As the climate crisis escalates, a just and rapid transition to renewable energy might seem like the obvious solution. Yet somehow, fossil fuel expansion always remains on the agenda. Environmental activist and author Bill McKibben joins Inequality Watch to expose the network of carbon guzzling billionaires manipulating our media to keep our planet warming and their pockets flush with oil and gas profits.

Produced by: Taya Graham, Stephen Janis
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Written by: Stephen Janis

Transcript

Taya Graham:  Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to our show, The Inequality Watch. You may know me and my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, for our police accountability reporting. Well, this show is similar except, in this case, our job is to hold billionaires and extremely wealthy individuals accountable. And to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of a single billionaire. Instead, we examine the system that makes the extreme hoarding of wealth possible.

And today we’re going to unpack a topic that is extremely unpopular with most billionaires. It also might not seem like the most likely topic for a story about inequality, but I think when we explain it and talk to our guests, you might find there’s more to it than meets the eye.

I’m talking about the future of renewable energy and how it could impact your life. And now wait, before you say, Taya, you’re crazy, I mean, Elon Musk builds electric cars. How do you know billionaires don’t like green energy? Well, just give me a second. I think the way we approach this topic will not be what you expect. That’s because there’s a huge invisible media ecosystem that has been constructed around the idea that green energy is somehow too expensive or useless — Or, even worse yet, a conspiracy to fill liberal elite politico coffers.

But what if that’s not true? What if it’s not just fault, but patently, vehemently untrue? If you believe the right-wing media ecosystem, we’re apparently destined to spend tens of thousands of dollars to purchase and then tens of thousands to maintain gas-guzzling cars for the rest of our lives. We’ll inevitably be forced to pay higher and higher utility bills to pay for gas, oil, and coal that will enrich the wealthiest who continue to extract it.

But I just want you to consider an alternative. What if, in fact, the opposite is true? What if renewables could finally and for once, and I really mean for once, actually benefit the working people of this country? What if solar, for example, keeps getting cheaper and batteries more efficient so that using this energy could be as cheap and as simple as pointing a mirror at the sun? And what about the so-called carbon billionaires who are enriched by burning planet-heating gases while they jet set in private planes burning even more carbon while I’m busy using recycled grocery bags? What if they’ve constructed an elaborate plan to make you believe that electricity from the sun is somehow more costly and less healthy?

And what if that’s all wrong? What if someday your utility bill could be halved? What if you could buy an electric car for one-fifth the price of a gas powered one and leave gas stations and high gas prices behind forever? And what if your life could actually be made easier by a new technology?

Well, there is a massive media ecosystem that wants you to think you are destined to be immersed in carbon. They want you to believe that progress is impossible, and ultimately, that innovation is simply something to be feared, not embraced.

But today we are here to discuss an alternative way of looking at renewable energy, and we’ll be talking to someone who knows more about its potential than anyone. His name is Bill McKibben, and he’s one of the foremost advocates for renewable energy and a leader in the fight against global climate change. Bill McKibben is the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate injustice. His 1989 book, The End of Nature, is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and it’s appeared in over 24 languages. He helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent — Including Antarctica — For climate change. And he even played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects like the Keystone XL and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anticorporate campaign in history. He’s even won the Gandhi Peace Prize. I cannot wait to speak to this amazing champion.

But before we turn to him, I want to turn to my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, and discuss how issues like renewables fit into the idea of inequality and why it’s important to view it through that lens.

Stephen Janis:  Well, Taya, one of the reasons we wanted to do this show was because I feel like we are living in the reality of the extractive economy that we’ve talked about. And that reality is psychological. Because we have to be extracted from. They’re not going to give us good products or good ways or improve our lives, they’re going to find ways to extract wealth from us.

And this issue, to me, is a perfect example because we’ve been living in this big carbon ecosystem of information, and the dividend has been cynicism. The main priority of the people who fill our minds with the impossibility are the people who really live off the idea of cynicism: nothing works, everything’s broken, technology can’t fix anything, and everything is dystopian.

But I thought when I was thinking about our own lives and how much money we spend to gas up a car, this actually has a possibility to transform the lives of the working class. And that’s why we have to take it seriously and look at it from a different perspective than the way the carbon billionaires want us to. Because the carbon billionaires are spending tons of money to make us think this is impossible.

And I think what we need really, truly is a revolution of competency here. A revolution of idea, a revolution that there are ways to improve our lives despite what the carbon billionaires want us to believe, that nothing works and we all hate each other. And so this, I think, is a perfect topic and a perfect example of that.

Taya Graham:  Stephen, that’s an excellent point.

Stephen Janis:  Thank you.

Taya Graham:  It really is. I feel like the entire idea of renewable energy has been sold as a cost rather than a benefit, and that seems intentional to me. It seems like there is an arc to this technology that could literally wipe carbon billionaires off the face of the earth in the sense that the carbon economy is simply less efficient, more costly, and, ultimately, less plentiful.

But before we get to our guest, let me just give one example. And to do so, I’m going to turn to politics in the UK. There, the leader of a reform party, a right-wing populous group that has been gaining power called renewable energy a massive con and pledged to enact laws that would tax solar power and ban — Yes, you heard it right — Ban industrial-scale battery power. But there was an issue: a fellow member of the party in Parliament had just installed solar panels on his farm and had touted it on a website as, you guessed it, a great business decision. The MP Robert Lowe, as The Guardian UK reported, was ecstatic about his investment, touting it as the best way to get low-cost energy. I mean, I don’t know if the word hypocrisy is strong enough to describe this.

Stephen Janis:  Seems inadequate.

Taya Graham:  Yeah, it really does.

But I do think it’s a great place to introduce and bring in our guest, Bill McKibbon. Mr. McKibbon, thank you so much for joining us.

Bill McKibben:  What a pleasure to be with you.

Taya Graham:  So first, please just help me understand how a party could, on one hand, advocate against renewable energy and, on the other, use it profitably? What is motivating what I think could be called hypocrisy?

Bill McKibben:  Well, we’re in a very paradoxical moment here. For a long time, what we would call renewable energy, energy from the sun and the wind, was more expensive. That’s why we talked about it as alternative energy. And we have talked about carbon taxes to make it a more viable alternative and things. Within the last decade, the price of energy from the sun and the wind and the batteries to store that when the sun goes down or the wind drops, the price of that’s been cut about 90%. The engineers have really done their job.

Sometime three or four years ago, we passed some invisible line where it became the cheapest power on the planet. We live on an earth where the cheapest way to make energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. So that’s great news. That’s one of the few pieces of good news that’s happening in a world where there’s a lot of bad news happening.

Great news, unless you own an oil well or a coal mine or something else that we wouldn’t need anymore, or if your political party has been tied up with that industry in the deepest ways. Those companies, those people are panicked. That’s why, for instance, in America, the fossil fuel industry spent $455 million on the last election cycle. They know that they have no choice but to try and slow down the transition to renewable energy.

Stephen Janis:  So I mean, how do they always seem to be able to set the debate, though? It always seems like carbon billionaires and carbon interests seem to be able to cast aside renewable energy ideas, and they always seem to be in control of the dialogue. Is that true? And how do they do that, do you think?

Bill McKibben:  Well, I mean, they’re in control of the dialogue the way they are in control of many dialogues in our political life by virtue of having a lot of money and owning TV networks and on and on and on. But in this case, they have to work very hard because renewable energy, especially solar energy, is so cheap and so many people have begun to use it and understand its appeal, that it’s getting harder and harder to stuff this genie back into the bottle.

Look at a place like Germany where last year, 2024, a million and a half Germans put solar panels on the balconies of their apartments. This balcony solar is suddenly a huge movement there. You can just go to IKEA and buy one and stick it up. You can’t do that in this country because our building codes and things make it hard, and the fossil fuel industry will do everything they can to make sure that continues to be the case.

Taya Graham:  Well, I have to ask, given what you’ve told us, what do you think are the biggest obstacles to taking advantage of these technological advances? What is getting in our way and what can we do about it?

Bill McKibben:  Well, look, there are two issues here. One is vested interest and the other is inertia. And these are always factors in human affairs, and they’re factors here. Vested interest now works by creating more inertia. So the fossil fuel industry won the election in 2024. They elected Donald Trump. And Donald Trump in his first day in office declared an energy emergency, saying that we needed to produce more energy, and then he defined energy to exclude wind and solar power; only fossil fuels and nuclear need apply. He’s banned new offshore wind and may, in fact, be trying to interfere with the construction of things that had already been approved and are underway.

So this is hard work to build out a new energy system, but by no means impossible. And for the last two years around the world, it’s been happening in remarkable fashion. Beginning in about the middle of 2023, human beings were putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels every day. A gigawatt’s the rough equivalent of a nuclear or a coal-fired power plant. So every day on their roofs, in solar farms, whatever, people were building another nuclear reactor, it’s just that they were doing it by pointing a sheet of black glass at the great nuclear reactor 93 million miles up in the sky.

Stephen Janis:  Speaking of around the world, I was just thinking, because I’ve been reading a lot, it seems like we’re conceding this renewable future to China a bit. Do you feel like there’s a threat that, if we don’t reverse course, that China could just completely overwhelm us with their advantages in this technology?

Bill McKibben:  I don’t think there’s a threat, I think there’s a guarantee. And in fact, I think in the course of doing this, we’re ceding global leadership overall to the Chinese. This is the most important economic transition that will happen this century. And China’s been in the lead, they’ve been much more proactive here, but the US was starting to catch up with the IRA that Biden passed, and we were beginning to build our own battery factories and so on. And that’s now all called into question by the Trump ascension. I think it will probably rank as one of the stupidest economic decisions in American history.

Taya Graham:  Well, I have to follow that up with this question: Do you think that the current administration can effectively shut down this kind of progress in solar and renewables? And how much do you think the recent freeze in spending can just derail the progress, basically?

Bill McKibben:  So they can’t shut it down, but they can slow it down, and they will. And in this case, time is everything. And that’s because one of, well, the biggest reason that we want to be making this shift is because the climate future of the planet is on the line. And, as you are aware, that climate future is playing out very quickly. Look, the world’s climate scientists have told us we need to cut emissions in half by 2030 to have some chance of staying on that Paris pathway. 2030, by my watch, is four years and 10 months away now. That doesn’t give us a huge amount of time. So the fact that Trump is slowing down this transition is really important.

Now, I think the deepest problem may be that he’s attempting to slow it down, not only in the US, but around the world. He’s been telling other countries that if they don’t buy a lot of us liquified natural gas, then he’ll hit them with tariffs and things like that. So he’s doing his best to impose his own weird views about climate and energy onto the entire planet.

Again, he can’t stop it. The economics of this are so powerful that eventually we’ll run the world on sun and wind — But eventually doesn’t help much with the climate, not when we’re watching the North and the South Poles melt in real time.

Taya Graham:  I just want to follow up with a clip from Russell Vought who was just confirmed the lead to the Office of Management and Budget. And he was giving a speech at the Center for Renewing America. And I just wanted Mr. McKibbon to hear this really quick first and then to have him respond. So let’s just play that clip for him.

[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

Russell Vought:  We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they’re increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

Taya Graham:  So the reason why I played this for you is because I wanted to know what your concerns would be with the EPA being kneecapped, if not utterly defunded. And just so people understand what the actions are that the EPA takes and the areas that the EPA regulates that protect the public that people just might not be aware of.

Bill McKibben:  I’m old enough to have been in this country before the EPA, and before the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. They all came together in the early 1970s right on the heels of the first Earth Day and the huge outpouring of Americans into the street. And in those days, you could not breathe the air in many of the cities in this nation without doing yourself damage. And when I was a boy, you couldn’t swim in an awful lot of the rivers, streams, lakes of America. We’ve made extraordinary environmental progress on those things, and we’d begun, finally, to make some halting progress around this even deeper environmental issue of climate change.

But what Mr. Vought is talking about is that that comes at some cost to the people who are his backers: the people in the fossil fuel industry. He doesn’t want rules about clean air, clean water, or a working climate. He wants to… Well, he wants short-term profit for his friends at the long-term expense of everybody in this country and in this world.

Stephen Janis:  It’s interesting because you bring up a point that I think I hear a lot in the right-wing ecosystem, media ecosystems, that, somehow, clean energy is unfairly subsidized by the government. But isn’t it true that carbon interests are subsidized to a great extent, if not more than green energy?

Bill McKibben:  Yes. The fossil fuel subsidy is, of course, enormous and has been for a century or more. That’s why we have things like the oil depletion allowance and on and on and on. But of course, the biggest subsidy to the fossil fuel industry by far is that we just allow them to use our atmosphere as an open sewer for free. There’s no cost to them to pour carbon into the air and heat up the planet. And when we try to impose some cost — New York state just passed a law that’s going to send a bill to big oil for the climate damages — They’re immediately opposed by the industry, and in this case, with the Trump administration on their side, they’ll do everything they can to make it impossible to ever recover any of those costs. So the subsidy to fossil energy dwarfs that to renewable energy by a factor of orders of magnitude.

Stephen Janis:  That’s really interesting because sometimes people try to, like there was a change in the calculation of the cost of each ton of carbon. That’s really a really important kind of way to measure the true impact. You make a really good point, and that is quite expensive when you take a ton of carbon and figure out what the real cost is to society and to our lives. It’s very high.

Bill McKibben:  Well, that cost gets higher, too, all the time. And sometimes people, it’s paid in very concentrated ways — Your neighborhood in Los Angeles burns down and every house goes with it. And sometimes the cost is more spread out. At the moment, anybody who has an insurance policy, a homeowner’s insurance policy in this country, is watching it skyrocket in price far faster than inflation. And that’s because the insurance companies have this huge climate risk to deal with, and they really can’t. That’s why, in many places, governments are becoming insurers of last resort for millions and millions of Americans.

Taya Graham:  I was curious about, since I asked you to rate something within the current Trump administration, I thought it would be fair to ask you to rate the Inflation Reduction Act. I know the current administration is trying to dismantle it, but I wanted your thoughts on this. Do you think it’s been effective?

Bill McKibben:  Yeah, it’s by no means a perfect piece of legislation. It had to pass the Senate by a single vote, Joe Manchin’s vote, and he took more money from the fossil fuel industry than anybody else, so he made sure that it was [loaded] with presence for that industry. So there’s a lot of stupid money in it, but that was the price for getting the wise money, the money that was backing sun and wind and battery development in this country, the money that was helping us begin to close that gap that you described with China. And it’s a grave mistake to derail it now, literally an attempt to send us backwards in our energy policy at a moment when the rest of the world is trying to go in the other direction.

Stephen Janis:  Speaking of that, I wanted to ask you a question from a personal… Our car was stolen and we were trying to get an electric car, but we couldn’t afford it. Why are there electric cars in China that supposedly run about 10,000 bucks, and you want to buy an electric car in this country and it’s like 50, 60, 70, whatever. I know it’s getting cheaper, but why are they cheaper elsewhere and not here?

Bill McKibben:  Well, I mean, first of all, they should not, unless you want a big luxury vehicle, shouldn’t be anything like that expensive even here. I drive a Kia Niro EV, and I’ve done it for years, and you can get it for less than the cost of the average new car in America. [Crosstalk] Chinese are developing beautiful, beautiful EVs, and we’ll never get them because of tariffs. We’re going to try and protect our auto industry — Which would be a reasonable thing to do if in the few years that we were protecting that auto industry, it was being transformed to compete with the Chinese. But Trump has decided he’s going to get rid of the EV mandate. I mean, in his view, in his world, I guess will be the last little island of the internal combustion engines, while everybody else around the world gets to use EVs.

And the thing about EVs is not just that they’re cleaner, it’s that they’re better in every way. They’re much cheaper to operate. They have no moving parts, hardly. I’ve had mine seven years and I haven’t been to the mechanic for anything on it yet. It’s the ultimate travesty of protectionism closing ourselves off from the future.

Taya Graham:  That’s such a shame. And because I feel like people are worried that in the auto industry, that bringing in renewables would somehow harm the autoworkers, it’s just asking them to build a different car. It’s not trying to take away jobs, which I think is really important for people to understand.

Stephen Janis:  Absolutely.

Taya Graham:  But I was curious, there’s a bunch of different types of renewables, I was wondering maybe you could help us understand what advantages solar might have versus what the advantages of wind [are]. Just maybe help us understand the different types of renewables we have.

Bill McKibben:  Solar and wind are beautifully complimentary, and in many ways. The higher in latitude you go, the less sun you get, but the more wind you tend to get. Sun is there during the midday and afternoon, and then when the sun begins to go down, it’s when the wind usually comes up. If you have a period without sun for a few days, it’s usually because a storm system of some kind that’s going through, and that makes wind all the more useful. So these two things work in complement powerfully with each other. And the third element that you need to really make it all work is a good system of batteries to store that power.

And when you get these things going simultaneously, you get enormous change. California last year passed some kind of tipping point. They’d put up enough solar panels and things that, for most of the year, most days, California was able to supply a hundred percent of its electricity renewably for long stretches of the day. And at night when the sun went down, batteries were the biggest source of supply to the grid. That’s a pretty remarkable thing because those batteries didn’t even exist on that grid two or three years ago. This change is happening fast. It’s happening fastest, as we’ve said in China, which has really turned itself into an electro state, if you will, as opposed to a petro state, in very short order. But as I say, California is a pretty good example. And now Texas is putting up more clean energy faster than any other place in the country.

Stephen Janis:  That’s ironic.

Taya Graham:  Yeah. Well, I was wondering, there’s a technology that makes the news pretty often, but I don’t know if it’s feasible, I think it’s called carbon capture or carbon sequestration. I know that the Biden administration had set aside money to bolster it, but does this technology make sense?

Bill McKibben:  These were the gifts to the fossil fuel industry that I was talking about in the IRA. It comes in several forms, but the one I think you’re referring to is that you put a filter on top, essentially, of a coal-fired power plant or a gas-fired power plant and catch the carbon as it comes out of the exhaust stream and then pump it underground someplace and lock it away. You can do it, you just can’t do it economically. Look, it’s already cheaper just to build a solar farm than to have a coal-fired power plant. And once you’ve doubled the price of that coal-fired power plant by putting an elaborate chemistry set on top of it, the only way to do this is with endless ongoing gifts from the taxpayer, which is what the fossil fuel industry would like, but doesn’t make any kind of economic sense.

Stephen Janis:  You just said something very profound there. You said that it’s cheaper to build a solar field than it is to build a coal plant, but why is this not getting through? I feel like the American public doesn’t really know this. Why is this being hidden from us, in many ways?

Bill McKibben:  In one way, it is getting through. Something like 80% of all the new electric generation that went up last year in this country was sun and wind. So utilities and things sort of understand it. But yes, you’re right. And I think the reason is that we still think of this stuff as alternative energy. I think in our minds, it lives like we think of it as the Whole Foods of energy; it’s nice, but it’s pricey. In fact, it’s the Costco of energy; It’s cheap, it’s available in bulk on the shelf, and it’s what we should be turning to. And the fact that utilities and things are increasingly trying to build solar power and whatever is precisely the reason that the fossil fuel industry is fighting so hard to elect people like Trump.

When I told you what California was doing last year, what change it had seen, as a result, California, in 2024, used 25% less natural gas to produce electricity than they had in 2023. That’s a huge change in the fifth largest economy on earth in one year. It shows you what can happen when you deploy this technology. And that’s the reason that the fossil fuel industry is completely freaked out.

Stephen Janis:  By the way, as a person who has tried to shop at Whole Foods, I immediately understood your comparison.

Taya Graham:  I thought that was great. It’s not the Whole Foods of energy, It’s actually the Costco, that’s so great.

Stephen Janis:  There is that perception though, it’s a bunch of latte-drinking liberals who think that this is what we’re trying to get across —

Taya Graham:  Chai latte, matcha latte.

Stephen Janis:  That’s why it’s so important. It’s cheaper! It’s cheaper. Sorry, go ahead —

Taya Graham:  That’s such a great point. We actually try to look for good policy everywhere we go. And we attended a discussion at the Cato Institute, and this is where their energy fellow described how Trump would use a so-called energy emergency to turn over more federal lands to drilling. So I’m just going to play a little bit of sound for you, and let’s take a listen.

[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]

Speaker 1:  What does work in your mix?

Speaker 2:  So I call it the Joe Dirt approach. Have you seen that scene in the movie where he’s talking to the guy selling fireworks, and the guy has preferences over very specific fireworks, like snakes and sparklers. The quote from Joe Dirt is, “It’s not about you, it’s about the consumer.” So I think, fundamentally, I’m resource neutral. I will support whatever consumers want and are willing to pay for. I think where that comes out in policy is you would remove artificial constraints. So right now we have a lot of artificial constraints from the Environmental Protection Agency on certain power plants, phasing out coal-fire power, for example. So I would hope, and I would encourage a resource-neutral approach, just we will take energy from anybody that wants to supply it and anybody that wants to buy it.

[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]

Stephen Janis:  Mr. McKibben, I still feel like he’s not really resource neutral. Do you trust the Cato Institute on this issue, or what do you think he’s trying to say there?

Bill McKibben:  Well, I mean, I think he’s… The problem, of course, is that we have one set of energy sources [which] causes this extraordinary crisis, the climate crisis. And so it really doesn’t make sense to be trying to increase the amount of oil or coal or whatever that we’re using. That’s why the world has been engaged for a couple of decades now in an effort, a theoretical effort, with some success in some places, to stop using these things. And the right wing in this country has always been triggered by this and has always done what they can to try and bolster the fossil fuel industry. That was always stupid economically just because the costs of climate change were so hot. But now it’s stupid economically because the cost of renewable energy is so low.

Stephen Janis:  Yeah, I mean, the right always purports to be more cost effective, cost conscious or whatever. I just don’t understand it. I would think they’d be greedy or something, or they’d want to make more money. Is it just that renewables ultimately won’t be profitable for them? Or what’s the…

Bill McKibben:  If you think about it, you’re catching an important point there. For all of us who have to use them, renewable energy is cheap, but it’s very hard to make a fortune in renewable energy precisely because it’s cheap. So the CEO of Exxon last year said his company would never be investing in renewable energy because, as he put it, it can’t return above average profits for investors. What he means is you can’t hoard it. You can’t hold it in reserve. The sun delivers energy for free every morning when it rises above the horizon. And for people, that’s great news, and for big oil, that’s terrible news because they’ve made their fortune for a century by, well, by selling you a little bit at a time. You have to write ’em a check every month.

Taya Graham:  Stephen and I came up with this theory about billionaires, that there’s conflict billionaires, for example, the ones who make money from social media; there’s capture billionaires with private equity; and then there’s carbon billionaires. So I was just wondering, we have this massive misinformation ecosystem that seems very much aligned against renewables. Do you have any idea who is funding this antirenewable coalition? Is our theory about the carbon class correct, I guess?

Bill McKibben:  Yes. The biggest oil and gas barons in America are the Koch brothers, they control more refining and pipeline capacity than anybody else. And they’ve also, of course, been the biggest bankrollers of the Republican right for 30 years. They built that series of institutions that, in the end, were the thing that elected Donald Trump and brought the Supreme Court to where it is and so on and so forth. So the linkages like that could not be tighter.

Stephen Janis:  So last question, ending on a positive note. Do you foresee a future where we could run our entire economy on renewables? I’m just going to put it out there and see if you think it’s actually feasible or possible.

Taya Graham:  And if so, how much money could it save us?

Bill McKibben:  People have done this work, a big study at Oxford two years ago, looking at just this question. It concluded that yes, it’s entirely possible to run the whole world on sun, wind, and batteries, and hydropower, and that if you did it, you’d save the world tens of trillions of dollars. You save more the faster you do it simply because you don’t have to keep paying for more fuel. Yes, you have to pay the upfront cost of putting up the solar panel, but after that, there’s no fuel cost. And that changes the equation in huge ways.

We want to get this across. That’s why later this year in September on the fall equinox, we’ll be having this big day of action. We’re going to call it Sun Day, and we’re going to make the effort to really drive home to people what a remarkable place we’re in right now, what a remarkable chance we have to reorient human societies. And in a world where everything seems to be going wrong, this is the thing that’s going right.

Stephen Janis:  Well, just [so you] know, we did buy a used hybrid, which I really love, but I love electric cars. I do want to get an electric car —

Bill McKibben:  Well, make sure you get an e-bike. That’s an even cooler piece of [crosstalk] technology. Oh, really?

Stephen Janis:  Oh, really? OK. Got it. Got it. But thank you so much.

Bill McKibben:  All right, thank you, guys.

Taya Graham:  Thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate you, and we got you out in exactly 40 minutes, so —

Bill McKibben:  [Crosstalk].

Taya Graham:  OK. Thank you so much. It was such a wonderful opportunity to meet you. Thank you so much.

Bill McKibben:  Take care.

Stephen Janis:  Take care.

Taya Graham:  OK, bye.

Wow. I have to thank our incredible guest, Bill McKibben, for his insights and thoughtful analysis. I think this type of discussion is so important to providing you, our viewers, with the facts regarding critical issues that will affect not only your future, but also your loved ones, your children, and your grandchildren. And I know the internet is replete with conspiracy theories about climate change and the technologies that we just discussed, but let’s remember, the real conspiracy might be to convince you that all of this possible progress is somehow bad. That the possibility of cheap, clean energy is what? It’s a plot. It’s a myth.

Stephen, what are your thoughts before I try to grab the wheel?

Stephen Janis:  I want to say emphatically that you’re being fooled in the worst possible way, all of us. And we’re literally being pushed towards our own demise by this. You want to talk about a real conspiracy, not QAnon or something, let’s talk about the reason that we don’t think that we could embrace this renewable future. And it’s for the working class. It’s for people like us that can barely afford to pay our bills. We’ll suddenly be saving thousands of dollars a year. It’s just an amazing construct that they’ve done on the psychology of it to make it think that we’re antiprogress, in America of all things. We’re antiprogress. We’re anti-the future.

Taya Graham:  We’re supposed to be the innovators. We’re the ones who have had the best science. Didn’t we get to the moon first?

Stephen Janis:  [Crosstalk]

Taya Graham:  We have scientists, innovation. I mean, in some ways we’ve been the envy of the world and we’ve attracted some of the most powerful scientists and intellectuals from around the globe to our country because we’re known for our innovation. This is really —

Stephen Janis:  We embrace stuff like AI, which, God knows where that’s going to go, and other things. But this is pretty simple. This is pretty simple. Something that could actually affect people’s lives directly. We spend $2,500 a year on gas, $3,000 to $4,000 a year on utilities. And here’s one of the leading, most respected people in this field saying, you know what? You’re not going to pay almost anything by the time it’s all installed. And yet we believe it’s impossible. And it’s really strange for me. But I’m glad we had him on to actually clarify that and maybe push through the noise a little bit.

Taya Graham:  Yeah, me too. Me too. I just wanted to add just a few closing thoughts about our discussion and why it’s important. And I think this conversation literally could not be more important, if only because the implications of being wrong are literally an existential crisis, and the consequences of being right could be liberating.

So to start this rant off, I want to begin with something that seems perhaps unrelated, but is a big part of the consequences for our environment and the people like us that will have to live with it. And hopefully in doing so, I’ll be able to unpack some of the consequences of how these carbon billionaires don’t just hurt our wallets, but actually put our lives in harm’s way. I want to talk about fire trucks.

Stephen Janis:  Fire trucks?

Taya Graham:  Yes. OK. I know that sounds crazy, but these massive red engines, they scream towards a fire to save lives. Isn’t this image iconic? Who hasn’t watched in awe as a ladder truck careens down a city street to subdue the flames of a possibly deadly blaze? But now, thanks to our ever increasingly extractive economy, they’re also a symbol of how extreme economic inequality affects our lives in unseen ways. And let me try to explain how.

Now, we all remember the horrific fires in Los Angeles several weeks ago. The historic blazes took out thousands of homes, leaving people’s lives in ruin and billions of dollars in damage. But the catastrophe was not immune from politics. President Trump accused California of holding back water from other parts of the state, which was untrue. And Los Angeles officials were also blasted for not being prepared, which is a more complicated conversation.

However, one aspect of fire that got less attention was the fire trucks. That is, until The New York Times wrote this article that is not only shocking, but actually shows how deep extractive capitalism has wreaked havoc on our lives.

So this story recounts how additional firefighters who were called in to help with the blaze were sidelined because of lack of fire trucks. So the story notes that the inability to mobilize was due to the sorry state of the fleet, which was aging, in disrepair, and new replacements had not been ordered, and the ones that had been ordered had yet to be delivered.

So this, of course, all begs the question why? Why is the mighty US economy not able to deliver lifesaving equipment in a timely manner? Well, the failure is, in part, thanks to private equity, the Wall Street firms who buy out healthy companies and then raid their coffers to enrich themselves. Well, during the aughts, a private equity firm named American Industrial Partners started buying up small fire truck manufacturers. They argued that the consolidation would lead to more efficiency — And, of course, higher profits. But those efficiencies never materialized. And as a result, deliveries of fire trucks slowed down significantly, from 18 months, to now to several years.

And this slow down left fire departments across the country without vital lifesaving equipment, a deficit that Edward Kelly, who’s the general president of the International Association of Firefighters, he said it was all due to extractive capitalism run amuck. Here’s how he capitalized it.

How can anyone place profits over first responders and their lifesaving equipment? To me, this is a failure of market capitalism, and it’s indicative of what we’re seeing with our renewable energy and our country’s failure to take advantage of it. They have literally captured the market and set the terms of the debate. Set the most widely beneficial and efficient solution buried underneath an avalanche of self-serving narratives. Greedy, private equity firms, hedge fund managers, and Wall Street investment banks have not just warped how our economy works, but also how we even perceive the challenges we face. They have flooded the zone, to borrow a phrase, with nihilistic and antagonistic and divisive sentiments that the future is bleak, hope is naive, and the only worthy and just outcome is their rapid accumulation of wealth.

And so with an alternative system of clean, affordable energy that’s achievable, that promises to save us money and our environment, consider the fire truck — Or as author David Foster Wallace said, consider the lobster. Consider that we are being slowly boiled by the uber rich. They distract us with immersive social media and misinformation so they can profit from it. They distort the present to make serious problems appear unsolvable to ensure the future so their profits will grow exponentially. They persuade us not to trust each other or even ourselves. And they literally convinced us to lack empathy for our fellow workers and then profit from our communal doomerism.

And like with the example with the fire trucks, they value, above all else, profits, not people, not the world in which we all live, not the safety of firefighters or the safety of the communities and the future that we’re all responsible for. None of it matters to them and none of it ever will. It’s up to us, we the people, to determine our future. Let’s fight for it together because it really does belong to us.

Well, I have to thank my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, for joining me on this new venture of The Inequality Watch. I really appreciate it.

Stephen Janis:  I’m very happy to be here, Taya. Thank you for having me.

Taya Graham:  Well, it’s a pleasure. It. I’m hoping that in the future we’ll be able to bring on more guests and we are going to bring on people that might surprise you. So please keep watching, because we are looking for good policy and sane policy wherever we can find it. My name is Taya Graham, and thank you so much for watching The Inequality Watch.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories, and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

In his 2009 paper Worst-Case Scenarios, Harvard professor Cass Sunstein coined the term the “Goldstein Effect” to describe a government’s “ability to intensify public concern, by giving a definite face to the adversary, specifying a human source of the underlying threat.” His basic argument was that in the instance of the “War on Terror,” the US government had Osama Bin Laden and his steady stream video messages. Selling the Iraq War, the Bush administration, obviously, had Saddam Hussein. The term came from Emmanuel Goldstein, the mysterious Party villain and counter-revolutionary in Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Bad Guys, in other words, need a human face for the public to care about a threat. And climate change, unlike the war on terror or other real wars, by its very nature, has no singular villain, nothing the public can put a literal face to. And this, Sunstein argued, is one of the primary barriers to get the public to truly care, on a visceral and real level, about pending climate chaos. 

The reality, of course, is climate change does have villains, with an “s.” The line of demarcation isn’t neat and clean, but, broadly speaking, it’s fossil fuel executives, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and media propagandists, and the private equity and hedge funds that fund them. And there are faces of the victims as well: the climate refugees in the Global South who are already suffering mass displacement whose numbers are expected to reach as high as 1.2 billion by 2050, those subject to increasing flash floods, fires, hurricanes, and tsunamis. A demographic that––despite what Serious Centrist Pundits Insist––increasingly includes Americans.

That climate change directly causes more frequent and more severe wildfires is no longer in dispute. A 2022 United Nations report concluded that the risk of wildfires around the world will surge as climate change intensifies. “The heating of the planet is turning landscapes into tinderboxes, while more extreme weather means stronger, hotter, drier winds to fan the flames,” states the report, produced by 50 researchers from six continents.

Media coverage of these sensationalist events almost never connects the dots. A survey of Nightly News coverage from the first full day of the LA fires showed that, in 16 minutes of coverage ABC, NBC, and CBS nightly news broadcasts did not mention climate change once. In their Wednesday morning coverage of the LA fires, neither the New York Times Daily podcast nor the New York Times Morning Newsletter addressed climate change at all. The Daily had a single throwaway mention but didn’t actually talk about it, and the newsletter just ignored it. One can see dozens and dozens of examples of lurid coverage of the LA Wildfires—and other extreme weather events—in US media that doesn’t mention climate change at all or relegates it to a throwaway line. 

Climate change-fueled extreme weather disasters overseas are typically ignored or downplayed altogether. A survey of two weeks of coverage from April 15 to 29—when the 2022 heat wave in India and Pakistan was at its most acute and newsworthy,ultimately killing almost 100—showed that it was ignored entirely by CNN’s primetime news programs: The Lead with Jake Tapper, The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, and Anderson Cooper 360°. The heat wave was also entirely ignored by NBC News (Today, Nightly News with Lester Holt, and Meet the Press), CBS News (Evening News, Sunday Morning News, and CBS Mornings), and ABC News (Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week With George Stephanopoulos). By way of comparison, a survey of the same news programs from the week of May 30 to June 6 showed almost 2.5 hours of coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s Jubilee, a holiday in the United Kingdom celebrating the 70th anniversary of her coronation.

To be clear, many of these outlets do sometimes have separate articles about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. But they’re typically relegated to “science” stories isolated from the original, far more impactful reporting of the human tragedy unfolding before our eyes. They read more like liberal box-checking than a fundamental feature of how these stories are covered. Severe weather events, when they’re reported on at all (typically because they’re within the US) are indexed in the “Oh, Dearism” genre of reporting, where politics and human decision making are stripped away entirely, and all one can do is look on helplessly and say “Oh, Dear.” There’s no villain, victims but no victimizer, no political actors or politics at all, and—above all—no explicit or implicit call to action. Just agency-free human suffering that may sorta kinda be linked to erratic weather patterns, with no sense there’s anything the viewer or reader can actually do about it. It’s just vaguely sad and everyone is expected to chip in a few dollars to GoFundMe, gawk at the suffering, and move on to the next extreme weather event right around the corner in a matter of weeks. Nothing is ever part of a pattern, a broader human-driven context. The headlines should, at least occasionally, read “Human-Caused Climate Change Fuels Another Disaster With LA Fires, not just a stream of “LA Fires Grip Nation.” 

If one accepts the basic tenets of the scientific consensus around climate change, that we more or less have a decade to radically alter course, then why wouldn’t our media outlets be more clear about the causes of the suffering, and what forces would have to be curtailed to practically do so? In March 2023 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released another damning report, authored by 93 experts, which found that the Earth’s average temperatures are likely on pace to rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels by the first half of the 2030s. This shift would surpass a climate threshold, they argue, which will unleash unprecedented flooding, heat waves, megastorms, and famines that could very well threaten all of human civilization. The only chance we have to avoid this extremely plausible scenario is for rich nations to immediately slash their greenhouse emissions and do so right away. 

