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When Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida three weeks ago, Jason Madison was alone at his place, which doubled as a shrimp storefront in Keaton Beach. As the wind began to roar and the bay started to roil, Madison decided to flee. It was the right call. When he returned home the next morning, he found that the nearly 20-foot storm surge had torn it apart. Dead fish and broken furniture littered the landscape. Most everything in the building was lost, taking with it a cornerstone of his livelihood.
“I had five tanks under there where I stored shrimp, because we sell everything alive, but all that’s all gone now,” said Madison, a commercial bait and shrimp farmer for the last 23 years. He paused to take in the strewn debris. “Well, the pieces are around.” Anything Helene left behind is a waterlogged shell of what used to be. He doesn’t know how, or even if, he’ll rebuild.
Stories like this are playing out all through the Southeast. The storm battered six states, causing billions of dollars in losses to crops, livestock, and aquaculture. Just 13 days later, Milton barreled across Florida, leaving millions without power and hampering ports, feed facilities, and fertilizer plants along the state’s west coast.
Preliminary estimates suggest Helene, one of the nation’s deadliest and costliest hurricanes since Katrina in 2005, upended hundreds of thousands of businesses throughout the Southeast and devastated a wide swath of the region’s agricultural operations. Milton’s impact was more limited, but the two calamities are expected to reduce feed and fertilizer supplies and increase production costs, which could drive up prices for things like chicken and fruit in the months and years to come.
The compounding effect of the two storms will create “a direct impact on agricultural production,” said Seungki Lee, an agricultural economist at Ohio State University.
When a farm, an orchard, a ranch, or any other agricultural operation is damaged in a disaster, it often leads to a drop in production, or even brings it to a screeching halt. That slowdown inevitably ripples through the companies that sell things like seeds and fertilizer and equipment. Even those growers and producers who manage to keep going — or weren’t directly impacted at all — might find that damage to roads and other critical infrastructure hampers the ability to bring their goods to market.
Early reports indicate this is already happening. Downed trees, flooded roads, and congested highways have disrupted key transport routes throughout the Southeast, while ports across the region suspended operations because of the storms, compounding a slowdown that followed a dockworker strike along the Gulf and East Coast.
Helene dismantled farming operations that serve as linchpins for the nation’s food supply chain. Cataclysmic winds destroyed hundreds of poultry houses across Georgia and North Carolina, which account for more than 25 percent of the machinery used to produce most of the country’s chicken meat. An analysis by the American Farm Bureau Federation found that the region hit by Helene produced some $6.3 billion in poultry products in 2022, with over 80 percent of it coming from the most severely impacted parts of both states. In Florida, the storm flattened roughly one in seven broiler houses, which the Farm Bureau noted, compounding losses throughout the region that “will not only reduce the immediate supply of poultry but also hinder local production capacity for months or even years.”
The storm uprooted groves, vegetable fields, and row crops throughout the region. Georgia produces more than a third of the nation’s pecans, and some growers have lost all of their trees. Farmers in Florida, one of the nation’s leading producers of oranges, bell peppers, sugar, and orchids, also have reported steep production losses, facing an uncertain future. The rain and floods unleashed by Helene hobbled livestock operations in every affected state, with the situation in western North Carolina so dire that local agricultural officials are crowdfunding feed and other supplies to help ranchers who lost their hay to rising water. Those working the sea were impacted as well; clam farmers along the Gulf Coast are grappling with the losses they incurred when Helene’s storm surge ravaged their stocks.
All told, the counties affected by Helene produce about $14.8 billion in crops and livestock each year, with Georgia and Florida accounting for more than half of that. If even one-third of that output has been lost to the two hurricanes, the loss could reach nearly $5 billion, according to the Farm Bureau.
Preliminary estimates from the Department of Agriculture suggest the one-two punch may incur more than $7 billion in crop insurance payouts. On October 15, the USDA reported allocating $233 million in payments to producers so far.
As bad as it is, it could have been worse both for consumers and for farmers nationwide. Florida is home to the highest concentration of fertilizer manufacturing plants in the nation. Twenty-two of the state’s 25 phosphate waste piles, several owned by industry powerhouse Mosaic, were in Milton’s path. The company, which did not respond to a request for comment, shuttered operations ahead of the storm, and has since announced it sustained “limited damage” to its plants and warehouses. (But the Tampa Bay Times reported that one facility was grappling with water intrusion following Helene and was inundated during Milton, likely sending water polluted with phosphate waste flowing into Tampa Bay.) The storm also halted operations for several days at Port Tampa Bay, which handles around a quarter of the country’s fertilizer exports.
Production impacts from both hurricanes may be felt most acutely by the Sunshine State’s struggling citrus industry, which has long been embattled by diseases and destructive hurricanes. Any additional losses could further inflate costs for goods like orange juice, which reached record highs this year, according to Lee, the agricultural economist. “In the face of hurricane shocks, agricultural production in southern states like Florida will take it on the chin,” he said.
But teasing out the effect of a single storm on consumer prices is not only exceedingly difficult, it requires many years of research, Lee warned. Although all signs indicate that Hurricane Ian was partly responsible for the record food prices that followed that storm in 2022, the strain the hurricane placed on costs compounded other factors, including global conflict, droughts in breadbasket regions and the bird flu epidemic that decimated the poultry sector.
Even so, there’s still a chance that ongoing disruptions to ports and trucking routes could cause “the entire food supply chain to experience additional strain due to rising prices” associated with moving those goods, said Lee. If that turns out to be the case, “eventually, when you go to the supermarket, you will end up finding more expensive commodities, by and large.”
One of the greatest unknowns remains the question of how many storm-weary operations will simply call it quits. Industrial-scale businesses will surely rebound, but the rapid succession of ruinous hurricanes may well discourage family farms and small producers from rebuilding, abandoning their livelihoods for less vulnerable ventures.
“It’s what we call a compound disaster. You’re still dealing with the effects of one particular storm while another storm is hitting,” said economist Christa Court. She directs the University of Florida’s Economic Impact Analysis program, which specializes in rapid assessments of agricultural losses after disasters. “We did see after Hurricane Idalia that there were operations that just decided to get out of the business and do something else because they were impacted so severely.”
Madison isn’t sure what’s next for his shrimp operation. He’s too focused on salvaging what he can to think that far ahead. “I don’t really know what I’m going to do,” he said. He hasn’t been able to afford flood insurance, so he’s not sure how much financial support he’ll end up getting to help him rebuild even as he’s still recovering from Hurricane Idalia, which pummeled Florida’s Big Bend area in August. “The last few years, it’s just things are dropping off, and times are getting hard … it’s like, what can you do?”
As the world continues to warm, more and more farmers may find themselves confronting the same question.
Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this story.
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Bangkok, October 23, 2024—Philippine authorities must launch a swift and thorough investigation into the killing of radio anchor Maria Vilma Rodriguez, who was shot three times on Tuesday evening in a store near her home, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday.
