with this project, including by authorizing half a million acres of tree cutting and burning without environmental review.
Despite the vast landscape the project will impact, the Forest Service did not disclose where the tree cutting and burning will occur. That’s a clear violation of the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the federal government — and anyone who does a project using federal money — to notify the public of what they plan to do, where they plan to do it, and how it will affect the environment.
In the case of the Eastside project, the Forest Service claims that the precise location, timing, and scope of the treatments will be decided immediately prior to implementation, but without further analysis or public input which is a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.
The law also requires the Forest Service to take a “hard look” at potential impacts to wildlife, including wolverines which are particularly important since scientists have discovered a lactating female wolverine in the project area, and there have been multiple instances of confirmed grizzly bear presence in the Sapphire Mountains over the past year. Grizzly bears, lynx, wolverines, bull trout and bull trout critical habitat are all protected under the Endangered Species Act.
American citizens are required to follow the law every single day. It is time for the Forest Service to start following the law and quit destroying habitat for threatened and endangered species.
During the last Trump administration, our small, gritty organization, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, sued 18 times to protect our planet and we won 16 times.
Please help the Alliance for the Wild Rockies fight to make the Trump Administration’s Forest Service follow the law and help Counterpunch spread the word.
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