Newsrooms are still neatly delineating the human story and the “science” story, when these are one and the same. Without centering the scientific explanation of the why—which is to say, the cause of the human suffering on display—journalism is just emotional pornography. We can’t cover school shootings without centering lawmakers who defend and take large sums of cash from gunmakers. We can’t cover mass death in Gaza without centering Israel and the White House’s central role in causing it. And we can’t cover extreme weather events without centering climate change, and the fossil execs and their media and political organs that fuel it. To do so is to take politics out of what is inherently political, to only show a small slice of a much larger and richer story. If US media won’t permit its viewers to put a face to the villain of extreme weather––and in the wake of media anger over Luigi Magione’s online popularity, this will almost certainly never happen––they can at least permit its viewers to put a face to its victims. On a negligent, massive scale, they are still failing to do so.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Fish and wildfires don’t tend to go together. But as a series of blazes driven by 100-mile-per-hour winds burned throughout Los Angeles, the country’s incoming president centered blame on a three-inch fish found in a completely different part of the state.

In a post on incoming President Donald Trump’s Truth Social, he blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom for not signing an agreement “that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way” all to “protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt.” 

The post was just one of many flooding social media with misinformation and falsehoods assigning blame for the unprecedented fires that have destroyed thousands of homes, forced over 130,000 people to evacuate and killed at least five people. The Palisades, Eaton and Hurst fires are already the most destructive in the history of the nation’s second-largest city, with all three continuing to burn with little if any containment so far and another fire breaking out in the city Thursday evening. Nowhere to be found in Trump’s message was the impact of climate change or how communities have been built in areas prone to fire. Just false mentions of the little-known endangered fish causing fire hydrants to run dry. 

The finger-pointing surrounding the LA fires offer a glimpse of the way political polarization and propaganda can increase the confusion that engulfs natural disasters. And the information ecosystem is expected to be further tested during climate-fueled disasters as social media platforms like Facebook roll back fact-checking programs.

“Several of the statements made by incoming president-elect Trump, as well as Elon Musk, were riddled with both misinformation about our water management system as well as about the fires,” said Ashley Overhouse, a water policy advisor for Defenders of Wildlife whose work has focused on protecting the Delta smelt. “That kind of misinformation is not only incredibly inappropriate here, it’s also dangerous.” 

The real reasons places like California are seeing more natural disasters, from wildfires to droughts to floods, are often swamped in the sea of misinformation. 

How Climate Change Fuels Bigger and Hotter Wildfires

Climate change has driven “weather whiplash” throughout California in recent years, with dramatic shifts in the state’s precipitation, temperature and wind patterns.

A severe drought gripped the region from 2020 to 2022. The next two years returned to the norm, with 2023 seeing 10 inches more rain than the average year. But recent months have brought back record-dry conditions for much of Southern California, drying out the vegetation that boomed during the moist years and leaving the landscape primed to burn.

Then the region’s Santa Ana winds, driven by extreme differences between high pressure in the Great Basin, to the east, and low pressure off the California coast, blasted at over 100 miles per hour. Santa Ana winds have been increasingly blowing in December and January, rather than the fall.

Such conditions have helped to extend California’s fire season year round, making major wildfires possible even in January.

“It’s not so much a problem that a fire happens, which is a very common occurrence in our ecosystems, but it might spread and ignite and grow much more quickly due to climate change,” said Sara McTarnaghan, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute who studies climate resilience and how communities are impacted by natural disasters. “So for many issues we have this environmental national phenomenon that exists, but it’s made more severe in some way.”

And those natural occurrences become disasters when cities and communities have been built in areas prone for them, she said.

“In a lot of places across the country, we have up until now taken insufficient action to adapt to climate change,” McTarnaghan said.

Mayor Karen Bass warned that Los Angeles could face more of these natural disasters. “Due to climate change, we are going to continue to see very unusual weather events,” she said during a Wednesday press conference in response to the fires. 

Misinformation and disinformation can add even more volatility to climate-driven disasters.

Tim Casperson, the host of the Hotshot Wake Up Podcast, which covers wildfire policy and response, dedicated a large section of his show on Thursday to debunking false claims about the LA fires. Casperson, who worked as a wildland firefighter, referenced people “making quite ridiculous claims about what’s happening out there.”

“There is a low bar when it comes to folks understanding wildfire,” he lamented.

Competing Claims About Fire Department Budget

Bass has been criticized for traveling to Ghana as the high winds mounted. She returned to Los Angeles on Wednesday to growing outrage over her handling of the fires. But some of the criticisms lodged against the mayor on social media were dubious if not outright false. 

Social media lit up with posts accusing Bass of cutting the budget for the Los Angeles Fire Department in favor of the Police Department. Los Angeles Times owner Pat Soon-Shiong posted on X that the mayor cut the department’s budget by $23 million. News reports referencing budget documents pointed out that Bass had cut the budget by $17.6 million from the previous year. 

But the real story is more complicated. The Los Angeles City Council adopted the budget in May, after intense pressure to make cuts. Months later, in November, the city approved a new contract with the union representing firefighters. The new contract included an annual 3 percent increase to their base wages. The city had set aside funding during the budget process in anticipation of the new contract, according to news reports at the time.

While the original allocation for LAFD had decreased $17.6 million—only 2 percent of the department’s budget—the funds dedicated to the new contract offset that amount. City documents show that the budget for operational supplies increased in 2023-2024 and then went back down in 2024-2025 after specific purchases were completed. In a Politico story, Los Angeles Councilmember Bob Blumenfield said that the city’s fire budget actually increased more than $50 million compared to the previous budget cycle. Inside Climate News reached out to Blumenfield’s office and the firefighters’ union, neither of which responded to emailed questions.

In the press conference Wednesday, Bass briefly addressed the uproar over the budget. “Within this fiscal year, LAFD would actually go above what it was allocated on July 1,” she said.

When reporters in attendance brought up a December request from the fire department for more funding, department spokesperson Jacob Raabe responded.

“Of course we can always use more resources, which is why we ask for more resources,” Raabe said. But he highlighted the challenge presented by the unprecedented nature of the fires, not the department’s budget. Officials noted that other fire departments have come to help Los Angeles because of the massive scale of the disaster.

“I’ve never seen winds that made it to the Pacific Ocean, turned around, and went back up the canyon,” the LAFD spokesperson said.

“When you have events like this where emotions are high … it’s easy to get caught up in information that’s not accurate,” Bass said Wednesday.

Tiny Endangered Fish Often Attacked by Trump

As firefighters battled the fire burning in the Pacific Palisades Wednesday morning, some 200 fire hydrants went dry, and rumors spread on social media that California’s lack of action to store more water during the recent wet winters was to blame.

Officials were forced to explain why the fire hydrants went dry and correct other falsehoods during press conferences that would normally be dedicated to providing real-time information on the progress of the fire, the firefighters and evacuations.

Janisse Quiñones, chief executive officer and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, explained during the press conference that the water distribution system saw four times the demand than it ever had before. 

“Fire hydrants are not made to fight multiple houses, hundreds of houses at a time,” she said. “They’re made to fight one or two houses.”

The system relies on three nearby water tanks located downhill from the site, which each holds 1 million gallons. With all the pumping to stop the fires, the tanks needed time to be refilled to restore pressure so the water could continue flowing uphill. High winds prevented helicopters from dropping water from the air, which only increased the pressure on the water tanks in the Palisades area.

But that context didn’t stop Trump from continuing his attack on the Delta smelt, the tiny endangered fish native to the San Francisco Estuary, though a truly wild one hasn’t been counted in years.

Listed under both federal and California endangered species acts since 1993, the fish has been a frequent target of Trump since 2016. While courting the votes of farmers facing water shortages at the time, he told a crowd in Fresno, California, that “there is no drought” in California and that the aridity was due to water being sent out to the ocean to help the smelt. 

The reality, of course, is much more complicated. The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is vital to the state’s water supply, providing water to 30 million people and 6 million acres of farmland across the state. Water is sent around the state via two systems with a giant network of reservoirs, pumps and canals that are operated by both the state and the federal government to supply California’s major cities and vital agricultural operations.

A small portion of the water goes to support wildlife, such as ensuring the San Francisco Estuary, where freshwater meets the sea, isn’t too salty, which helps not only the endangered Delta smelt, but the entire ecosystem, including other fish and even humans, said Defenders of Wildlife’s Overhouse. The freshwater sent to the estuary protects the region’s water quality and helps ensure the water that farmers use isn’t too saline for farming, she said.

“Delta smelt are the canary in the coal mine for ecosystem collapse and unfortunately, in this case, they are the red herring then as well, for decision-makers who do not understand the complexity of our water system and blame one species for a lack of flow that’s being pumped artificially down to Southern California,” Overhouse said. “That’s just really not the case.”

If that water wasn’t used for the Delta smelt, California water law would send it to farmers in the Central Valley who have priority water rights, not to fight fires in Los Angeles.

Sacrifice zones are areas where people have been left to live in conditions that threaten life itself, from toxic industrial pollution to the deadly, intensifying effects of man-made climate change. In a more just and less cruel society, the very concept of a “sacrifice zone” wouldn’t exist. And yet, in America, after decades of deregulation and public disinvestment, more working-class communities are becoming sacrifice zones, and more of us are being set up for sacrifice at the altars of corporate greed and government abandonment.

America’s sacrifice zones are no longer extreme outliers; they are, in fact, a harrowing model of the future that lies in store for most of us if the corporate monsters, corporate politicians, and Wall Street vampires destroying our communities aren’t stopped. And residents of different sacrifice zones across the country, fellow workers on the frontlines of all this reckless and preventable destruction, are connecting with each other, learning from one another, and working together to fight back. In this Working People liveshow, recorded on Oct. 19 at Red Emma’s worker cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore, we speak with a special panel of residents from four different sacrifice zones in the US about how the situations they’re facing in their own communities and their struggles for justice and accountability are connected.

Panelists include: Hilary Flint, communications director of Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community and a former resident of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, a few miles from the site of the Feb 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio; Melanie Meade, a community organizer, educator, and life-long resident of Clairton, Pennsylvania, the site of US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, which was named the most toxic air polluter in Allegheny County in a 2021 report by PennEnvironment; Elise Keaton Wade, a real estate attorney by trade, longtime environmental justice activist, and a native of Southern West Virginia; Angela “Angie” Shaneyfelt, a resident of Curtis Bay in South Baltimore, who lives just blocks away from an open air coal terminal owned and operated by rail giant CSX Transportation, which has been polluting her community for generations.

Special thanks to Dr. Nicole Fabricant and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust for organizing this live show.

Additional links/info below…

• Coal-Free Curtis Bay Facebook page and Instagram
• South Baltimore Community Land Trust website, Twitter/X page, Facebook page, and Instagram
• Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community website, Facebook page, Instagram, and Twitter/X page
• Hilary’s Instagram
• Nicole Fabricant’s Instagram
• Melanie’s Facebook page
• Angela’s Facebook page
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “South Baltimore residents on the toxic reality of living in a ‘sacrifice zone’“
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “East Palestine residents demand fully-funded healthcare“
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “One year later, East Palestine residents want Norfolk-Southern held accountable”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘Towns are gone’: In Helene-devastated Asheville, NC, volunteers battle misinformation and ‘apocalyptic’ wreckage”
• Maximillian Alvarez, In These Times / The Real News Network, “Scenes from a sacrifice zone: South Baltimore residents fight back against industrial pollution“
• Maximillian Alvarez & Molly Crabapple, In These Times, “Wasteland warriors”
• Laura Gottesdiener, The Nation, “You can wipe out coal, but you can’t bring the mountains back”
• Nicole Fabricant, University of California Press, Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore
• Nicole Fabricant, The Real News Network, “Opinion | CSX explosion in Curtis Bay should alarm Baltimore City and accelerate real change”
• Adam Willis, The Baltimore Banner, “A state-backed report found coal dust across Curtis Bay. CSX isn’t convinced“
• Melanie Meade, PublicSource, “Family history, loss and hopes for a bright future fuel my fight for clean air in Clairton”
• Daniel Shailer, PublicSource, “The Mon Valley holds its breath as the latest U.S. Steel settlement promises a fresh approach”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Hilary Flint:

Hi everyone. My name is Hilary Flint. My pronouns are she her. I am from Enon Valley, Pennsylvania that is a town of less than 300 people that borders East Palestinian, Ohio. I have a background of chronic health issues and I’m a young adult cancer survivor, and I’d always been very conscious of the environment and very conscious of health issues, but it wasn’t until the East Palestine trained derailment and chemical disaster did I start organizing full-time in this work. So I’m director of Communications and community Engagement at Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community. And we really work around fracking and the Shell Plastics plant in Beaver County and also around the East Palestine trained real as well. And then I also work with Clean Air Action Fund. It’s a C four. And the reason I do that is so I can put on a different hat and do things like lobby and help write bills that would prevent these types of things from happening.

And then I also just started working for Center for Oil and Gas organizing around the issue of LNG, which is kind of the next big thing that we need to be working on. But a lot of the work I do is through a lens of disability justice, solidarity building and trying to change the way nonprofits work. So getting more mutual aid, getting money directly to grassroots instead of big green except food and water watch, they can have all the money. So yeah, just figuring out a different way to do the work because I’ve seen that the system currently just does not work.

Melanie Meade:

Hi everyone. My name is Melanie Meade. I’m from Clairton, PA, and I came into this work in 2013 when I was burying my father, when six months later I buried my mother. And from the span of 2011 to 2020, I buried all of my immediate family. I live next to one of the largest plants, USX coing plants in Clairton pa, and I’m so thankful to have sisters like Hilary and everyone on the panel to stand in solidarity with.

Elise Keaton Wade:

Hello, my name is Elise Keaton Wade. I am from Southern West Virginia. I am a real estate attorney by trade, but I got started in my activism 25 years ago on Payford Mountain with Larry Gibson, looking at mountains being blown up for tiny seams of coal through the process of mountaintop removal, strip mining. And that is how I came to my environmentalism. It’s how I became a lawyer trying to find out why it was legal to blow the tops off mountains to get coal. Turns out it’s legal because we made a law allowing it. So it’s a policy issue, right? So I lived in Colorado for a little while. I was licensed to practice out there, and I came back to West Virginia in 2011, reconnected with Larry Gibson in 2012. He passed away shortly thereafter, but I was involved with the organization where I met Dr. Fabricant. And so she and I, 13 years ago sat on Payford Mountain and dreamed of a regional coordination of efforts. And here we are today with multiple states in this room, and we’ve spent two days together talking about how we’re all interconnected. So I’m honored and pleased, and I’m so grateful for each of you being here.

Angela Shaneyfelt:

And I’m Angela Shaneyfelt and I am a community member of Curtis Bay here in Baltimore. And I got started in this in December 30th, 2021 when the CSX Coal terminal had their explosion. And the reason why I am here is just when you look into your child’s eyes and they’re mentally checked out and you don’t know why. So that’s why I am here.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, welcome everyone to this special live show of working people, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today, brought to you in partnership within in these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and I cannot overstate how much of an honor it is to be sitting here with all of you here in this room here at this table. As those of you listening just heard, we have a really special installment of our ongoing series sacrificed where we have been talking with working class folks, living, working and fighting for justice in different, so-called Sacrifice Zones around the US and even beyond. And we are sitting here in the great red Emma’s cooperative bookstore and cafe and organizing space here in Baltimore. Shout out to Red Emmas, thank you for hosting us.

And I also wanted to shout out and thank the great Dr. Nicole Fabrican for bringing us altogether, everyone at the South Baltimore Community Land Trust for bringing us together. And thank you for all the incredible work that y’all do, and thank you all for being here. And yeah, as listeners of this show, no, I didn’t expect to be doing this kind of work. I’ve been doing this show for years, mainly talking to working people about their lives, jobs, dreams and struggles, but within the context of their workaday lives and labor shop floor struggles. And that’s why I was interviewing railroad workers a few years ago, nonstop, all of whom were telling me that there was a crisis on the freight rail system. I talked to engineers, I talked to dispatchers, I talked to the folks who maintain the track, right? And all of them were saying some version of the same thing, which is that corporate greed has destroyed this vital element of our supply chain, and it is putting all of us workers, residents, and our planet at Hazard, and they were screaming for someone to listen to them, and they were demanding of those companies and of their government and of the public that we support them.

And instead, as we all know, a little over two years ago, Joe Biden and both parties in Congress worked together to block railroad workers from going on strike, forced a contract down their throats and basically told them to shut up and go away. Two months later, east Palestine happened, a Norfolk southern bomb train derailed in Hilary’s backyard, and then three days later, the Norfolk Southern pressured local authorities to make the disastrous and unnecessary decision to vent and burn five cars worth of toxic vinyl chloride, spewing a massive black death plume into the air that we all remember seeing Hilary and her neighbors lived it, and they are still living in it. I mean, I think one thing that we want to emphasize here and that’s going to come out in the stories of our incredible panelists is that maybe you heard about the issues that they’re dealing with in the past, and then it faded from the headlines.

That does not mean the issue has gone away. In fact, quite the opposite is true in most cases. But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been wins and struggle, and we want to make space to talk about that as well. But I really want to emphasize first and foremost that when communities are sacrificed for the sake of corporate profits or government negligence or what have you, I mean, these are people’s lives. These are communities that are destroyed and then forgotten. And as a journalist investigating and talking to folks living in these areas, what I’m realizing is we’re going to run out of places to forget. And so it breaks my heart going from East Palestine to South Baltimore to communities around the country talking to folks who feel so forgotten yet who are dealing so many of the same problems caused by the same villains. And so really, we’re here to talk about what we as fellow workers, as neighbors can do to band together to put a stop to this, to get justice and to build a world in which this kind of thing is not only unthinkable, but it sure as hell isn’t as normalized as it is today.

And so with all that upfront, I want to shut up and really just have you all listen more to the incredible women I’m sitting next to. I want us in the first half of this to just sort of talk a bit more for listeners and folks here about your story, about where you come from, about the kind of issues that you all are dealing with in your own respective communities. Because each has its own specificities. Every community is different. And then in the second half, I want us to talk about the significance of all of us being here together, of what y’all have seen in Baltimore, what discussions you’re getting into and what we can do to fight these corporate villains, wall Street monsters and corporate politicians who are destroying the planet upon which we all depend. So with all that upfront, Angie, I wanted to turn it back over to you since you are home based here in Baltimore. Tell us a bit more about yourself and about the struggle going on in Curtis Bay for folks who maybe haven’t heard about it yet.

Angela Shaneyfelt:

I grew up not in Curtis Bay or Brooklyn, I grew up just a little bit south of there in Anne Arundel County in Pasadena, a suburb of Baltimore City. And honestly, when I was younger, I said I would never live in the city, ever. And here I am 16 years later in the city that I said I would never live in. When I first moved to Curtis Bay, I never even thought about the coal other than it’s getting in my house. And I opened my windows the first year I lived there. And then after that first year, I was like, what is this black dust in my house and where is it coming from? And so we figured out that it was from the coal pile that’s two blocks, three blocks, city blocks down from where I live, just wafting into my house any way it could get in.

And so that’s when I just didn’t for 15 now years that I’ve not opened my windows at all. And then never, still didn’t pay attention to it honestly. And then December 30th happened, 2021, and literally I felt the sonic didn’t know what it was, did the mental checks looking around, and my kids were in the living room with me. My husband was on his way to Dunking Donuts. I had Covid, my daughter had covid, so we couldn’t go outside. He was going for coffee and we felt the pressure from the boom, didn’t hear anything yet. And I’m just looking around, what is it? My kids are looking at me for direction they didn’t know. And then we heard it and it shook our house. There’s neighbors that had windows blown out from this explosion. And then I looked at my daughter and she, one doesn’t, even before this, never really dealt well with loud noises or balloons.

And I’m looking at her and she literally wasn’t there. And my kids were around seven or eight at the time, so I had to tap on her chin three times to get her to come back to normal. And in that couple minutes time, I had to do the checks. The electricity’s still on. My windows are intact, and I live in Baltimore, so there’s nobody shooting outside my house. So we’re okay, but I don’t know what happened. And so then after the explosion, initial explosion happened, I go outside what we do here in Baltimore, go outside and talk to neighbors.

We didn’t get any alerts at all from any government agency, but word on the street what we go by a lot of times in South Baltimore because kind of the forgotten part of Baltimore City word on the street was there’s no threat to the community. But if you go outside and we found this out hours later from news and whatever, if you go outside, wear a mask, now it’s 2021 and we’re in the middle of a pandemic, of course we’re going to wear a mask, but why are you telling me to wear a mask if I go outside if there’s no threat to the community, like one plus one equals two in my world and that doesn’t add up. So with C, I lost my sense of smell and taste, and I had a mask on anyway, I was coming back inside because it was don’t go outside.

I had the worst suer and rotten egg smell that I’ve ever smelled in my life without a sense of smell and a mask on. So I don’t know, I can only imagine what a normal person at that point would’ve been smelling in our neighborhood. And so then my husband comes back and I literally was shuffling him inside because go inside, don’t be outside. And he had no clue. He was driving up the hill when the initial blast happened to the point where he felt like the car tires were lifting up off the ground and he stopped when he made the turn off of the street right next to ours and to check the tires to make sure there was still air in the tires. And that’s just one explosion. There’s been a history of explosions from CSX and they initially didn’t know it wasn’t us.

We’ve heard different things like it’s not our coal that is in our neighborhood, that is in your neighborhood. It comes from across the water in Ock, but your coal doesn’t leave the terminal. We’re breathing in somebody else’s coal. They tried to say it wasn’t coal. Well, what is it? Black dust. And now the community with the help of some scientists from John Hopkins have done the research, which we shouldn’t have to do. Honestly, we shouldn’t have to do that. The MDE and EPA should be doing their job. That’s their job, not our job to protect us as a community and as a city.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And just to clarify for folks listening, y’all heard the episodes that we’ve done in the past with Angie and her neighbors in South Baltimore, and what we’re talking about here is the massive open air like coal terminal that is owned and operated by CSX rail, multi-billion dollar rail company that these uncovered coal cars have been coming in and out of that terminal for decades over a century. So we’re talking about the explosion that happened at the cult pier that Angie was referring to, but as you’ll hear later on in the conversation, and as y’all remember from our past episodes based on South Baltimore, this is sadly only one of many polluters poisoning Angie and her community.

Elise Keaton Wade:

So my name is Elise Keaton again, Elise Keaton Wade. It’s tough when you get married later in life, confuses things and complicates things. I said in my introduction that I got started with my environmental activism in college because I had to go away to college to learn about the environmental degradation happening in my backyard. And imagine my surprise at 19 years old when I’m sitting in an Appalachian studies course in Virginia Tech and I hear the words mountaintop removal for the very first time in my life, and I’m like, what are we talking about? And that visceral reaction to something so wrong, and that journey over the last 25 years has landed me in places where really tragic things are happening. For example, I graduated law school the year that Katrina happened. I was in the evacuation from Houston, from Rita where more people died in the evacuation from Rita than died in Katrina.

And that’s a little known fact, right? The entire city of Houston tried to leave within 36 hours and we sat for 28 hours going nowhere. But my policy mind was always at work in those instances, what is the policy that got us here? What is happening? Why am I staring at a bridge? And I was naive. I don’t know who said it earlier about being a naive high school student, but I thought it was a great statement that I’m a student. Of course I’m naive. I don’t know what’s going on right in my naivete, I thought this hurricane was going to be something that’s shone the light on all of these policy issues. This hurricane was going to show that we weren’t able to evacuate in a big way very quickly from some mass event. What if it wasn’t a hurricane? What if it wasn’t explosion or a chemical plant or some trained derailment with deadly chemicals going into the air?

We are ill-equipped across the board to deal with those types of things. That was in 2005, right? What the hell have we been doing? What have we been doing? Where is our plan? Right? So now, okay, it’s 2014. No, it’s not today. You’re glad I drank the espresso, I’m telling you. So it’s 2024 and in West Virginia right now what we’re dealing with is poisoned water in Indian Creek in Wyoming County because the coal companies are going back into the coal mines for the methane, the coal bed methane that’s down there. And one way they’re trying to figure out how to get it out of there is to flush it out with water.

Well, they’ve found out pretty quickly, that’s a terrible idea, but they continued to do it and continued to pollute. It’s been about a year and a half, maybe close to two years that this community has been aware of this, and they’re just now acknowledging that they have an issue. And yesterday they withdrew their permits to continue this practice. It was because hashtag Appalachian living on TikTok, my girlfriend Lindsay Riser who’s out there beating the drum every day, calling out the hypocrisy, telling people, why are you not talking about the industry that’s poisoning us? At the same time, we have a solid candidate coming out of that district. This is my Senate district, my state Senate District nine. She is a 35 year member of Teachers union. She started teaching right out of high school. She is from our community. She’s been a teacher for decades. She is pro West Virginia. She got involved in politics because one of her children is transgender, and she had to sit in our legislature and listen to them abuse transgender individuals with their legislation. It triggered her into action. The UMWA United Mine Workers Association, the union that we wear our bandanas to remember and to support supported her candidacy in the primary. They’re supporting her Republican opponent in the general.

Now out of respect for her, I’m going to wait until after the election to address this issue, but this issue will be addressed because of East Palestine. East Palestine is the reason that I am involved again in these issues. When Nikki brought me to East Palestine and I heard what really happened and the fact that very few news outlets were actually telling us the real news about what was happening up there, I realize it’s never going to stop. They are never going to stop doing this to us. The only people who have ever shown up for our communities are the people within our communities. And unless we’re there making other people show up, they don’t come. They’re not trying to help us and find out what’s going on. It is up to us every single time I’ve been around long enough to know Katrina, Rita, name your disaster, right?

It’s not changing and it’s unacceptable. It is disastrous and unnecessary to quote our host. And so when you find yourself in these systems and these situations where you are somewhat powerless as an individual, right? I can stand up and scream all night long and it’s not going to get anything done, but I can work in regional coordination and support the people who are in these different areas because those trains roll through my community. The coal in your bay came from my mountains in West Virginia that we have stood on as activists. They’re blowing mountains apart. Those mountains filter clean water. That’s a very shortsighted plan, don’t you think? So everything that happens in Appalachia, in West Virginia, in East Palestine, in Baltimore, this is all coordinated together and us talking to each other and having in these gatherings and committing to supporting each other regionally is their biggest fear because we’re recognizing our power and we’re using it. So I don’t know, that’s exactly the question you asked, but it felt good while I was saying it, so I’m going to stick with it. All right. Alright, with

Maximillian Alvarez:

Nah, sister, preach. Everything you guys say is incredible and important. I only picked the mic back up just to note and make a very grim footnote for listeners, because we just published another installment of this series where I spoke to two folks on the ground in Asheville, North Carolina providing mutual aid and trying to repair their destroyed community, their destroyed region, and something that Byron Ballard, who’s there working at a church and doing great work, said that really stuck with me. If you’re trying to see the connections here, not only through manmade climate change and all the ways that that is making these massive hurricanes bigger, more destructive and going and destroying parts of Western North Carolina for Pete’s sake, but what she said, because we’ve seen those pictures of towns that have been wiped off the map, mudslides that have taken towns off the map that have killed families. She said mountaintop removal made those mudslides a lot worse. So just really wanted to drive that home. If you think that these are distinct issues that aren’t going to come back and combine in monstrous ways they already are. Melanie, please hop in.

Melanie Meade:

Thank you Max. In Clariton. In 2005, I was successfully working at American University in Bowie State. I was part-time adjunct professor in Spanish. I was so proud to have my job. I went home to a Clairton reunion we have during Labor Day and I woke up the next morning in the hospital being diagnosed with what is called nocturnal epilepsy. That emergency doctor did not tell me what it came from and no other doctor could find it whenever they did scans of my brain. But then in 2013, when I came home to bury my father, I met a gentleman named Dave Smith and he was working for Clean Air Council and he had taught me about the campaign leaders of 10 and he said, Melanie, get 10 friends and tell them to each get one friend and let’s start talking about our shared issues. In 2018, fires burned the size of three football fields for 17 days before the mayor and Health Department informed us little black boys because they’re typically outside and want to be outside and play outside. We’re five times more affected according to a doctor’s report. Then we came to find out months later that everyone’s health was harmed who live within 10 miles of the USX Claritin K works.

And we didn’t get the right help, nor did we know what kind of help we needed. So there were people who came in to say they were helping, but we never really found out the truth. And it disturbed me to find out that those fires burned again in 2019 total of over 100 days, and it wasn’t on the news anymore. Hilary and I are very close, so we’re not in competition, but I felt like USX was in control of the media. There was a stop and desist with USXK works to talk about the trains, and those trains come through clariton as well. I can hear them all through the night and day.

That’s where I realized we have to remain connected. We have to tell our stories, we have to have real news. We have to have real journalists that report the truth according to what we have experienced because it can’t be done any other way. And I’m just really encouraged to have you all to look, to call on and come together like this because this is helpful and it’s healing to know that our work is meaningful and it will result in something. So I just continue to thank you for real news. I continue to thank Curtis Bay for sharing your stories. I continue to thank Hilary. I continue to thank Elise, Dr. Fabricant, all of you who are here because you are the wind beneath my wings, not having my parents or siblings. It can be a lonely place, but you fill those voids for me and I’m so very grateful for you all and I’m so very grateful that we can say let’s blow stuff up.

Hilary Flint:

I just want to start off by something I feel like is not spoken about enough is that East Palestine did get a lot of media coverage, especially in the beginning, right? We were on all the news stations and it was this big plume, but I genuinely think it’s not because USX is not allowing media to do things. I think it’s because we’re a predominantly white community, and I’m going to be super frank about that. Myself and two other community members were able to meet President Biden within a year of the trained derailment. And I have to see black leaders in Louisiana and in Texas who have been doing this fight for 40 plus years, 50 years, and they do not get proximity to the White House. They get nowhere near it. So I just want to start with that because I think we talk about East Palestine a lot and it’s like, yeah, we got the media coverage because it was a white community and it was not only that, it’s a very conservative area.

So it was a flashier news story than, oh, we’ve been poisoning people for 40 years. It was different. And that’s what was different about it is that we were a white, small rural community. And I try to do the work that now we can bring people with us because one thing about your whiteness is I can’t get rid of it, but what I can do is utilize it to then make sure that now the White House is contacting other communities because it’s disgusting to me that you feel this guilt that day that myself and other community members met with President Biden, I had the most extreme guilt because it was like we did this in a year and through that year I was connecting with communities all over the United States that went through environmental disasters. And I had to think like, oh, you expect, oh wow, that’s so cool.

You did that in one year. And so part of it, you do have that little bit of pride and you’re like, yeah, that’s awesome. And then you’re like, but why could I do that? Watching these other women, and by the way, it’s usually women, it’s usually female activists. I’m watching them and I heard Melanie speak one day and I was like, that is a fierce woman. And if Melanie Mead isn’t getting the help that she needs, then there is something wrong with the system. And that’s what this solidarity building is. It’s so important. But I did want to talk about the day of the derailment and how people think it is the derailment. That’s the problem. I refer to this as the East Palestinian trained derailment and chemical disaster because the derailment is just a piece of the puzzle. And yes, there was all these chemicals and there was fires, but it really wasn’t until a couple of days later when they burned the vinyl chloride that my community was affected.

So we know this as the East Palestine trained around it, but it’s directly on the border where this happened. Pennsylvania is right there, and other communities outside of East Palestine were affected and will be affected down the line, but it would not be as bad as it will be that vinyl chloride changed the game. So that’s the mushroom cloud that everyone saw. And I remember that day very distinctly because I was convinced I was glued to the news thinking they’re going to evacuate us. Of course they are. East Palestine at that point had been under evacuation. It was a one by two mile radius, but where I lived, you could see the smoke. So I’m thinking they’re going to have to evacuate us. And so then I’m watching the TV and I see, oh, my little brother’s school, they’re sending the kids home and our school is way further away from East Palestine than our physical home.

So I’m thinking, oh, okay, they’re sending the kids home so then we can evacuate as families. He gets home and we’re waiting and we’re waiting and we’re seeing, I’m watching the press conference on the news. They’re saying, alright, at three 30 we’re going to blow this up. And the call that we were looking for never came. We were never going to be evacuated. It was just a one by two mile radius. Now we’re over a year out and there is proof that this plume traveled to 16 different states. So imagine a one by two mile radius. Us, my family chose to self evacuate. We did it very last minute. I had my go-bag prepped. My Italian grandma was like, I’m not leaving my house. So last minute we got Mimi. We got Mimi in the car. She was the last one. But as we were driving away and we had no idea where we were going by the way, it was just like, you just have to get away.

And I look in the rear view mirror and that’s when they blew it up. So it felt like I was a storm chaser running away from a tornado or something. That’s what it felt like. And you see it. And at that moment, my dog just started barking like crazy, just barking like crazy. And I think they have a more sensitive smell and things like that. And we just kept driving and I’m like, where are we going by the way? So I don’t know. I had family in another town. So we went and I was sat in my cousin’s driveway for hours. She wasn’t home. And then I was like, well, I guess we’re going to have to get a hotel. Because once we saw what it looked like, some of my neighbors that had stayed behind at the farm next door to me and took pictures, I was shocked.

People were alive. It was black. The whole area was just black smoke. I couldn’t imagine that was safe to go home to. So we did end up getting a hotel. It was the last hotel book. We are small communities. Guess what? We don’t have a lot of hotel rooms available and the National Guard there. And we were checking in kind of at the same time. And so I had asked this man in full uniform, I said, we weren’t supposed to be evacuated, but we did anyway. What would you have done in that situation? And he said, ma’am, if it was up to me, I wouldn’t even be here right now. So this is someone in full uniform who came to respond to the crisis, who understood how dangerous it was. And at that point we were like 15 miles away and he didn’t even want to be there.

And the next day they say everything’s fine, everyone can go home. And I remember I had a business trip that I had to go back, pack my bag, and then go to the airport. The minute we opened the door of our home, I knew everything had changed. It was a smell that I had never sm smelled before. I couldn’t even find the correct words to describe it except sweet bleach. It was a chemical smell, but it also smelled sugary. And within a few minutes we had health symptoms. I mean, it did not take long. So I have some preexisting health conditions. I have chronic illness, and one of the diseases that I have is called rainy odds. And in rayons it causes blood vessel constriction. So you turn purple. Now, I’ve always had rayons since I was little. My hands would turn purple, but I’d never had it go beyond that.

And all of a sudden I look down, my feet are purple, everything is turning purple. And it wasn’t until later I find out that their vinyl chloride is one of the known triggers of that particular disease. And when we’re told it’s safe to go home, my question is, who is it safe for? It’s not safe for everyone. It’s not safe for people with asthma. It’s not safe with for people with preexisting conditions, but that is what we operate off of. It’s a blanket statement of, oh, it’s safe. That’s not true. It wasn’t safe for me. And then I had to get on a plane and leave my family and say, oh, I had to go to work. And so I was on this work trip and just, I smelled, there was a smell that lingered. So I get off the plane, I was flying to California and my boss and I are meeting at the airport and I go to hug him and he goes, Ooh, why do you smell like that?

It came with me to California. And that smell traveled with me for a full year. I had to leave all my clothes behind. I had to leave mattresses. You couldn’t take anything that was a soft surface because this chemical smell lived in it. And no matter how many times you washed it, it didn’t matter. And it got to the point where it became embarrassing because you had a smell. My partner also has chronic illness, and the smell would make him sick just from me being in his home. And it got to the point where when I would go over, I would have to get completely naked at the door, get in a shower, shut my clothes in a basement. I would have to shower, I would’ve to put on different clothes that I had to buy to keep there. And it was so I didn’t feel like a human.

And I remember at one point I was crying. I was so upset, I was so tired. And I was like, I can’t believe I have to go through this whole ritual, this decontamination ritual. And I just remember him saying, it’s not you, honey, it’s the chemicals. I’m like, I don’t know that. That makes me feel that much better, right? Yeah. He would get nosebleeds just from being around my suitcase. And so about six months in, I ended up, I worked two jobs until I could afford to move. Because when they tell you to just move, it actually doesn’t work like that, especially if you were exposed to a chemical. So now all of your belongings, you can’t take them with you. And so when I did move, I finally got a place, I was on an air mattress. Me and my grandma were sharing an air mattress on the ground.

There was no furniture. I just got a couch. And I’ve been there for over a year at this point, because you are rebuilding, you were starting over again. And so I’ve had to work from the crack of dawn until it’s dark out. And that’s what I had to do to move. And that’s a privilege, right? Not everyone even has that privilege. That’s pretty shocking. I can do that as a disabled person. But I look at people with families. My family is a small, well, small business owner, but we own a lot of acreage. And my parents want to move. But when you have 10,000 acres and you have a business based on tourism, and guess what? You can’t sell it. So where are you going to go? And you can’t pull equity out of your house. So they’re stuck. I could just up and move.