“The killing of radio reporter Maria Vilma Rodriguez shows that the murderers of journalists remain undeterred in the Philippines,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “Until President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s government firmly moves to end impunity, these heinous crimes against the press will continue.”
Rodriguez, who presented 105.9 Emedia FM’s news program Barangay Action Center, was killed by a lone shooter in Zamboanga City on the southern island of Mindanao, according to news reports.
The Office of the President issued a statement condemning the October 22 killing and called for a “swift and impartial probe.”
Philippine National Police spokesperson Brigadier General Jean Fajardo told a press briefing that Rodriguez was shot by a relative over a land dispute following an argument the previous day. The suspect had been arrested, he said.
The Philippines ranked eighth on CPJ’s most recent Impunity Index, a global ranking of countries where journalists’ murderers are most likely to go free.
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“Are you sure you don’t want to just, you know, remove it?” the artist asks assertively.
I considered this before making my appointment at the open-air studio. It’s a relic from a bleak time, after all. But history wasn’t meant to be erased.
“Yep, let’s stick with the plan.”
I’m nervous I’ll prickle too much once the algae ink-coated needle pierces my forearm, now sun-loved and wrinkled. But the process ends up being way less painful than I remember.
After a couple of pokes, the tattoo of my youth, The climate changed, has a new ending: And so did we.
— a drabble by Emma Loewe
Roughly half of L.A. tattoo artist Sonny Robinson Bailey’s clients come to him for climate-themed tats: a motley crew of surfers, scuba divers, scientists, and environmental scholars no doubt lured by his Instagram bio: “tattoos for the climate concerned.”
Originally from the U.K., Robinson Bailey started focusing on climate tattoos after moving to the U.S. and feeling overwhelmed by all the waste he saw. Some of his designs are quite dramatic (think: a cartoon sun with burning-hot lasers coming out of its eyes; “MINDLESS CONSUMPTION” written in commanding letters), while others are more subtle nods to planetary thresholds and tipping points.
“I did a flash tattoo day a couple of years ago where I wrote a few paragraphs of facts and figures about the climate, put all the numbers in boxes, and tattooed them on people,” he told me on a video call. Five people showed up to get inked with numbers such as .9 (projected sea level rise by the end of the 21st century, in meters) and 1.5° (the warming threshold set forth in the Paris Agreement, in Celsius).
He added a new tattoo to his personal collection that day, too, he said, maneuvering the camera to show me the 2.12° above his left elbow — the approximate amount that global temps have risen since the Industrial Revolution, in Fahrenheit.
Sonny Robinson Bailey’s “2.12” tattoo. Courtesy of Sonny Robinson Bailey
While this figure will eventually become outdated, Robinson Bailey doesn’t mind. “I like to look at my tattoos as a journal,” he said. “[They] are always going to be a sign of the times.” And, he said, looking at it helps him sit in the discomfort of global warming. While many climate disasters feel far away when he reads about them in the news, tattoos “bring things back to reality.”
Robinson Bailey’s clients all have their own reasons for getting climate-themed tattoos. He recalls a researcher who asked for a coral tat to celebrate their work making reefs more resistant to heat waves, and a New Yorker who got the .9 sea level rise tattoo in solidarity with their threatened coastal city. Robinson Bailey said that talking to people about their connections to the climate is “the best part” of his job.
I took a page from his book and spoke with several people who have climate-themed tattoos about why they got them and what they represent. For some, they are reminders of what to fight for; for others, an ever-present reminder of what’s already lost. Almost all of them said they plan to get more. Here are their tats and the stories behind them.
Most of visual artist Justin Brice Guariglia’s photography, sculpture, and installation work explores human relationships with the natural world, built upon a foundation of climate science. So when he felt the itch to get tatted in 2016, it was only natural to turn to the latest NASA data for source material.
Sitting in a bean bag chair in his studio in downtown New York, Brice Guariglia pulled up his sleeve to reveal a NASA Surface Temperature Analysis graph climbing all the way up his right arm.
Justin Brice Guariglia’s Surface Temperature Analysis tattoo. Studio Justin Brice Guariglia
The tattoo, which shows the planet’s surface temperature from 1880 to 2016, is accurate and to scale. Brice Guariglia even emailed the scientist behind the work, James Hansen, for fact-checking before he made it permanent. “If you make art about climate or the environment, it’s so important to know the science,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s just decoration.”
Although his tattoo is essentially global warming immortalized, Brice Guariglia isn’t distressed when he looks at it — or when he explains it to others who inevitably mistake it for a mountain range or an electrocardiogram reading. “It doesn’t feel negative to me. If it felt negative, I wouldn’t have gotten it.” Instead, he said, it reminds him of his mission to keep working for a better future. “Climate change is the moral imperative of our time.”
Sanjana Paul is currently a graduate student at MIT focused on conflict negotiation in the energy transition, but she’s worn many hats throughout her career in climate. Trained as an electrical engineer, Paul (who was featured on the Grist 50 list in 2023) has collected atmospheric science data with NASA, hosted environmental hackathons, and pushed for climate policy as a community organizer.
The tattoo on her right ankle — the “ground” symbol, which resembles an upside-down T with two lines underneath — is a symbol for her of what has been constant throughout these diverse experiences.
“In circuit diagrams, the ground symbol is where the electric potential of the circuit is zero, so it’s your starting point,” she explained. She got the tat after she graduated from engineering school as a way to mark the starting point of her new career. Now, it nudges her to stay “grounded” — that is, motivated by her deep love for the planet — as she engages in different forms of climate work. And, she added, “In all seriousness, it was just funny.”
Sanjana Paul’s ground symbol and Green New Deal tattoos. Courtesy of Sanjana Paul
As for the “GND” letters above it, Paul added those after her community successfully advocated for a Green New Deal in Cambridge, Massachusetts — a package of environmental policies that passed the legislature in 2023.
“It took us two years of concerted effort,” Paul said. “[The tattoo] was kind of a commemorative thing to say, ‘We did it.’” She still has a screenshot of the photo of it she sent to her group chat when the legislation passed.
Paul, who also has a likeness of the NASA satellite Calipso on her arm, is currently dreaming up her next climate tattoo: an ode to the North Atlantic Ocean in honor of an offshore wind project she’s involved with. The tattoos in her growing collection are reminders of the unexpected places her work has taken her, and she also considers them gateways into climate conversations with all types of new people who ask about what the designs mean.
France-based photographer Mary-Lou Mauricio started something of a movement two years ago, when she began taking photographs for a campaign she called “Born in … PPM.” In the lead-up to COP27, the 2022 U.N. climate summit, she used temporary makeup to “tattoo” subjects with the measurement of the parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere the year they were born — a way to capture just how much our overreliance on fossil fuels has changed the Earth’s chemistry — and photographed portraits of them.