I didn’t have the business. I didn’t have this and that. So now my grandma and I, we lived in the home. My great-grandmother built on the land that my family originally lived on. My parents built a house in the backyard. I had moved back home because I had cancer. And I was a young adult and I couldn’t financially recover unless I did that. My plan was I live back with my grandma and then I build a house in the backyard. Cause we have 40 acres, we have our own little commune. That can’t happen now. There’s no way we used to lease farm land. And how can we ethically do that? How can we ethically, if you have farmers who want to farm that land, is that ethical? Is it ethical to sell your home? So right now, we just have our home sitting there because we don’t feel comfortable selling it.

And I had someone who was a lawyer be like, oh, actually you can, it’s okay. And I said, I’m not actually asking about the law here. I’m talking about ethics. Can I sell this home so that some little kid someday gets angiosarcoma, which is the cancer that vinyl chloride is tied to? So in the beginning, I was kind of the person behind the scenes organizing, I don’t really like to do stuff like this. I’m the person who likes to prep people for these things. And about six months in, I realized I was going to have to do this and step up. And so we had a grassroots group that we started just like a volunteer. We weren’t a nonprofit, we weren’t anything. And people always said like, oh, why didn’t you become a nonprofit right away? And I said, oh, because we didn’t want the rules.

So we did have some civil disobedience in the beginning. That’s how I met Robin and David. They went to the Ohio State Capitol with us. And we didn’t storm the capitol, but we had people go sit in a session and stand up and say, remember he is Palestine. My kid’s nose is bleeding. And let me tell you, once you go back to your community after you do something like that, things don’t go well. Small, rural conservative communities aren’t really into that kind of thing. But it was effective. And the reason we went when we did was one thing we thought that could help us was a major disaster declaration because we didn’t even get a state of emergency. It opened up this problem that because there was a company who was the reason this happened, the liability was with that company and it wasn’t a natural disaster.

So there was just so many things behind the scenes that they couldn’t figure out how to classify the disaster essentially to give us the government services we needed. But we thought a major disaster declaration would help. In the beginning had started a petition. We had over 20,000 signatures. And then it was the next day it was, if the governor didn’t ask President Biden for that, then you could never get it. And so we went because we knew we had to put pressure on Ohio’s governor to win Pennsylvania’s governor. I found out couldn’t even call that disaster declaration because it physically didn’t happen. So where an accident happens is really important apparently. So we went and we put the pressure on, and guess what? The next day DeWine did ask for the disaster declaration. So it worked to the whole community hated us after that. And I mean, still to this day, Facebook groups terrify me like what they’re saying about us, but it’s what we had to do.

And that’s what I’ve realized. Some of these decisions I have to make in this work is like, I have to do this and I’m not going to be liked after, and I have to do this in a way that I can stay in the work too. So maybe sometimes that means not organizing as close to home. I learned that federal policy actually can help us a lot more than talking to my representatives when they tell you, oh, talk to your representatives, talk to your counsel. That is true in some cases, but in this case, that wasn’t true. So a lot of my work has been about going to the very top and figuring out what we can get from the government. And unfortunately, it doesn’t happen quick. It does not happen quick. And so by the time we are going to get the things we’re fighting for, people are going to be sick.

There’s already people sick. There’s people with rare forms of breast cancer. There’s young girls getting their period super early. There’s respiratory issues. I was hospitalized multiple times. My sibling was life-flighted multiple times. My three-year-old sister has obstructive sleep apnea, which only happened after the derailment. So the system was horrible. And that’s kind of what I’m trying to change. And we found out when we did get to meet at the White House, something I had asked later, I said to them, what got us here? What was the difference maker? And they actually said, we noticed you were working with other communities and other industries. And they talked about the fact that we were working with labor, we were working with unions, and then they found out that we’ve been working with the Gulf South and we were working in West Virginia. And that scared them. It should.

And that got us in the door. And that’s why I think what we’re doing here is more important than anything we could do because this is what scares them. People coming together and realizing it’s not left versus right. It’s not Republican versus liberal. It is us versus them. And we are the people. We’re the everyday people. It’s us versus the billionaires in the systems and that’s scaring them. So we have to keep doing this in other communities because this is what gets the attention. Sometimes it’s not the rallies or the op-eds, sometimes it’s them simply understanding your network. So anytime I go to another community, I was in Louisiana at a public meeting and someone from industry said, oh, who are you and why are you here? And I said, oh, we all work together. And they were like, oh no. So letting industry know like, oh yeah, I know Elise in West Virginia. I know Nikki in Baltimore, and that’s really scary to them.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk about that. Let’s go back around the table before we open it up to q and a. And I want to acknowledge that as y’all had laid out, and as Hilary, you were talking through some of the gains that you made by not going away. And I know that that has happened in your respective communities. Y’all are true heroes, love warriors for justice because you refuse to go away. And in that way, you were also an inspiration to all of us. So I want to acknowledge the fact that here in South Baltimore, y’all got together high school students, folks from Johns Hopkins doing community science to provide the proof that CSX without which CSX could keep on saying, no, that black shit in your home is not us, must be something else. So that’s a victory. But yet they’re still denying culpability. Their operational permits still up for renewal in coal country, right?

It’s like, oh, well, we stopped mining coal, now we’re fracking the shit out of everything and still poisoning the water that way. So I say this by way of asking if in our final turnaround the table, if y’all could say a little bit about what the communities have been doing and achieving through struggle, but also what this week has shown us in regards to as valiant and essential as those local efforts are to take on these international corporations. We need solidarity that’s operating at the level that they are and what we can do working together, building on what Hilary kind of got us started on. So yeah, could you say a little bit about what y’all and your communities have achieved and have been working towards, but also where you’re seeing that that’s not enough and that we need to band together to take this fight to the higher level higher.

Elise Keaton Wade:

So I want to start this. Can you hear me okay? I want to start this because their fights are more current in time than mine, and I want to kind of build on what Hilary said and then hand it to them to talk about their current struggles. But now you understand why Palestine at Palestine set me back on fire right now. You understand that I got there and realized that everything I’d seen wasn’t true. They were misleading the rest of the world about what happened there. And it wasn’t until I sat in the room and heard these people talk about why the people with no marks on their skin or their hair falling out were the ones who got to go into the White House, how they divided the community. And I stood next to my friend Dustin White who is here tonight with me.

He was at that meeting and the entire time they were talking about how that community and how the officials responded in that disaster. We were looking at each other across the room. That’s exactly what they did in 2014 at the Elk River Chemical disaster in West Virginia. The leak spill, whatever, nearly verbatim responses. And then the split, you have a coalition of people and we cobbled ourselves together. And now they’re going to pick and choose who they bring into the room so that when you leave that room, there’s division within your community. They did exactly the same thing to us. And I sat there with my jaw on the floor and they’re going to keep doing it to every community. There’s their standard playbook. So yes, what scares them is that we talk to each other now that we stand in solidarity with each other, that I go and raise hell with the union in West Virginia for our railroad brothers and sisters in East Palestine who stood for two months and screamed about the safety issues on this railroad, screamed to the people in this country about what was happening and what was going to happen if they didn’t shut it down and address it.

And we told ’em to sit down and shut up because our economy needed those trains to roll. Now, if you’ve been with me for the past couple of days, I’ve been on a bit of a diatribe about the failed economic theory of capitalism. Happy to go into that more on another podcast Max. But this is a great example.

This is a great example of why it doesn’t work, because if it worked in theory, they would’ve taken as long as they needed to clean up that mess because it would’ve been what was safe and best for the community and for making sure that the altruistic idea of what happened happened. That’s not what happened in West Virginia. If they cared about the community and the long-term effects, they would’ve addressed the issues that caused that chemical spill, which are mountaintop removal and contamination of local water sources from coal mining and chemical production. If they care, they don’t care. The only people who have ever shown up for us are us. The only people who have ever shown up for us are us. And then we have to support each other. Don’t let them divide us. Don’t let them go back and forth. So I want to step back and just say that the fact that it has become more egregious, they are pushing that boundary, right?

They are pushing it constantly and they will continue. Every community in this country has a train rail through it. This could be Hinton, this could be any town that has a railway through it. And what are they going to do? They’re going to destroy your lives with their contamination and they’re going to point fingers at each other and they’re going to point fingers at you and tell you it’s really not as bad as you say it is, because how do you know it wasn’t the nail polish you were wearing that caused the toxicity in your body?

Yeah, that’s what they told me. Do you wear nail polish? Do you color your hair? Well, how do you know you didn’t poison yourself? Do you smoke cigarettes? Do you drink soda West Virginia? Maybe you’re the problem. I want to say one thing about the myth of the inbred hillbilly, because this is one of my favorite things to talk about in broad groups, and I think it goes back a long time in our history, and I know everybody’s heard about the inbred hillbilly. If you haven’t heard about the inbred hillbilly, raise your hand. This is so diffused throughout our culture, right? Well, I went into the world carrying the identity of the hillbilly that had to do better. I had to prove that we’re not all inbred, that some of us aren’t. So I let them tell me who I was. I accepted their identity of who they told me I, I carried it with me into the world espousing it.

I came back to West Virginia because I love my state. I wanted to come back and do the good things that I’d learned out there that nobody taught me here, come back here and do those good works. And when I got back here with a little bit of perspective and context and some world experience, I realize that may be the biggest hoax of the 20th century. Because what happens when you live next to unregulated pollutants? You have high instances of birth defects, cancers deadly diseases. You die young, you die sick. You have offspring that are compromised and sick and young. And 150 years ago, all of these toxins were going unchecked into the community. And what better way to marginalize that community than they say, well, don’t look at that ugliness. They inbred and they changed the narrative and they framed a region for decades. The myth of the inbred hillbilly is still carried forward.

So it is on purpose. It is deliberate. If they can tell you who you are and what you’ve done to f your life up, then they’re not responsible. So don’t let them gaslight you. Stand firm and speak your truth to power because you’re right at the end of the day. You’re right. And what did Larry Gibson teach us? Teach us while we stood on Payford Mountain? If you’re telling the truth, what are you afraid of? Speak your truth to power and stand firm. And you’ve got brothers and sisters in West Virginia standing with you and you’ve got brothers and sisters in Pennsylvania standing with you. You’ve got brothers and sisters in Curtis Bay standing with you. So thank you for standing up East Palestine, we are with you in this. Thank you.

Angela Shaneyfelt:

Thank all of you. And I’m so, so glad that we’re sitting all here in this room together tonight because Curtis Bay, we’re at a point right now. We’re pushing. We’re getting the attention that East Palestine got. And I mean, I said it two years ago at a rally. Let’s take this to Annapolis and to dc. We’re so close to DC that we can’t stop fighting the fight. And it’s not for us. It’s for my kids who are in middle school right now. And my daughter joined us today for as long as she could hang, and she got up on the steps and she said her, she was awesome. And we have the higher cancer rates in Curtis Bay, like asthma rates. I never had asthma growing up. And I found out I had asthma in 2020 in the hospital for surgery. And they’re like, this is your breathing treatment. And I’m like, breathing treatment for what? Nobody ever told me I had asthma.

And we have been fighting. We’ve been going to city council. And at one point they didn’t listen, but then we kept fighting and we kept calling the news. And Max, thank you for starting the whole podcast thing and just getting the word out. I’ve gone through times. I mean, the fight is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. And I’ve had my own thoughts. What am I doing this for? I doing it. And I just, I’m so grateful right now that I’m sitting in this room with you guys because we’ve gotten to a point where what is our next step? And I’ve even said it along the way. There’s this lull of large numbers, and I see it happening right now. I didn’t know any of you guys before today. So I knew Nikki for a few years and I never would’ve ever imagined before 2021 that I would ever be sitting in circles that I’m sitting in now. And now I’m 16 years ago, I wanted to be out of Curtis Bay as fast as possible no matter what. And then kids happen. And Curtis Bay is where I can afford to live in all honesty. And in two years, I’m like ready to, the plan is to buy a house. Is it going to be in Curtis Bay? A hundred percent, no. But I’m invested now. So even if I move out, I’m still coming back to keep the fight going and keep the story going, to make the change because that’s what I need to do.

Melanie Meade:

My father taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Thomas Vme. He passed in 2013. And the reason he stayed in Clariton is because the family land that we had called Randolph Hollow was taken over for mill housing and he felt like it was worth it to sacrifice his life and his health so that our history could not be forgotten. And so when I hear Hilary stand in solidarity, and the new friend I have in Curtis Bay stand in solidarity, Elise and Dr. Nikki standing in solidarity with me, I know that I’m on the right path. I know that I have not forgotten my history, who I am and what I’m capable of. And I think each and every one of you are fierce in your own way. And it is so wonderful that we have this opportunity because we need it. We need to check in with ourselves, check in with others, because we are the ones showing up for ourselves, as Elisa said. And I need each and every one of you for the long haul. So thank you again, and let’s keep doing the work.

Hilary Flint:

To go off of what Melanie said, it’s stuff like this that keeps me in the work. So that’s a question I ask myself a lot, and I see other activists and I think, what do they need to stay in the work? What do I need to stay in the work? And every once in a while it’s going to a community and getting inspired by their wins. I noticed how closely the communities here, the EJ conversation is happening with housing injustice and you’re talking about racial justice, and we don’t see a lot of that in our corner of Appalachia. That type of solidarity building doesn’t happen. And so I get to leave and be really inspired by that. I have been working with a group of folks from the Gulf South, and we’re talking about creating an area where climate refugees can live. So I’m looking at the passive housing and I’m thinking, oh, interesting. And I bet a funder would fund something like that. So I get to think about those different ways of doing the work. And we just don’t celebrate joy very much in Appalachia, unfortunately.

And to see the positivity and the solutions, I got to see solutions to problems instead of just problems where we are just stuck in the doom and gloom. So for me, coming to this, this is what keeps me in the work. It keeps me going, but then as most people know, I’m a homebody. So I’ll go home and you won’t see me for three weeks now because this social battery, but we all have, that’s such an important lesson. As an activist, what are your boundaries? What keeps you in the work? What are you comfortable in and what are not? What type of hate are you willing to put up with? What’s going to cross the line for you? It can get really bad. I always say being an activist is choosing to be a target, and not only to industry, but sometimes community, sometimes politicians.

So again, it’s like what’s going to keep me in the work creating solutions to some of those problems? So something we’ve been trying to do is, again, bring mutual aid into the work. Because what we found out is in East Palestine and Beaver County, they go, oh, well there’s not property damage and there’s not this and there’s not that. So no one’s coming to help you because you don’t fit in a box. And mutual aid is the answer to that, right? It’s community care. It’s, we’re not looking for a box to check off on a grant. You tell me you need a mattress, we get you a mattress. And so how do we make sure that that’s present in the nonprofit industry? So we are fighting really hard to get mutual aid funds set up at small grassroots nonprofits that are just meant for answering community need, peer support.

So something that we’re working on is building up mental health resources within the movement. And what does it look to make sure other nonprofits are trauma informed, because what I saw was a lot of groups coming in and taking advantage of people, and I was expected to tell my story of my battle with cancer, and then I turned purple and I wasn’t getting paid for any of that. So something that I’ve been doing is I call people out and I say, you can build paying community members into a grant. And so we do it with everything. We build that money into a grant. And I did a video project where I made sure we paid everyone and paid them well. And this one funder said, that’s revolutionary. We don’t do that. And I said, paying people for their work is revolutionary. I said, and we are the progressive industry.

No, we’re not. So thinking about what does care look like in every aspect, because we are not going to stay in this fight. And as we’ve seen it as a long fight, if we don’t think about those things and we’re just, I’m an action oriented person, I’m like, I got to keep going. I got to keep going. And so that gets tiring. And it’s like sometimes I need Melanie to be like, Hilary, have you checked in with yourself today? Are you doing your self care? And we don’t always get that in our own community because when you’re fighting so closely together, people want to do the work differently. And there’s just so much division going on. The minute I decided that I was going to meet the president and then continue a relationship with politicians, it was, she’s been bought off.

We can’t trust her anymore. And I had to be okay with that and say, that’s fine. I’m going to work silently. I’m going to get done what I know is going to work because I have been with all of these people now for a year. I know what the needs are and I don’t need to be liked anymore, but I do need to be liked by someone. So that’s where activists come in. They remind me, okay, Hilary, you’re loved and respected in some just not your own home right now. So, okay. So it builds that friendship. And when I get to come and be with Melanie, or even I work very closely with Robin at home, and just to have people that keep filling you up, even if it’s just a couple people in the community, a couple people in different neighborhoods, or when you go through a really heavy situation and no one in your community can relate to it, I can say, Hey Melanie, have you ever experienced this?

What does it mean? Can you just be my friend right now and talk me through it? No one else gets it in the community. So again, there’s nothing more important than the solidarity building that we’re doing right now. It’s what scares them. I heard it from the highest up mouth that I could find in the United States. This is what scares them. So the more we do it, the more we win. Especially when it comes to public hearings, public comment periods, vinyl chloride, the chemical that ruined my home on October 23rd, you have until October 23rd to submit a public comment about what you think about that chemical, should it be banned. They’ve known since the 1970s that it was a carcinogen. It was the reason the EPA started something called tosca. Yet it has yet to be banned by tosca. This is the first year it’s up to be banned.

Just letting each other know, Hey, I have a public comment period. I would really appreciate it. Because then guess what? They look and they go, oh crap. They got all these public comments from Pennsylvania. They’ve hit every state. Now we’re going to have to do something no longer. Oh no, we poisoned this one community. We poisoned this one community. And they talk to this other poison community, and they talk to this house that has these people that have been dealing with racism. And then they talk to these people that are dealing with transgender rights and they go, oh, so reminding each other, we have some group chats that’ll be like, Hey guys, public comment period here. Submit. And just finding ways to engage with each other outside of this stuff is really important. Mutual aid fundraisers, some people I meet will have a chat where we’re just like, oh, here’s a GoFundMe.

Everyone send $5. And it doesn’t ruin my day to send someone $5 at this point. So it’s like, it’s so simple. But if you keep building out these networks and someone has a crisis, and I know people all over the United States, we can get a lot of money. I think we got $3,000 and not even 24 hours. And that’s just like us being random people. It wasn’t a part of our work. It’s just like you can get it because your network is big and your relationships are the work. And if people trust you, they’re going to donate to that. They trust you. So this is how we win

Melanie Meade:

In all aspects. Relationships are the work is powerful. And hills is,

Hilary Flint:

It wasn’t me, my colleague Andrew Wooer said it the first time, and I’ll never forget it because I don’t like emotional labor. I am someone who I don’t feel often. I just want to do. I want to solve problems. I want to keep going. And so I was getting so upset that people would be crying and I didn’t know what to do. I’m like, I don’t know what this means. I’m like Googling. I’m like, why would someone cry about this? So I was getting so frustrated and it was going to take me out of the work. It was because I was so bogged down and people would want to have two hour long conversations to tell me about their feelings. And I’m like, I am not the one I truly wish I was, but I’m not. So then you have to find your person who’s the one who does

Melanie Meade:

The feeling.

And I think what I learned here in Curtis Bay is education is important and valuable, especially for our youth in Clariton right now in 2024, we do not have climate change or environmental justice spoken of, nor will they allow me to go in and volunteer to talk to the youth. Our newest superintendent, who is an African-American woman, would not allow us to prepare a lawyer clinic because there are three remaining class action lawsuits for the 2018 and 2019 Christmas fires. So our youth are disengaged. Our little league football team practices directly across the street from the industry. And the coaches say to me, who are sickly, this is not harming us. It hasn’t harmed us. We did it when we were little. And that is what must stop aligning with Hilary, aligning with Elise, Dr. Nikki and Curtis Bay gives me voices to now take back to those coaches to say, look, here it is a problem and let’s stop it.

Let’s unite. Let’s stop allowing them to divide. Because our youth in Clariton are winning football games for 40 years and dying at the age of 20, overdosing on Fentanyl or other drugs less than 30 years. And we don’t have the time. We’re 50 years behind in the conversation. So we need to pick it up. And I’m able to pick it up because I have Hills, tiktoks and Curtis Bay and you Max real-time news. So that if you don’t understand, take a moment to listen here, check in and let’s continue this work. We are not defeated because we are together. Give it up for our incredible panel.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 28, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

With the world on track for 3.1°C of warming this century, Oxfam International on Monday blamed global billionaires who—with their superyachts, private jets, and investments—emit more carbon pollution in 90 minutes of their lives than the average person does in a lifetime.

That’s according to Carbon Inequality Kills, Oxfam’s first-of-its-kind study tracking planet-heating emissions from the pricey transportation and polluting investments of the world’s 50 richest people, which was released ahead of COP29, the United Nations climate summit scheduled for next month in Baku, Azerbaijan.

“The superrich are treating our planet like their personal playground, setting it ablaze for pleasure and profit,” said Oxfam executive director Amitabh Behar in a statement. “Their dirty investments and luxury toys—private jets and yachts—aren’t just symbols of excess; they’re a direct threat to people and the planet.”

The report explains that “Oxfam was able to identify the private jets belonging to 23 of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires; the others either do not own private jets or have kept them out of the public record.”

“On average, these 23 billionaires each took 184 flights—spending 425 hours in the air—over a 12-month period. That is equivalent to each of them circumnavigating the globe 10 times,” the publication continues. “On average, the private jets of these 23 superrich individuals emitted 2,074 tonnes of carbon a year. This is equivalent to 300 years’ worth of emissions for the average person in the world, or over 2,000 years’ worth for someone in the global poorest 50%.”

For example, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person based on Monday updates to the Bloomberg and Forbes lists, “owns (at least) two private jets which together produce 5,497 tonnes of CO2 per year,” the study highlights. “This is the equivalent of 834 years’ worth of emissions for the average person in the world, or 5,437 years’ worth for someone in the poorest 50%.”

“The two private jets owned by Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon, collectively spent almost 25 days in the air, emitting 2,908 tonnes of CO2. It would take the average U.S. Amazon employee almost 207 years to emit that much,” the document adds. Bezos is the world’s second- or third-richest person, according to the various billionaire indexes.

The report says that “the number of superyachts has more than doubled since 2000, with around 150 new launches every year. Not only do these giant ships guzzle an immense amount of fuel for propulsion, their air conditioning, swimming pools, and extensive staff further add to emissions. Although they are moored for most of the year, about 22% of their overall emissions are generated during this ‘downtime.'”

“Superyachts are exempt from both E.U. carbon pricing and International Maritime Organization emissions rules,” the publication points out. “Oxfam was able to identify 23 superyachts owned by 18 of the 50 billionaires in our study. These floating mansions traveled an average of 12,465 nautical miles a year: This is equivalent to each superyacht crossing the Atlantic almost four times.”

According to the group:

Oxfam estimates the average annual carbon footprint of each these yachts to be 5,672 tonnes, which is more than three times the emissions of the billionaires’ private jets. This is equivalent to 860 years of emissions for the average person in the world, and 5,610 times the average of someone in the global poorest 50%.

The Walton family, heirs of the Walmart retail chain, own three superyachts worth over $500 million. They traveled 56,000 nautical miles in a year with a combined carbon footprint of 18,000 tonnes: This is equivalent to the carbon emissions of around 1,714 Walmart shop workers. The company that has generated their extreme wealth has also been found to drive economic inequality in the USA through low wages, workplace discrimination, and huge CEO pay.

In terms of investments, the study says, “the richest 1% control 43% of global financial assets, and billionaires control (either as CEOs or principal investors) 34% of the 50 largest listed companies in the world, and 7 out of the 10 largest. The investment footprint of the superrich is the most important element of their overall impact on people and the planet.”

The organization found that “the average investment emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires were around 2.6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents (CO2e) each. That is around 340 times their emissions from private jets and superyachts combined.”

“Each billionaire’s investment emissions are equivalent to almost 400,000 years of consumption emissions by the average person, or 2.6 million years of consumption emissions by someone in the poorest 50% of the world,” the report says. “Almost 40% of the investments analyzed in Oxfam’s research were in highly polluting industries including: oil, mining, shipping, and cement. Only one billionaire, Gautam Adani, has significant investments in renewable energy—which account for 18% of his overall investment portfolio. Just 24% of the companies that these billionaires invested in have set net-zero targets.”

The publication also features “a new analysis of the inequality in the impacts of climate breakdown.”

Behar concluded that “Oxfam’s research makes it painfully clear: The extreme emissions of the richest, from their luxury lifestyles and even more from their polluting investments, are fueling inequality, hunger, and—make no mistake—threatening lives. It’s not just unfair that their reckless pollution and unbridled greed is fueling the very crisis threatening our collective future—it’s lethal.”

The document’s final section includes detailed recommendations to reduce the emissions of the richest, make polluters pay, and “reimagine our economies and societies to deliver well-being and planetary flourishing.”

The report is a reminder of how rich and powerful people are impeding efforts to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, whose government signatories will be gathering in Baku next month to discuss efforts to limit global temperature rise this century to 1.5°C.

“The wealth of the world’s 2,781 billionaires has soared to $14.2 trillion,” the study notes. “If it was invested in renewable energy and energy efficiency measures by 2030, this wealth could cover the entire funding gap between what governments have pledged and what is needed to keep global warming below 1.5°C, according to estimates by the International Renewable Energy Agency.”

Over the past two weeks, people around the country have watched in horror as our neighbors and fellow workers have been battered by the successive disasters of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. “After making landfall as a Category 4 hurricane on Sept. 26 and tearing through the Gulf Coast of Florida,” Adeel Hassan and Isabelle Taft write in The New York Times, “Helene plowed north through Georgia and walloped the Blue Ridge Mountains, washing out roads, causing landslides and knocking out power and cell service for millions of people. Across western North Carolina, towns were destroyed, water and fuel supplies were disrupted, and residents were in a communications black hole, scrambling for Wi-Fi to try to reach friends and family… As of Oct. 6, there were more than 230 confirmed deaths from the storm.” The hurricanes have passed, but the devastation and dire need they left in their wake remain. In this urgent mini-cast, we speak with two guests who are on the ground in Asheville, NC, providing relief and mutual aid to their community: Byon Ballard, a cofounder of the Mother Grove Goddess Temple in Asheville, where she serves as Senior Priestess, and Lori Freshwater, a journalist and relief aid volunteer who is originally from North Carolina.

Additional links/info below:

• Mother Grove Goddess Temple website, Facebook page, and Instagram
• Mother Grove Goddess Temple volunteer and donation information page
• Beloved Asheville website, Facebook page, and Instagram
• Adeel Hassan & Isabelle Taft, The New York Times, “What we know about Hurricane Helene’s destruction so far”
• Dharna Noor, The Guardian, “Double punch of hurricanes could become common due to climate crisis”
• Oliver Milman, The Guardian, “‘It’s mindblowing’: US meteorologists face death threats as hurricane conspiracies surge”
• Oliver Milman & Jonathan Watts, The Guardian, “Global heating makes hurricanes like Helene twice as likely, data shows”
• Lauren Aratani, The Guardian, “Insurance is failing hurricane survivors: ‘People thought they were covered’”

Permanent links below:

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music:
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Lori Freshwater:

Hey Max, I am Lori Freshwater and I am originally from North Carolina, although I’m on the coast, but when I heard that my beloved mountains were in trouble, I had to come here and see if there was anything I could do to help and I found the Mother Grove goddess where I am today. I’m a journalist, kind of a nomadic journalist, and so I’m going to be here for the foreseeable future trying to get the news out about what the needs are here in Western North Carolina.

Byron Ballard:

I’m Byron Ballard. I am one of the founders, one of the co-founders, and I serve as senior priestess for the Mother Grove Goddess Temple here in Asheville. We are a church that honors and celebrates the divine feminine in whatever spiritual tradition you’re in, and we’ve been around for about 18 years doing public rituals, teaching classes, and this is our first and we are hoping, hoping it is going to be our last major push on relief efforts. Please. Oh, please.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. And please support the work that we do at The Real News Network by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got an urgent episode for y’all today. If you have been watching the news or just going outside in the record breaking October heat, then you like me, have surely been feeling ever more anxious and uneasy about the intensifying effects of climate change. If you live in the American Southeast, however, chances are you are feeling the disastrous effects of what must be understood as a full-blown climate emergency. Over the past two weeks, those of us around the country have watched in horror as our neighbors and fellow workers have been battered by the successive terrors of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. As a deal, Hassan and Isabelle Taft write in the New York Times after making landfall as a category for hurricane on September 26th and through the Gulf coast of Florida, Helene plowed north through Georgia and walloped the Blue Ridge Mountains washing out roads causing landslides and knocking out power and cell service for millions of people.

Across Western North Carolina. Towns were destroyed. Water and fuel supplies were disrupted and residents were in a communications black hole scrambling for wifi to try to reach friends and family officials raced to rescue survivors, locate victims, and restore flood damaged water systems. The chaos in the state was part of a path of destruction that Helene carved through the region, including portions of Tennessee, South Carolina and Virginia. As of October 6th, there were more than 230 confirmed deaths from the storm. Helene is the deadliest tropical cyclone to strike the mainland United States since 2005 when Hurricane Katrina caused nearly 1400 deaths on the Gulf Coast. According to statistics from the National Hurricane Center, pounding rain flash, floods and dangerous landslides savage, the area around Asheville and Western North Carolina putting the region in crisis. It’s like a mini apocalypse said Gretchen Hogan, a resident of Brevard, North Carolina. Now the hurricanes may have passed, but the devastation and dire need they left in their wake remain.

The stories coming out of communities ravaged by Helene and Milton are ghastly, devastating and heartbreaking. And the reality that humanity has been barreling down a decades long path to the extremely predictable climate emergency we’re now in is in infuriating, terrifying and overwhelming, but out of darkness. There has been light out of crisis, an outpouring of love, solidarity, and sacrifice, and today we are talking with two incredible human beings on the ground around Asheville, where communities have been directly impacted and where folks have been working overtime to provide relief and mutual aid to their community. Lori Byron, thank you so much for joining us today amidst all this chaos. We really, really appreciate it and I promise I won’t keep you too long. I was wondering if we could just start by turning things over to you and asking if you could talk us through what you have been seeing, feeling, experiencing, hearing from your community there in Asheville since Hurricane Helene hit and especially in the weeks since.

Byron Ballard:

I’ve got to be honest with you, many of the people that I talk to and deal with every day aren’t feeling anything. We can’t. We can’t because there’s too much work to do to stop and process. So we’ll do that later. I’m dreaming of a trip to the beach in the winter where nobody’s there and I don’t have to answer anybody else’s questions. We are in a place that we’re in the middle of a natural disaster. We’re at the beginning of a natural disaster. There are places that look perfect and untouched only to discover that there’s four feet of toxic mud inside them. My family has lived on the French Broad River since they came from an adjoining county at the end of the 19th century, and I lived there still, but high up so that I could watch the river rise in 1916. This river rose to 22.4, I think feet above its banks and it was over 27 feet for this flood.

So it is the worst flood that anyone here has ever historically experienced. What we are looking at is need on every possible level. So people need water because the water system is destroyed. There are towns that are gone. There’s a little sweet little touristy town called chimney rock, and it is much of it is simply gone. It’s not that the trees are down and there’s some mud, it’s that the buildings are gone. There is a beautiful valley called Swano, which we understand is a native ward and I don’t know if it’s creek or Cherokee, but that means beautiful valley and it is a long valley between heading east out of Asheville, heading towards downstate and the Swanno River, which is a tiny little drought, water river most of the time floods a lot and it flood flooded. It flooded in a horrific and substantial way so that the Swanno Valley is now the Swanno Valley of the shadow of death.

And for over a week it was almost impossible to get in and people would get in with a four wheel drive or an A TV or however they could do it and do the basics, pull people off the roofs of their houses, get the people into shelter and safety. It was extreme wartime triage, and I’ve heard that again and again from people who say, I was in Korea, I was in Iraq, and this is wartime damage. We are fortunate in that no one is bombing us actively. But yeah, that’s what we’re looking at. And at this point, two weeks in much of the triage is accomplished. People have water people, the hierarchy of needs are met with exception of shelter. And that’s what everyone is working on now, cleaning up, rebuilding, building where they can, but the infrastructure is gone.

The water system can’t be rebuilt in places because there are no roads left in those places. So first a road has to be built and then the water system can be addressed. And I want to address one thing right now, right up front there’s a lot, lot of misinformation. And here in the mountains we would just call it damn lion about what is and is not here. FEMA is here, the Army Corps of Engineers is here. We have had utility workers from as far away as Canada to reestablish power here. The government that everybody hates is here and they are functioning, but the terrain is impossibly difficult. So there are still without any doubt, families and individuals in the far western part of this state and in the higher elevations in these counties around here and in Buncombe County that have not been reached yet because it’s the terrain.

These are among the oldest mountains in the world and people look at ’em and go, well, they’re not the Rockies. They shouldn’t be too bad. Well, they’re bad, they’re bad. And because decisions were made on a higher level than any of us, we’ve had ridge top development and steep slope development that never should have happened because in addition to the flooding, we have landslides, we have rock falls. They tell us in order to drive the federal highway I 40 west to get from North Carolina to Tennessee, we will not be able to do that until November of 2025. So that’s the level of destruction. I’m going to say one more thing and I’m going to turn it over. Last night we had been expecting a load of supplies from the Charlotte area and the fellow got here and with his father-in-law, and we started unpacking all that we needed unpack.

And he turned me and just grabbed me in a big bear hug and looked in my face and he said, I don’t know if I should say this to you, but I was in Katrina and this is worse than Katrina. And he had tears in his eyes. So we know. But to get back to your first question, what are we feeling? We can’t feel that yet. Not yet, because we’re still delivering water, we’re still collecting diapers and bleach wipes and every afternoon we drink elderberry, tincture and hope we’re not going to get sick. Yeah, I mean that’s our reality right here on the ground.

Lori Freshwater:

Thank you, Byron. I would really also like to kind of clear up from people on the ground some of these absolutely insane conspiracies. I complained about FEMA being slow, getting in here with water openly. So I’m not someone who is afraid to criticize the government, but they are here and you see them with vest everywhere and they’re going around to people that are in the parks and that just clearly don’t have any place to go. The Army Corps of Engineers is here. I was listening to the Buncombe County press conference this morning and just heard this statistic that was just mind blowing from the Army Corps of Engineer Engineers. He said that there are an estimated, there’s an estimated 10 million tons of debris out here, 10 million tons of debris that has to be taken care of. So that alone is enough to just cripple the entire area if we aren’t really all working together. And that’s what people have been doing. They’ve been working together in a way that I’ve never seen through any other community. People have been communicating with people in far areas. They’ve been looking online in different Facebook groups to see, oh, there’s somebody that needs a meal for their autistic child. We can bring it up.

People are rising above what I would have ever even expected or dreamed. And I would just ask the rest of America to kind of the best thing you could do for the people of Western North Carolina is to follow their example. Stop looking at hate and conspiracies and things that push people down and look at what is going on here now and get your As to work. Sorry, that was a little interruption from Byron. They’re welcome to come here and work as well. We have plenty of work to do. But would just say what I’ve seen here has been really, really special and incredible. And I think that what I want to do going forward is to tell other communities whether you are a coastal community or wildfire or just a community that hasn’t been touched yet, start working together now with your community because that’s what’s going to save you.

Luckily the people here, were able to get things together quickly and are still trying to do so, but when you have to go to a cashless society overnight, it’s like no technology. So there’s no way to buy gas. There’s no way to buy food. You run out of cash pretty quickly. You want to be prepared. And so that’s a big lesson that I would say Max, that people really need to take from this is get going now. Get to know your neighbors, get out there and talk to people in your community and say, who’s got these skills? Who has a chainsaw? Who’s a good organizer on doing meal drops? That kind of thing. And that’s what people should be doing instead of talking about conspiracy theories, how you get through disasters, that’s how we become better Americans and that’s how we become better humans. So that’s my little preach for the day Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, I can’t thank you both enough for laying that out and preaching the good word that needs to be heard right now. I want us to end here in a second by talking about those relief and mutual aid efforts and the light that has come out of this darkness. The great Mr. Rogers famously said, in a moment of disaster or crisis like this, we always need to look for the helpers. We need to know that there are people there helping and you all are out there helping. And I want folks listening to this to look for the helpers and to be the helpers. And I want to emphasize that the people out there spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories and all that crap are not helping shit. So I want us to end on that in a second. And pardon my French, it’s heartbreaking hearing what you guys are laying out for us.

And I just wanted to, by way of getting us to the final question here, I want hover on something that you guys said about how other communities need to be preparing themselves for eventualities like this. Because when the catastrophe comes, you’re going to need your neighbors more than you ever thought you would. But this really speaks to the heart of an investigation that we’ve been doing on this podcast for years now. We’ve been interviewing working class people, living, working and fighting in different, so-called sacrifice zones around the country, places like East Palestinian, Ohio where working class residents have had their lives upended by the derailment unavoidable derailment of a Norfolk southern bomb train two years ago almost, right? And to communities here in South Baltimore who are being poisoned by another railroad, a medical trash incinerator, all that kind of work that we’ve done to talk to folks, living in areas like that has taught us something that I’ve said on this show many times is that we are all more or less being set up for sacrifice.

And in these communities you can see the future that’s in store for most of us. And if you don’t believe that, just look at the last two weeks. Listen to what Byron said about the toxic sort of sludge that you can’t control where that stuff goes when a hurricane hits your area. What about the mountaintop removal that’s increasing the likelihood for deadly landslides? I mean, what about the insurance companies that are telling people after a natural disaster that they are shit out of luck? I mean, this is what we mean when we say we all need to care about this and we all need to be fighting together against this because we’re all being set up for sacrifice. And that is unacceptable on every single level. And so I can’t stress that enough for people out there listening, please don’t comfort yourself with the notion that you’re going to be fine even if others aren’t.

And just hoping and praying that you live in a safe zone. We need to be proactive about this. And I just can’t emphasize that enough. And I know I can’t keep you both for much longer because you have the vital work to do of repairing your community and meeting your community members’ needs. And once again, we can’t thank you enough for doing that work. I want to just ask if you could tell our listeners a bit more about the kind of relief work that you’ve been doing, the kind of needs in the community that you referenced earlier that are ongoing, the different orgs, volunteer groups that are doing the work of helping and what folks out there listening right now can do to support those efforts and support our fellow workers in these regions battered by the hurricanes.

Lori Freshwater:

Right. Thank you for all that and thank you for just, it’s so nice to talk to someone so informed from a distance about what’s going on, not just here, but like you said, so many places. I was at a place called Beloved Asheville yesterday, which is they’ve kind of risen to the top of the organization chart. It’s amazing to watch. I was there a couple of days after the storm and I watched them ramp up and now I think it’s acres out there and they’re on social media, so please go find them on social media. They’re posting a lot of videos and reels and that kind of thing, and it really does show you how massive their relief efforts have become. And they have everything from gas cans, camping supplies, things we still need. By the way, it’s getting cold here. So we need blankets, we need clothes for people, gloves, those kinds of things.

We need medical first aid supplies. Like Byron said, I think we’re okay on water. We need to keep distributing what’s here and make sure that people aren’t getting left out, but we are pivoting now to a different kind of needs. When I was at Beloved Asheville, I spoke to the co co person facilitator, I’m not sure if his title, I apologize. And he was saying that what we need is land and we need housing, and that’s what we need to start thinking of now. Instead of saying, well, this isn’t the time to think of that, it is the time to think of that. There was a homeless population here before and now that population, we don’t know. We have no idea how many people are homeless in Western North Carolina right now. So his point is so valid. We need to be thinking about getting land and building housing for people and people who are owning investment homes here.

They need to do the moral thing since our laws won’t force them to do it, and they need to stop sitting on empty houses in these places where people are homeless. So that’s the focus going forward. How can we not just get to where we were, but how can we come out better? So that’s what I would say. And I think I would just ask Byron if she has a couple of things to say that people are sending here that we might have enough of or things that we need. Let me see what she has to say because kind of really got her eye on everything coming and going. Right now,

Byron Ballard:

I course want to talk about Barnardsville. So we heard early on that Barnardsville was a disaster, and it is the big Ivy River, which is kind of a misnomer. It’s never been a real big river, but the devastating flood on that river in this little valley, again, in this beautiful little valley, we just heard how terrible it was. So we loaded it up, a four wheel drive with water, food, diapers, all of that. We headed out there and the road was good, and that is a huge blessing. The road was good, but on a quarter mile, either side of the road, it looked apocalyptic.

Lori Freshwater:

It really max. It does. I have to just say it really does look like what people think of as the zombie apocalypse.

Byron Ballard:

It looks like the suburbs of Beirut, just fewer buildings. But then we got to the place we were headed and they said it’s right across from the post office. We got there, and it’s an old firehouse and the group of people who have organized that, a group of, I’m going to call them anarchists, that is a word close and dear to my heart, but they’re primitive skills experts and they do workshops in the area all the time. They had that thing set up so elegantly. So the first bay was missing persons. Second bay was first aid. After that, there was a section of clothing and a section of food and outside under 10 by 10 popups or thousands of cases of bottled water. And you pulled in differently if you were delivering versus picking up. The point is they had within hours of the disaster, they had organized that because they knew how to organize. So we at Mother Grove, goddess Temple are doing nothing, anybody. We’re not doing anything special. Everybody can do this, but you need to think about it now when you’re not in the grips of a crisis, it is possible to organize so that you get people what they need. But you need to think about it now because it is absolutely true that the first responders of any disaster are the people who are also the most effective victims, the disaster.

And we need to be ready for that because this is a warning shot the same way that Katrina was a warning shot, and we’re not going to get many more warning shots before the big huge cataclysm happens. We just simply aren’t. So I would say, and I’ve said this again and again, do the work. Do the damn work. Look at what your community needs and do it and do it and do it. And yes, it is exhausting. I mean, I look at your face and I know you look at my face, look at us, look at hanging out over your phone and we look tired because we aren’t tired, but we’re doing good work. So if people want to come to Mother Grave, goddess Temple, we are here. We will give you a cup of tea or a cup of coffee and a cookie and maybe some food, and then we may say, how much gas you got in your car? Can I give you money for gas? This stuff needs to go and I want to emphasize this. We are not special. Anybody can do this, but you just have to have the guts to do it, and you’ve got to get off your lazy ass and do something. Okay, I guess I’ll finish with that.

“Why is the Biden administration helping migrants and not hurricane victims?” You’ve no doubt heard this line, or some version of it, from your Facebook Uncle over the past two weeks. “Why is the government spending money on food stamps for drug addicts and not taking care of homeless vets?”

Rhetorical questions like these, drenched in faux-populist concern for the “average American,” have always been crowd-pleasers in conservative media and online circles, but their popular appeal is growing as climate chaos accelerates acute disasters and exposes the broken liberal state of the world’s ostensibly wealthiest country. As bridges fail, trains derail, disaster responses struggle to keep up, and infrastructure continues to erode, the very same forces that seek to gut the social state will turn to these failures—some real, some imagined—and exploit them to show how the priorities of liberalism are “anti-white” and anti-rural. 

None of it makes any sense; it’s draped in transparent cynicism and hypocrisy. But this doesn’t matter. What matters is that this line works, and liberals have failed to sufficiently build a media and political system that can counter it—a problem that will only get worse as climate chaos exposes the United States’ uniquely poor infrastructure and social welfare system. 

This talking point has become a full-blown Trump campaign focus in the last few weeks before the election. As dual hurricanes, Helene and Milton, destroyed much of the southeastern coast of the United States, Republicans didn’t even wait for the dead to be named and counted before exploiting the tragedy to attack immigrant communities. “A lot of the money that was supposed to go to Georgia and supposed to go to North Carolina and all of the others is going and has gone already,” former President Donald Trump told a crowd last Friday. “It’s been gone for people that came into the country illegally.” 

“Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you! It is happening right in front of your eyes. And FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason,” Elon Musk insisted on Twitter. 

“There’s a bucket of money in FEMA that’s gone to illegal aliens and that’s somehow separate than the bucket of money that should by right go to American citizens,” JD Vance told Fox News’s Fox & Friends last week.

None of these claims, of course, are true. It’s simply a variation on an increasingly popular GOP attack line: feigning social welfare concerns for True Americans while claiming sinister minority groups or immigrants are soaking up free government cash. The most recent “Appalachian hurricane victims are left to die while migrants live high on the hog” meme comes after a similar lie, since debunked, was spread by Republicans last year, this time pitting “homeless vets” against migrants supposedly getting free housing. 

Thus far, liberals’ response to this line of attack—which we’ll call The Sudden, Selective Social Democrat Republican—has been to feign incredulity and fact check. Incredulity and fact checking are fine, and the White House was smart to quickly put up a website debunking the most outlandish of the lies, but not before they went viral and created a contagious thought meme that permeated online to millions of Americans. 

So how can liberals and leftists counter this seemingly effective talking point? A useful place to start would be to not point out Republican hypocrisy for its own sake, but orient this hypocrisy in contrast to a liberal vision of a more egalitarian, social welfare worldview for everyone—poor whites and poor migrants alike. 

Republican hypocrisy, make no mistake, is galling and worth noting. 

Trump, while president, sought to cut $271 million for FEMA disaster relief and redirect the money to “cracking down” on border enforcement. The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025— which Trump and his running mate Vance have championed, despite efforts to distance themselves from it—explicitly seeks to gut FEMA response capacity. As Ali Velshi documents at MSNBC, the authors of the Heritage foundation’s blueprint call for ““Privatizing … the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Flood Insurance Program, reforming FEMA emergency spending to shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government, eliminating most of DHS’s grant programs.” The blueprint also says the federal government’s cost-sharing for disaster response should be reduced, which would be particularly burdensome for poor states.

Likewise, Republicans—chief among them then-President Trump—have sought to gut housing services for veterans and cut the budget of the Department of Veterans Affairs more broadly. 

The groups right-wing demagogues like Trump and Vance claim are being harmed by liberals shoveling money to immigrants are the exact same groups these demagogues routinely seek to cut services and support for. They’re the exact same groups the corporate-funded think tanks that will take over and run Trump’s policy priorities have spent decades disempowering, endangering, and polluting.  

But it can’t all be hypocrisy gotchas. While it may feel good to point out what naked phonies Trump and Co. are, doing so is no substitute for politics. There’s a fairly competent and well-funded center-left media industry that can do the work of pointing out both that Republicans are lying, and that they are totally full-of-shit, small, austerity-driven hypocrites. 

The next part––the hard part––is where liberals have more or less given up. Tales of widespread FEMA neglect are false. But Democrats countering Trump’s dark nativist vision with the politics of social welfare is a dream that more or less died when the Sanders campaign fizzled out in early Spring 2020. From de-industrialization to free trade ideology to sunsetting COVID-19 aid, Democratic leadership, with some exceptions, has proudly adopted the mantle of On Your Own politics, embracing austerity and free market dog-eat-dog capitalism. Add to this Democrats’ almost wholesale concession on the racist premises of immigration panic, and the ability to credibly combat The Sudden, Selective Social Democrat Republican becomes that much more difficult. From a messaging standpoint, Democrats’ defense of the Department of Homeland Security’s meager support for migrants is unconvincing when these same Democrats consistently frame migrants as little more than a burden on civilized society. 

Misdirecting populist anger toward vulnerable populations is, of course, not new. Peasant uprisings in 1848 Europe sometimes turned their ire away from the aristocrats and focused it on local Jewish communities. In his excellent book Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, historian Christopher Clark recites dozens of examples of local clergy and petit bourgeois redirecting popular anger towards the “other.” In revolutionary Galecia, he illustrates one example: prominent Polish-Armenian priest Karol Antoniewicz told the angry masses that the chief culprit for their ills was “the Jews” who, “like spiders, had wrapped the poor peasants in their web of immoral behaviour.” Antisemitic pogroms followed throughout central Europe, while the landed gentry watched in comfort and amusement from afar.  

But we can look to more recent examples to elucidate this point. Ronald Regean rose to popularity reciting a made-up story about a “welfare queen,” a Chicago woman who supposedly had “80 names,” “30 addresses,” and $150,000 a year in income from public coffers. And during his speeches throughout the South, while campaigning for the presidency in the 1970s, he made up an equally fictional “strapping young buck” using food stamps to “buy a T-Bone steak,” while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.”

Using immigrant scapegoats to channel justified—and sometimes unjustified—popular anger is as old as popular anger and immigrants. 

To an extent there’s only so much liberal-left messaging can do. Conservative media is sprawling, well-funded, and exists in its own alternative universe. They’ll use brain-dead fascistic claptrap to divide and conquer Americans no matter how economically populist Democrats become. 

But working to create a genuine social safety net, openly campaigning on universal, non-means-tested programs like single-payer healthcare and free higher education for all, would combat the image—not altogether unfounded—that Democrats are increasingly the party of only the highly educated and professional. Democrats have lost large swaths of the white working and middle class, and, increasingly, working and middle-class minorities. This is the logical outcome of (1) an overt pivot to Wall Street and neoliberal ideology (self-inflicted), and (2) the fact that Republicans just got better at exploiting racism (out of Democrats’ control). 

To combat fake populism requires not just hypocrisy dunks or fact checks—both of which are fine and true as far as they go—but a vision of actual populism, of a government that fights for and with the working class, whether they be migrants or born in the US, Black or white, rural or urban. These divisions are artificial constructs of class control, ones gleefully used by billionaire-funded Republicans. Liberals should work to erode them with a broad message of collective social welfare. This, more than any front-row-kid “fact check” or whining to the media refs, would inculcate Democrats from charges of abandoning disaffected working-class voters.

The climate crisis is intensifying every year. From deadly, record-breaking heatwaves and forest fires to rising sea levels, the devastating impacts of man-made climate change are being felt across the globe. But you would hardly know there was a crisis after watching the 2024 Democratic National Convention. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Collin Rees, political director at Oil Change US, about the shocking lack of urgency on addressing the climate emergency at the DNC in Chicago.

Videography: Kayla Rivara
Post-Production: Adam Coley

Transcript

Collin Rees:  I’m Colin Rees, Political Director at Oil Change US.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Colin, thanks so much for talking to me, man. It’s been a wild week. We are here on Thursday, Aug. 22, the Democratic National Convention has officially ended. Kamala Harris has formally accepted the nomination, and now it’s a full-on sprint to the general election.

I wanted to talk to you specifically because it felt, to me, very obvious that one of the most absent issues throughout the course of this week is the climate. And of course, on the Republican side at the RNC, they’re calling climate change a total hoax. This is just old jazzy standards of the right. I guess, how did you feel looking back on the week about how much climate change and climate policy was addressed, or wasn’t, this week?

Collin Rees:  I thought it was a huge missed opportunity. I think there is no question that the Democratic Party is better than the Republicans on climate, but I think the key problem there is that better than the Republicans is the lowest bar imaginable. That’s not going to get it done.

And so I think, in particular, the way the presidential election has unfolded, the lack of a real primary, the substitution of Kamala Harris, hasn’t allowed for that richer discussion that we need, raising the bar on what’s needed on climate. And I think that’s concerning from a climate policy standpoint, but it’s also a deep political vulnerability.

If Kamala is not able to or willing to put out a bold climate platform, be specific about what she’s going to do to phase out fossil fuels and build out renewable energy, that could very much hurt her. Youth voters care deeply about this, voters on the front lines of extraction and of climate impacts care deeply about this issue, and so I think it’s a really missed opportunity.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And I want to ask if you could just underscore for folks out there watching and listening where we are with the climate crisis right now, because it’s the thing that people love to put out of sight, out of mind, as the planet continues to warm, as the world continues to break apart into something we are not prepared for. So, from your vantage point, where are we right now with the climate crisis, and how does that square with the apparent lack of urgency here at the Democratic National Convention and in this election in general?

Collin Rees:  Max, vibes are bad. We are not in a good place on the climate crisis. And in particular, we have seen, this is the hottest year on record. We are breaking temperature records several days in a row in July, I believe. We’re seeing flooding in Connecticut and other places across the country. We have Hurricane Beryl hitting the Gulf Coast. Wildfire is starting out West again. These climate impacts are here to stay and they’re only getting worse.

I think the other really dangerous thing that happens when you have this lack of discussion at the DNC, for instance, is that space is not just left empty in a vacuum, that space is filled by actors like ExxonMobil, by actors like oily Texas Democrats who would like to delay and deny climate action, block climate action.

I think there is this prevailing sense in the media in particular, the mainstream media, that the IRA was passed, the Inflation Reduction Act under Joe Biden, we’ve done some of the things on climate, and so there’s not a need to focus anymore. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Not only was that, at best, a down payment on the climate action that we need, but some of the deeply irresponsible and dangerous trade-offs that were made in the IRA are coming to fruition and are starting to boost the fossil fuel industry, starting to give it new life.

You have false solutions like carbon capture and storage, dirty hydrogen. These things the fossil fuel industry is using to cling to its existence by continuing fossil fuel production, doubling down on oil and gas expansion, and its political existence as well.

The idea that you can continue to have a fossil fuel industry as long as you suck carbon out of the air, these fanciful, unbelievably expensive ideas where the technology doesn’t even exist, set that all aside for a moment. The main point from the lobby industry, from the fossil fuel industry’s side, is that they’re still in the room.

They’re still making these decisions about climate policy. They’re still hosting and sponsoring panels on the sidelines of the DNC despite donating vastly more to Republicans than to Democrats. They just want to stay in the conversation, they just want to stay afloat to continue that private profit greed machine, and I think that’s one of the less talked about things when you don’t have the proper discussion that you should on climate.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And as far as the climate justice movement is concerned, what would a bold climate platform look like? And from your perspective as someone who covers this day in, day out, what is it going to actually take to get there?

Collin Rees:  It’s going to take political will. The science is extremely clear on this. We have a lot of the tools. A lot of those tools are actually executive branch tools, too. The President can do this. We certainly need Congress to come along, and that would be great, but there’s so much that Kamala can do just by herself.

Where we’re at right now is that we are seeing major gains in renewable energy. That’s great. Wind and solar are coming along. They could be faster, and they need to be, but we’re getting there.

What we’re not seeing is a corresponding phase out of fossil fuels. Or, even barring that, we’re not even seeing an end to fossil fuel expansion. The first step is to stop digging when you’re in a hole, and we’re not even doing that.

So what we really need to see specific action on is to constrain that expansion of the fossil fuel industry and to start to phase it out. That’s a few things. It’s taking the Biden pause on new LNG export authorizations and making it permanent, saying, we will not be issuing new export authorizations for LNG.

It’s rejecting the Dakota access pipeline. People don’t necessarily know this, this is DAPL, this is the pipeline that was bravely resisted by the Standing Rock Sioux during late Obama years. It was approved by Trump, but it was approved illegally, and the judge has said that. He sent it back to the Department of the Interior and it’s sitting on their desk right now waiting to be approved or not. That pipeline could be shut down, could be taken out of the ground, even could be capped. That’s a decision that will be waiting on Kamala Harris’s desk if she’s president next spring.

Ending fossil fuel subsidies is another really critical piece here. We have to stop sending tens of billions of dollars a year towards making the problem worse and start redirecting that money toward a livable future.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And last question, man. For folks out there, voters who are thinking about this as, well, that’s a distant issue. This is not an immediate issue like stopping a second Trump presidency, or for people who are still caught in that mental frame, what would you want folks out there to know who are going to maybe see this and recoil at first? What is the climate justice movement’s message to people about why they need to care about this now, in this election and beyond?

Collin Rees:  Yeah. I think not only is this an issue that is critical here at home, we’re seeing the mounting climate impacts. This is a crucial effort issue in which global leadership is sorely needed. The US is falling behind all its peer nations in terms of these commitments to phase out fossil fuels. This is an area where America can lead and can work for that brighter future, but it’s not guaranteed. We’re not going to get there unless we actively take those steps.

I guess I would just say the other thing here is that I think there’s this false perception, frankly, bought by the fossil fuel industry and its donations, that climate is a losing issue or that tackling the fossil fuel industry is not popular politically.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. We have very good polling and data showing large majorities of the American people want to take down the fossil fuel industry. People don’t like big oil. People don’t like Exxon fucking up their water. People don’t like Chevron polluting their communities. People don’t like these companies and the oil industry making their lives a living hell.

A majority of Pennsylvanians want to ban fracking. This is something where the American people are very much on the side of aggressive action, and the only people who don’t want that action is the American Petroleum Institute, is the fossil fuel industry lobby.

The Olympics weren’t the only place new world records were set this summer. Across the globe, sweltering temperatures shattered previous climate records. As the climate crisis continues, these new records will only be broken time and again. The impact is already being felt on the world of sports, and the effects will only become more acute with time. Climate and sports scholar Dr. Madeleine Orr speaks with Edge of Sports from the streets of Paris to discuss what the future of sports, and the Olympics, could look like in a rapidly warming world.

Studio Production: Jules Boykoff
Post-Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Dave Zirin:

Hey, this is Dave Zirin, here at Edge of Sports TV, only on The Real News Network, coming to you from Olympic Paris. Thrilled to have with me on the show someone who’s been on in the past and we all know the number, she did great, and so we’re thrilled to have her back on with us. Madeleine Orr, author of Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sports. Madeleine, thank you so much for talking to us here in Paris.

Madeleine Orr:

What a city, and I’m happy to be here.

Dave Zirin:

That’s awesome. That train is going by right now, and that just makes this more authentic. So Madeleine, real quick, just give us a sense of the main thrust of your book, please.

Madeleine Orr:

So my book is about what happens when climate change starts to impact the sports we love, whether it’s the athletes, the events, the teams, the venues, and we’re starting to see that. We’re seeing it in the Seine this week. The water quality is still gross. The air quality has been very mediocre in Paris the last few days. The heat is noticeable. We’re starting to get some hot days. Today was pretty hot. It’s only going to get hotter from here. So we’re seeing those impacts happen and we’re seeing it not just in summer sports, but winter sports as well, and pro sports around the world.

Dave Zirin:

Wow. So based on everything we’re seeing in Paris, the big question, can the Olympics be environmentally sustainable?

Madeleine Orr:

So Paris is a spectacle, and if you walk around the city right now, you might notice that there are streets blocked off. There are entire sections where you can’t approach. We’re on a street right now that is blocked off to cars and there is gendarmerie, the police, standing at the edge, making sure you can’t get in here. So massive disruption, and that’s because they’re bringing in 15 million tourists, and on top of 15,000 athletes and all of the staff and volunteers. So you can imagine there’s no version of bringing that many people to one place, for what’s functionally a big party, that’s going to be sustainable. That’s an oxymoron. A sustainable Olympics is an oxymoron and the model is completely untenable. They’re not going to be able to continue to do it for much longer.

Dave Zirin:

Well, our show is based in the United States and of course 2028, the Olympics go to Los Angeles. What message do you have via sustainability for people in LA?

Madeleine Orr:

If you live in LA, please get public transit. Get on them for public transit, it’s the best thing you can do, not just for your city, for yourselves, for your well-being, for your health, for your community, but also for everyone who’s going to inevitably descend on Los Angeles. Second thing you want to do is pressure them to have tickets for locals. Make sure they sell you tickets first. And when they do that, we can lower the number of international tourists that descend, and that reduces that carbon footprint. So that would be number one and two. Keep holding them to their promises. They said they’d have a sustainable games. It’s not possible to do that, but you should hold them to every promise they’ve made in terms of the little stuff, the bus lanes, the bike lanes, the pedestrian areas, all this stuff. Make them do it.

Dave Zirin:

Wow. Now I want my audience to know that you’re not just somebody who writes books, not just somebody who is a university professor, but you’re actually connected with a lot of these athletes who are dealing with political issues, and also with the issues of how they manage environmental catastrophe and world-class sport. I know, I’m not going to ask you to name names of the athletes who you’ve been speaking with, but can you speak a little bit about that work?

Madeleine Orr:

Sure. So in the last three, four years, there’s been groups of athletes organizing behind closed doors. So in Zoom calls, and LinkedIn groups, and WhatsApp groups, trying to figure out how do we take on the powers that be and get our message heard on things like sustainability, on things like racism, on things like Palestinian liberation. And those efforts are really interesting and beautiful to see. Now, it’s not easy for athletes to do that if, for example, they compete for a team like USA whose government is aligned strategically with Israel and has been supporting Israel, or Canada, where I come from, one of the big sponsors and they’ve just extended for eight years is Petro-Can. So very hard to talk about sustainability in that context.

Dave Zirin:

Wow.

Madeleine Orr:

So what’s happening there is they’ve solicited, I guess, a few of us academics to help them on the backend, fact check their messaging, support them in how they’re going to talk about it, and make sure that they feel confident when they go and create their activist work.

Dave Zirin:

Wow. Do you see a day in the near future where an Olympics are called and they quite literally cannot happen because of the climate?

Madeleine Orr:

I think that’s going to happen on the winter side sooner than we think.

Dave Zirin:

Wow.

Madeleine Orr:

I think we’ll get through in the next couple rounds, but if they don’t start really culling where they’re going to go, we are going to see places be too hot to host the Winter Games. And on the summer side, 2016 study out of the UK said, “Actually there’s maybe a dozen cities across the Northern Hemisphere that will be tenable to host the games by mid-century if it continues to be in July and August.” So we’re either going to see a scaled down games or we’re going to see a games in the shoulder season, so not summer as we know it, but a May, June, or a September, October, or we’re going to see them go away. Something’s got a give.

Dave Zirin:

Staggering. I know you’ve done a lot of media, but do you feel like the message that you have is getting out there and is part of the conversation around the Olympics? It seems to me it’s the question, will we have an Olympics? Only if we’re in some way heal the planet and radically refigure what we mean by international sports competition. Do you feel like this is a discussion, a debate that you’re seeing in the broader media landscape?

Madeleine Orr:

I think every Olympics has the discussion, right? There’s a discussion every time. In Rio it was inequality and then it was Zika virus. In Tokyo it was COVID, and here I think we’re finally having a conversation about sustainability. Is it as robust a conversation as I would hope we’re having in public? No, it’s still a lot of greenwashing, but it’s starting to be on the tip of people’s tongues. We’re starting to talk about what’s this going to look like in the context of a world on fire? And it’s important that we have that conversation, that we ask those questions, that we keep pushing the organizers.

Dave Zirin:

And then just the last question is about greenwashing. I’m hoping you can explain what that means-

Madeleine Orr:

Sure.

Dave Zirin:

… in the context of the sustainability message that comes from the International Olympic Committee.

Madeleine Orr:

Yeah. So there’s two versions of greenwashing at the Olympic level that are really nefarious. The first one is, they will tell you that these are a sustainable Olympic Games and, y’all, that’s not possible. It doesn’t exist. So they’re labeling things as sustainable because really there’s nobody to tell them not to, so they’re just using it. The other thing they do is they use a lesser of two evils argument. And this is also really pretty nasty, where they’ll say, “Oh, well these other Olympics in the past had a carbon footprint of X. We aren’t going to have that.” Well, that doesn’t mean your games are suddenly sustainable because it’s slightly better than that other thing. The bar for these things, frankly, is on the floor. And so any action is good and we want to see more of it, but you can’t jump from awful to slightly less awful and all of a sudden call it good.

Dave Zirin:

Her name is Madeleine Orr, she’s the author of Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sports. If you care about the future of sports, this is a book you have to read. Madeleine Orr, thank you so much for joining us here on Edge of Sports.

Madeleine Orr:

Thanks for having me.

A 42-year-old Black woman, Adrienne Boulware, has died in the custody of the California Department of Corrections at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. On July 4, prison guards exposed Boulware to extreme temperatures outdoors during a heatwave for 15 minutes, leaving her with just a small glass of water in the over 110 F heat. Boulware began to exhibit symptoms of heat exhaustion almost immediately after returning indoors. Two days later, she passed away while receiving medical care. Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura of the California Coalition for Women’s Prisoners joins Rattling the Bars to discuss Boulware’s tragic death, and what it reveals about the dangers prisons place incarcerated people in as the climate crisis intensifies. 

Studio / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rallying the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. It’d be unimaginable to think that if I left a dog in the car with the windows rolled up under these heating conditions that I would not be held accountable by the animal and Humane Society. But the same thing is taking place right now in California with the women in Central California Women’s Facility. The same thing is taking place right now where women are being held in environments where the heat has reached a temperature of 110. As a result, a woman has died, and not to say how many more will die or what the state of these women are at this current time. Joining me today is Elizabeth Nomura. Welcome, Nomura. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what organization you’re representing at this juncture.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Again, my name is Leesa Nomura. I am the statewide membership organizer for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. We are a organization that’s been around for almost just shy of 30 years, and I have been a statewide organizer for close to three years, but have been connected with CCWP since I was incarcerated. And I’ve been home in January, it will be five years I have been released from prison. I am of Pacific Islander descent and I am very grateful to be here calling from Tonga Land, or commonly known as Los Angeles. Thank you for having me.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. Yeah. And thank you for that. Okay, so let’s get right into it. According to a report that just came out on July 6th, a woman died from heat exhaustion in Central California Women’s Facility. Talk about what’s going on with them conditions right now as we walk back through what happened with this system.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Yeah. Tragically, a 42-year-old black woman, a very good friend of mine, of our sisterhood inside, Adrienne Boulware, just shy of coming home next year. It was 4th of July and she was being released for her meds and the institution was locked down because of course, on the holidays, there’s a lack of staff. And so because of that, on those days, the institution will be locked down because of lack of staff. And so it was med time. She was popped out for her meds. And in the configuration of the institution, the meds are not distributed to the cells like in some of the men’s joints. They have to leave their room, walk out of the unit and walk across the yard to the medical unit, stand in line with all of the other folks from the yard, and then wait in line for their turn to go up to the med window and then get their meds and then walk back to the door and then wait for whenever the housing staff in their air-conditioned cop shop is to walk to the door and unlock it and let them in.

And so apparently what the story is from our folks inside who we have direct communication with and tell us that Adrienne was out there in addition to the time it took for her to stand out there, wait out there and be exposed to above 111 degrees, I believe it was that day. What the temperature is and what the feels like temperature is always different, right, especially in the armpit of California, which is central California. And so Adrienne is standing out there and they said about 15 minutes. She’s waiting, she’s looking at the CO, he’s seeing her, she’s seeing him, and he is leaving her out there. And the whole time, there’s no water, there’s nothing out there for her to drink. And the only water she’s had the whole entire time is a little cup.

Mansa Musa:

Right, they give you water with your meds.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

They give you water, and that’s all she’s had that whole entire time. And so by the time she went inside, she was let in, went inside, she was suffering from heat exhaustion, she was sweating, her roommates were concerned for her, helped her into the room. She was shaking. In the configuration of these units, the rooms hold up to eight people and there’s a shower, a toilet, and two sinks in there so they have access to shower anytime in those cells. Her roommates helped her into the shower. She went in and once she went in there to try to cool off, she collapsed. And she collapsed and she became incoherent.

They said that her legs were shaking uncontrollably and they then called out for medical help, in which case the call-out for medical emergency is 222. So if you can imagine that scene, all of the roommates pounding on the door screaming [inaudible 00:06:37]. So it was very frantic, and they’re just trying to do the best they could because of course they’re the first responders.

Mansa Musa:

Right. You’re exactly right.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

They’re doing the best they can to keep her coherent, to keep her there and to monitor her health at that time and see how she’s doing. And so finally, medical comes and takes her away and they don’t hear anything until they receive the word Saturday morning that she had passed.

Mansa Musa:

How long did it take? Okay, because like I said, I’ve been in this space. I did 48 years prior to being released. I got five years coming up. I’ll be out five years December the 5th, but I did 48 years. When I first went in the ’70s, you had fans on the wall. It was these steel cells. It’d be so hot that the paint would literally be peeling off the wall and we ain’t get no ice. Back then, you ain’t get no ice.

But talk about how long, first of all, how long did it take for them to respond before we go into unpacking the conditions? Because it’s my understanding this is not new to this environment. How long did it take for them to respond to her, to get to her before they was able to get her to a unit where she would get treated properly to your knowledge?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

They said the total amount of time, it was about 12 minutes. So it took about three minutes for the CO to get down the hallway, unlock the door, assist the situation, hit the button, and then go to the door, let wait for the medical staff, bring the gurney, walk to them, and-

Mansa Musa:

Take another 15 minutes to get across to y’all.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Yeah, to get across the yard.

Mansa Musa:

So all together is a total of 35 to 40 minutes.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

No, no, actually it wasn’t that long because remember, each yard has their own medical unit, has their own medical thing, so the nurses there came with a gurney. It was about 13 minutes.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, it’s 13 minutes too long.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

It’s 13 minutes too long. She’s already suffering.

Mansa Musa:

And the reality is, the reality is that, okay, we recognized and this is in the United States of America, this is not isolated to this California prison, we recognized that the heat wave was going across this country. We recognized… I was in Vegas and it was 115 and I went outside and I did something every three minutes and came back in. That’s how burned the heat was. But it wasn’t so much the heat, it was just like the lack of air. It was just like not told. So I know from experience, but more importantly, I know from experience from being in that space.

Talk about now… My understanding is that this is not the first time that this institution or the California prisons has been cited for not being prepared to deal with the heat or elements, period. Talk about, to your knowledge, has it changed? How long did you do before you was released?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

I did 10 years.

Mansa Musa:

All right, so you can walk us back. So has the conditions staying there, have they gotten any better during the course of your incarceration?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

No, they’ve only progressively gotten worse because of course the equipment is becoming more and more dilapidated and over time and it hasn’t been replaced. And I worked on those maintenance crews that did the preventative maintenance that’s supposed to happen every winter in preparation for the summer. So I know what those preventative maintenance procedures look like. They’re just walkthroughs and just procedural and just checkoffs as opposed to actually things being really done to actually prepare. And so those cooling units or those swamp coolers actually are not doing the jobs that they’re doing.

Mansa Musa:

So what exactly are they for our audience? Because I know they got… I told you, the women at the correction at the county, the detention center in Baltimore City, they had got an injunction. They brought coolers, what you see on the football fields. They grown a cooling station. They grown and ran these pipes and ran these conduits all through the prison was popping in air the whole entire time because it got so hot that they didn’t have the amenities that modern prison have in terms of fans or air or be able to cool down the [inaudible 00:12:08], So they was able to get that done. So talk about what they got compared to what they should have.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

So they have swamp cooler systems that sit at the top of the roofs of every unit. However, those units, those units are connected to piping systems that pump water because of course swamp coolers need a flow of water in order for them to work. So what’s happened is that each of those units, when you run them, now the water leaks into the ceilings and now they leak into the buildings when they run them and cause more problems. And now you have leaking into the day rooms, leaking into the rooms, and so they’re causing more issues where the ceilings are falling in.

So what they end up doing is they end up not running them because of the fact that they know they’re going to cause more problems in the end and then they don’t have the people to come in or they don’t want to repair them and so they just don’t run it. And so they refuse to run or they run the air but not the water or the cut off the water line and just run the air but what ends up happening is the air will run, but after a while because the water’s not running, the engine will run hot and then it’ll pump out hot air.

Mansa Musa:

Hot air.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

And so that’s what happened on Friday.

Mansa Musa:

Right. I see. Yeah.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

That’s what ended up happening on Friday afternoon when we started Friday morning to get desperate pleas and cries for help. In the early morning hours of a lockdown status, we were getting… No, it was Saturday morning. Everyone had found out that Adrienne had passed away and they were all distraught about the passing, but then they were also all locked down and they were calling out to us and they were just getting ahold of all of us advocates saying, “We are locked down and the vents are pumping out hot air and we can’t breathe,” and they were saying, “We can’t breathe,” and then women were throwing up, they were having headaches, leg pain.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Heat exhaustion.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

And already it’s 113 that day, so the pipes were all running hot. They had no ice water because all of the ice machines in the institution except for one were all broke down. So they had no access to ice water, lack of staff, so nobody was out there trying to-

Mansa Musa:

Get ice.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

… solve the problem or get ice or make any phone calls outside to get any ice shipped in. And so nobody cared. And so everyone’s locked in their cells, up to eight people in a room, and then to add insult to injury, they’re pumping in hot air-

Mansa Musa:

Hot air.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

… from these things and they’re not even popping the doors open so that people can breathe. And half of the staff there that doesn’t give a crap is ignoring the women asking and begging to at least be let out a hallway by hallway to breathe in the day room. They’re not going to stab them. This is not the men’s joint. This is the women’s institution. All they want to do is just come out hallway by hallway.