The campaign caught on, and to date, she has collected over 4,000 images of people all around the world who have marked their personal ppm on their hands, faces, and stomachs. The portraits offer a way to visualize rapidly rising global greenhouse gas emissions, particularly when older subjects are juxtaposed with younger ones.
She knows of at least two people who have gotten their numbers permanently inked — and she has as well.
Mary-Lou Mauricio’s ppm tattoo. “Born in … PPM” / Mary-Lou Mauricio
For Mauricio, the 340 ppm tattoo on her right shoulder represents the marks that climate change has already left on her and her family. “My parents live in the south of Portugal, where droughts are becoming increasingly severe,” she said. “In 2022, a fire ravaged my parents’ region. … Sometimes they call me when it’s raining, because it’s becoming so rare.”
She told me that this ppm tattoo likely won’t be her last: “I’d like to add the ppms of my children’s births, because they’re the ones I’m campaigning for.”
— Emma Loewe
A collage of flash tattoo designs by Sonny Robinson Bailey, featuring climate, sustainability, and conservation messages.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Tattoos for the climate concerned’: Why people are getting inked for the planet on Oct 23, 2024.
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Cuong first left his home in Vietnam’s central northern Nghe An province five years ago with a single goal in mind – to earn more money to support his wife and three kids.
He set off first for Romania, where he was told it was easier for Vietnamese nationals to get visas and find good-paying work. But once he arrived, he was shuffled through a series of manual labor jobs that paid just $500 — less than a third of what he had been promised.
With living expenses and the bribes he had to pay each time he wanted to move jobs, after four years, he had barely even managed to earn back the nearly $7,000 he had borrowed from the bank to pay an agent to get to Romania in the first place.
“Around that time I got a call from a group of smugglers saying they could take me to the United Kingdom,” the 39-year-old recounted to Radio Free Asia through a translator in early September.
“I was scared but after another group of migrants went with them and made it, I thought it was safe and so I agreed to go as well.”
Cuong spent a week crammed in the back of different vans and sleeping in warehouses where all there was to eat was one loaf of bread between 20 people. By the time the group arrived at their “destination” – a coastline along the English Channel – Cuong was so disoriented he didn’t even know what country he was in.
This is how he found himself, on an evening in June 2023, watching as “at least 60 people” were loaded into a glorified dinghy.
“The whole time I was praying to God that I would survive, I was so frightened. I kept thinking ‘this boat is too heavy, I won’t make it’,” he said.
“I decided that I would never do anything like this again. If anyone ever asked me to travel like that in the future I would say no.”
Cuong’s circumstances didn’t improve much once he got to dry land. He was again in debt, owing more than $26,000 to the smugglers for the trip. He struck a deal whereby he would work at a cannabis farm to pay it back, but was fired this year and left homeless, unemployed, and with less money in his pocket than when he had first left Vietnam.
Even still, Cuong counts himself lucky. “At least I’m still alive,” he told RFA from London where he has been living since he lost his job.
The same cannot be said for everyone who has attempted the journey.
The same year Cuong left Vietnam, 39 Vietnamese set out for the UK. On the evening of October 22, 2019, the group climbed into the back of a refrigerated truck in Belgium and headed toward Essex, a county on the UK’s southeastern coast. Twelve hours later, they had all died of suffocation and hypothermia.
The incident – at the time the UK’s worst migrant tragedy in over two decades – sent shockwaves around the world. But it hasn’t stopped those in Vietnam from moving abroad to seek better opportunities. Whether they travel by sea or by land, in the years since, thousands of people like Cuong have continued to gamble their lives – and their savings – with corrupt brokers looking to profit off the desperate and vulnerable.
In August and September, RFA traveled to Vietnam, the UK and Canada to speak with migrants and trafficking victims, and their families, as well as researchers and support organizations to understand why so many people continue to leave Vietnam, what the process really entails and what happens to those who finally make it abroad.
The push factors
Many of those leaving Vietnam hail from Nghe An, the country’s largest province, and neighboring Ha Tinh. Of the 39 victims in the Essex incident, almost all were from those provinces.
Nghe An holds great significance in the country’s history. Ho Chi Minh, the revered leader of Vietnam’s fight for independence and the country’s first president and first prime minister, was born in a small town in Kim Lien commune, 15 kilometers west of the provincial capital Vinh.
But its legacy has done little to protect the province from becoming one of the country’s poorest. There are not enough jobs to support the population of 3.3 million, so people “want to move abroad to earn more money,” according to Mau, an electrical engineer from Nghe An who runs the over 44,000 member information-sharing group on Facebook called ‘Người Nghệ An’, or People of Nghe An.
Farming – the primary source of income for most residents – is a constant challenge as a result of the province’s famously volatile weather. “When it’s hot, it’s very hot. When it rains, there is lots of rain, which also causes flooding,” explained Mau. These extremes are expected to worsen in the next 20 years due to climate change and rising temperatures.
Jobs outside the agricultural sector are few, with the handful of factories that have been established in rural areas insufficient to match the labor supply, especially as the population continues to grow.
The average monthly income per capita in Nghe An in 2022 was 3.639 million VND (around $150) – over 1 million VND less than the national average. The income from salaries and wages alone, which pertain to formal types of employment, was even lower at only 1.758 million VND per month (around $71).
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Beyond these, political oppression creates another reason to leave.
On paper, certain rights and freedoms are enshrined in the country’s constitution; in practice the government maintains a tight grip on power by blocking access to information, restricting civil spaces, and limiting all political opposition.
These circumstances played a part in Cuong’s decision to leave Vietnam.
A few years before he went to Romania, Cuong took part in a protest against a foreign manufacturing conglomerate responsible for a chemical spill that killed millions of fish and stripped local communities of jobs without compensation— one of Vietnam’s largest public demonstrations in recent years.
At least 41 activists who took part in the protests were put in prison; 31 remain behind bars today. Cuong told RFA that as he was leaving the protest, he was followed by police officers in plainclothes. While he never had any direct run-in with the authorities afterwards, the experience planted a paranoia in him that he couldn’t shake.
“I felt that they were keeping an eye on me all the time, which made me scared to leave my house, even to work and earn money,” he told RFA.
Making the move
Residents of Nghe An and Ha Tinh provinces who spoke to RFA described three ways that most people tend to move abroad. The first, is through government programs, which are largely carried out through over 500 licensed labor export agencies that arrange recruitment, immigration, travel and work placement for Vietnamese going abroad.
Vietnam’s government has long been in favor of exporting labor, repeatedly encouraging its citizens to work overseas to improve “the quality of the nations’ workforce” and promote “international integration”.
In 2023, 160,000 Vietnamese nationals traveled abroad via government-sponsored programs, an increase from the 142,000 that went abroad in 2022. Most of these programs placed workers in East Asia, with more than 90 percent going to Japan, Taiwan and South Korea last year.
But Vietnam doesn’t have labor contracts with most countries in Europe and North America, where many wish to go because they believe they can earn more money. These prospective migrants often left relying on private agencies, rather than government schemes, like the one that Cuong used. These agencies are not legal entities in Vietnam, but people pay them to guide them through legal migration channels by securing legitimate visas and employment.
Even with these independent companies, prospective migrants can encounter roadblocks in terms of language or other skills that fail to qualify them for a visa. In these cases there is only one option left and that is to go abroad illegally with nothing but a tourist visa or no visa at all through schemes often orchestrated by smugglers and human trafficking rings.
Regardless of the method, the primary motivation for leaving is to earn more money that can be sent home to support their families. In 2023, recorded remittances in Vietnam totaled $14 billion – over three percent of the country’s GDP – and is expected to reach $15 billion next year, according to the Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development, or Knomad, a platform that tracks migration patterns.
The only country to exceed Vietnam in Southeast Asia is the Philippines, which also sees a high rate of outward migration every year. In both countries, 40 to 60 percent of exported labor end up in the United States and the United Kingdom, where salaries are higher, according to Knomad.
Billionaire’s Village
Do Thanh, located just north of Vinh in Nghe An, is one Vietnamese commune that has seen countless numbers of its residents go off to work in North America and Europe — through both legal and illegal pathways.
Dubbed “Billionaire’s Village,” the town has been transformed in recent years due to the generous remittances sent home by loved ones abroad. When RFA visited in mid-August, the streets were lined with large gold-plated gates wrapping around recently-renovated, multi-story homes.
“In this town, every family has at least one member who has gone abroad to work,” said Ninh, a long-term resident. He and others who spoke to RFA for this story asked that only their first name or a pseudonym be used due to the sensitivity around migration in Vietnam.
A smiley man in his 50s, Ninh has embraced his hometown’s reputation. Four of his five children have already gone to work in construction and at nail salons in Canada and in Europe, and when RFA spoke with Ninh, his youngest, who had recently turned 20, was preparing to fly to Canada to work on a farm.
To send them abroad, Ninh worked with a private agency that took care of visa applications, travel arrangements and sorted out employment abroad. He told RFA that his children traveled legally, each with two-year work visas.
They’re paid significantly more than what they would get in Vietnam, though well below minimum wage by Western standards.
“If my children stayed in Vietnam they would only be able to do manual work where they wouldn’t get paid much,” Ninh explained, stopping to take a puff from his pipe.
“The way I see it they may as well go abroad where they can do the same work but get paid more.”
Gambling life savings
While the incentive to leave is high, sending a loved one abroad requires months of planning and a huge financial investment on the part of the entire family.
Ninh paid $30,000 to send each of his children abroad – more than 200 times the average monthly income in Nghe An. To pull together this kind of money, he had to take out numerous bank loans, mortgage his home and borrow from friends and family. Each time his children sent home remittances – a couple thousand dollars a month each – it was put aside to help fund the next child’s travels.
Only now that his youngest is leaving will they have enough money to start paying off their debt, but it will take a long time, he said.
Hong, a food vendor who lives in Do Thanh, also paid $30,000 for her son to move to Canada.
She told RFA that he had made most of the arrangements and all she knew was that the money had gone to a “Canada-based company that helps prospective Vietnamese migrants.” But similar to Ninh, the cost took an enormous toll on her family.
“We had to mortgage our house, but this only covered around 70 percent of the payment, so the rest of the money we had to borrow from family,” Hong explained.
While Ninh said that he worked with an independent agent and his children all traveled abroad legally, he noted that it was difficult at first to tell the corrupt agents from the clean ones.
“I was very afraid that I would become victim to a scam. We were paying so much money and had made so many sacrifices to get that money, and only one out 10 of these cases are successful,” said Ninh.
He had good reason to be afraid. Last year, Vietnam’s Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs found increasing amounts of fraud among companies posing as legitimate labor export agencies. Some are in it for the cash, swindling prospective migrants out of their life savings,
but others are part of a much more insidious network of forced labor scams that send vulnerable workers to cyber scam compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar.
A recent report from the United States Institute of Peace found that Nghe An and Ha Tinh provinces were “trafficking hot spots” for scam compounds and casinos that have become prevalent in those countries.
Minh, a young photographer from Vinh, avoided being trafficked but was scammed out of his savings. He had been struggling to find work in Vietnam when he heard about a husband and wife team based in Nghe An who he thought were offering legitimate services to help people move to Canada, he told RFA.
“At the time, I had only heard success stories of people moving abroad and making lots of money so I didn’t think I had any reason to be scared,” he said.
He paid the couple an upfront fee of 90 million VND ($3,650). But after a year, he still hadn’t heard back.
“They told me that my ‘supporting documents’ were not sufficient, but I’m pretty sure they never even submitted my application. They just took my money and did nothing,” he said.
He had put most of his savings toward the deposit, he said. With limited work available for him in Vietnam, it took him more than a year to make it back.
The agents
While working with agents brings a level of risk, they are an integral part of the labor export market.
Both legal and illegal agencies are often based in, or have affiliates in, areas that see high rates of outward migration. In Thien Loc, a commune in northeastern Ha Tinh province where many have migrated out of in recent years, several agencies are known to have helped workers travel to Hungary and then elsewhere in Europe. Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, most would fly to Russia first.
Ha, a young salon owner in Thien Loc, told RFA that this was how her husband first left home back in 2018.
“My husband first flew to Russia with a tourist visa. Then he was driven overland to Germany where he worked in a restaurant that hires undocumented workers,” explained Ha, speaking to RFA through a translator from her salon in mid-August.
“He wanted to stay in Germany but he couldn’t get a visa, so he went to France, but he faced the same problem, so he moved again to the UK where he’s hoping he’ll be able to stay long term.”
Ha doesn’t know the specifics of her husband’s circumstances, only that he managed to find work at a nail salon and has applied to stay in the UK long-term.
“He’s become an even better manicurist than me now,” she joked, before a solemn look came back over her face and her eyes filled with tears.
She and her husband speak on the phone when they can and he has sent home remittances from his work abroad, but the distance and not knowing when they will be reunited has been hard on her and her children.
“It’s been six years since I’ve seen him and I don’t know when I’ll see him next,” she said.
But Ha was grateful that her husband is safe, especially when other families in Can Loc district have sent loved ones and never seen them again.
Nguyen Thi Phong and her husband, who are from Nghen, a town neighboring Thien Loc, became one of these families when their daughter Pham Thi Tra My, then 26, ended up in the back of the infamous Essex lorry.
Eager to go to the UK, Tra My had sought out a local agent for help. While her family helped pull together the $40,000 in travel expenses and agent fees, Tra My had handled most of the planning herself.
“She made all the arrangements and as a result we didn’t know much about the process until after the fact,” her mother, Nguyen Thi Phong, told RFA in mid-August.