Mansa Musa:

Breathe, so they can breathe.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Let them get some reprieve out of these ovens, I mean, these practical death chambers that are… I mean, it’s just crazy because not only… I mean, it would be better to be outside in 113 degree weather where you can actually breathe air and to be confined in a space that has no windows, no ventilation and then you’re pumping in hot air on top of that on top of breathing the air from your friend that’s-

Mansa Musa:

Everybody, all air being sucked up.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

… pressed up against you.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. Let me ask you this, Elizabeth. Okay, you just outlined that this been going on for a minute, right? Why haven’t they fixed this? Because we’re talking about at least it’s been in existence for at least five years, this system of cooling, air, water, cold air. Hot summer, California, always going to be hot. The environment ain’t going to change. You ain’t going to put no windows in it, you ain’t going to knock no windows off. You ain’t going to do none of that. You ain’t going to bring no air conditioning. Why haven’t this changed? What is the reason why the state of California has not invested money into changing this situation?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

They don’t care. They don’t care.

Mansa Musa:

All right. What’s the status of the environment now? Since now we got death and potential deaths on the way or potential irreversible injuries because of heat exhaustion, what is being done now by the California State Prison system, the Department of Correction in California? Because this ain’t only… If they got this attitude towards women prison, and this is a general attitude towards prisoners in general, women prisoners, men prisoners, juvenile prisoners, kid prisoners, prisoners in general, you going to die, well, so be it.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Right? I mean, so in terms of California Department of Corrections, or specifically for what has happened following our advocacy at CCWF, we had immediately after these cries for help, we immediately put out a press release in response to Adrienne’s passing or Adrienne’s death, and also too, putting out specifically the cries for help, and we did it quoting folks and quoting the emails and text messages we were receiving with their permission. And we put it out to every news agency that would listen to us and all of our social media, all of our social media platforms so that folks could see and we could get as much support that we could in the general public.

And the response was overwhelming. We went viral within the hour of placing that out. And so I spent the good part of the rest of that day and the following next day doing interviews and talking with people and sharing just the stories of my folks on the inside, what they were going through and how it consistently continues to be this way year after year, summer after summer, and they’re burning them up in the summer and freezing them out in the winter.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, freezing them out in the winter.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

That’s how it is. And it never changes. And so in response to our advocacy, our ongoing pressure that we were putting on CDCR and the administration there at the institution, they had immediately went to work on getting those ice machines back online. They immediately went to work on purchasing additional igloos so that each unit could have two igloos at all times. And then they immediately started to open up each of the trailers that have a AC units in those trailers that they usually have like NA, AA classes.

Mansa Musa:

I got you, I got you.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

So they open those up as cooling stations when the temperatures go up, when they go up to above 90 degrees. So these things have aggressively gotten better. However, in order for those igloos to be filled with ice and filled with water, to get those in there, you have to have staff that want to do it. So then we’re getting those staff members that are petty, and so then we’re finding out, oh, we’re getting staff that will fill the ice chest with 80% water and only a small scoop of ice and then by the time you get the igloo from the kitchen to the unit, that thing is already melted, so that’s the kind of attitude you get from inside from people from those, I’m sorry, from those pigs, that don’t give a crap-

Mansa Musa:

Yes, yes, they are.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

… that don’t give a crap and they’re retaliating against for what? For people, all they’re trying to do is stay alive and they don’t want to give people that right to advocate for their own lives. They’re not asking for much, they’re just asking [inaudible 00:22:26]-

Mansa Musa:

Let me ask you this, what’s the security status of that particular concentration camp?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Well, women’s prisons… Well, this particular women’s prison is the highest security women’s prison.

Mansa Musa:

So it’s max? It’s max medium?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Yeah, because actually, CCWF was the only institution in the state that housed death row.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, so it’s max medium.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

So you had everyone from death row to level ones.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right. Let me offer this though, for clarity, right? The sister that passed away, her name was Adrienne?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Adrienne Boulware.

Mansa Musa:

Well, Adrienne was murdered. That wasn’t-

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Yes, yes.

Mansa Musa:

That’s murder. There’s no way you can describe that but when you take [inaudible 00:23:15]-

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Let me be clear that the institution and CDCRs went on the record to state that she had passed away from a preexisting health condition.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. The preexisting health condition was neglect of taking care of me and providing me with the adequate medical attention that I need. That’s neglect, neglect turned into murder. But okay, going forward.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

In any heat advisory in the free world that comes up on every billboard, on every [inaudible 00:23:48], when they tell you to be aware or be careful, they tell you to be careful in this heat of your family members and your elderly who have what? Preexisting health conditions.

Mansa Musa:

Right, and-

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

They’re at risk.

Mansa Musa:

And then we not confused by this because we recognize that if she was in society and left in a car by anybody under the same conditions and died, they would lock them up for a homicide or involuntary manslaughter. So the fact that she was held on a plantation, under the new form of plantation, prison industrial complex, the fact that she was in that environment, they tend to minimize her existence and her being a human being, but we here to tell them right now that this is murder.

And I’m imploring y’all to at some point in time come to that place where y’all try to get some redress around that, around why did she have to die, because as you said earlier, okay, they’re putting these things into place, which is good, but the fact of the matter is if you don’t change the attitude of the pigs, if you don’t change the attitude of the institution, then somebody else is waiting in the wings to die and they justify it by saying, “Oh, they died because they had preexisting conditions and it wasn’t the fact that we was neglectful in getting them treatment or putting them in an environment that did not exasperate these preexisting conditions. That ain’t had nothing to do with it. It was just the fact that they wasn’t healthy and their health contributed to them dying.” But going forward, what do you want our audience to know?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

So basically what I would like your audience to know is that California Coalition for Women Prisoners is not done with this fight. We are going to take this fight to the legislative level and we are going to take specific asks to the legislation and these asks are going to look like short-term asks, but also some long-term asks. At the short-term level, we want every person inside every institution in California to be given state-issued cooling rags. Such an easy thing. Just cooling rags, just something that could provide immediate relief that you and I and the free world no big deal could get at the 99 Cent Store.

Also, too, is that we want also state-issued fans issued to every person that’s incarcerated. That is not a hard ask because a fan that’s issued is cheap. They are not expensive compared to the medical expense to deal with heat-related issues that come up because of the heat, extreme heat. Issuing a fan upon a person’s intake or person being booked into the prison is actually a cheap ask. If any legislator wants to push back on that because of budget, that is one of our asks.

The other thing is we want cold water dispensers accessible in every unit and not cheaply. We want it always to stay cold. So we want that to be accessible and we don’t want it held back from anyone in any lockdown situation. If someone needs that water, there needs to be a protocol in a way that that person, whether they’re in their cell or outside, be able to access that water or get that-

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, water. We talking about water, cold water.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

[inaudible 00:27:38] at any time they need.

Mansa Musa:

That’s all. Yeah. Cold water. That’s all. Cold water.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Cold water and not tepid water. They can get that from the [inaudible 00:27:46]-

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, we asking them for cold water. Cold water, that’s all.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Cold ice water.

Mansa Musa:

We didn’t ask for you to go melt the ice glacier to bring it in there and import it from Alaska. We just asking you to make the water cold and give us access to it as we need it. Come on.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

So long-term asks, we would like AC, not swamp coolers.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, we want the same thing they getting cool with. Same thing they getting cool with. We want the same thing.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

We want two units installed because the inclement weather is not getting any better. Climate change is causing it to get worse. And so it’s unavoidable. AC units must be installed in every unit in every prison, and I’m just saying starting with the Central Valley, because the weather there is more clocked 100 degree weather, simultaneous 100 degree weather in the Central Valley than any area of California statistically. So that’s a great place to start.

And I will say this. I received Intel that a year ago the institution had purchased brand new chillers and signed a contract to have those installed and installed one in one unit in the institution and somehow ran out of the funds to install any chillers.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, what happened to the money? What happened to the money? Yeah.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

All of those chillers are sitting in the warehouse.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. What happened to that money? Yeah. What happened to that money?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

What happened to that money? Who misappropriated those funds to complete the installation project and why did Adrienne have to die because of it?

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. And also, I think that y’all need to ask that they do an internal investigation on that right there because this been going on far too long.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Don’t you worry about the thing, brother. I got that.

Mansa Musa:

See, one thing, I just recently became aware of it but this been going on for a while and then Adrienne was murdered. Her murder should be the reason why they should feel like they should be hard-pressed to resolve it. But how can our audience get in touch with you and support what y’all are doing?

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Well, right now, the Adrienne Boulware family is asking for support to help them not only with funeral expenses, but they would like to fund their own independent autopsy. And so we are assisting them in supporting their GoFundMe fundraiser. And so I do have a link for that. I will forward that to you if you don’t already have it already, and also to an ongoing support of the work that CCWP has. CCWP, California Coalition for Women Prisoners dot org, is our webpage and you can connect with us or you can also connect with us on our Instagram @ccwp and that’s our Instagram handle.

Mansa Musa:

Thank you, Liz. And there you have it, real news rattling the bars. This is not a big ask. Just imagine somebody asking you say, “Listen, just give me a wet rag, cool wet rag to put on my head to lower my temperature.” That’s not a big ask. Just imagine somebody ask, you say, “Can I just get a cold drink of water?” That’s not a big ask. All the women in California ask to be treated like human beings. And as a result of being treated inhuman, someone has been murdered, not died from preexisting conditions, but died from the fact that they was neglected. We ask that you look into this. We ask that you evaluate this report and support the women in the California prison system, but more importantly, we ask that you write your congressmen or get involved with this because this is a problem. There you have it. Rattling the bars, the real news. Thank you.

Elizabeth “Leesa” Nomura:

Thank you.

This story originally appeared in Truthout on July 11, 2024. It is shared here with permission.

The hurricane season is just getting started, but a powerful storm has already brought a round of toxic releases from a cluster of fossil fuel plants on the Gulf Coast. Multiple refineries and petrochemical plants reported losing power as Hurricane Beryl slammed into Texas as a Category 1 storm on Tuesday. Those outages force operators to “flare,” or burn off, excess gases, which can release cancer-causing benzene and other toxic pollutants directly into the atmosphere.

Freeport LNG, a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal in Southeast Texas, previously suffered a massive explosion in 2022. On Tuesday, the terminal reported flaring during power outages caused by Beryl to state regulators. So did the Formosa Plastics Corporation, which is notorious for agreeing to a $50 million settlement in 2019 after dumping millions of plastic pellets into Texas waterways. Marathon Petroleum reported a “safe combustion of excess gases” at its refinery in Texas City, but the company did not disclose the volume or duration of the flaring.

Toxic flaring at fossil fuel plants is unfortunately common across the heavily industrialized region even in good weather, but power outages and flooding brought by intensifying storms can unleash extreme levels of pollution into wetlands and residential areas.

Shaq Cossé, a program manager at the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental justice group, analyzed reports submitted to state regulators on the flaring incidents in Texas.

Cossé said the latest flaring incidents in Texas should serve as a warning to federal regulators considering proposals to expand LNG export terminals in neighboring Louisiana, where an existing terminal in Cameron Parish is already disrupting local fisheries and sparking protests by residents. A separate terminal owned same company, Venture Global, is under construction in Plaquemines Parish south of New Orleans — a low-lying coastal area frequently hit by storms and hurricanes.

“Despite massive flood walls, facilities can become isolated by surrounding open water,” Cossé said in a statement. “Federal and state agencies failed to fully consider future sea level rise, land subsidence, and the stronger and more frequent hurricanes brought on by climate change when permitting these facilities.”

Medical experts also urged the Biden administration this week to reject plans to build more fossil fuel infrastructure in the potential path of hurricanes. In an open letter to President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm released on Tuesday, a coalition of 23 climate groups representing 67,000 doctors, nurses, and other health professionals urged the Energy Department to consider public health as regulators consider proposals to build more LNG export terminals.

“Bottom line here is that there is no point in the use of [LNG] as it is causing human harms,” said Mark Vossler, president-elect of Physicians for Social Responsibility, in a call with reporters. “So, our obligation is to be scaling back, and our request, which is completely reasonable, is that the Department of Energy consider these human health impacts along the entire product life cycle when they are looking at new facilities.”

Gas from the nation’s vast fracking fields is piped to Freeport LNG and other export terminals along the coast of Texas and Louisiana, where the gas is liquified at extremely low temperatures before being shipped overseas on huge barges. Communities across the Gulf Coast have been devastated by strong storms in recent years, but the industry is rushing to build more LNG terminals to feed global demand for natural gas, particularly in Asia.

Venture Global recently received a crucial permit for CP2, a controversial LNG terminal proposed to be built next to the company’s existing terminal in Cameron Parish, which has already racked up more than 100 air permit violations in two years of operation. In Plaquemines Parish, Venture Global is building a 26-foot sea wall to shield the LNG terminal currently under construction from powerful storm surges.

“When Hurricane Ida hit [in 2021], it flooded the site of the Plaquemines LNG plant and nearby areas, disrupted over 94 percent of the nation’s oil refining and gas production, and caused irreparable damage to a Phillips 66 refinery in Plaquemines Parish,” Cossé said.

However, Venture Global is still waiting on the Energy Department to permit international gas exports before breaking ground on CP2. Earlier this year, the Biden administration announced a “pause” on gas export permits while regulators update the process for determining whether the new exports are in the public interest. A federal judge in Louisiana recently stayed the so-called “pause” on export approvals, but environmentalists say the Biden administration still has time to update its public interest criteria and ultimately decide the fate of any new terminals on the Gulf Coast.

In the letter to Biden and Granholm, the medical experts said regulators should make the public interest determination based on the entire life cycle of fossil gas, which leaks climate-warming methane into the atmosphere on every leg of its journey.

“Methane gas extracted domestically that becomes LNG for export is deleterious to public health through every stage of its life cycle; from drilling and fracking, to processing, transportation, refining, and liquefaction to combustion and other end-uses such as the manufacturing of plastics and petrochemicals,” the letter states, adding that such harms disproportionately fall on lower-income people and communities of color.

Roishetta Ozane, an environmental justice activist and founder of Vessel Project of Louisiana, knows all about the way fossil fuel pollution impacts communities. Ozane is raising children in Lake Charles, Louisiana, near the border with Texas, where she says a cluster of petrochemical facilities routinely leaves the air smelling like chlorine or rotten eggs. Last week an explosion at one facility forced residents to shelter in place days before Beryl made landfall and caused flooding across the region.

“For a long time — Black communities, low-income communities, Indigenous communities — we’ve been deemed sacrifices for the almighty oil and gas companies, for the almighty dollar,” Ozane told reporters on Tuesday. “And enough is enough.”

Ozane said communities can’t rely on state regulators who are supposed to keep them safe from industrial pollution even when a storm isn’t raging up the Gulf Coast. Ozane pointed to Satartia, Mississippi, where a CO2 pipeline used by the oil and gas industry exploded in 2020 and released gas that poisoned residents of the small town, and also referenced the Freeport LNG explosion in 2022.

“But those are just the things we hear about in the news,” Ozane said. “A lot of times, the things that happened don’t make the national news.”

Instead of permitting new pipelines and export terminals, Ozane said the government should require the industry to fix and clean up its existing infrastructure.

“We need the Biden administration to really act on this public interest determination [for LNG exports],” Ozane said. “What more do we need to say? I am here as mom in my community fighting for my children.”

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

Residents of East Palestine, Ohio, and nearby areas in Pennsylvania harmed by the Norfolk Southern train disaster say a new $310 million settlement announced by the Biden administration on May 23 will not meet their communities’ most urgent needs, like access to health care for chronic conditions that emerged after the derailment.  

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan told reporters last month that the settlement with Norfolk Southern was an attempt by his agency and the Justice Department “to once again make this community whole” after 38 train cars derailed in February 2023, leading to the venting and burn-off of vinyl chloride, the toxic chemical some of the cars were carrying. 

Regan’s words echoed President Joe Biden’s remarks in East Palestine in February, when he vowed “to hold Norfolk Southern accountable and make sure they make your community whole now and in the future.”

The settlement came after Norfolk Southern announced in April that it would settle a class action lawsuit related to the derailment for $600 million. The class action settlement “does not include or constitute any admission of liability, wrongdoing or fault” on the part of the company. Both settlements are pending approval by the courts. 

Despite the size of these settlements, some residents in Pennsylvania and Ohio say the two agreements do not begin to cover their past and ongoing costs related to the derailment, like prescription medications, environmental cleaning, testing fees and relocation expenses.

“Neither of these deals announced in the past month come even close to making the impacted residents whole again,” said Hilary Flint, who lives about five miles from East Palestine in Beaver County, Pennsylvania.

Flint is one of a number of impacted residents in western Pennsylvania who have struggled to access resources for symptoms they say started after the venting and burning released more than 115,000 gallons of the carcinogen vinyl chloride into the environment. Flint has been renting a house in western New York for months so she can limit her time at her home in Pennsylvania, because she gets sick whenever she visits. In an interview in May, she said that she has bronchitis that started when she recently returned to Beaver County, and her doctor has advised her to avoid her home. 

In 2023, Flint co-founded the Unity Council for the East Palestine Train Derailment, a community organization meant to help residents affected by the disaster access resources, advocate for their needs and get their questions answered.

Unity council members traveled to Washington, D.C., last July to meet with lawmakers from Pennsylvania and Ohio as well as representatives from the EPA. 

The council also weighed in on the class action settlement proposal in April. “How can you make an offer when people are still being exposed and you still don’t know the extent or results of that exposure?” council members asked in a statement. Another East Palestine resident called the class action settlement “a slap in the face.” 

Flint said neither agreement would provide her with enough funding to cover the medical and housing costs she’s already paid, let alone her future costs. There is also not enough money available for her or her family to permanently relocate. The government settlement money is not going to individuals or families, and opting into the class action suit requires signing away the right to sue over claims in the future, Flint said. At a town hall held in May to inform the community about the class action settlement, residents criticized the terms and said the awards would not be enough to cover relocation or their medical costs. 

“Why would I sign over my future health claims for less than $20,000? That doesn’t even cover what I’ve spent on hospital bills over the past year and a half,” Flint said. “It’s a bad deal. It’s frankly a really, really bad deal. And I don’t know many people taking it.”

The settlement with the government includes $235 million for “past and future” costs, including water and soil clean-up, $25 million for community health monitoring for the next 20 years and mental health care, $15 million in penalties for violations under the Clean Water Act and more than $30 million for monitoring groundwater, surface water and private drinking water in the surrounding areas. Norfolk Southern will also be required to implement safety measures on its rails. The company said it has spent more than $200 million on improving rail safety since the derailment. 

In a statement provided to Inside Climate News, the EPA said medical monitoring and mental health services were included in the government settlement because “these are services that community members have repeatedly expressed an interest in receiving” that had been identified as “top priorities” in a stakeholder survey. 

Alan Shaw, president and CEO of Norfolk Southern, said in a press release that the company will “continue keeping our promises and are invested in the community’s future for the long-haul.” 

“From day one, it was important for Norfolk Southern to make things right for the residents of East Palestine and the surrounding areas,” he said. 

“Over the last 15 months, the people of East Palestine have remained strong, resilient and committed to healing and restoring their community. But they haven’t spent a single day alone,” Regan told reporters. “Under President Biden’s direction, EPA personnel arrived on site within hours of the derailment. And we’re committed to remaining there until the hazardous contamination has gone.” 

Jess Conard, who lives in East Palestine and whose son has developed asthma since the derailment, was similarly disappointed by the government settlement and by the proposed agreement for the class action claims. “I am glad that the EPA’s pockets are getting refilled by the polluter,” she said. “I think that the same level of responsibility should be applied to the community’s pockets. Our basic needs continue to be ignored.” 

Conard said she has not been reimbursed for costs like her son’s asthma medication or environmental testing she had conducted at her home, which showed elevated levels of vinyl chloride on her porch. She wonders every day if staying in East Palestine is contributing to her son’s health condition. “No one’s looking to get rich off of this,” she said. “They’re just looking to heal and to make sure that they don’t go bankrupt if they relocate or to make sure that their kids get the medication that they need.” 

When Conard requested funding for a filter for her well, she was asked if she lived within one mile of the derailment site, and her request was denied because she lives two miles away. The question is familiar to anyone living near the East Palestine site who has attempted to access aid from the federal or state government, residents say. 

When the derailment first occurred, the EPA set a one-by-two-mile protective radius around the accident site that became the evacuation zone and has since been used as a guideline for allocating resources from the company and the government. 

Residents who live outside the EPA’s radius have struggled to get help with cleaning, medical and relocation expenses, an issue that has not been remedied by the terms of the government’s settlement. To automatically qualify for the medical monitoring program outlined in the settlement, for example, residents must live within two miles of the accident site or near certain nearby waterways. Those living outside the two-mile radius must apply separately to qualify on a case-by-case basis. 

Experts say chemical exposure and potential harm to the environment and to public health is unlikely to be confined within the EPA’s boundary. EPA models of the plume of soot created by the vent and burn showed dispersal as far as Youngstown, Ohio, 20 miles from East Palestine, and Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, 25 miles away. 

The class action lawsuit covers claims from residents and business owners located within 20 miles of the derailment site and personal injury claims within 10 miles. The mental health care services in the government settlement are available to anyone living in Beaver County or Lawrence County in Pennsylvania or Columbiana County in Ohio, as well as first responders. 

The EPA spokesperson said the medical monitoring program is “intended to focus on individuals within the 2-mile radius who were most impacted by the derailment” and noted that the class action settlement’s “potential, average” payment to households within the two-mile radius is $70,000 and drops down to $250 for families living 15 to 20 miles away. 

Flint and Conard said that while funding for medical monitoring and research was important, what their communities needed most was access to covered treatment for the symptoms they are experiencing now. Like other local activists, Conard wants the federal government to issue a major disaster declaration for East Palestine, which she said would guarantee health care coverage for residents and grant access to other resources the community needs. 

In response to questions about the lack of health care or medical treatment programs in the government settlement, EPA pointed to the existence of the East Palestine Clinic at East Liverpool City Hospital in Ohio, set up after the derailment to provide services for residents in 2023. “The clinic provides medical treatment and care,” the EPA spokesperson said. But Conard disputed the idea that this clinic is meeting the health care needs of residents, calling it “useless.” Conard said Pennsylvanians are not eligible to receive care there, and it is not free.

“In my mind, justice means none of us have to pay health care costs moving forward, because we are the guinea pigs now for this,” Flint said. Flint and other residents are being asked to participate in an array of public health studies to better understand the long and short-term impacts of the derailment on the population. 

When she is feeling sick or develops a new symptom, like chronic itching or a need for an inhaler, she said, researchers are eager to collect her hair and blood samples. But they are not able to offer help accessing or paying for treatment or prescription medications. “Research is great, but what about care for the community? You can’t just use them as rats,” she said. 

More than a year on, the physical and mental toll of grappling with the aftermath of the derailment weighs heavily on both Flint and Conard. “Life is out the window,” Flint said. “This has become our life.” Between dealing with her symptoms and working to advocate for herself, her family and her community, she has had little time in the last year for ordinary things like hanging out with friends.

Conard spoke about the often “exhausting” and “terrifying” reality of living in East Palestine in the year since the derailment, trying to figure out how best to protect and fight for her family while contending with normal parenting responsibilities. “When I wake up and I hear news, I think, what fresh hell is this to deal with?” she said.

She compared the settlements to being repeatedly offered cheap coffee when residents only wanted water. “I have gratitude that things are moving forward. But the programs that we need still have not been implemented, and we’ve been asking for the same program since day one,” she said. “I’m tired of being told what I want, when I’m already telling you what I want and what I need.” 

Marianne Lavelle contributed to this report.

It’s been six years since the IPCC released its 2018 report warning that mean global temperatures would rise past 1.5 Celsius unless drastic action was taken by 2030. While climate change is already impacting all aspects of our lives, there is one area where relatively rapid and meaningful steps could be taken, but have yet to materialize: sports. Rising temperatures, seas, and emissions all call into question the sustainability of current sports practices. Can athletes continue to compete outdoors under current game conditions in scorching climates? What happens to athletes from island nations threatened by rising sea levels? How can mega-events like the Olympics and the carbon footprints left behind by associated construction and tourism continue to be justified? Professor Madeleine Orr joins Edge of Sports to discuss these questions and other topics addressed in her book, Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sports.

Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Taylor Hebden
Audio Post-Production: David Hebden
Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Dave Zirin:

Meet me on the edge. Welcome to Edge of Sports, the TV show only on the Real News Network. I’m Dave Zirin. Right now we’re going to do, ask a sports scholar where we’re going to speak to a professor at the University of Toronto, Professor Madeleine Orr, who has a book coming out called Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sports. Let’s bring her on right now. Professor Orr, thank you so much for joining us.

Madeleine Orr:

Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Dave Zirin:

Yes. Look, I know your goal from an email you sent me is not just to write a climate book, but one that appeals to sports fans. How are you endeavoring to pull that off?

Madeleine Orr:

Yeah, I think sports fans are; it’s such a huge tent, so it’s hard to catch them all, but I think they want to hear sports stories; they want to hear human stories, and often with climate, we get science stories, and it just doesn’t resonate in the same way. So what I tried to do here is to tell those human stories, to bring up athletes and coaches and how this is impacting them in different ways around the world. And so, I hope that comes across in the book. I’ll let readers decide for themselves.

Dave Zirin:

Yeah. I want to ask you what story is really resonating with you as you look back on the writing, but first, can you give our audience a sense how is climate change changing sports?

Madeleine Orr:

Yeah, so the big one is it’s getting warmer, which global warming, it’s in the name, but that means winter sports are starting to get squished on the schedule. So we’ve basically lost November and April skiing on both sides of the Atlantic in the last 30 years. We’ve also seen in the summer side, it’s getting too hot to play. So at the moment, in North America, heat stroke and heat illness is the leading cause of death among youth athletes. We don’t often hear about it because it often gets chalked up as basically anything else because they don’t want to talk about heat, but heat is the big, big one.

The second issues tend to be related to water, so either not enough water or too much water. Both are not good if you’re playing on drought-based fields; it’s hard. It injures you more when you fall, and if you’re playing on a wet field, well, we’re looking at slip and falls, and we’re looking at all kinds of issues with flooding. So really, kind of across the gamut, it’s either too much water, not enough water, or heat that’s really changing the landscape around the world.

Dave Zirin:

Yeah. As you said, you are trying to tell the story of climate change in sports by telling the stories of athletes, of events, of the problematic nature of this current moment. Can you tell us one of those stories that really sticks with you as you’re coming out there with the book?

Madeleine Orr:

Yeah, so I spent some time in California with communities impacted by fire, and Paradise, California, got razed to the ground in 2018 with the campfire. The story that I tell in Paradise is the high school football team, and from the lens of the coaches, who essentially had to stop all football and evacuate the city with their athletes, and then over the course of a year build a program back up from the ground with very traumatized athletes, a bit of a problematic space in terms of where they were playing and what resources were available to them.

There were athletes who were homeless following the fires. There were athletes who had experienced months and months of insomnia and associated mental health issues. There were coaches that were landing in the hospital from related injuries to the fire, and because of the let’s get after it, macho football culture, a lot of that went unheard, right? The idea was let’s get everyone on the field as fast as possible, get “back to normal,” and all of these mental and physical health issues got pushed to the side, which ended some athletes’ careers, it ended some of the coaches’ careers. And so four years on, I was talking to some of those athletes and coaches and trying to figure out what happened there and how do we keep athletes safe when big events like this come to town.

Dave Zirin:

Are we looking at the end of youth sports in the foreseeable future in big swaths of the world, or is there time to wind this back?

Madeleine Orr:

I don’t think we’re looking at the end of sport. I think we’re looking at a huge shift in sport. I don’t think that we can continue to play on the seasons that we currently have. So your American football in the fall, soccer in the spring, that’s going to have to shift. I also know from working with organizations in Oceania, for example, to Southeast Asia, the Caribbean that they’re looking at completely untenable playing surfaces and fields as early as the 2030s. So by Brisbane in 2032 and sport events kind of further into the 2030s, we could see entire nations dropping off the map in terms of playing ability.

And that means that, at the youth level, it’ll happen sooner. So I think there’s a lot of work to be done to preserve playing opportunities. The good news is almost all of these playing opportunities can be preserved, but we’ve got to divorce ourselves from the tradition Latin sports system where we’re married to schedules; we’re obsessed with keeping certain play traditions. The amount of time, for example, in a half or a quarter of a game that might have to shift, there might need to be more breaks to accommodate heat, to accommodate rain or whatever it is. And I think we’re just going to have to get more comfortable being flexible.

Dave Zirin:

What does it tell us about the sports media? And I’m talking about sports radio, ESPN, TSN. What does it say that, in my opinion, they’ve completely missed this story when it can so irrevocably alter or warp sports?

Madeleine Orr:

Yeah, they have totally missed it. So far, there’s a trickle of stories since 2020 coming into play. They tend to focus just on, there’s a hurricane in the South, but they play it off as a one-time event. They’re not kind of drawing the thread from hurricane, to hurricane, to fire, to heatwave, to hurricane, which is what you need to do with climate change is kind of tie these things together and see the bigger picture. What we do know is we’re starting to get pushback. The leagues are starting to push back on 10-year media contracts to try to get them tighter into three to five, which allows for a renegotiation and more flexibility in terms of how those commercial breaks happen and when they happen. And can we get more time? And what does it look like if we need to have a rain delay?

All of those questions are now on the table in these negotiations. It’s not coming out to the public though, and I think that’s a shame because sport has a huge opportunity to tell a story about climate change that’s not necessarily life and death but will hit people right in the feels. In terms of that’s their pastime on the weekend, it might be their passion, it might be what they’re listening to on the radio on the way to work. So if sports is such a big part of our lives and the media is how we receive that information, the media has got to be part of telling the story better.

Dave Zirin:

What are your thoughts about the mega events, the massive mega events like the Olympics or the World Cup that do leave a big carbon footprint, but they always say that they’re doing these events with green principles in mind?

Madeleine Orr:

Yeah, I think that claim that they’re green is, it’s cute; it’s not real, but it’s cute. I have worked with the IOC on projects, I know that it’s not about them not having a few good people in place; it’s that they need a hundred people in place and a totally new model of hosting. The tweaks that are happening at the moment are generally related to using existing facilities, increasing public and active transit in the city once people are there, and changing the way that the events move, meaning when they go from one place to another, that more information and knowledge sharing happens between host cities. That’s not enough, in my view. It’s not even close. In order to have more sustainable events, if they want to use that word, we need to be talking about a huge shift in the scale of the event, meaning much, much smaller.

It would not be a tourism spectacle. It would be mostly reserved for the folks who live in the region where it’s being hosted, but that will be necessarily a hit to the economics of the event, which already aren’t great. And you’ve had Jules Boykoff on; he has written extensively about NoLympics campaigns about folks in the community that get displaced around these events, around harm and violence that happen systematically because of the events related to police and security, et cetera. So there’s already a long list of reasons these events are not great for hosts. In Paris already, we’re seeing quite a few riots related to this summer’s games. I think we’re going to keep seeing it. Are they fun? Sure. Is it worth it? Not from an environmental standpoint, at least not yet.

Dave Zirin:

I was going to ask you if these events were incompatible with the planetary crisis.

Madeleine Orr:

Yes.

Dave Zirin:

It sounds like you’re saying yes.

Madeleine Orr:

Yes.

Dave Zirin:

Wow. You can’t have a healing planet and the World Cup, and the Olympics as they currently exist.

Madeleine Orr:

That’s right. Yep. And I think that they want to sell this idea that they’re green, I mean for their sponsor’s sake. The sponsors want to be telling that message, but also because it allows them to continue business as usual. The problem with that is, right now you can kind of slap a green label or the word sustainable on just about anything because there’s not clear rules on what that means. And so there’s a lot of work happening by organizations like Carbon Market Watch in the UK to break down what these organizations are doing, what’s real and not real. There’s quite a lot of creative accounting on the emissions side, but there is no version of a sustainable games as of yet.

Dave Zirin:

So, professor, or if I put you in the throne and made you the commander-in-chief of all things sports-

Madeleine Orr:

Okay.

Dave Zirin:

-How would you change the current setup? And I’m talking about from youth to the pros, so sports could, in theory, operate ethically with regards to the climate?

Madeleine Orr:

Well, so a couple of things, right? The first thing would be we need healthy people in order to have a healthy climate. If people are unhealthy and they’re on that kind of rat race wheel of stress and frustration around jobs and they don’t have time to do things like care about the planet, or they don’t have money to make choices that care about the planet, then they’ll get discouraged and drop out of that project. So the big thing is I would focus on participation, not medals, which is the model that certain countries have begun to adopt with considerable success. That would mean majority of the funding that goes to sport would be for youth and participation sport. It would also mean that all the big sporting events would be considerably smaller, and that would also link to a huge quota of tickets for any given event reserved for folks that live within kind of a 20, 30-mile radius of the event.

So that kind of scales it down considerably. The other thing I would start to think about is we got really creative during COVID with how the media delivers events to people at home, and we need to start using some of that technology, whether it’s AR and VR, whether it’s holographs of athletes, like if you had an Olympic Games in Paris where only the athletes and the media travel and everyone else in the stands is from Paris, and then everyone who wants to watch around the world, who ordinarily would travel, is going to go to their local venue and watch holograms of the athletes at their local venues. Not only does that bring sport to home and makes it more accessible financially for people to get engaged and involved, it also means that we’re reducing all that travel. So there’s, I think, a lot of ways that we can improve without cutting the opportunity for athletes at the elite levels to play. And without removing fandom completely, it’s just going to look a lot different.

Dave Zirin:

The book is called Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sports by Madeleine Orr. It sounds like an absolute must-read for anybody who cares about sports or the history of the planet. I can’t let you go though, Professor Orr, without talking about something not completely different but certainly on a bit of a parallel track. I understand that you are at the NCAA Women’s Basketball Final Four, which secured bonkers ratings, became a national phenomenon for about 55 different reasons, and I was hoping maybe you could share some of that experience of what it was like to be there live.

Madeleine Orr:

Yeah, so this wasn’t my first Final Four, but it was the biggest hype around a Final Four that I’ve ever seen. I follow the women’s game, not the men’s game, although there were a lot of fun men’s games this year. The vibe in Cleveland was awesome, frankly, in the city. It was the same weekend as the eclipse, so you had women’s basketball fans and science nerds, which is the best possible combo in my book. And it was electric. The venue was sold out, 18,300 people, a lot of kids, way more kids than you would ordinarily see at an event like this. Families were coming all together, and I think that’s something really unique about the women’s game. And then just the number of women in the stands. You go to an NBA game or a Men’s Final Four, and it’s a lot of young men that’s kind of dominating the space.

At Women’s Final Four, it’s hugely diverse, it’s really inclusive, it’s a lot of fun, way less beer sales, way more kind of soda and candy, and that kind of thing. But it was a lot of fun. You had to stand in line for about half an hour to get merch, which is a great sign. And they had merch at every corner, and you still were standing in line. The festival area outside was packed all weekend, and it was free. Even if you didn’t have a ticket to the game, you could go to the fan zones for free. On the Saturday between the Friday and Sunday games, they had an open practice for both the teams in the finals, so South Carolina and Iowa played open practices, and they filled the stadium for open practice. Just the support for these women was amazing, the media presence was awesome. It felt like the women’s game was finally given its flowers, and credit to Dawn Staley, credit to Caitlin Clark, and the two teams that were there for raising the women’s game, for drawing that much attention.

And all I can hope is that people are going to watch the draft this year. It’s in a few days, and the women’s game is wild because you have players competing in Final Four and then literally the following week in a draft, and then within about five to 10 days of the draft, they’re in camps because training camp has to be done for two weeks before the season starts a month later. And in some cases, athletes who get drafted are still writing final exams for college while they’re in training camp and at the draft, and then in the W. So it’s fun, it’s fast, it feels like this space is growing really quickly, and I can only hope that it doesn’t slow down.

Dave Zirin:

Higher ratings than the World Series, higher ratings than the NBA finals, higher ratings than the Men’s Final Four, higher ratings than a lot of NFL games this year. Peak ratings: 24 million people watching. I got to ask you the questions everybody’s asking me: do you see this as a one-time, women’s game, getting its flowers, Caitlin Clark phenomena? Or do you think we’ve hit a pivot point in the history of popularity in women’s sports, particularly women’s hoops?

Madeleine Orr:

I think we’ve hit a pivot point. We’ve got women in the pipeline that are just absolute rock stars that are going to be around for a while. The fun thing about the women’s game is there’s no one and done; they’re there for four years. So the younger players that are absolutely dominating right now, we’re going to see them for a while, and that’s what makes it so fun compared to the men’s game. So I’m hoping, and actually, I’m betting on this being a turning point and not just a flash in the pan.

Dave Zirin:

JuJu Watkins already a star. Can’t wait to see how that popularity explodes in the years ahead, because that’s where I’m putting my hard-earned money. No doubt about it. And I also agree that we’re at a pivot. Professor Madeleine Orr, thank you so much for joining us here on Edge of Sports.

Madeleine Orr:

Thanks for having me.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Apr. 16, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

Scientists said Monday that the world’s coral reefs are facing a fourth global bleaching event as the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency pushes ocean temperatures to record highs, imperiling the critical underwater ecosystems that sustain thousands of species.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI)—which NOAA co-chairs—said they documented coral bleaching in the northern and southern hemispheres of every major ocean basin on Earth between February 2023 and April of this year. It could be the worst global bleaching event on record.

“Since early 2023, mass bleaching of coral reefs has been confirmed throughout the tropics including Florida in the U.S.; the Caribbean; Brazil; the eastern Tropical Pacific (including Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia); Australia’s Great Barrier Reef; large areas of the South Pacific (including Fiji, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Samoas, and French Polynesia); the Red Sea (including the Gulf of Aqaba); the Persian Gulf; and the Gulf of Aden,” the organizations said in a statement.

“NOAA has received confirmation of widespread bleaching across other parts of the Indian Ocean basin as well, including in Tanzania, Kenya, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Tromelin, Mayotte, and off the western coast of Indonesia,” they added.

“More than half the reefs on the planet have basically experienced bleaching-level heat stress in the last year.”

Derek Manzello, coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch, said that “as the world’s oceans continue to warm, coral bleaching is becoming more frequent.”

Excessively warm water causes corals to expel algae from their tissues, causing the organisms to turn white. While they can recover, such bleaching is evidence that corals are under significant stress and at risk of death.

The latest global bleaching event is the second in the last 10 years and “should be a global wake-up call,” Manzello told The Washington Post.

“More than half the reefs on the planet have basically experienced bleaching-level heat stress in the last year,” said Manzello.

NOAA and ICRI’s statement comes as scientists around the world are voicing growing alarm over high ocean temperatures. Research released last month showed that global ocean surface temperatures had broken records every day of the year up to that point, underscoring the need to aggressively rein in fossil fuel production and use.

“Temperatures are off the charts,” Emily Darling, director of coral reefs at the Wildlife Conservation Society, said Monday. “While many corals are suffering from extreme heat stress and bleaching, some locations and species show different types of natural resilience. Finding and conserving these priority coral reefs are critical to any global strategy to safeguard the planet’s oceans and blue economies.”

“The announcement of the fourth global bleaching event is an urgent call to do two things: reduce greenhouse gas emissions and work together to prioritize resilient coral reefs for conservation,” Darling added.

Few places illustrate the destructive cycle of fossil fuel-driven climate change as well as Alberta, Canada. Home to the tar sands boom, the province’s remote north has also become a site of some of the worst climate disasters in recorded history—like the 2016 Fort McMurray Fire, which swallowed up 1.5 million acres and burned for three months. John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the Fort McMurray Fire, the tar sands industry responsible for the conditions that produced it, and the tinderbox world Big Oil has made in its all-consuming pursuit of profit.

Studio: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley
Post-Production: Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Chris Hedges:  In May 2016, a monster wildfire engulfed the city of Fort McMurray in the Canadian province of Alberta, destroying thousands of homes and forcing the evacuation of 88,000 people. The freakishly destructive conflagration which tore into the town with such speed that residents barely escaped in their cars as their houses flared and vaporized, is a harbinger of the new normal; The climate catastrophe that will become commonplace as the climate heats up and monster storms, heat waves, and wildfires proliferate. Fort McMurray is in the heart of the Alberta tar sands, one of the largest concentrations of crude oil in the world. The tar sands produce 98% of Canada’s oil and are the US’s largest source of imported oil. This oil, among the dirtiest fossil fuels on earth, is a leading cause of atmospheric pollution, releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide. The production and consumption of one barrel of tar sands crude oil releases 17% more carbon dioxide than the production and consumption of a standard barrel of oil.

Tar sand oil is a thick, mucky, clay-like substance that is infused with a hydrocarbon called bitumen. The oil is extracted by a process known as steam-assisted gravity drainage which occurs under the earth and is similar to fracking. In the northern part of the province, extraction is done by strip-mining the remote boreal forest of Alberta, 2 million acres of which have already been destroyed. The destruction of vast forests sold to timber companies and the scraping away of the topsoil has left behind poisoned wastelands. This industrial operation, perhaps the largest such project in the world, is rapidly accelerating the release of carbon emissions that will, if left unchecked, soon render the planet uninhabitable for humans and most other species.

The oil is transported thousands of miles, to refineries as far away as Houston, through pipelines and in tractor-trailer trucks or railroad cars. More than 100 climate scientists have called for a moratorium on the extraction of tar sands oil. Former NASA scientist, James Hansen, has warned that if the tar sands oil is fully exploited, it will be “game over for the planet.” He’s also called for the CEOs of fossil fuel companies to be tried for high crimes against humanity. Joining me to discuss the suicidal folly of our continued extraction of fossil fuels and the consequences for the planet is John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World which is a finalist for the National Book Award.

So let’s begin. I’m going to read this passage from the beginning of your book. It describes the fire itself. “Within hours, Fort McMurray was overtaken by a regional apocalypse that drove serial firestorms through the city from end to end – for days. Entire neighborhoods burned to their foundations beneath a towering pyrocumulus cloud typically found over erupting volcanoes. So huge and energetic was this fire-driven weather system that it generated hurricane-force winds and lightning that ignited still more fires many miles away. Nearly 100,000 people were forced to flee in what remains the largest, most rapid single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire.” This incident that you build your book around, at one point you compare it to the firebombing of Hamburg. Lay out first, the preconditions that are there including, you write about it, the nature of the forest itself. You wrote the trees don’t grow because it’s designed or it’s expected to burn. Before we get into what happened, lay out the antecedents.

John Vaillant:  Yeah, sure. It’s good to be with you, Chris. The boreal forest system is the largest such forest system on earth. It circumnavigates the Northern Hemisphere. It goes all the way across Canada, all the way across Alaska, through Russia where it’s known as the “taiga,” into Scandinavia, touches down on Iceland, picks up again in Newfoundland, and heads off westward again across Canada, completing the circle. Alberta is about half boreal forest, and one way to understand Alberta is it’s the Texas of Canada. So a lot of the same values, interests, economy, religious emphasis, alienation from the federal government, and all of that can be found in Alberta too, along with this very naturally flammable forest system.

In May of 2016 when this fire broke out, you could say erupted, we were seeing a landmark in a steady trend of heating and drying. So the boreal forest system has more sources of freshwater than any other biome, including the tropical jungle. It’s been slowly warming and slowly drying out, and on May 3, 2016, there were five separate wildfires burning around Fort McMurray. The conditions were extraordinary, in the low 90s. And again, we’re in the subarctic here. We’re 600 miles north of the US border, so 90 degrees is a very unusual temperature. Not only that, we have a relative humidity of about 11%, and to find a similar environment, you have to go to Death Valley in Southern California to find a steady relative humidity like that.

So now you have this naturally explosive fire system, the boreal forest, heated to Southern California temperatures and dried to desert dryness. You put a fire in there and you put a wind blowing in the wrong direction and you don’t have a normal wildfire – you have a firestorm. A quick science lesson here; Radiant heat is the heat coming off the fire. It’s the heat that tells you not to touch the candle or put your hand in the fire. The heat that day coming toward Fort McMurray out of this wildfire was about 950 degrees Fahrenheit, and that’s hotter than Venus.

Chris Hedges:  Let’s talk about the natural cycle within the ecological system. You write one of the reasons the trees never get very big or very old is because, despite all that water, they burn down regularly. They’re designed to.

John Vaillant:  Yeah. The boreal forest system, we don’t think about it too much because it’s so far north. It’s very sparsely inhabited up there, so enormous fires are natural. You could have a thousand-square-mile fire that would be headline news if it was in California and it will pass without a ripple in the Canadian news cycle because they’re relatively common. But this is where Fort McMurray is an anomaly: It’s a city of 90,000 permanent and temporary workers. 600 miles north of the US border, in the middle of this forest system that is typically uninhabited and generally left to burn on its own. So to put a large, permanent city that has enormous economic value to the country in the way of a fire-prone environment is asking for trouble. And they had managed to deflect it in the past and their number came up in May 2016.

Chris Hedges:  Let’s talk about the extraction. As I told you before we went on the air, I visited Fort McMurray and drove up through the tar sands and it’s very hard to grasp the size of the operation and these monster trucks, and it is something out of a moonscape. But talk a little bit about the extraction, both in terms of this special equipment in the book but also of how vast it is.

John Vaillant:  Yeah. When Canada talks about its petroleum industry, we think of oil wells, drilling rigs, and things like that, and we have to forget all that. What it’s closer to is a massive coal mining project. Bitumen is sand; It’s sand soaked in bitumen which is tar. And no ordinary person would ever imagine extracting oil from that but –

Chris Hedges:  You write in the book that it’s only 10% bitumen.

John Vaillant:  – Yeah, yeah. So it’s about 90% or 85% quartzite sand which is a hard mineral, 5% water, bits of clay, and then this tiny percentage of bitumen which has to be dug up with giant machines. When I say giant machines, I’m talking about cranes and shovels that have scoops about the size of a garage and the trucks that they then fill with this material weigh 400 tons empty so that the trucks themselves are the size of three-story houses. The wheels are 13 feet tall. Everything is steroidally large and it’s because the landscape itself is so vast. It’s very hard to even find a scale for it until you stand a person next to it and people just disappear in that environment.

So you have these massive shovels digging up this bituminous sand that grows under the boreal forest. So before you can even dig anything, you have these even larger bulldozers that plow the forest up into heaps. Then the shovels come in, the trucks are driving across this blackened landscape, and they come to these upgrading facilities where they heat up this bituminous sand and melt the tar out of it. The goal here is to make a petroleum product but they squander, in my view, billions of cubic feet of natural gas every day to melt the bitumen out of the sand. All you have after you’ve burnt all that natural gas are vats full of tar which is essentially driveway sealant. Then to render it into something like petroleum, you have to heat it again in these pressurized tanks, and that takes more natural gas and produces extraordinary amounts of pollution.

In the petroleum industry, you’re fractionating usable elements of whatever petroleum product you’re trying to render, and here they get this oil-like substance that then has to be piped or trucked south to American refineries that can handle heavy, dirty oil, and then it needs to be heated again. So when you think of the amount of fossil fuel that is used simply to get this to the factory where it can be turned into something resembling oil. It’s called synthetic crude; It is cheap and abundant but extraordinarily wasteful. I spent some time in the book trying to explain the business case but no ordinary business person would take it on because it’s so extraordinarily inefficient and wasteful.

Chris Hedges:  Here’s your description of what it looks like, and a pretty good one having been there myself. “Mile upon mile of black and ransacked earth pocked with stadium-swallowing pits and dead, discolored lakes guarded by scarecrows in cast-off rain gear and overseen by flaming stacks and fuming refineries, the whole laced together by circuit board mazes of dirt roads and piping, patrolled by building-sized machines that, enormous as they are, appear dwarfed by the wastelands they have made. The tailings ponds alone cover well over a hundred square miles and contain more than a quarter of a trillion gallons of contaminated water and effluent from the bitumen upgrading process. There is no place for this toxic sludge to go except into the soil, or the air, or, if one of the massive earthen dams should fail, into the Athabasca River. For decades, cancer rates have been abnormally high in the downstream community.” What you’re leaving behind, especially because this is such a large source of fresh water, is this gigantic poisoned landscape that’s probably irrecoverable.

John Vaillant:  Yeah, I think so. The petroleum companies working up there will be long gone by the time any serious reclamation has to happen. So in a sense, it’s a sacrifice zone in the making. There are high rates of asthma in town. There are elevated rates of cancer, not just downstream, but in Fort McMurray itself. The smell of bitumen is in the air and people there joke, well, you smell that tarry smell when the wind’s blowing the right direction, and you say that smells like money but it also smells like cancer.

Chris Hedges:  Well, there is money to be made. The markets declined a bit with the drop-in crude but what I think you had in the book is that the average salary in Fort McMurray or household was $200,000 a year.

John Vaillant:  It’s like a hothouse up there. All kinds of people from across Canada – There are some depressed parts of Canada, especially in the Maritimes on the east coast – Ever since the cod fishery collapsed, people have struggled to make a living there. A third of the population of Fort McMurray is from the east coast of Canada, from Newfoundland, Labrador, Nova Scotia, and places like that. This is the only place they can simulate a middle-class lifestyle, and they do it hundreds, and in that case thousands, of miles from their families. But they’ve created these simulacra of suburbia in these subarctic forestscapes. It works for them but it’s a very artificial construct because it’s completely dependent on the bitumen industry which is completely dependent on the global oil price. And bitumen, because everybody in the industry understands that it’s a third-rate material, it’s a stepchild of the industry so it has to accept lower prices and deal with a lot of abuse from people who are drilling oil out of the ground.

Chris Hedges:  A lot of these people may have their family in Fort McMurray but they’re put on buses. I saw the buses because it’s so vast, the area, go up to these man camps where I don’t know how many days they work before they get to come back. So they’re not living in Fort McMurray.

John Vaillant:  There are different tiers of inhabitants. These camp workers and these camps are like gulags; It’s really cold up there in the winter, as you can imagine, 40-50 below zero. These are insulated trailers that are stacked up, they look a little bit like polar research stations except they’re surrounded by heavy fencing and patrolled by guards. Everybody has to wear an RFID device so that they can be tracked wherever they go. They work 12-hour shifts. These facilities run 24/7, 365. They never stop. These men have a look to them; After a few weeks in that environment, there’s a pallor and a weariness that sets in, and as good as the money is that they’re making, the toll on the soul is heavy.

There’s another population that lives in town in nicer houses and they’re able to have their families with them. They’ve thrown in their whole lot and moved everything up to Fort McMurray. They’re permanent residents. So there are these two tiers of laborers up there but ultimately they’re all serving this giant machine whose sole purpose is to excavate, melt, process, and transport bitumen.

Chris Hedges:  Why is the security so heavy around the camps?

John Vaillant:  There is anxiety around protestors. The bitumen industry has been a pariah in the petroleum industry for decades now, and it’s been a target of environmental groups and environmental activists. They honestly don’t have that much to worry about because it’s so remote, it’s so hard to get there, there’s only one road in one road out, and again, there are police everywhere. I’ve never been – Certainly in North America – In a place that felt like it had such a heavy police/security presence. There are many different private companies working up there along with the RCMP and the city police.

The workers, because it’s so… And you hear about this in Williston, North Dakota, and other boom towns in Texas. When you get that many men together far from their families, working extraordinarily hard, paid extraordinarily well, the incidents of drug use and other kinds of violence – Internal and external – Are elevated; The normal governors aren’t there, there’s a lack of civility, and the normal stabilizing characteristics of a multi-gender, multi-generational society are substituted by police order, fencing, and rigorous systems of control. You check in, you check out. It’s like a low-security prison, I would say. Comparable to that.

Chris Hedges:  Let’s talk about wildfires. You write that they’re not single entities and you divide them into three distinct parts. What are those parts and how do they work?

John Vaillant:  Yeah. The behavior of wildfire is varied and depends on its stage of growth and the nature of the fuel. So we’ve all seen a cigarette fire on the side of the road which is a slow-spreading blackness that might glow at night but in the daytime, you might not see it except for the smoke on the leading edge. Then as it gets into larger fuels, leaves, and underbrush, you might see actual flame. Depending on heat and wind – Heat and wind are the deciding factors for whether a fire will succeed or not – If you’ve got hot conditions and windy conditions and you get into some good fuel underbrush and susceptible trees – Especially conifer trees which are in abundance in the boreal forest – You’ll get those flames climbing up into the architecture of the trees and then the forest.

As it climbs – Fire wants to climb, we all know heat rises – It’s rising into the treetops and it’s sucking in wind from underneath because it needs oxygen all the time. So the fire, it’s helpful to think of it as a breathing entity; It’s pulling oxygen in from all around and rising into the architecture of the trees and so there’s this rushing chimney-like effect. Where the fire is in a way happiest, most energetic, most charismatic, and dynamic is up in the treetops, and then it’s pulling in wind from down below. As that heat builds, as the whole tree is engaged, you have this increasing heat and increasing wind which then builds on itself so it becomes almost a self-perpetuation machine. If you have hot enough, dry enough, and windy enough conditions, those flames will then begin to leap from treetop to treetop.

Why it’s hot, what the heat does is it releases vapor, it releases hydrocarbons from the fuels around it. That’s the purpose of the heat. So what the fire is sensing that we can’t see is vapor and that’s why you see these explosive fireballs and massive surges of flame coming out of big boreal fires because that’s the superheated vapor rising and being ignited. Imagine an empty gas can – Even though there might not be a lot of liquid in it, it will still explode in a spectacular fashion. That’s what the fire is enabling in the forest, for all those hydrocarbons to release in this gaseous cloud that then ignites. That’s when you see, especially a boreal fire, in a full run; It’s called a Rank 6. It’s comparable to a Category 5 hurricane.

These flames can be 300 feet tall. They can send fireballs rolling up into the smoke column for another 1,000 feet. The firefront can be many miles wide. They’re less like fires and more like tidal waves of flame rolling across the landscape. They are charismatic, terrifying, and impossible to stop once they get running like that.

Chris Hedges:  You have this amazing story from, is it the Chisholm fire in 1950? I’ll let you tell it. NASA or NORAD or somebody is monitoring global weather from a satellite feed, but you can pick it up from there.

John Vaillant:  Yeah, yeah. This was in 2001 and about 100 miles or so south of Fort McMurray, in the boreal forest. This fire ignited under similarly hot, dry conditions. I think it was a Navy satellite observer in DC, he saw this aerosol injection, this giant smoke plume erupting out of the forest of Alberta. He knew there were no volcanoes there, so what else could send up a jet of smoke like that with that much ferocity and energy into the stratosphere? The only other thing he could think of that could do that is a nuke. So they inquired to the authorities in Alberta, have you just detonated a nuclear device? And they said no, we haven’t.

When the fellow in DC identified the zone on the map where this was happening, that was the Chisholm fire which has gone down in the record books as the most energetic, intense, and ferocious wildfire ever measured on earth. It’s got a lot of competition, not just from Alberta, but from California, Australia, and even Siberia. So it was an extraordinary event, but it was in a way, a bellwether for what was to come. And Alberta has produced some of the most intense fires ever measured since then.

Chris Hedges:  In the book, you ask us to look at fires from a different perspective, and at the top of chapter 12, you quote Ray Rasker, the co-founder of Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire. He says, “We don’t have a forest fire problem. We have a home ignition problem. As soon as you come to that realization, it changes your view on wildfire.”

John Vaillant:  Yeah. People talk about human beings being people of the corn And I think more apt, and certainly in the 21st century, we are people of the hydrocarbon. Not only is our entire economy – Or 80% of it, anyway – Driven by fossil fuels at this point, but an extraordinary percentage of the things that we interact with and even wear are derived from petroleum products. Our clothes, our shoes, our mattresses, our playground furniture. We have tar shingles, we have vinyl siding, we have vinyl windows, and we have all plastic laminates in our flooring. Most of us go to bed at night on petroleum products in terms of what our bedsheets might be made out of, what our mattresses are made out of.

So the home, which is this sanctuary for us, is thought of as this inviolable space where you can safely raise your family. When you heat it to temperature, it begins to off-gas hydrocarbons like the forest does, like a gas can does. The modern home is more flammable than a log cabin or a 19th-century home that’s made mostly out of wood, mostly furnished with cotton-stuffed furniture or horse hair stuffed furniture, things that we think of as antiques now. But the modern home is a giant gas can and we don’t think of that when it’s 75 degrees. But when it’s 300 degrees because of the radiant heat coming off a fire, or 1,000 degrees because of the radiant heat coming off a boreal wildfire, it turns into something completely different. Firefighters discovered that in some painful ways in May 2016.

Chris Hedges:  Well, that’s what you call flashover.

John Vaillant:  Yes. Again, the point of the heat and fire is to release the hydrocarbons in a potential fuel, and the fuels that fire interacts with are in vapor form. Fire can’t burn solids. It needs to heat the solids until they begin to vaporize. So when you have 1,000-degree heat coming out of a wildfire, like the one that came into Fort McMurray on May 3, entire houses were heating up to 600, 700, 800 degrees. All the vinyl siding, all the glues and laminates in the plywood, everything was vaporizing. Firefighters and homeowners couldn’t see it, but the fire could sense these giant billows of flammable gas in and around these homes.

When I was speaking to firefighters afterward, they said, yeah, houses were burning to the basement in five minutes. I was sure that they were exaggerating, and not because they were untruthful but because there was a lot of adrenaline, there was a lot of fatigue; A lot of these guys didn’t sleep for days on end because the fire never let up so I assumed it was the fog of war type of a situation. And then I spoke to a physicist who specialized in home destruction and home flammability, a guy named Vyto Babrauskas in Seattle, and he said, yeah, no, that is possible to get those incredible burn times. I said, but can you explain it? And he said, well, you should probably look at the Hamburg firestorm from World War II and that will give you an idea of the energy and circumstances that were to be found in Fort McMurray in May of 2016.

Chris Hedges:  I didn’t know until I read it in your book, that that firestorm was completely engineered where they, in preparation, erected buildings that replicated German construction styles right down to sofa stuffing and the placement of babies’ cribs.

John Vaillant:  Yeah. It was diabolical, yeah.

Chris Hedges:  Yeah. But you liken that engineering of the firestorm in Hamburg to our own, the engineering that we live in.

John Vaillant:  This is what is strange and sinister about this. Standard Oil, now Exxon, has had a sideline in incendiary weapons. And they partnered with the US Army to develop a bombing program to ignite the city of Hamburg. Before doing that, they hired architects, set designers, and carpenters to simulate German homes and then they tested these incendiary devices on these homes in Utah, some other bombing ranges around the country, and in the UK to see what combination of thermite and other products would work best for setting these houses on fire and engineering a firestorm. So it was one of the most extraordinary and premeditated acts of state-sanctioned arson ever perpetrated on a civilian population, and it was repeated numerous times in Germany but also in Japan. Scores of cities were bombed this way in Japan as well during World War II.

There’s this quite bizarre irony that now the modern home is its incendiary device in the sense that it is filled with petrochemicals and sheathed, in many cases, with petroleum products like vinyl siding and tar shingles. It makes sense when you look at the petroleum industry. Its business is fire. We think of it as oil. We might think of it as natural gas or bitumen but its sole purpose is to burn, and that’s the business that these companies are in. And so everything they touch – Whether it’s a plastic garbage can, a rubber tire, or a beautiful modern home – At the root of it is this extraordinarily flammable substance which is petroleum products.

It took me a while of researching and thinking about it to realize – And look around my home – That I’m sitting inside an incendiary device, and that is a strange feeling. Then it makes you wonder whose side is the petroleum company on. It changed my view of how we live, how we power our lives, and the strange ease we have with extraordinarily explosive substances – Not to mention a gas tank full of gas set right behind our child’s car seat, gas grills, we have flames burning in our basement with a water heater and furnaces. We have an eerie comfort with this destructive energy.

Chris Hedges:  You ask, what role does the petroleum industry play in promoting and approving building materials that are supposed to shelter families from harm?

John Vaillant:  Yeah. There are fire retardancy ratings for products including mattresses and things like that. Many of those fire-retardant substances are quite carcinogenic and they only work up to a certain point. So no amount of fire retardancy will stop a house that’s fully engulfed in fire. And it certainly won’t stop a house from burning if it is confronted with the energy coming out of a forest fire like we saw in Fort McMurray. Boulder, Colorado has had similar fires, and California and Montana. Lahaina was a tragic example of that. Canada has been burning all summer long, almost from coast to coast, communities have been evacuated throughout the country, and several of them have burnt to the ground. It’s an energy that is enhanced and enabled by the high petroleum content in every aspect of our lives.

Chris Hedges:  Well, you call the age we live in the “petro scene.”

John Vaillant:  Yeah. The petroleum age – I would date that from around 1859 when the gusher at Titusville was released, the first industrial oil well. Standard Oil, now Exxon, and many other petroleum companies were founded in 1870. That’s when the kerosene industry took off. That was the precursor of the petroleum industry as we know it, and then the automobile set it in motion, so to speak. There’s evidence to suggest that the petroleum age is peaking right now, that we’re hitting peak oil. There is a transition underway, if uneven. There’s a lot of pushback from a deeply, deeply entrenched petroleum industry and all the systems that are enabled by it and financed by it, including our politics.

Chris Hedges:  Here’s a point that I knew but once you articulated it I thought it was interesting. You said, “Exhaust fumes, like the atmosphere that they flow into, are mostly invisible and easy to keep out of mind, but if that Silverado’s tailpipe were directed back into the vehicle, the driver and all her passengers would be dead in minutes. If the Silverado’s exhaust were piped to the driver’s living room, she and her family would be dead in an hour. But somehow, when we run our cars ‘outside,’ in our shared atmosphere, all of a sudden soot and toxic gas magically disappear.”

John Vaillant:  Yeah. All of us alive today have grown up in the petroleum age; It feels normal to us the way people smoking on airplanes and in doctors’ waiting rooms felt normal to people in the 1950s. We’re completely habituated to it, to the point that it’s invisible to us. But if you stop and think about how petroleum is rendered and what it is, It’s toxic at every stage of its life; From the moment it’s drawn from the ground through the incredibly polluting refining process into our cars and where it’s burned. Petroleum will kill you in every form, whether as a liquid, as a toxic spill, as a gas, or as an emission. It’s strange to think that we have surrounded ourselves and persuaded ourselves that this profoundly toxic substance is an ally to us and an enabler of this wonderful lifestyle that we live that is now being compromised in measurable and visible ways by that very energy source.

Chris Hedges:  Well, let’s talk a little bit about that. You write about it – Ronald Wright called us the future eaters – But you also deal with this issue of convenience, luxury, and the power that fossil fuels give us. You talk about a woman driving a car.; The science is there, and not just the science but the breakdown of the climate itself is visible, and yet we don’t react in any meaningful way. That is an issue you deal with in the book. Explain why you think we don’t react.

John Vaillant:  The ease, the sense of there’s a disassociation that we’re engaged in our daily lives and we might see in the headlines. Now, pretty much everybody in Canada knows somebody who’s been evacuated due to wildfire. That’s how ubiquitous it is up here now after this terrible summer we’ve had. Certainly, many people in the States are no strangers to this either. At the same time, we continue to drive, we may continue to invest in the petroleum industry; We accept it.

First of all, humans have an adaptive genius for compartmentalizing, dissociating, and managing risk but there is this allegiance to the status quo that compromises our good judgment and compromises our capacity for self-preservation. A really good illustration of this can be seen in Alberta, which has suffered terrible fires, where the industry is heavily dependent on petroleum extraction. Folks up there… There was this thought that when people went through climate disasters, they would become climate activists. They would wake up. In Alberta, people have gone through some of the worst fires you can imagine, terrifying events. Many of them have PTSD, and many of them have health issues as a result of this, but they will still vote for a climate-denying government that is pro-petroleum. Their lifestyle is so dependent on remaining allegiant to the industry and all of its benefits – In terms of the cash rewards of being associated with that industry – That it seems too expensive and impossible to envision not being associated with it.

It made me look at petroleum executives in a different way. It’s easy to see them in all kinds of negative lights, but if you think of that, the petroleum industry is their status quo. Their entire professional life, their status, their friends, and their whole social structure are built around a close affiliation with an acceptance of the petroleum industry as it is with that status quo. To disconnect yourself from it, to depart from it, or to criticize it could almost be seen as a social suicide and certainly a professional suicide. That’s where our clannishness… I mean this in the best sense: We’re a family-oriented, community-oriented species. We evolved in small groups, intimately dependent on each other’s approval and acceptance, and that lasts to this day. Our affiliation with the group and allegiance to the group trumps everything else. So if that stability is dependent on petroleum or the industry, it would be counterintuitive and almost insane to turn against it or reject it.

All of us, even those of us who think of ourselves as quite green, are still underpinned and the foundation of our society is still petroleum-driven and petroleum-enabled. It gives us this incredible mobility through travel. It’s enabled extraordinary wealth because everything we do is multiplied; It’s easy to forget that. But when you have an internal combustion engine or a jet engine or fossil fuel-powered electricity, everything you do is enhanced and multiplied. It’s like having a retinue of servants at your beck and call but they’re machines instead of human beings or animals. But all of that goes back to energy. Most of that energy, thus far, is fossil fuel-driven so it’s hard for people to imagine an alternative Most of us are unwilling to give that up, especially when our financial system and our economy are so dependent on our continuing to buy, continuing to mortgage, continuing to invest ourselves, and cantilever ourselves forward into debt and consumption.

We’re part of this larger machine that also enables us to live quite beautiful lives in many ways and to provide our children and our families with things that most people would want their families to have. I don’t think it’s all cynical or malicious or anything like that, this is this lifestyle that we’ve become dependent on. That status quo generates its own allegiance, and we need to put up certain blinders to maintain comfort with it. It’s an interesting psychological issue and spending time with people in Fort McMurray illuminated that; These are good, hardworking, earnest people who want the best for their families and were terrifically honest with me and open with me. And yet they are… It’s like golden handcuffs. Collectively as a civilization, we have golden handcuffs linking us to the petroleum industry as it exists now, and transitioning out of that is going to take a conscious effort.

Chris Hedges:  I saw the same thing in Southern West Virginia in the coal fields. Joe Sacco and I wrote Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. Well, they’re golden handcuffs. It’s completely suicidal.

John Vaillant:  Yeah. You’re chained. In a way you’re handcuffed to the bumper of this juggernaut; You have to keep running behind it, you have to keep up with it, but it’s going to keep going, and it is suicidal. What a hallmark of the 2020s is this increasingly extreme dissonance that we find ourselves in. Almost everybody alive now is experiencing climate disruption of one kind or another. The deluge-like floods that would’ve been a normal thunderstorm 20 years ago and now cars are floating around, and then the analog or the corollary to that are these terrible fires, terrible droughts, and heat waves, all of which are directly traceable to our appetite for fossil fuels. Yet, separating ourselves from that, stopping that, and getting off that wheel seems impossible for so many. For many, it is, especially if you’re beholden to a bank or any other debt carrier.

Chris Hedges:  As you point out in the book, the fossil fuel industry is very aggressive against people who say precisely what you’ve been saying.

John Vaillant:  Yeah, yeah. They’re so entrenched. Not just in our psyche but in every aspect of our government, our religion, and our media. To call it out feels like it’s going against our best interests and it’s in the best interest of the petroleum industry to maintain that illusion and maintain that anxiety in us that you don’t go against us. In Alberta, when people criticize the industry there, they’ll say, well, without us you’d all freeze in the dark. There’s that fear.

It took me years of thinking about this to realize the petroleum industry is only about five generations old and human civilization is many millennia old. We have lived without petroleum and we’ve lived beautiful, productive lives that were much healthier and much more intimately connected to nature and its rhythms than we do now. That’s something I tried to do in Fire Weather is to invite the reader to step back and look at this anomalous time that we live in; This is the aberration. This isn’t normal. We’re in a strange and very disruptive experiment right now and that experiment is an economy fueled by flammable, highly toxic substances.

Chris Hedges:  We took, as you write in the book, 500 million years of energy and decided to set it alight in a century and a half.

John Vaillant:  Yeah. I mean, nobody has ever burned through a trust fund that quickly. In a way, that’s what petroleum is. It has enormous utility, and it always will, but the profligacy with which we’ve burnt it is unconscionable. The egregiousness of the waste that continues to this day, where it’s almost a virtue to burn as much as you can is so twisted, yet we’ve been persuaded through advertising and the momentum of the culture that this is normal and desirable. The SUV is a beautiful illustration of that. That was a fabricated need that arose out of the 1990s and they’ve been growing ever since. This idea that you need to have this gigantic vehicle that requires vast quantities of natural resources, and huge amounts of fuel to operate, in order to feel safe and like you belong in the world is an illusion. But it’s so ubiquitous that it’s hard to see it.

Chris Hedges:  Great. That was John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team; Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 17, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

New research on the rate at which Greenland’s glaciers are melting shed new light on how the climate emergency is rapidly raising the chance that crucial ocean current systems could soon collapse, as scientists revealed Wednesday that the vast island has lost about 20% more ice than previously understood.

Scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory led the study, published in Nature, which showed that Greenland’s ice cap is losing an average of 33 million tons of ice per hour, including from glaciers that are already below sea level.

The researchers analyzed satellite photos showing the end positions of Greenland’s glaciers every month from 1985 to 2022, examining a total of about 235,000 end positions.

Over the 38-year period, Greenland lost about 1,930 square miles of ice—equivalent to one trillion metric tons and roughly the size of Delaware.

An earlier study had estimated that 221 billion metric tons had been lost since 2003, but the researchers added another 43 billion metric tons to that assessment.

Previous research had not quantified the level of ice melt and breakage from the ends of glaciers around the perimeter of Greenland.

“Almost every glacier in Greenland is retreating. And that story is true no matter where you look,” Chad Greene, a glaciologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led study, told The New York Times. “This retreat is happening everywhere and all at once.”

Because the glaciers examined in the study are already below sea level, their lost ice would have been replaced by sea water and would not have contributed to sea-level rise.

But as Greene told The Guardian, “It almost certainly has an indirect effect, by allowing glaciers to speed up.”

“These narrow fjords are the bottleneck, so if you start carving away at the edges of the ice, it’s like removing the plug in the drain,” he said.

The previously unaccounted-for ice melt is also an additional source of freshwater that pours into the North Atlantic Ocean, which scientists warn places the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) at risk of collapse.

AMOC carries warm water from the tropics into the North Atlantic, allowing nutrients to rise from the bottom of the ocean and supporting phytoplankton production and the basis of the global food chain.

A collapse of the system would also disrupt weather patterns across the globe, likely leading to drier conditions and threatening food security in Asia, South America, and Africa, and increasing extreme weather events in other parts of the world.

One analysis found the collapse could take place as soon as 2025.

Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian Parliament representing the New Democratic Party, noted that the study was released as Canada’s government continues to support fossil fuel production and what experts call false solutions to the planetary heating crisis—including a $12 billion carbon capture and storage project led by tar sands oil companies.

The Environmental Voter Project in the U.S. urged Americans to consider the latest statistics on melting glaciers when choosing the candidates and political parties they will support in 2024.

“Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice an hour,” said the group. “So vote like it.”

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 1, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

The year 2023 was marked by weather events that made it increasingly clear that the Earth has entered what United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called the “era of global boiling,” with wildfires and prolonged heatwaves impacting millions of people and scientists confirming their suffering was the direct result of fossil fuel extraction and planetary heating.

But for the world’s five largest oil giants, the year marked record profits and the approval of several major new fossil fuel projects, allowing the companies to lavish their shareholders with payouts that are expected to exceed $100 billion—signaling that executives have little anxiety that demand for their products will fall, said one economist.

The companies—BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies—spent $104 billion on shareholder payouts in 2022, and are expected to reward investors with even more in buybacks and dividends for 2023, The Guardian reported.

Shell announced plans in November to pay investors at least $23 billion—more than six times the amount it planned to spend on renewable energy projects—while BP promised shareholders a 10% raise in dividends and Chevron could exceed the $75 billion stock buyback it announced early last year.