From Vietnam, Tra My first traveled to China, where she spent several days, then on to France and finally to Belgium where she boarded the truck to Essex.
Tra My was the one to sound the alarms about the situation inside the lorry. The evening before the bodies were found she sent her parents a text. “I’m sorry Dad and Mom. The way I went overseas was not successful. Mom, I love Dad and you so much. I’m dying because I can’t breathe,” the message read. But it was too late. The truck was found the following day and everyone inside was already dead.
“At least thanks to that message they were able to find the bodies and eventually return them home to us,” Thi Phong said.
Twenty-nine people in the UK and France have been convicted in connection to the horrific incident, and some of the agencies, including the one that Tra My used, have been closed, her mother said.
But the long-term impact in Vietnam has been minimal.
Nga, a teacher from Do Thanh, explained that while the incident was shocking, it didn’t put a stop to the mass exodus the way that many may have thought.
“People were a little scared, but they are still so eager to go abroad. They know it is risky, especially those who go abroad illegally, but they are desperate so they continue to take the risk,” said Nga.
The only deterrent in recent years has come from restrictions imposed by countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, but now that these have been lifted, migration has once again spiked.
Between January and April, the UK recorded 1,060 small boats carrying Vietnamese nationals across the English Channel to its shore – the highest among all nationalities and almost as many as the total recorded in all of 2023. Thousands more Vietnamese have also continued to travel to other countries in Europe as well as Asia and North America.
“The economy is not good, there are not many jobs. People see all the successful cases and keep choosing to go abroad but I hope that they will remember what happened to my daughter and stop taking the risk,” said Thi Phong.
Alone and isolated
The first time Quan Tranh, a coordinator at the Community of Refugees from Vietnam, or CRV, in London, found Cuong, he was sleeping outside his office.
Tranh found Cuong a room at a hotel run by the UK’s Home Office and has been assisting him in filing an official asylum claim.
The UK’s Modern Slavery Act, passed in 2015, has made it easier for victims of human trafficking to seek asylum, but many, like Cuong, don’t know this and end up falling victim to scams that see refugees pay as much as $17,000 to have a so-called “storyteller” manufacture an asylum narrative that they claim will pass muster with the authorities.
Already in debt from paying agents for their travels from Vietnam, migrants are often coerced into cobbling together yet another huge lump sum of cash to pay these storytellers.
Then, it’s another long wait. While the UK government claims that each application will be processed in six months, Tranh said that it usually takes closer to three years. If they want to claim residency afterwards, it’s another five to 10 years.
In the United States, it’s a similar story. An American immigration lawyer who previously spoke to RFA explained that migrants could have up to nine years of legal residence as their case is processed. In Canada, another popular destination, it usually takes three to four years for asylum claims to be processed and several more years to receive residency, according to Le, who works at the Vietnamese community center in Canada.
In response to the high number of migrants, the UK and Vietnam signed an agreement in April, committing to increase intelligence sharing, better facilitate the return of those with “no right to remain in the UK” and promote legal migration routes.
While it’s too soon to see much of an impact from the agreement, Tranh suspects it will result in a higher rate of deportation back to Vietnam. However, when it comes to addressing the root causes of the mass exodus, residents of Nghe An and Ha Tinh told RFA that not enough is being done – most of the government’s efforts remain focused on encouraging overseas migration rather than boosting the local economy.
Requests for comment to national labor officials and government departments in Ha Tinh and Nghe An were not answered by press time. Local officials have announced plans to boost development and the economy, most recently with an effort to improve education and job opportunities by 2030. But even if such a policy succeeded, it would take years to see its impact on the ground.
Meanwhile, for many migrants, returning to Vietnam remains an impossibility.
“When I first left Vietnam, I had to borrow money from the bank to pay the agent, which I haven’t been able to pay back while I’ve been abroad,” said Cuong. “If I go back to Vietnam before I pay them back, I am scared they will report me to the police.”
Cuong no longer feels he has any option but to ride out the long wait for his asylum claim in the UK with the hope that his application will be approved and he will find work soon.
“I wish I had never come to Europe the way that I did with corrupt agents that cheated me,” he said. “If I had known that everything would turn out like this, I wouldn’t do it again.”
Edited by Abby Seiff and Boer Deng.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Allegra Mendelson for RFA Investigative.
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On October 26, Georgia heads into what is widely viewed as its most critical election since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The incumbent party Georgian Dream is pitted against a loose coalition of pro-Western parties united under the Georgian Charter, a roadmap for Georgian integration into the European Union.
Georgia’s relation to the EU is a central issue of the vote. While the population is overwhelmingly in favor of joining the union — the country was granted EU candidate status last year — Georgian Dream has taken a sharply anti-Western turn, sparking fears it is steering the country into neighboring Russia’s embrace. In May, parliament overrode a presidential veto to pass a Russian-style “foreign agents” law, directly targeting the heavily donor-reliant independent press. If Georgian Dream wins the parliamentary election, it has vowed to crack down on what it calls the “collective” opposition, a threat many fear extends to the pro-opposition press.
On a fact-finding mission to Georgia this month with several partner groups, CPJ asked local journalists, advocates, and a journalist turned opposition politician what they feel is at stake in the upcoming vote. Their answers have been edited for length and clarity.
CPJ emailed the Georgian Dream party for comment on the concerns raised by interviewees, but did not receive a reply.
Mamuka Andguladze, chair of Media Advocacy Coalition, which promotes media rights
How important are this month’s elections for press freedom in Georgia?
The upcoming elections represent a critical juncture for press freedom in Georgia. At stake is not only the integrity of our democratic processes but also the very foundation of independent Georgian journalism. In what is already a very challenging landscape, the adoption of the “Russian law” [the “foreign agents” law] poses a severe threat to independent media’s survival. The law stigmatizes media outlets as “organizations pursuing the interests of a foreign power” essentially as “foreign agents.” It subjects them to invasive monitoring and an obligation to provide authorities with any information they demand, which could threaten outlets’ sources and contacts, making it impossible for them to operate. This is not to mention heavy fines for alleged violations.
Georgian journalists are frequently the target of violence, as we saw during the terrible events of July 2021 [when anti-LGBT demonstrators attacked dozens of journalists] and the tragic death of camera operator Aleksandre Lashkarava [who was beaten at the protests]. They are subject to verbal attacks from officials and orchestrated intimidation campaigns. This creates a climate of fear which diminishes the quality of reporting, as journalists are less likely to investigate sensitive topics. Online harassment and disinformation campaigns against critical journalists and media are rampant. Longstanding issues of impunity for attacks against journalists fuel further violence. The ongoing boycott by the ruling party toward independent and critical media and severe problems with access to official information remain existential threats. Economic pressures are intense, with many outlets struggling for funding.
Despite all these challenges, past experiences — when the media actively covered mass protests against the “Russian law” and contributed to increasing public awareness — give me hope. I have great faith in our independent media and am confident that they are capable of defending their own rights and the historical choice of the Georgian people to join the European family.