Alice Harrison, a campaigner for Global Witness, noted that fossil fuel shareholders will be enjoying their paydays as households across Europe struggle with fuel poverty and the world faces the rising threat of climate disasters brought on by the industry.

“The global energy crisis has been a giant cash grab for fossil fuel firms,” Harrison told The Guardian. “And instead of investing their record profits in clean energy, these companies are doubling down on oil, gas, and shareholder payouts. Yet again millions of families won’t be able to afford to heat their homes this winter, and countries around the world will continue to suffer the extreme weather events of climate collapse. This is the fossil fuel economy, and it’s rigged in favor of the rich.”

In 2023 campaigners intensified their demands for accountability from the oil, gas, and coal industries, and as of last month had successfully pressured more than 1,600 universities, pension funds, and other institutions to divest from fossil fuels. In the U.S., provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been touted as the “largest investment in climate and energy in American history,” went into effect.

But Dieter Helm, a professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford, The Guardian that if the industry were truly fearful of policymakers phasing out fossil fuel extraction and expediting a transition to renewable sources, they would be spending far less on new projects and shareholder payouts.

“For this to be the case you would have to believe that the energy transition is happening, and that demand for fossil fuels is going to fall,” Helm told The Guardian.

In 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden infuriated climate campaigners by approving the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska, which could lead to roughly 280 million metric tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions. His administration also included in a debt limit deal language that would expedite the approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which could emit the equivalent of more than 89 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, while the U.K. government greenlit a massive oil drilling field in the North Sea and French company TotalEnergies continued to construct the 900-mile-long East African Crude Oil Pipeline, which would transport up to 230,000 barrels of crude oil per day.

“These companies are investing a huge amount in new projects, and they’re handing out bigger dividends because they are confident that they’re going to make big returns,” Helm said. “And when we look at the state of our current climate progress, who’s to say they’re wrong?”

Climate campaigner Vanessa Nakate pointed out that the shareholder paydays are expected following a deal on a loss and damage fund at the 28th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, aimed at helping developing countries to fight the climate emergency. That fund was hailed as “historic” and included a commitment of $700 million from wealthy countries—a sum that is expected to be dwarfed by fossil fuel investors’ profits.

“They have picked people’s pockets, fueled inflation and pollution, and deepened poverty,” U.K. House of Lords member and Tax Justice Network co-founder Prem Sikka said of the oil giants. “Governments do nothing to end their monopolistic control. Need to break-up this cartel.”

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Dec. 5, 2023. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

A record number of fossil fuel lobbyists have inundated the COP28 climate summit in the United Arab Emirates, with new research released Tuesday showing that more than 2,400 industry influence-peddlers were granted access to the critical U.N. talks—a 400% increase over last year.

The Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) coalition tallied 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists on the provisional list of COP28 participants, a likely undercount as the estimate doesn’t include those who are attending the talks under a different professional title. A new U.N. rule approved earlier this year requires lobbyists at COP28 to declare their affiliation.

Representatives from ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, and other oil and gas firms outnumber the delegations of nearly every single country at the summit except Brazil and the UAE, according to the new analysis. KBPO said that more fossil fuel lobbyists received attendance passes than all of the delegates from the 10 most climate-vulnerable nations combined.

“The sheer number of fossil fuel lobbyists at climate talks that could determine our future is beyond justification,” said Joseph Sikulu, pacific managing director at 350.org. “Their increasing presence at COP undermines the integrity of the process as a whole. We come here to fight for our survival and what chance do we have if our voices are suffocated by the influence of Big Polluters? This poisoning of the process needs to end, we will not let oil and gas influence the future of the Pacific this heavily.”

Climate Action Network International added that “you don’t bring arsonists to a firefighting convention—or the climate talks, for that matter—but that’s precisely what is happening here at COP28.”

“Big Polluter interference in climate negotiations is costing millions of people their homes, livelihoods, and lives,” the group wrote on social media.

Ahead of COP28, KBPO estimated that fossil fuel lobbyists from some of the world’s top oil and gas firms attended past U.N. climate summits more than 7,000 times.

Advocates said the sharp increase in lobbyist attendance at COP28 underscores the industry’s commitment to preventing substantive climate action as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, imperiling hopes of preventing catastrophic warming.

“Their agenda is crystal clear: safeguarding their profits at the expense of a livable future for all of us,” Kathy Mulvey, accountability campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement. “The urgency of phasing out fossil fuels demands a unified, unwavering commitment from global leaders, unencumbered by the fossil fuel industry’s self-serving agenda.”

Industry influence could help explain the inadequacy of climate commitments that have emerged from the summit this far. The Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter, spearheaded by the UAE and Saudi Arabia—two leading petrostates—has been called a “dangerous distraction” from efforts to phase out fossil fuels, and a new agreement on a global loss and damage fund has been criticized as badly inadequate to meet the needs of frontline nations.

COP28 president Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber—who is also CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company—has dismissed calls to phase out fossil fuels as his company plots a massive expansion that could make it the second-largest oil producer on the planet. Al Jaber has also used his role as the head of the summit to pursue new oil and gas deals.

“Oil and gas companies and their enablers—the climate arsonists fueling climate chaos—cannot be trusted to help put out the fire or deliver what we need: a full, fast, fair, and funded fossil fuel phaseout,” said David Tong, global industry campaign manager at Oil Change International.

KBPO noted in its new analysis that lobbying at COP28 is hardly limited to the fossil fuel industry, pointing to the presence of finance, agribusiness, and transportation representatives.

“To share seats with the Big Polluters in climate change conversations is to dine with the devil,” Ogunlade Olamide Martins, program manager at Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa, said in a statement. “This unholy matrimony will only endorse ‘conflict of interest’ and further facilitate the silence of honest agitation. COP’s conclusions must be independent of industries’ parasitic influences and must only address the concerns of the vulnerable masses.”

Canada’s multibillion dollar tar sands industry in Alberta is a climate wrecking force with immense sway over Canadian politics. ‘Killer Water,’ a new documentary produced in partnership with The Real News, Ricochet Media, and IndigiNews, exposes the long-hidden truths of Big Oil’s operations on the health and environment of local First Nations communities.

Hosted by award-winning journalist Brandi Morin, this live panel features Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, toxicologist Mandy Olsgard, physician Dr. John O’Connor, and lawyer Steven Donziger. This panel took place on Monday, Nov. 27, and was produced by Ricochet Media. It is shared here with permission.

Transcript

Brandi Morin:  Tânisi, hello everybody. Thank you so much for being a part of this discussion today. I am Brandi Morin. I am a freelance journalist based in Treaty 6 area. I am Cree, Iroquois, and French. I specialize in telling Indigenous stories, and I have recently produced a documentary called Killer Water, and it’s about the impacts of the Alberta oil sands and tailings spills on Indigenous communities. This documentary specifically focuses on Fort Chipewyan, which is downstream from one of the world’s largest industrial projects. The film was released last Friday, and we are gathering today with some of the experts that were in the film, as well as an incredible lawyer named Steven Donziger. He’s from south of the Medicine Line in the United States, who’s worked extensively with Native communities who are fighting for their rights with oil companies in the Amazon.

So thank you to everybody for being here. We have Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation chief, Allan Adam. He is featured in the documentary. He’s been in leadership for nearly two decades now. And we have Dr. John O’Connor. He is a medical physician. He worked in Fort Chipewyan for several years, and still works in Fort McMurray, Alberta, and area. And he helped raise the alarm, so to speak, of the disease and cancer rates that were significantly high in the Fort Chipewyan area.

And then we have Mandy Olsgard. Mandy is a toxicologist, she’s an environmental scientist, and she is the most prominent scientist of her kind in the province, and, arguably, the country. And she has worked for industry and the Alberta Energy Regulator, as well as many Indigenous communities. So hay hay, thank you.

Hi, Steven. Good to see you. Thank you so much for being here. This is such a badass group of panelists.

So I would really love to start today with Chief Allan Adam. Thank you so much, Chief, for being here, for making the time. And I want to express my condolences to you and your family on the loss of your father-in-law, Johnny Courtoreille, who I had the privilege of meeting when I was up there. And he was healthy and joking, and a lovely man who had just come from being in the bush, which was his love, which is what Chief Adam shared with us. And he passed away in October of cancer. So condolences to you and your family.

First off, Chief, I haven’t spoken to you in a few months. I haven’t really spoken to you directly since I was there. And I know that you had a chance to view the film last week. I am wondering, first off, what was your response to the film when you seen it?

Chief Allan Adam:  It brought out the anger, the resentment, in regards to what’s been going on for decades. It’s probably been going on for about four decades now. Looking back at when we started this crusade and getting to where we’re at today, you ask yourself, is there ever an endpoint? It just gets worse and worse as we carry on. And it just goes to show that the people in the community do have concerns in regards to what’s going on upstream from us. And we, as leaders, we’re worried about it, and we’ve questioned parties involved and everything, and we continue to question the authorities at hand in regards to what’s happening here.

And till today, ACFN hasn’t got any answers in regards to what’s going on out there, other than the fact that hidden facts are being brushed underneath the rug and nothing’s being brought out to the public. And one thing for sure, that Alberta Energy Regulators, their job is to inform the public when some kind of environmental protection order is being called out. And none of this is being done, especially when it comes to harmful water mixed with heavy materials and stuff like that that are unknown to the human body. And then you could tell from the community’s point of view, rapid rates of cancer are still being recorded, and nothing’s being done about it at this point in time.

It seems like when it comes to the environment, there is no human health concern and nobody wants to take the responsibility for your human health, and especially when it’s coming out of Fort Chip. And then when you look at the blueprint, and you start following downstream from there, and you could tell the rates of cancer are even going up downstream further than Fort Chip as well too. And all these have to be recorded and have to be taken down into consideration because these things are happening all over the place, and they’re happening to mostly Aboriginal communities downstream.

Brandi Morin:  Absolutely. I’ve seen even the stories that I’ve covered throughout my years as a journalist that it’s the Native communities that are always impacted and overlooked by industry, and how these governments, they excuse these projects in the name of so-called national or public interest. And so there were always communities that made these literal sacrifice zones, and it’s always the Native communities. And it’s like, at what point do they even draw the line? And so that was my hope in making this doc and doing other stories, to try to humanize people, so people can really see this is what people live with on the ground.

And specifically, Chief, I know that you have been advocating for years, but this year particularly, I would say the past few years with COVID and such, but this year for you, with the spills and then the wildfire which saw Fort Chipewyan entirely evacuated, and the loss of loved ones, and the election. Can you explain to people that might not understand here how all of this correlates together with the wildfires, with the industry, and these issues that we’re talking about? How do they correlate and what was that like for you?

Chief Allan Adam:  It was overwhelming, I guess, in that regard. When you take a look at the early spring when we had to deal with the report of the spill that was happening into the tributaries that led into the Firebag River and also into the Athabasca from Imperial’s Kearl site. And the AER had covered that up. And dealing with that situation, and from bringing it out into perspective and everything, and then having the wildfire occur in the community just two kilometers from the community at the airport, we had to change gears. And for the first time ever, the community has been evacuated from Fort Chip. And it was very tough on the leaders. You just don’t want to go through that again.

And I know that in my earlier terms, around 2008, 2009, I had mentioned in a documentary once that we would become environmental refugees due to climate change. And when I raised the issue back then about climate change, everybody was saying, Chief Adam, you’re crazy to talk about climate change because there’s no such thing as climate change. And I gave bold warning that climate change was coming, and it is happening, because it’s happening in our own backyard. And we, as traditional land users, we see it happening on a day-to-day basis from what’s taken place in our area, and the transformation of scenery and water, and everything, and stuff like that.

And the drying up of… The moisture content is not there anymore in the summer. In spring runoffs, you don’t feel that moisture inside there, and everything is evaporating, and it’s just getting drier. And a little spark will ignite anything. And that was pretty noticeable the past summer. Climate change is here, it’s real, it’s alive, and it ain’t going nowhere. And we live in the world’s largest complex of an industrial movement right now. And there’s nobody at the helm, I could say, because the Alberta Energy Regulator has failed to protect the communities that are downstream, and failed to warn the communities of potential contaminants coming down the river when they are the ones that issued, what you call it, environmental protection orders.

Brandi Morin:  Hay hay Chief, thank you. I’m going to come back to you. I have more questions for you.

Dr. O’Connor, so you brought up concerns, a couple of decades ago already, about different high rates of cancer, rare cancers and disease that you were seeing, and then you were reprimanded by the Physician’s Association, investigated for raising undue alarm. And then you were, what would we call it, you were resolved of that.

Dr. John O’Connor:  Vindicated.

Brandi Morin:  Vindicated. Yes. But you were seeing this a long time ago. You talk about it in the film. Now we’re in 2024 almost, and we’re talking about this. We’re talking about these tailings spills. You said, when I interviewed you for the film, you said, you know what? I wasn’t surprised at all. This is ongoing. You said these spills have been ongoing. This was just another incident, even though it was alarming for the public to find out and understand. But since then, you have done a lot of research into what’s been happening and connecting it to medical issues. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Dr. John O’Connor:  Yeah. Brandi, I started going up to Fort Chip almost a quarter of a century ago, almost 25 years ago.

Brandi Morin:  Wow.

Dr. John O’Connor:  And when I went into the community, the first few visits, I was vetted by the elders, which is a process that I understand clearly now. But I listened to their descriptions, their traditional knowledge, descriptions of the changes in the environment that they’d seen in the 10, 15 years prior to me coming up, which was astonishing. The story was so consistent across the board.

And then I started to find the amount of pathology that I did, the cancers and the autoimmune disease that exists in the community. A population of 1,200 people, the majority of which were traditional living off the land and the water. And I questioned, where could this be coming from? And at the time… And still, Health Canada is responsible for on-reserve health. So this had been an issue for a number of years before I came to the community. I just documented and brought it to light, and I questioned the origin of it.

And so historically, going back to the mid to late 90s, there have been recommendations by scientific groups, federal and provincial, and university based. Based on their analysis of the downstream environment and what was happening upstream, there have been strong recommendations and suggestions for baseline health studies to be done of the human population. Completely ignored. Twice in the 90s, then in 2009, when the Alberta Cancer Board confirmed rare cancers and higher rates of cancer in Fort Chip, they recommended it as well. 2014, University of Manitoba did a study of the community, and they strongly recommended a health study. Nothing has been done.

But in the meantime, going back to your initial question, these latest spills highlight what’s been going on, like Allan said, for decades. These tailings ponds that line the river are designed to seep and leak into the groundwater and the surface water. If they didn’t — And this is Alberta government and industry’s evidence — The dikes that keep these tailings ponds intact would collapse. So this noxious water in these tailings ponds, which contain Class 1 human carcinogens as well as fish and wildlife carcinogens, have been seeping and going downstream for well over 40 years. So the delta spill is just the tip of the iceberg.

Brandi Morin:  Yeah. And so as far as you know, what have been the reasons why any of these recommended health studies by scientists and health professionals, why have they not been done?

Dr. John O’Connor:  I believe because industry is being protected. Governments, provincial and federal, do not want to know the truth.

Brandi Morin:  Wow.

Dr. John O’Connor:  It came close to having a health study after the Alberta Cancer Board confirmed rare findings, rare cancers in Fort Chip. In 2009, there was a scientific team struck to look at putting together terms of reference for a health study. I was invited to be part of that team. We met for a year, put together terms of reference. And at the end of the year, the chair of the committee, who was himself a physician from Calgary, working in Fort Mac at the time and was the medical officer of health, he inserted a clause, but insisted that this clause be inserted, that industry should be part of the management oversight committee.

Brandi Morin:  Wow.

Dr. John O’Connor:  Leadership in Ford Chip totally rejected this. They rejected the idea of industry being part of it. As one of the chiefs said back then, this could be like the fox looking out for the hen house. So that was the closest that it came. The government, of course, walked away when industry was not accepted as being part of the committee.

But astonishingly, with all the recommendations, with all the independent findings, with the traditional knowledge, especially, which has been completely ignored, and the industry’s own admission [with] support of the government that these tailings bonds are designed to leak this toxic water to get into the layer of the river where fish spawn. So when you consider that, for instance, the findings of traditional knowledge keepers in Fort Chip of the deformities in fish, the fish with missing parts and —

Brandi Morin:  I was there a year and a half ago, and I just went to one fish camp. I was only there for two hours. And out of that catch that they had been fishing all week, and out of this one catch that they brought in of like 50 fish or something, there were two deformed ones that I witnessed. And so I found that alarming, but apparently that’s kind of normal around there. I was stunned.

Dr. John O’Connor:  And this was part of the traditional knowledge that I was made privy to when I started going up to Fort Chip in 2000. So these deformities and anomalies in fish downstream, obviously if you’ve got toxins in tailings ponds — And among those toxins are a group called naphthenic acids. And among other impacts, naphthenic acids are hormone disruptors. So fish are being born with these deformities, and they get into the food chain. And of course, traditional Fort Chip, eating fish and subsisting off the land. Is it any wonder that illnesses abound in Fort Chip?

And governments just have washed their hands. They’ve paid lip service, they’ve raised their hands to their face, oh my God, we’ve another spill. All the time realizing the spills that have been happening for decades are monumental compared to the latest spills. At one point, I was calculating just a few months ago that from a fraction of the 19 tailings ponds that line the river, that the seepages, leakages, amount to an Exxon Valdez disaster every week. One a week.

Brandi Morin:  Which kind of disaster?

Dr. John O’Connor:  The Exxon Valdez, [inaudible] went down up the coast of Alaska over 20 years [inaudible].

Brandi Morin:  Every week. Yeah.

Dr. John O’Connor:  [inaudible]

Brandi Morin:  Yes. So Mandy, you are an expert. You’re a toxicologist. Can you explain this from your point of view? Now, from what I understand and from what you told me when I interviewed you in the doc that there’s human health studies that are only done initially and in relation to the environment, and then nothing else after that. And there are chemicals that aren’t even tested for, that they’re not looking for. Can you elaborate a little bit further on that, what that means and what needs to be done? Please and thank you.

Mandy Olsgard:  Yeah, thanks, Brandi. Just quickly, I’ll correct. I didn’t actually work for industry. I’ve never worked for industry. So I was a consultant that would’ve done the assessments to get projects approved. And then I was with the regulator, and now I’m a consultant that, again, works for clients like Indigenous communities. So just quickly, I’ve never worked for industry.

Yeah, it’s an extremely complex system. And so, as Dr. O’Connor said, often Indigenous people observe tumors and fish, and those types of bumps and lesions. When we do ecological risk assessments, so when you are doing an assessment and applying for a project, there’s a lot of modeling and predictions in that assessment. One component is the ecological risk, and the other component is the human health risk. And both of these are done quite detailed and in depth. However, ecological risk assessments do not consider cancer. They don’t consider that chemicals can cause tumors and cancers in animals. So that’s not an endpoint they look at.

But in the human health risk assessment, they do look at cancer, and they’ve often predicted that there could be a potential higher rate of cancers. So the way we, in Western science terms, in Alberta, an acceptable rate of cancer, maybe from natural exposure or just your lifestyle, would be 1 in 100,000 people. So you could have 1 case of cancer in 100,000 people. That’s kind of our risk benchmark when we do do an assessment.

Brandi Morin:  Because it’s way higher in Fort Chip.

Mandy Olsgard:  And so that’s the thing. So when they do these assessments, that’s the risk benchmark, 1 in 100,000 people. And they use an incremental lifetime cancer risk to predict that. And almost across the board in these EIAs that industry have completed to get their projects approved, elevated cancers have been a potential risk.

Then a project gets approved and we move into the monitoring phase, and we see really heavy environmental monitoring. So the water, the air, I wouldn’t say the wildlife though, the mammals and the birds, the foods and the medicines, we don’t see a lot of monitoring there. But we do monitor the environmental media, water and sediment, those types of things.

And so this is where the disconnect really happens, in my view. Even though there were human health risks predicted, risk to the immune system, the skin very often, and cancer, there’s no monitoring component. Alberta Health doesn’t step in and support the Alberta Energy Regulator in developing a human-focused monitoring program. Health Canada doesn’t step in. Indigenous services Canada now. First Nation Indigenous Health Branch. All these different provincial and federal health regulatory agencies, they sit tangentially on the outside and hear about these things, but they’re not looking at an approved monitoring plan or a monitoring plan that industry’s submitting, and making recommendations about how to actually monitor, to understand and assess potential risks to the downstream communities or any member of the public, really.

And so this gets back to that conversation. We have the most stringent environmental regulations in Canada. I would agree. We have very stringent environmental legislation. The Canadian Environmental Protection Act, Alberta’s Environmental Protection Enhancement Act. These are very robust pieces of legislation. It’s the policies and the regulation, how they’ve been regulated and interpreted, and then how they actually regulate the industry using this robust legislation, that’s where we’re seeing these systemic flaws, in my view. And that’s really where I do my research.

Brandi Morin:  Well, thank you. So what monitoring and testing specifically needs to be done, where you’re seeing the gaps? What needs to be tested for that’s not being done?

Mandy Olsgard:  Yeah, so I would say you’d need to go back to the original human health risk assessments that were done in those project applications and look at the single chemicals or groups of chemicals and the health effects in humans that were predicted. And then you would have to work with health agencies, medical doctors, different groups of experts to design those monitoring programs. And so Alberta Health, through the Primary Care Network, puts out the community profile in the Wood Buffalo region. And they themselves are reporting that, through doctor’s visits and the health statistics, that there are higher rates of cancer in the Indigenous populations in the Wood Buffalo area compared to Alberta populations. 

So this data’s being collected through health networks, but then we don’t see Alberta Health reaching into the regulator and acting on that. So that’s the first level of monitoring, I would say, what’s coming in through the public health networks when people visit their doctor, those high level statistics that we collect.

If you are observing something, then we would want to move into surveillance, as Dr. O’Connor’s talked about here, getting into the populations. And I’m not talking about going straight to monitoring people, but monitoring the foods people are eating, monitoring natural surface water bodies as a drinking water source. That is something I’ve fought for in my career in Alberta, just for industry and the Alberta Energy Regulator to acknowledge and assess rivers, and lakes, and muskeg as a drinking water source. So apply drinking water guidelines that consider humans. So right now, all the guidelines that are applied in the oil sands region by industry and the Regulator are focused on the protection of ecological receptors in those surface water bodies. They don’t consider cancer-causing agents. Groundwater’s a different situation — I’m talking about surface water.

So there’s low-hanging fruit here, applying guidelines that consider that humans are exposed to these chemicals through their interactions with the environment, traditional foods and medicines. Right there we’d have a better understanding of how those community members could be exposed. Then when you consider the Indigenous knowledge, what members are telling us day in and day out, we would be seeing more focused health studies, I think.

Brandi Morin:  Amazing. Thank you, Mandy. I’m going to come back to you as well.

I would love to hear from Steven. So like I said, Steven represented Indigenous tribes in Ecuador for many years and was successful in gaining a judgment against Chevron for this mass of oil poisons that were left behind. They were kind of like tailings. They were pits, right? They just didn’t clean up. They didn’t clean up their mess.

Anyways, Steven, for those that you don’t know, he was prosecuted, these oil companies vindictively went after him. And he is a very renowned advocate, human rights advocate and environmental lawyer, and he’s a friend of mine. And I wanted to bring him in to gain your thoughts on this situation in regards to your own experiences.

Steven Donziger:  Thank you, Brandi. And thank you for making a great film. It’s amazing.

Brandi Morin:  Thank you.

Steven Donziger:  And Chief Adam, pleasure, honor to meet you, sir. And I don’t know, Dr. O’Connor, I’m so bad with names. Mandy, Dr. Olsgard, thank you for your work. It’s so important that people come together in support of these frontline communities.

I’m just a white dude from the United States who got involved as a lawyer in this big case against Chevron in Ecuador. And when I hear these descriptions of what happened in Fort Chip, it reminds me very much of what I experienced at the hands, or what my clients, I should say, experienced at the hands of Chevron in Ecuador in the Amazon where Texaco, later bought by Chevron, went in there in the 1960s and essentially designed a system of oil extraction to pollute the environment. They didn’t even attempt to try to minimize the impacts. They essentially decided that they would dump, systematically, billions of gallons of cancer-causing toxic oil waste into streams and rivers that Indigenous peoples have been using for their drinking water, bathing, and fishing.

My experience is pretty simple. Industry will do anything it can if it thinks it can get away with it. You see this in Canada, you see it in the United States, you see it in Ecuador, and you see it everywhere I’ve looked at it. Without sufficient and robust regulation by authorities, there’s just nothing that will be done to stop this. And even with well-meaning regulators, often it’s very difficult to stop it because industry is so powerful. People who often, in government, who do their jobs conscientiously end up losing their jobs because they’re just not supposed to really do their jobs. They’re supposed to balance it all out such that industry always seems to have the upper hand. And in my experience, the only way to stop that is through frontline organizing, political organizing, really, to support the regulators and the scientists so they’re able to actually do their jobs correctly despite the massive resistance that industry often generates to block their work.

And it doesn’t surprise me to hear what’s happening in the Fort Chip area, as distressing as it is. But I will say that the film, and having panels like this, and doing advocacy, and understanding the relationship between advocacy and the need to do serious, rigorous science, is absolutely critical. Science, the scientific part of it always seems to be diminished by industry lobbying and advocacy efforts by what I would call BS industry scientists who really are out there to create confusion and to sow doubt about the truth, about the evidence. So it really does take, I think, a high degree of awareness of the tricks the industry uses in how they do their so-called science, which is what I would call junk science, versus how real science is done. And how, really, the truth needs to be put out there, and it’s only going to come through organizing, through social media, through independent journalists like Brandi.

Brandi, you do such amazing work, not only on this issue, but across so many issues. And so few journalists are really focused on these issues. Far too few. And it’s just unbelievable to me that why is it that you as a Cree Iroquois take on these burdens? Where are all the other journalists? Why are they not focusing on these issues? And it’s really important that we keep pushing and we get the journalistic community to write about this, and to publicize this, and that other Indigenous and First Nations peoples in Canada support Chief Adam and the work that his people are doing. It’s really, ultimately, at the end of the day, about political organizing and political power, supporting truth, and science, and fairness, and protection of the earth, and the planet. So there’s a lot going on here in this issue that, to me, symbolizes so much of what so many communities around the world are dealing with. And I salute all of you for taking this on and for pushing it, and I will do my best personally in my own little way to help you try to amplify what you’re doing.

Brandi Morin:  Hay hay, Steven, thank you so much for joining us, for being here.

And Chief, you’ve been in this on and off. And you told me specifically when I was interviewing you in the film, you said, they could be giants and walk all over us, but you take out their knees and they will fall. And I know that you are very resolute in your belief of your rights as a nation, and how unjust this is, and where you stand. And I know that you said there was legal action prepping to be taken. But can you tell me, from your point of view, how you feel, what your stance is when you say, they might fight, but they’re going to fall, in regards to industry and getting justice for what’s happening?

Chief Allan Adam:  Well, it’s quite evident that the evidence is out there, and it’s been out there for a long time. And when people say, how come they’re not fighting anymore? Why are they continuing to sell out? Well, when you look at the whole circumstances, we’ve raised this issue in regards to the AER, to the environment, to human health, to the growths that are happening in the fish, in the wild, food as well. There were even reports from our area that when a bull moose was taken down and it had a deformed horn on it and everything, and they did analysis on it and everything, and it had cancer. And it was still consumed.

That’s just the lifestyle of the people out there. They don’t know what’s going on. Nobody knows nothing. They didn’t talk to no scientists. But somebody took a look at that moose and took some samples of it and sent it in. And by the time it came back, the people were eating the moose already. This is continuing. I’ve seen stuff myself as a gatherer because I go out and use the land. I was out fall hunting this fall. We harvest our moose, we distribute it out to the people and families and everything, and it’s a continuation of tradition [inaudible]…

Brandi Morin:  Is that me or Chief that’s frozen? I think Chief just froze up a bit.

Mandy Olsgard:  Yeah, I think.

Brandi Morin:  Yeah. So we’ll just wait for him to come back. Sometimes that happens. So yeah, I mean, it’s all connected and sometimes it’s like, okay, is it a choice between keeping tradition and culture alive, or your health? And ultimately, in Native communities, your culture and your tradition is intertwined with everything that you are as a human being. So it’s like stripping away of that. Dr. John, I see your hand is up. Go ahead.

Dr. John O’Connor:  Yeah, it is interesting. One of the comments that was made after the Alberta Cancer Board report came out was that the community of Fort Chip was of great concern, but the sample size was too small to be considered significant. That’s one way of using statistics to push your point of view and your agenda. Very frustrating, totally inappropriate for the community of its location and what it’s exposed to.

Me and my wife were up in Inuvik in March of this year at the Dene Water Summit, worked for a couple of days, and listened to communities that had come from across the far north, accessible by boat, by fixed-wing. But their evidence, their traditional knowledge, and some white men’s knowledge as well, pointed to findings that they were getting in their own communities, their own little small sample sizes. Again, too small a community to be considered a problem. If we all banded together, all these communities, including Fort Chip, we would no longer have a small sample size.

Brandi Morin:  So basically they said they don’t matter because they’re only a community of 1,200 people, is what you’re saying.

Dr. John O’Connor:  Exactly. And also, the fact that they’re Indigenous. If this was happening south of Edmonton or south of Red Deer or south of Calgary, it wouldn’t have happened.

Brandi Morin:  Yeah, I agree. Mandy.

Dr. John O’Connor:  Environmental racism at its worst.

Mandy Olsgard:  Yeah, I just want to interject. There’s no doubt in my mind there’s environmental racism happening in this region. Statistically, it’s very difficult to significantly prove an increased cancer rate in a small population. We see it all across the world, right? Toms River down in the States, it took them decades to prove that there was this increased cancer rate in children when it was just evident. There’s books written on it, and it was dyes being released. So I don’t want to discount that there is very clear environmental racism going on. But statistically speaking, small sample sizes for showing significant increases in cancer, it’s like a mathematical error, not entirely racism. So sometimes it’s a little bit difficult as a scientist working in this region, and I just want to make it clear that there’s a lot happening there.

Brandi Morin:  Hay, hay, Mandy, thank you.

So Chief Adam, I just wanted to follow up. Okay, so we know that there’s been another spill… They’re not calling it a spill, it’s a “release” of water from one of Imperial Oil’s containment ponds from, it’s used as runoff and different things, but it was over the sediment guidelines, and that was released last week into the Muskeg River. Again, another failure. And it’s not just one company that’s doing this. We focus on Imperial Oil because it was where these significant releases happened last spring. We know that Suncor had a major release within that time period, and that these things are ongoing.

But Chief, this is something that you’re living with all the time. Right now we’re talking about it, and it’s in the media, but what’s going on behind the scenes? I know that tomorrow the AER is speaking to the environmental committee again in Ottawa. And apparently Laurie Pushor at first refused after he was called up to go and testify to them again. And he had to be summoned by the governmental committee to actually go, and that’s happening tomorrow. I don’t really know what’s going to happen. They’re going to be questioning the AER after it absolved itself in September of any wrongdoing in regards to following protocol to notify communities, even though it apologized.

What’s going on now, Chief? What’s happening right now in regards to your relationship and actions with the AER, and with oil industries, and governments?

Chief Allan Adam:  Right now, this must be a hot topic, because I lost my phone service there because my phone overheated.

Brandi Morin:  [Laughs] Yes.

Chief Allan Adam:  But when you look at the whole structure of everything, there’s a lot of moving parts happening as we speak. And it’s unfortunate that we had to come to this component. It could have been all avoided if the Alberta Energy Regulator just lived up to its name: a regulator, energy regulator, but it failed to do so.

And I was getting to the point earlier that never before have we been into a situation like this where we had an opportunity to do something. Even though we talked about it in the past, we knew that there was something wrong, but there was never an opportunity to catch them in the cookie jar, I guess you could say. And over the years, we kept on fighting, telling people, telling the media, telling the public, that there’s something going on here, there’s something wrong here, the Alberta Energy Regulator is not doing nothing. They just stayed back, stayed silent. Everybody stayed silent on that notion.

Nothing came about until the spill happened. And when the spill happened, and then the Energy Regulator came out and started saying all these other things, and next thing you know, just like, what’s going on here?

And this is the evidence that we needed. This is what we needed as a nation to fight and to go after them under the treaty, because they broke the treaty in our regard. And because it states in the treaty that life will go on, life never even disturbed anything. As settlers coming in, you’ll continue your way of life undisturbed, you’ll be able to eat the food that you’ve eaten throughout the whole time you’re there, travel wherever you want to travel and everything. All these are playing into effects on our community and everything. And now we got the Alberta Energy Regulator.

We caught them, we got them for negligence. Poor response. We got them for anything. And that’s when I said to you earlier, you said it yourself, that they may be giants, but when you take out their knees, they’re going to fall. And it’s too bad that the Alberta Energy Regulator is going to fall this time because of poor mistakes that have been done that they should have carried out properly. I don’t think we would be in a scenario that we’re in today if it was carried out properly.

But when you take a look last year, the profits alone from the oil and gas industry here in Alberta is $47 billion to shareholders outside of Alberta. So you could tell the stakes are high here in this region, and it’s not going to get any better because of the demand for oil that’s out there.

And we live in a safe zone. Nobody’s doing nothing about it. We’re not in the Middle East where there’s war and everything. We’re not in Nigeria. We’re not all these other countries where there’s uncertainty. But here in Canada, here in Alberta, they have certainty, and they abused it. They abused it for their own power, for their own will, and they forgot about one thing: they forgot about the people that live downstream. And we the people who live downstream, we have had enough, and we’re going to do something about it. And I guarantee you, man, I’m quite 100% sure that the Alberta Energy Regulator will have a Christmas gift before Dec. 25, coming to them from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation.

Brandi Morin:  Yeah, I get that. I get that. So Chief, can I ask you, and I think this is kind of the consensus out there, that the AER is in bed with the governments as well as industry, and they’re supposed to be separate. Can you comment on that?

Chief Allan Adam:  They’ve always been together. I myself called the CEO from the AER in the past to resign. And I asked him publicly, even through the media, to resign. And that was before Laurie came involved. And he was hired to regulate the Alberta Energy Regulator, but he was a former CEO for an oil company, or some kind of company… So you could tell that they… How would you say? They just keep rewashing and they keep bringing it back. They don’t have no solutions to anything. They hire people that were part of the problem, and then they hire them again to solve, to see what would happen. In my view, it doesn’t make sense to hire people that were part of the problem to create a solution.

Brandi Morin:  Yeah. Wow.

Now, Steven, I have a question. Are you there? I’d like to know…

Steven Donziger:  I’m here.

Brandi Morin:  You’re there. Do you think, Steven, that, ultimately, it really comes down to power and politics? Is that the number one barrier? Nothing else is considered. It comes down to power and politics. Is that your opinion?

Steven Donziger:  There’s a lot of factors. I do think, though, that the issue of politics, political structures, and political power tends to get not integrated with the legal and scientific strategies enough. So while I wouldn’t say that it’s only about politics and power, although I think that has a great deal to do with explaining why these things keep happening all over the world, I do think that we need to be smarter in terms of integrating different disciplines. 

Even on this panel, we have a lawyer, we have scientists, we have frontline defenders, the chief, we have a journalist. All of those communities need to work very closely together and create these new alliances, this new broad-based movement. Of course, in service of the frontline defenders. It is Chief Adam and the people, the frontline Indigenous peoples in Canada and around the world that need our support, that are the frontline defenders of life on this planet. And so I think we need to be really smarter about how we integrate different disciplines, how we integrate different communities, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, toward our common goal of justice in this world and saving our planet. 

So the awful situation of this killer water that you document in the film is a function of a power structure. The fact that the problem exists is a function of a power structure. It is not just one lax regulator. It’s not just one captured bureaucracy in Alberta. It is part of a global power structure created by an industry to keep extracting natural resources, mostly from under Indigenous lands around the world, to power this insane growth that the world economy, that is the owners of the world economy, need to keep maintaining their profits at the expense of the rest of us, the rest of us people, the rest of all of species, and the rest of life’s ecosystem. So I think that yeah, it does have a tremendous amount to do with politics and power.

Brandi Morin:  But Steven, when you’re saying this, what makes them fall? I’m going to use Chief Adam’s words. If you take out their knees, they will fall. You had success. Even though it kind of backfired when the oil company came after you, but in the judicial system in Ecuador, you had success. What does it take to make them fall, so to speak?