Nino Zuriashvili, head of Studio Monitor, an independent outlet making investigative documentaries
What is at stake for independent media in the upcoming elections?
We in Georgia have never had such an important election. After 33 years of independence from the Soviet Union, it’s a shame, but we are once again deciding our direction, our orientation – either we will again be a province of Russia or we will join the European Union as an equal country.
It means we’ll either have a Russian-style government or a European-style one. And we know what they do with journalists in Russia.
What does this “orientation” mean for the media? It’s not just a word. It means we’ll either have a Russian-style government or a European-style one. And we know what they do with journalists in Russia. Dozens of journalists have been killed. Journalists are not free there, they are intimidated, they are forced out of the country. In the media we face two possible futures: independence, the freedom to work and grow, to develop as professionals, or be intimidated, imprisoned, killed, to flee and seek asylum.
What difficulties has Studio Monitor faced under the current authorities, and what problems might you face after the elections?
We already know that if the current government remains in power, Studio Monitor will be a major target of the “Russian law.” We specialize in investigations into corruption, nepotism, and official abuses. We also took the lead in organizing media protests against the “Russian law.” We know that many in the government are irritated by us. A ruling party politician who is widely thought to have organized a campaign of intimidation against opponents of the [“foreign agents”] law publicly named us as a key target. They stencil graffitied “Agents’ HQ” outside our office, put up dozens of posters of me outside our office and outside my apartment with slogans like “No place in Georgia for agents,” and graffitied my car with obscene images calling me a prostitute and an agent. Like many others, I received dozens of abusive calls, swearing at me and telling me to stop calling the [“foreign agents”] law a “Russian law.” They even called my sister and threatened her over my opposition to the law. This all happened at the same time as leading opponents of the law were severely beaten outside their homes. So it was deeply intimidating, even if we continue to resist.
So we know what to expect if the ruling party stays in power. Even if they haven’t used the [“foreign agents”] law ahead of the elections, we know they will start to use it afterwards, and we know that over time, they will make this law more and more strict. We’ve seen how this went in Russia and we know what awaits.
That’s why this election is different. This election will decide our fate. Independent media could disappear.
Nika Gvaramia, former director of broadcaster Mtavari Arkhi and 2023 CPJ International Press Freedom Award winner, now a leader of opposition group Coalition for Change
You left the media earlier this year to become an opposition leader, but you still keep a close eye on the press. How important are these elections for media freedom in Georgia?
These elections are crucial, not just for media freedom in Georgia, but for every kind of freedom. This is not a regular election, where you’re choosing between better or worse governance; it’s about authoritarianism, it’s about choosing between Western civilization or Russia and some kind of political Mordor [the realm of Dark Lord Sauron in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”]. Under authoritarianism, there is no special space for different kinds of freedom. And there is no chance that a Russian-backed regime could be favorable to freedoms of speech and the media. That means that everything is at stake in these elections, including perhaps first of all freedom of speech.
If there is no change of government in a few weeks, it means that [independent] media will be shut down. The “Russian law” is about closing down media outlets, closing down critical NGOs. And one of the promises of the ruling party if they win a constitutional majority is to abolish all opposition parties. If they are abolishing opposition parties, what do you think they will do with the media? Georgian media is highly professional, highly devoted, and pretty fearless, so the media is a number one target. If Georgian Dream prevails, there will be no opposition parties, they will be shutting down media and NGOs, and there will be tens or hundreds of political prisoners – as a former political prisoner myself, I know. [Gvaramia served more than a year of a three and a half year sentence in retaliation for his reporting before being released from prison in May 2023.]
How will you reform the press freedom environment if your coalition comes to power?
International pressure played a crucial role in my release, especially the efforts of CPJ. Following this, I set up the Ahali [“New”] party, because I feel I can make more of a difference being directly engaged in politics. When we win – not if – we will open negotiations with the EU, we will repeal any law that is against the European understanding of democracy. We’ve signed a charter pledging to do this, and we will follow it.
Georgian media has been deeply damaged by this regime, especially financially. As former director of Georgia’s leading independent broadcaster, I can say that they have deliberately passed laws restricting the advertising market, which is vital for independent TV, put pressure on broadcasters’ financial backers and on those who place ads. They have hit broadcasters with SLAPP suits [Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation] and fines from the broadcast regulator that is under their control. Not to mention mob violence, incited and orchestrated by the government. Georgian media desperately needs more income, and we need to bolster the media’s financial situation by bringing in special tax regulations and restoring a properly functioning advertising market. And simply more free speech. On paper, Georgia has great laws on press freedom and freedom of speech, on a par with the United States; they just need to be put into effect. We will do that.
Independent media, opposition parties, NGOs, and most importantly – Georgian society itself, especially the young, what we call the BIG generations, “Born In Georgia” [after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991] – we are all united. We must and we will prevail.
Nestan Tsetskhladze, editor-in-chief of independent news website Netgazeti
How are you viewing these elections in terms of the press’s ability to function?
Independent Georgian media have never had an easy time, but now things are particularly bad. If the law passed in 2024 on “foreign agents”—which we call the “Russian law”—and the law on the protection of “family values” [which allows for fines against media outlets found “promoting” LGBT issues] are not repealed after the elections, these laws — which amount to the legalization of censorship — will prevent independent media outlets from continuing their activities in Georgia, just as happened in Russia after the adoption of similar legislation.
This is the first election out of many that we have covered which could decide our own fate, as journalists and free people in Georgia.
This is the first election out of many that we have covered which could decide our own fate, as journalists and free people in Georgia. So it’s an unusual situation for us too — the result of this election could abolish our profession and everything we’ve been working on for two decades, as journalists and as media outlets. However, I don’t think that will happen, and I believe that the citizens of this country will not choose repression, the disappearance of the media, and civil society.
How is Netgazeti navigating current challenges, including the “foreign agents” law?
Netgazeti has not registered as a “foreign agent.” This is our editorial decision because we believe that continuing our journalistic activities under the label of a “foreign agent” damages our professional reputation and portrays us as a media outlet without editorial independence, which is not the case. In addition, working under such a label endangers the physical safety of all journalists working here. So far, we have not been fined for not registering as “agents,” but we will appeal any such step at the European Court of Human Rights. We intend to legally fight for our rights as long as possible while continuing to inform the Georgian people.
We in the media are not burying our heads in the sand during the pre-election period; we do not artificially balance the news, and we do not pretend that the results of the elections are irrelevant. No, we are saying that the worst times will come for journalism if the authorities who support Russian-style laws remain in power and wish for us, independent media and citizens, to disappear. Independent online media do not have a lot of resources for this, unlike the official propaganda, but we do everything we can. And I personally believe that we will be able to hold fair elections and stay in this country. We have worked hard for this for many years, and we are not afraid.
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Amid the escalation of conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, a claim emerged in Chinese-language social media posts that the United States had not evacuated its citizens from Lebanon as of Oct. 6.
But the claim is false. The U.S. had arranged multiple evacuation flights, including on Oct. 2.
The claim was shared on Weibo on Oct. 6, 2024.
“The United States is not organizing an evacuation in Lebanon, and more than 80,000 American citizens who are under fire need to evacuate themselves,” the claim reads in part.
Similar claims have been shared to draw a comparison between the U.S. and China, with users touting China’s prompt evacuation of its citizens.
China’s ministry of foreign affairs announced on Oct. 8 it evacuated 215 of its citizens in two batches from Lebanon.
Following targeted explosions of many Hezbollah group members’ electronic devices on Sept. 17 and 18, conflict between the militant group and Israel has escalated into open exchanges of fire on several occasions.
But the claim about the U.S. not moving its people out of Lebanon is false.
The U.S. State Department urged U.S. citizens to leave the country while commercial flights were still available and raised its travel alert for Lebanon to a four – the highest level available – on Sept. 21.
It later ordered families of embassy personnel and some employees in Beirut to leave Lebanon on Sept. 28.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Oct. 2 and 3 that the U.S. had arranged evacuation flights on Oct. 2.
U.S. evacuation efforts have been also reported by international media outlets, including Reuters, which reported on Oct. 10 that U.S.-organized flights had carried more than 1,000 U.S. citizens from Lebanon to Turkey over a week.
Reuters added that two other aircraft had delivered U.S. citizens from Beirut to Frankfurt and Doha, and that “authorities expect” that such evacuations would continue for the thousands of U.S. citizens remaining in Lebanon.
Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Shen Ke and Taejun Kang.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.
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A row of executives from grain-processing behemoth Archer Daniels Midland watched as Verlyn Rosenberger, 88, took the podium at a Decatur city council meeting last week. It was the first meeting since she and the rest of her central Illinois community learned of a second leak at ADM’s carbon dioxide sequestration well beneath Lake Decatur, their primary source of drinking water.
“Just because CO2 sequestration can be done doesn’t mean it should be done,” the retired elementary school teacher told the city council. “Pipes eventually leak.”
ADM’s facility in central Illinois was the first permitted commercial carbon sequestration operation in the country, and is on the forefront of a booming, multibillion-dollar carbon capture and storage, or CCS, industry that promises to permanently sequester planet-warming carbon dioxide deep underground.
The emerging technology has become a cornerstone of government strategies to slash fossil fuel emissions and meet climate goals. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, has supercharged industry subsidies and tax credits and set off a CCS gold rush.
There are now only four carbon sequestration wells operating in the United States — two each in Illinois and Indiana — but many more are on the way. Three proposed pipelines and 22 wells are up for review by state and federal regulators in Illinois, where the geography makes the landscape especially well suited for CCS. Nationwide, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is reviewing 150 different applications.
But if CCS operations leak, they can pose significant risks to water resources. That’s because pressurized CO2 stored underground can escape or propel brine trapped in the saline reservoirs typically used for permanent storage. The leaks can lead to heavy metal contamination and potentially lower pH levels, all of which can make drinking water undrinkable. This is what bothers critics of carbon capture, who worry that it’s solving one problem by creating another.
In September, the public learned of a leak at ADM’s Decatur site after it was reported by E&E News, which covers energy and environmental issues. Additional testing mandated by the EPA turned up a second leak later that month. The EPA has confirmed these leaks posed no threat to water sources. Still, they raise concern about whether more leaks are likely, whether the public has any right to know when leaks occur, and if CCS technology is really a viable climate solution.
Officials with Chicago-based ADM spoke at the Decatur City Council meeting immediately after Rosenberger. They tried to assuage her concerns. “We simply wouldn’t do this if we didn’t believe that it was safe,” said Greg Webb, ADM’s vice president of state-government relations.
But ADM kept local and state officials in the dark for months about the first leak. They detected it back in March, five months after discovering corrosion in the tubing in the sequestration well. However, neither leak was disclosed as the company this spring petitioned the city of Decatur for an easement to expand its operations. The company also remained tight-lipped about the leak as it took part in major negotiations over the state’s first CCS regulations, the SAFE CCS Act, between April and May, according to several parties involved.
As a result, when Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed those CCS regulations into law at ADM’s Decatur facility in July, he was unaware of the leak that had occurred more than 5,000 feet below his seat, his office confirmed.
“I thought we were negotiating in good faith with ADM,” bill sponsor and state Senator Laura Fine, a Democrat, said in a statement. “When negotiating complex legislation, we expect all parties to be forthcoming and transparent in order to ensure we enact effective legislation.”
It’s unclear whether ADM was required by law to report the leaks any sooner than it did. According to the company’s permits, it only has to notify state and local officials if there are “major” or “serious” emergencies. The EPA wouldn’t comment on whether ADM was required to disclose, and neither the EPA nor ADM would confirm if the two leaks in Decatur qualified as “minor” emergencies.
In a statement, an ADM spokesperson said “the developments occurred at a depth of approximately 5,000 feet. They posed no threat to the surface or groundwater, nor to public health. It is for those reasons that additional notifications were not made.”
That’s little comfort to Jenny Cassel, a senior attorney with Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm.
“It’s a little terrifying,” Cassel said. “Because if the operator, in fact, made the wrong decision, and there is in fact a major problem, then not only will local officials not know about it, EPA is not going to know about it, which is indeed what appears to have happened here.”
The Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition, which applauded the signing of the regulatory bill earlier this summer, called ADM’s decision to keep the March 2024 leak from the public “unacceptable and dangerous.”
David Horn, a city councilman and professor of biology at Decatur’s Millikin University, said the city was blindsided. “This information was substantive, relevant information that could have influenced the terms of the easement that was ultimately signed in May of 2024,” he said, adding that the delay in disclosure calls into question the long-term safety of CCS, and the ability of the EPA to protect water in the face of future CCS mishaps.
ADM waited until July 31 to notify the EPA of the leak, more than three months after it was discovered. The EPA alerted a small number of local and state officials and ordered the company to conduct further tests. They also issued a notice for alleged violations, citing the movement of CO2 and other fluids beyond “authorized zones” and the failure of the company to comply with its own monitoring, emergency response, and remediation plans.
But the infractions weren’t made public until September 13, when E&E News first reported the leak.
Two weeks later, ADM notified the EPA that it had discovered a second suspected leak. Only then did they temporarily pause CO2 injections into the well.
Councilman Horn says that isn’t good enough.
“The ADM company was aware of the leak in March, and we were not aware of it until September,” Horn said. “So really the city of Decatur, its residents, the decision-makers have been on the back foot for months.”
Meanwhile, the city of Decatur has contracted with an environmental attorney. They have yet to pursue any legal action.
Central Illinois is becoming a hotspot nationwide for the nascent CCS industry because of the Mt. Simon Sandstone, a deep saline formation of porous rock especially suitable for CO2 storage. It underlies the majority of Illinois and spills into parts of Indiana and Kentucky. It has an estimated storage capacity of up to 150 billion tons of CO2, making it the largest reservoir of its kind anywhere in the Midwest.
However, there is concern that pumping CO2 into saline reservoirs near subsurface water risks pushing pressurized CO2 and brine toward those resources, which would pose additional contamination risks. “Brine is pretty nasty stuff,” said Dominic Diguilio, a retired geoscientist from the EPA Office of Research and Development. “It has a very high concentration of salts, heavy metals, sometimes volatile organic compounds and radionuclides like radium.”
Horn says with so many more wells planned for Illinois, the Decatur leaks should be a wakeup call not just to the city, but to the region. He is particularly concerned about any future wells near east central Illinois’ primary drinking water source, the Mahomet aquifer, which lies above the Mt. Simon Sandstone formation.
Close to a million people rely on the Mahomet aquifer for drinking water, according to the Prairie Research Institute. In 2015, the EPA designated the underground reservoir a “sole source,” meaning there are no other feasible drinking water alternatives should the groundwater be contaminated. When it comes to the Mahomet aquifer, “there is no room for error if there is a mistake,” said Horn.
In light of the CCS boom headed their way, rural Illinois counties are stepping up to protect themselves from future carbon leaks, said Andrew Renh, the director of climate policy at Prairie Rivers Network, a Champaign-based environmental protection organization.
DeWitt County, half an hour north of Decatur, passed a carbon sequestration ban last year. To Decatur’s west, Sangamon County previously expanded an existing moratorium on transporting or storing CO2 underground. And just last week, Champaign County, directly east of Decatur, advanced an ordinance to consider a 12-month moratorium on CCS.
Rehn said his organization would like to see all 14 counties that overlap the Mahomet aquifer impose such bans.
In the meantime, his hope is that state legislators finish what the Illinois counties have started. Two companion bills introduced earlier this year would patch up the regulatory gaps left by the CCS bill Pritzker signed into law this summer. The bills would outright prohibit carbon sequestration immediately in and around the Mahomet Aquifer.
“My community, as well as many surrounding areas, depend on the Mahomet Aquifer to provide clean drinking water, support our agriculture, and sustain industrial operations,” bill sponsor and state Senator Paul Faraci, a Democrat, said in a statement. “Protecting the health and livelihood of our residents and industries that rely on the aquifer must remain our top priority.
As the Decatur city council meeting adjourned last week, Rosenberger helped her husband Paul Rosenberger put on his coat. The row of ADM officials behind her walked past and then lingered in the council chamber. “I’m not afraid of them,” Rosenberger said as she wheeled her husband out.
“We haven’t changed anything yet,” Rosenberger said. “But I think maybe we can.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The nation’s first commercial carbon sequestration plant is in Illinois. It leaks. on Oct 21, 2024.
This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco.
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The dangers should be plastered on every wall in every office occupied by a military and political advisor. Israel’s attempt to reshape the Middle East, far from giving it enduring security, will merely serve to make it more vulnerable and unstable than ever. In that mix and mess will be its greatest sponsor and guardian, the United States, a giant of almost blind antiquity in all matters concerning the Jewish state.
In a measure that should have garnered bold headlines, the Biden administration has announced the deployment of some 100 US soldiers to Israel who will be responsible for operating the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. They are being sent to a conflict that resembles a train travelling at high speed, with no risk of stopping. As Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant promised in the aftermath of Iran’s October 1 missile assault on his country, “Our strike will be powerful, precise, and above all – surprising.” It would be of such a nature that “They will not understand what happened and how it happened.”
In an October 16 meeting between the Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Gallant, the deployment of a mobile THAAD battery was seen “as an operational example of the United States’ ironclad support to the defense of Israel.” Largely meaningless bits of advice were offered to Gallant: that Israel “continue taking steps to address the dire humanitarian situation” and take “all necessary measures to ensure the safety and security” of UN peacekeepers operating in Lebanon’s south.
The charade continued the next day in a conversation between Austin and Gallant discussing the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. THAAD was again mentioned as essential for Israel’s “right to defence itself” while representing the “United States’ unwavering, enduring, and ironclad commitment to Israel’s security.” (“Ironclad” would seem to be the word of the moment, neatly accompanying Israel’s own Iron Dome defence system.)
A statement from the Pentagon press secretary, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, was a fatuous effort in minimising the dangers of the deployment. The battery would merely “augment Israel’s integrated air defense system,” affirm the ongoing commitment to Israel’s defence and “defend Americans in Israel, from any further ballistic missile attacks from Iran.”
The very public presence of US troops, working alongside their Israeli counterparts in anticipation of broadening conflict, does not merely suggest Washington’s failure to contain their ally. It entails a promise of ceaseless supply, bolstering and emboldening. Furthermore, it will involve placing US troops in harm’s way, a quixotic invitation if ever there was one.
As things stand, the US is already imperilling its troops by deploying them in a series of bases in Jordan, Syria and Iraq. Iran’s armed affiliates have been making their presence felt, harrying the stationed troops with increasing regularity since the Israel-Hamas war broke out on October 7 last year. A gradual, attritive toll is registering, featuring such attacks as those on the Tower 22 base in northern Jordan in January that left three US soldiers dead.
Writing in August for the Guardian, former US army major Harrison Mann eventually realised an awful truth about the mounting assaults on these sandy outposts of the US imperium: “there was no real plan to protect US troops beyond leaving them in their small, isolated bases while local militants, emboldened and agitated by US support for Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, used them for target practice.” To send more aircraft and warships to the Middle East also served to encourage “reckless escalation towards a wider war,” providing insurance to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he could be protected “from the consequences of his actions.”
Daniel Davis, a military expert at Defense Priorities, is firmly logical on the point of enlisting US personnel in the Israeli cause. “Naturally, if Americans are killed in the execution of their duties, there will be howls from the pro-war hawks in the West ‘demanding’ the president ‘protect our troops’ by firing back on Iran.” It was “exactly the sort of thing that gets nations sucked into war they have no interest in fighting.”
Polling, insofar as that measure counts, suggests that enthusiasm for enrolling US troops in Israel’s defence is far from warm. In results from a survey published by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in August, some four in ten polled would favour sending US troops to defend Israel if it was attacked by Iran. Of the sample, 53% of Republicans would favour defending Israel in that context, along with four in 10 independents (42%), and a third of Democrats (34%).
There have also been some mutterings from the Pentagon itself about Israel’s burgeoning military effort, in particular against the Lebanese Iran-backed militia, Hezbollah. In a report from the New York Times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., is said to be worried about the widening US presence in the region, a fact that would hamper overall “readiness” of the US in other conflicts. Being worried is just the start of it.
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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.
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