Steven Donziger:  Well, it takes a lot [laughs]. And we’re still battling, but I do think, and I think the chief makes a really good point in the film, is that in any given situation, in any given context, they can fall. You can make them fall. I think globally the structure is very difficult to dismantle overnight. It takes years and years of organizing. I do think though, that in particular situations, they can be defeated and justice can be won. And I’m hoping that obviously what’s happening, what you’re describing, what the chief is dealing with, is one of those situations where true accountability can be had.

I mean, obviously damage has been done already. If the regulators had been doing their job, this never would’ve happened. Now that it’s happened, there needs to be accountability, there needs to be compensation for the harms, and those who are responsible need to pay a price. They need to be moved out of their jobs, with responsible regulators put in.

But these people can fall. There’s no doubt in my mind. The fact that Chevron, just talking personally, spent literally $3 billion on 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers in the United States to go after our team after we won a $10 billion pollution judgment tells you how weak they are. That’s just weak, how they perceive themselves as being really under threat and facing enormous risk.

And our situation was unusual for various reasons, but the fundamentals are the same. It’s a battle. They don’t want to pay for the pollution that they caused, and they want to spend money paying lawyers and lobbyists to keep First Nations at bay and their allies at bay so they’re never held accountable. And they calculated it’ll be cheaper to pay lobbyists and lawyers than it will be to pay the people they harmed. And that calculation is at the heart of this entire battle. And it’s up to us to change the calculus.

In other words, it has to be so expensive for them to do this because they know they can’t get away with it. They know there will be costs to them, could be legal, could be financial, could be reputational, it could be Brandi writing an article that’s part of the cost. The chief, the organizing, it’s a hassle. These bureaucrats go to bed, they can’t feel good about themselves at some level. So all of that factors into it. Yes, they can be defeated on an ad hoc basis.

I think the broader picture is a little more complicated, but it all starts in your community, and it all starts on battles like this, whether they be Fort Chip or whether they be in Lago Agrio, Ecuador. The same battles, they can be won. It just takes interdisciplinary organizing and lots of good leadership and alliance building, and obviously some level of resources. So it can definitely be done. I didn’t mean to leave the picture that it was all…

Brandi Morin:  No, it’s all good. No, thank you, Steven. That’s so important, that perspective, even for me to learn to think about what maybe ACFN and others are going into.

But did anybody want to speak to that question, how the authorities and so on are just dismissing the concerns of the people on the ground when we hear about these things happening, and how they’re so easily able to do that? Does anybody want to speak to that, Chief or Dr. John?

Dr. John O’Connor:  Oh, yeah. My perspective, Brandi, having lived in Alberta for the last 30 years, is that industry owns this province. There’s a very blurry line between who is a politician and who’s a CEO of an oil company. When industry can parachute into Fort Chip and have consultation with the community at the community hall and provide a lavish meal and door prizes and cash and present this PowerPoint description of what they’re doing accompanied by politicians, totally supported by politicians, it is no wonder that the little voices from the likes of Fort Chip or other little communities downstream, those voices are not heard at all. And the evidence that’s been produced and publicized, backed by robust, reputable science, they just wait. The headline disappears a day or two or three after, and it’s gone. It’s a very different matter at grassroots level downstream, but very easy for authorities to ignore.

Brandi Morin:  Yeah. Chief, I just want to give Chief a moment to respond too, and then we’ll go back to Mandy.

Chief Allan Adam:  It’s a challenge when you look at all these things and everything. And as a leader, you have to look at all sides and everything, and you’ve got to do the proper analysis to do what’s best for the community. One of the things that I always look for, and maybe Mandy could answer this one, or Dr. O’Connor, with all the damages that are done already within the region, is it repairable? And if it’s not repairable, is it safe for the community of Fort Chipewyan residents to remain in Fort Chip or do we have to pack up and become environmental refugees? I think that would be the most prominent question that could be answered here today. And if that could be answered, then we’ll determine what’s our fate from here.

Brandi Morin:  Dr. O’Connor?

Dr. John O’Connor:  Yeah. Truth and reconciliation has to start with honesty and accountability, and if this start was made in Alberta along those lines, and an admission of the harm that’s been caused by industry, and an undertaking to put a moratorium on the development or the maintenance of these tailings ponds, that would go a long way towards mitigating the damage or at least preventing issues from happening in the future. Obviously, independent authorities, independent science that have nothing to do with Alberta, nothing to do with industry need to be involved in this. And they have been over the years, but like I said, their voices have been ignored. But I think it must start with a discussion, a conversation, a candid, honest attempt at accountability, and then taking on the responsibility, and then moving from there.

Brandi Morin:  Hay hay. Mandy, is the damage done? Is it too late?

Mandy Olsgard:  Yeah. Technology exists to remediate and remove the chemicals that are being placed in the tailings ponds, that are being emitted in the air. Scientifically and technologically, we can address all the chemicals. And from what I hear from communities, other than water levels and the drop in water levels, which is really caused by the dams in British Columbia, to a greater extent, the chemical emissions from oil sands can be controlled. But it is all about dollars and cents and stakeholder profits. So until we see that shift in society, and pushing for it, and a regulator that’s requiring oil sands to clean up, we’re in the situation we’re in.

And I can’t speak for any individual member, but I know what I hear from members. I’m in Fort Chipewyan all the time. And so that situation’s not going to change until we see either the federal government step in and require these technologies to actually be used to remove the chemicals that could be causing harm and the studies that tell us.

So Chief, to be honest, we need to see the studies. I do independent research with your community, with several other communities. We’re trying to fill the gap, but we’re this small group who recognizes this and is seeing this. So if we can get these larger groups, the money behind us, a true regulator that’s looking at the data being provided to them and then making real action.

Like when you have leaking tailings ponds, there’s a requirement to remediate groundwater that’s been contaminated. This is done in every other sector, every other energy sector, but the oil sands is a money making business. We had the CEO of Suncor come out and say they’re getting back to the fundamentals. We’re in a position where we now know quite honestly where industry stands. So we need a true regulator to turn this ship around.

What I was going to show you, to me, this speaks volumes. You don’t need a master’s in toxicology. This is the surface water. This was the industrial wastewater report that Imperial sent to the AER. Everywhere you see yellow is an exceedance of a guideline.

Brandi Morin:  Wow.

Mandy Olsgard:  That’s the approved water that’s released daily, continuously.

Brandi Morin:  Wow.

Mandy Olsgard:  So this is what —

Brandi Morin:  That’s just the approved?

Mandy Olsgard:  This is the approved. So when you see an incident that was a higher concentration, add more yellow, turn that yellow red because it’s actually over a limit. Even higher. This is what’s acceptable on a daily basis from 43 approved releases, 36 of which release. That’s surface water. That’s not even talking about tailings ponds. This is what the Regulator receives, their scientists review — And they are good scientists, I believe, who are technical experts in their field — But to make a decision, they need support of the leaders within the Alberta Energy Regulator, the management, and that’s where we find industry is having a say at stopping decisions.

Brandi Morin:  Absolutely.

Mandy Olsgard:  Anyone can speak to this. We go to the groundwater issue. This is what was submitted by Imperial, one of the two monitoring wells offsite. So you can see that elevated naphthenic acids in that red box, go to the far right-hand side. That’s been increasing since, arguably, 2017. So I don’t say it lightly when I say they knew that tailings pond was leaking, something was changing in the environment. This is Imperial’s own reporting to the Alberta Energy Regulator years before the environmental protection order. And I’m not doing this to scare people. It’s not a fear tactic. This is what Alberta Energy Regulator receives monthly, annually, weekly, daily from industry, from oil sands operators, and they are allowed discretionarily to make all decisions on that.

We don’t see it publicly. I had to request these reports from the Regulator, independently review them. That takes some education, experience. But anyone can read this and say, I have questions. And then when you hear what communities are telling us about what they’re seeing changing on the land, to me, that’s when the story became inexcusable and unignorable, as a consultant, as a scientist. I couldn’t do my job ethically working at the Regulator because I couldn’t follow through on the decisions that I knew that needed to be made.

Brandi Morin:  So what needs to be done specifically in this instance? Is it the health studies? Is it the reporting, the regulating? Mandy, can you break it down for us in layman’s terms? From your standpoint with seeing these graphs and this information, what needs to be done?

Mandy Olsgard:  I feel like Steven could be better here. I sit from a position where we’re in a province that is so divisive right now. If you don’t support the oil and gas industry, you are an enemy of the state. It is the language we see coming out of the premier’s office and pervading into every decision being made. As a scientist, I actually can’t even figure out how to navigate it. And I’ve had to take time off recently just to understand if I maybe knew what I was doing. The gaslighting scientists in this province are experiencing right now is real, and it’s hard to walk the line and keep doing what we’re doing because what’s right and wrong, what’s black and white?

It’s very difficult because industry is so well organized in their lobbying effort. They do studies. I read that study and I come to a completely different conclusion than those scientists. The science, the study might actually be quite robust, but how it’s been interpreted, and then how COSIA or CAP or registered industry lobbying agencies then move that through Pathways Alliance, it is so concerted. As a single scientist, I actually can’t answer that because I don’t know anymore, but I know what I’m looking at, and I know we have an issue with chemical exposures in that region. So I don’t know, Steven, if you can add to that, how to move this forward.

Brandi Morin:  And he did speak to that. And then I had a question like, okay, so these health studies, somebody that’s watching wondered what is the estimated cost and lengths for these health impact assessments and these studies? What are the barriers to getting them done other than industry not wanting to be found out?

Mandy Olsgard:  Well, industry controls the flow of money in this region, whether it’s to scientists like me often, applying for something, or paying the Regulator’s levy, or putting in for the liability, or working with communities through agreements. I think this is all pretty well known, that industry controls that flow of money. And so even when we’re proposing to do studies, they have the ability to vet those and be like, well, remove this component. Do this. Not always. We go for grants and research as well, but yeah.

Brandi Morin:  How feasible is an independent study? Is it a matter of resources, or do you know?

Mandy Olsgard:  Yeah, for sure. There’s independent scientists who do this type of work. I’m an independent consultant. I can take contracts from whoever has the money to fund them. And so you need a group of independent consultants which are willing to do this type of work and maybe publish a study and results that might be an opposition to a study that came out from a different researcher. You have to have that space to be able to speak to it.

And thankfully, we are in Canada. We have the space. If we were in a different jurisdiction, it could be very different to speak out as a scientist. I still feel fairly free to do that. So you need scientists who are willing to take that stand.

I’m the only independent toxicologist that doesn’t work for large consulting firms that support industry. There’s a handful in the region. And then you have to find contaminated groundwater, like contaminant hydrogeologists, who don’t work for the big industry consulting firms. So it’s a lack of resources, I think, to get the work done. It’s a lack of funding for this independent work.

And then you have communities who, Chief, maybe you can speak to it, people just want to live. They didn’t take on the job of fighting big industry so that they can go about their way of life. Does everybody want that? Hunting season comes, members are like, fine, Mandy, we’ll meet with you, but we’re meeting out in the bush, right? People just want to live. So it’s really complex, I think there’s a lot of factors, Brandi, but yes, it’s absolutely possible to do these studies. Science is there. Science and technology are not limitations to anything we’re discussing here today.

Steven Donziger:  Can I have a quick word?

Brandi Morin:  Yeah.

Steven Donziger:  So first of all, Mandy, thank you for that. You really nailed it, I think, in many respects. Now, all these studies can be done in Canada, and generally in the United States, with money. It’s a question of money. Industry has massive sums of money to do their fake studies, and the communities usually have almost no money, no money or almost no money to do the studies they need to do, even if they can access the expertise to do a study, to know how to do a study, to design the study, to do the right data collection. And I understand what Mandy is saying because there are very, very few independent scientists in the world who are willing to take on industry because most scientists, unfortunately, just like most lawyers work for wealth and power, most scientists work for industry because that’s where the jobs are. And what I think has to happen is really two things.

One is there needs to be a pot of money created to do independent science in conjunction with the communities by qualified scientists. And I think that money should come from the industry. The industry should be forced — And this is where you get back into the politics — Should be taxed, basically, on their profits to put aside funds so the communities can do their own independent assessments of the impacts of operations on their lands, water, et cetera. There’s got to be some independent source of funds that should come from industry.

Now, obviously industry would fight this. Obviously there’s probably not a lot of elected officials in Alberta who would support this. But put it out there, put the aspiration out there. You never know what might come of it. Suddenly there’s some big-ass spill, and then there’s a whole impetus politically to do something. And then your proposal that no one paid attention to for six months is sitting there like, hey, what about that proposal proposed by Chief Adam in conjunction with this toxicologist to tax the industry to fund for studies?

And also, I think in the scientific community, we’re seeing more and more in the United States small independent groups of scientists who understand exactly what Mandy is talking about and are trying to design systems or structures where they can do the independent science, understanding they will never work for industry their whole lives. You really have to make a choice as a scientist. You’re going to work for industry or you’re going to work for communities. And you really can’t do both because once you start working for communities, industries won’t hire you. Once you start working for industries, you’re tainted.

There’s a group that I work with in the United States in the Ecuador case called Stratus Consulting, just one example of a few. They have like 75 scientists, and they did almost all their work for municipalities, and they worked for the communities of Ecuador once we got funds to pay them. It wasn’t as expensive as scientists who worked for industry. but I also found that these are the best scientists.

A lot of the industry scientists, the scientists that Chevron used to try to create doubt and to do all sorts of what I would call BS science were really second, third rate scientists from really marginal programs, but they were more than willing to sell their souls and whatever little expertise they had for political purposes. They really were political scientists. They were on the other side. They would use their studies or their non-studies, or they designed the questions in such a way that they knew the answers in advance, and they would use them to help industry. And then Chevron’s PR machine would put out their study, see, this is a new study, blah, blah, blah. But then you’d look at the study and realize it was completely flawed on a thousand levels.

So it’s really important, I think, to find resources, to put out a proposal to tax the industry to pay for independent science, and to organize so the communities, Chief Adam, know the available toxicologists and independent scientists that can help. And they don’t necessarily, by the way, have to be from where you are. They can be from the United States, they can be from Ontario, they can be from Nova Scotia, they can be from British Columbia. Science is science, and many people are willing to travel to do the work to give people like Mandy support.

Brandi Morin:  Hay hay, Steven. Chief?

Chief Allan Adam:  Brandi, when it comes to these issues in regards to some of the stuff, you’ve got to take a look at what the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and other First Nations are doing in regards to the area. We have our own community-based monitoring program that’s up and going, which is funded by industry. We collect the data on the water issue. We start taking collections from animals as well as they’re being harvested, just to get a collection and to get the numbers that we’re out there telling everybody that there’s something wrong here. Not only to that, just recently, probably within a month or so, we’ve just introduced a new policy for the nation, and it’s a water guideline policy, that if industry and government doesn’t meet the threshold of safe drinking water for our community and for our members, then we’re going to question everything.

And it’s a game changer for industry because we are, as a sovereign nation, we have the ability to create laws to protect our own people. And it states that as long as we don’t create policies or laws to protect our people, the governments will create these for us. So now we went beyond that point, and we’re totally not reliant on the government, both federally and provincially. We’re doing this on our own. We’re putting our own guidelines in place, and we’re saying that in order for you to get approved, you have to meet our standards of water level. And if it’s not at our level, then it does not get approved, and we have to do something about it, and we have to bring it to that state of mind. And that’s probably going to be another game changer in light of everything that’s going on. And we developed that water policy in light of what had happened over the last year and years past.

So this is one of the things that gives us more sovereign rights as a nation, because under treaty you had to be a sovereign nation to sign treaty. And when we signed treaty, we were a sovereign nation back then, and we had our own environmental laws, we had our own governance laws, and we had our own space about where we had to go and travel at all times. And today, now we’re just secluded to one area, and the environmental component is way out of whack. There is no conductor at the helm. We got a ghost train going out of control.

Brandi Morin:  I didn’t know about that policy, Chief. That sounds incredible. And does that come into effect immediately, or how does that work?

Chief Allan Adam:  Once we get this thing and everything, then we’re going to send notifications out that these are going to happen. And I gotta take it to our team, Lisa, the LRM team. I think Mandy might have been involved with it as well too, to develop all these things. And we’re doing these things from our own perspective and from our own nation, and we’re doing it with our own funding and all these stuff because not only do we want to walk the talk, we want to do it and make sure it gets done because we’re tired of relying on government, and we’re tired of relying on industry to make things happen for us.

Brandi Morin:  Wow. And then these initiatives as well as the lawsuit that I understand is coming, it’s not like the lawsuit is going to fix anything immediately. These things take years. But they are initiatives, like these policies that you’re developing, that it’s going to help?

Chief Allan Adam:  That’s going to help our nation, yeah.

Brandi Morin:  I would love to see that when it comes out and a copy of it, because that must be pretty, your nation, how often is that done that you know of?

Chief Allan Adam:  This would be the first one done in that regard to environmental policies, for the protection of water and all these other things. And it’s just one of many that probably could keep coming down because we know our rights. I’ve said it before in the past at public meetings, in our own meetings, that if we ever wanted to get anything done, we would have to create our own constitution out of that. We have to create our own laws and everything and stuff like that. So we’re working on a constitution, and out of the constitution we will develop our own environmental laws, our own health laws, and everything that goes with it, and stuff like that. So it’s basically a start in some way, even if it’s a little small start, it’s a start that we’re doing something.

Brandi Morin:  And that’s something that industry and governments or whoever, they have to adhere to because of your sovereignty as a nation, and you’re creating those laws and policies?

Chief Allan Adam:  Yep. They have to because it’s our law and it’s our guidelines, and if they don’t meet the guidelines, and if they exceed the guidelines, then there’ll be damages reputed to it.

Brandi Morin:  Wow, that’s interesting. That’s pretty cool. Mandy, did you want to speak to that?

Mandy Olsgard:  Yeah, I just want to say thank you, Chief, for bringing up that project. It’s a great example of how communities and First Nations and sometimes Métis communities are bringing the science that we’re talking about here to the Regulator.

So that project specifically is called the Water Quality Criteria For Indigenous Use. Took us four years, almost five years. And because we saw independent scientists like myself and I have a team of other scientists, Dr. Thompson and Dr. Thomas Dick that I worked with, so water quality experts, social scientists, human geographers, to actually work with ACFN and a few other nations to understand how communities use water, rely on water, their rights tied to water, how it supports their lives. And then we develop the criteria to protect those. Their water use categories consider drinking water, traditional plant medicines, foods, and then you have guidelines, criteria that protect those uses for surface water and sediment. We’re doing the same thing for terrestrial ecosystems. So soil, forest, the animals, and the birds and that. So moving those things forward.

But these criteria are more stringent than anything government will have ever required industry to use. So like Chief spoke to, it’s getting it into policy linked to rights and moving it forward because this is what it takes to protect human health. Humans are not distinct from the environments that they live in and rely on, and especially in these communities.

And it is available. It’s on ACFN’s website. It’s a huge report. Hundreds of pages, thousands with the appendices, but ACFN has made that available for everyone to review. We just went to a conference and presented on that research with other Indigenous groups who are doing this from British Columbia and across Canada and internationally. So there is a body of scientists and communities doing this work and pushing it forward. So thank you, Chief, for opening that, and bringing some positivity and solutions.

Brandi Morin:  Wow. That is. That’s something. You feel like often when you’re doing this work or doing these stories, it’s like you don’t find that you have the solutions. And this is representing some of that. We’re going to wrap up here in a few minutes. I was wondering, Chief, if you had anything to say to the fed or provincial and AER about where things are at right now? What would you say to them?

Chief Allan Adam:  As a chief, I think we’re at a state of emergency in regards to the environment, in regards to what’s happening with our ecosystem. We need to get down to the nitty-gritty and bring it all out and notify the people. Are we safe in the community? And the only ones that could tell us and give us the answer to that is the government agent bodies like the AER, Environment Canada, DFO, all these agencies could play a part in doing something, but unfortunately they choose not to do so in that light itself.

Is there hope? There’s always hope. It’s just a matter of how much effort do you want to put into it? And right now with this happening and everything, it’s a big game changer for ACFN. It’s a big game changer for everybody. Everybody involved with what’s going on sees it’s a big game changer. And if we don’t do it right and we don’t correct the problem, it’s just going to get worse from here on in. It ain’t going to get better. We have a lot of legal rights that are on our side. I wouldn’t know how to say it, but maybe Steve or Mandy or even Dr. O’Connor could say, we finally got them.

Brandi Morin:

Hay, hay, Chief. Steven? Wrap up words, respond?

Steven Donziger:

Well, let me just say I’m talking a lot, but there’s a lot I don’t know as well. And the things I said on this panel, I really say with great humility and respect for the chief in particular and the other panelists. But I do think the monitoring program that the First Nation is doing in Fort Chip is really significant. That’s the basis for information that can really be used with the support of scientists who can help interpret it to raise a lot of help with these regulators and call them out and capture, I think, more support around the nation of Canada.

I’ve seen this a lot. I’m down here and I haven’t traveled for a bunch of years, by the way. Chevron took my passport, otherwise I’d be up there visiting if I could. I really mean that. But it seems to me there have been a couple of instances in recent years where First Nations have captured the imagination of the whole country. I think the Wet’suwet’en to some degree with the —

Brandi Morin:  And internationally. Yes.

Steven Donziger:  And internationally. And I think this film is the basis to project this out much further. So there might be ways for all of us to think about strategies to do that in light of the film and in light of the opportunity that the film offers.

Brandi Morin:  Just a second. So just saying that the chief, one of the people that works with the chief have said that they’re showing the film during one of their sessions at COP in Dubai. I don’t know how big of a difference that’ll get. I know that that’ll get to these officials that they’re giving information to at COP. But I think it really does need to get to a wider audience in order to create that grassroots awareness and pressure. Is that what you’re saying, Steven?

Steven Donziger:  Yeah. And I would say yes, I am. And I would say two other things, which is… Am I, can you see me? Yeah, there I am.

Brandi Morin:  Yeah, I can see you.

Steven Donziger:  So the other thing is think big. It is just as much energy to go to the premier of Alberta as it is to the prime minister of Canada. It’s just as much energy to go to the environment minister of Alberta as it is to the environment minister of the whole country. And if Alberta is so captured by industry, I think we ought to consider strategies to go outside Alberta to get pressure back into Alberta, because this is embarrassing. For a country that purports, at least in its rhetoric, to care about First Nations, this is not good.

And I think that, again, affords opportunities. In other words, there’s never really a problem or a resistance that is out there that doesn’t have some major opportunity in it to try to flip the frame and really advance what you’re trying to do.

Now, having said all that, it’s easy for me as an armchair person in the US to say all this stuff. You folks are doing the actual work. I am highly sympathetic to what Mandy said. People just want to live. It’s not your fault they did this. You just want to live as you’ve lived, as your people have lived for millennia. So why is it on you that you have to deal with this shit? Why is it on you that you have to listen to a guy like me say you need to organize politically? Why is it on you that you got to find scientists and money to do the studies? So it’s hard, and I get it, and nothing but sympathy.

But I’m telling you, these people, the chief is right. They can be slayed, they really can. And how it gets done, I’m not really sure. There’s a lot of good ideas. The chief probably knows best. The monitoring program that you’re doing is phenomenal. I’m really happy to hear about that because that can be used to parlay into something more. And I’m willing to help to the extent that I can.

So I don’t know what else I can say except I have tremendous respect for all of you folks, starting with the chief and all your colleagues and the scientists and Brandi, you, it’s amazing what you’re doing to raise the profile of this issue and let’s just see where it goes with the film and what kind of opportunities that might create.

Brandi Morin:  Yeah. Hay hay, Steven. I’m again grateful for your time to be here to share your expertise and your perspective.

I just had one more quick question for Chief, and then I was going to give Dr. John a wrap up. So Chief, I’m just wondering, how are other First Nation leadership in regards to this issue? I know that you’re on the Treaty VIII executive Council, I believe. And do you know, is there any unified front to support these kinds of issues? Again, we have focused on Fort Chip, but Fort Chip is not the only community that is experiencing this up there. But is there anything going on politically within the assembly of First Nations or within your treaty area?

Chief Allan Adam:  No, there’s nothing in that regard going on, other than the fact that business is normal. I could say this for a fact that I’ve been elected official chief for 16 years, and I’ve been on council for four years, so I’ve been in council 20 years, and I’m going into another four-year term. And I haven’t really had to deal with being the chief of the nation other than the fact of fighting with industry and government with the environment. Ever since I’ve taken the position as the chief, and raising the concerns, and the dilemma of everything that’s going on.

If the proper mechanisms were in place and everything to counter all of these things and the resources were there, could you imagine what we could have built and did right in regards to how to develop an industry, to protect the environment, to protect the community, to protect the health, and to provide education and let the people be aware of what’s happening at all times. If we were to do that, we wouldn’t be in a predicament that we are in today.

And it goes to show that ignorance and racism still plays a big part here in the oil sands region. And that we as First Nations people are looked down on, not looked upon, and that’s going to change.

Brandi Morin:  Wow. And any word from the MP or follow up from the premier’s office or anything? I know it’s kind of early in regards to response to the film, but —

Chief Allan Adam:  I find this ironic that COP28 that’s happening, the Alberta government is sending a delegation of 150 to go and tell —

Brandi Morin:  Oh my gosh.

Chief Allan Adam:  …To go and tell the world that everything in Alberta is fine, nothing wrong. And we are sending a delegation of probably four, and we’re also sending some of the footage and documentaries and stuff like that down there. And we’re going to let the world know that this is happening in our backyard, and it’s time to expose the whole thing, and let everybody know that what Canada’s been telling the UN and what other government agencies have been telling the UN about how good things are in Canada and in Alberta with the First Nations communities, we’re there to go and tell the world that everything is not good.

Brandi Morin:  Wow. It’s really representative of these giants that we’re talking about when you’re talking about these numbers of 150 and all of these resources, and then you’re sending four people to go there and speak the truth of what you’re experiencing. I mean, wow. Wow.

Chief Allan Adam:  So that just goes to show how much of a cover-up they’re willing to do and to take and to lobby all these other groups of people whatsoever. But we will make a note on this, and it’s time that we do what we have to do. And I’ve always said it before, we have to go to the UN and expose Canada for what they are, and we have to expose Alberta for who they are.

Brandi Morin:  Hay, hay, Chief, thank you.

And then John, Dr. John.

Dr. John O’Connor:  As Mandy and Steven have said, this is a very complex situation. About 12 years ago, myself, my wife, and Andrew Nikiforuk, a legendary environmental journalist, were invited and participated in a Scandinavian venture through Nordic Greenpeace to publicize what’s happening downstream. We actually were given shares in Statoil to be able to address their AGM, their shareholders AGM in Stavanger in Norway, about 2010.

And we got actually a topic for debate. Do we stay in the, what was called the oil sands, the tar sands, or not? We got an opportunity to actually go on stage and address the shareholders. And for the first time in their history, they had to vote. Now, about 99% voted to stay. 1% said no. These are the shareholders, and they withdrew. And of course since then, Statoil have left the tar sands.

So I think going abroad and revealing the story, informing people, educating people just with the honest, real picture of what’s happening at a grassroots level, that is so important.

2008, we had a call from Richard Rockefeller. So Richard Rockefeller was actually a family doctor in Maine, but one of the Rockefeller family. I was living in Nova Scotia at the time, and we were back and forth. So he set up a time to meet us in Nova Scotia, flew his plane into Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. We sat together for half a day. He’d been up to Fort Chip because of the issues that were highlighted about two or three years before. Confirmed what we’d found. And after listening to us, he said, John, he said, don’t stop what you’re doing. You’re on the right track. And this is coming from Standard Oil, the Standard Oil family.

So there’s awareness. There are bureaucrats and CEOs who I’m sure can’t sleep at night. Once the information is out there, once people realize what’s happening, that is so important. It’s not the only thing. Like I said, the picture is very complex.

A few years ago, Syncrude put pressure on the MCFN chief regarding their CEO. Their CEO had gone around the world, publicized what was going on in Fort Chip. He said, this will have implications for your nation if you don’t rein in the CEO. So unfortunately, the CEO had to quieten down. But to illustrate how powerful they were, Syncrude canceled two contracts that the MCFN had on site just to show that, economically, we hold the purse.

And that, unfortunately, is the issue. There’s no other show in town. If it wasn’t for big oil, what would Fort Chip look like now? It would be a healthier place. That’s another of the complexities of this issue. We must continue to talk, and to publicize, and to answer questions, and spread it as wide as we can.

Brandi Morin:  Thank you. Well, hay hay, everybody. We’re going to wrap up now, but I just want to thank each and every one of you for participating in this discussion. I respect and admire your knowledge and your experiences and your input into this. And I just pray that injustices such as this one that we’re discussing, the toxins and the corruption that’s happening to Fort Chipewyan, that this is addressed. And my dog wants to make an exit appearance, so I’m going to wrap it up and say hay hay. Go watch Killer Water. Stay tuned. I will be following the nation of Fort Chipewyan. I’m going to follow them from here as we go to COP. Thank you, everybody.

Dr. John O’Connor:  Thank you.

Chief Allan Adam:  Thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories, and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

In Northern Alberta, Canada, sit the Athabasca tar sands—the world’s largest known reservoir of crude bitumen, and a major driver of Canada’s economy. The vast majority of Canadian oil production comes from the extraction and processing of the crude bitumen found in the tar sands. But while Canada prospers off the tar sands industry, Indigenous communities downstream are in the grips of its toxic impact. It is well documented that the people of Fort Chipewyan, in northern Alberta, have been struck by disproportionately high rates of cancer, and their proximity to the tar sands has long been the suspected dominant factor contributing to their sickness. 

In a new feature documentary, Killer Water, award-winning journalist Brandi Morin and award-winning filmmaker/director Geordie Day delve deep into the heart of the environmental crisis plaguing the Alberta oil sands, uncovering the hidden truths that have long been ignored. The film exposes the detrimental impact of toxic tailings ponds leakage on the delicate ecosystems, water sources, and human life in and around Fort Chipewyan. Through stunning visuals and compelling narratives, Morin and Day take viewers on a journey that highlights the injustices faced by the Indigenous community living in the shadow of this industrial development.

Killer Water was produced in partnership with The Real News Network, IndigiNews, and Ricochet Media.

Pre-Production: Brandi Morin, Geordie Day, Ethan Cox, Andrea Houston, Cara McKenna, Eden Fineday, Maximillian Alvarez, Kayla Rivara

Studio Production: Geordie Day

Post-Production: Brandi Morin, Geordie Day, Ethan Cox, Andrea Houston, Cara McKenna, Eden Fineday, Maximillian Alvarez, Kayla Rivara

TRANSCRIPT

Brandi Morin:  This is a stretch of Lake Athabasca, in northern Alberta, Canada. Jason Castor is going as fast as he can, but the waters here are shallow, too shallow. If he slows down, his boat could get stuck in the mud, or even flip over. The water here is low due to industries drawing out water like the WAC Bennett Dam in British Columbia. The other culprits are climate change and the relentless industrial mining of the Alberta tar sands.

The Peace-Athabasca Delta is the second largest freshwater delta in the world. And under the delta is the world’s largest known reservoir of crude bitumen. A black, viscus, semi-solid form of petroleum, [bitumen] is the main component of Canadian oil production, growing from 48% of total production in 2008 to 73% in 2021 according to the Canada Energy Regulator. In 2021, crude bitumen production totaled about 3.3 million barrels per day, and in 2020, it was worth $42.7 billion in sales value.

But while Canada prospers off the oil sands industry, Indigenous communities downstream are in the grips of its toxic impact.

Jason Castor:  On the riverways, there’s this slurry of foam that looks like oil, or some kind of chemical in there. And they said it’s supposed to be safe to drink. So, I don’t know, would you feed your family this? I look at this stuff and most of the time, I find this substance in it, mixed with the foam itself. And once it dries, it doesn’t come off. You pressure wash it, it won’t come off.

Back in the day, elders used to take water, a cup in their boat, and they used to drink it. Nowadays, I wouldn’t want to drink this.

Brandi Morin:  Jason is a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, ACFN for short, located in Fort Chipewyan. He’s been a traditional hunter, trapper, and fisherman for nearly 20 years. Over that time, he has documented strange changes in the water, the land, and even in the animals.

Jason Pastor:  And they say that it’s natural. Well, I know that that’s not natural, because I’ve been on the river my whole life.

Brandi Morin:  Jason worked as a heavy equipment operator for a major oil extraction company in the oil sands for several years. But over time, he says, being that close to the site of extraction gave him reasons to be unnerved.

Jason Pastor:  I was working out on site, and then, there’s so much things going on on site. There’s oil trucks moving around, and all the spills, and there’s always the smell of bitumen. I just felt sick to my stomach when I went to work [inaudible]. And in my mind, what am I doing to my land, or what I’m doing to our water?

Brandi Morin:  Jason was raised in the foster care system, away from Fort Chipewyan, after both of his parents died while ice fishing on Lake Athabasca when he was young. Then, nearly 20 years ago, Jason moved his wife and children back to Fort Chipewyan, and did the hard work of learning a traditional lifestyle, the lifestyle his ancestors created over countless generations. But those traditions are now at risk.

When you were a kid, did you swim in the lake?

Jason Pastor:  Yeah.

Brandi Morin:  And now…?

Jason Pastor:  Now I don’t go in the water. I just don’t.

Brandi Morin:  What about your kids? Do you tell them not to?

Jason Pastor:  I don’t take them on the lake over there. I take them elsewhere. I tell them, ‘You don’t go swimming at the dock, you don’t go swimming at the beach park, you don’t go swimming anywhere around here. You want to go, we go to Inland Lake, or I’ll take you way up the lake to the beaches.’

Brandi Morin:  That life-giving, life-sustaining river is now a little more than a transportation route. When he travels the river to pick up supplies or visit friends in Fort McMurray, Jason doesn’t take his hunting or fishing equipment anymore.

Jason Pastor:  From this area, I usually hunt for another… about 40 minutes, and I won’t go any further. That’s my area of hunting. Even though my reserve is still up here, ACFN Reserve, I choose not to go hunting in that area because the oil plants are getting closer. When we get so close to the oil and gas, we have animals, they’ll be just walking right along the bank. And it seems like they just know that we’re not going to hunt them, because we already passed our buffer zone and put our guns away, and we decided we’re not hunting in that area because there’s too much contaminants. They know, because they know we’re not going to hunt them.

Brandi Morin:  Jason and other local residents have suspected pollution from the oil sands has been affecting them for years. Their fears aren’t unfounded. It is well documented that the people of Fort Chipewyan have been struck by disproportionately high rates of cancer, and their proximity to the tar sands has long been the suspected dominant factor contributing to their sickness. And a recent tailings pond spill reiterated their concerns.

In February, Indigenous communities downstream from Imperial Oil’s Kearl Mine, about 75 kilometers upstream of Fort Chipewyan, learned of a massive spill of 5.3 million liters, or 1.4 million gallons, from the mine’s tailing area. Oil sands tailings are where the mining companies store the byproducts of the oil sands mining and extraction process, including water, sand, clay, residual bitumen, and various chemicals.

Imperial Oil’s Kearl Mine spill was one of the largest releases of toxic tailings in Alberta’s history. However, Fort Chipewyan’s leadership was only made aware of the toxic spill through an environmental protection order, issued by the Alberta Energy Regulator, that called on the company to immediately contain and remediate the spill on Feb. 6. Then, in March, the Canadian press obtained a document that showed the province stalled the initiation of an emergency response for a month.

Meanwhile, Indigenous leaders found out that another tailings pond at the same Kearl Mine site had been leaking for at least nine months prior to the major incident in February.

Soon after the incident, Environment and Climate Change Canada launched a formal investigation into potential violations of the Fisheries Act by Imperial Oil.

Speaker 1:  …An official investigation into the Imperial Oil Kearl Facility.

Chief Allan Adam:  For some reason, it has become my job to come to this place in order to remind this government and its duties and its responsibilities. Your responsibility for properly regulating massive industry projects that potentially threaten the health and safety of Fort Chipewyan and other downstream communities. For 10 months, this leak went unreported, despite the Alberta Regulator and the oil sands operators being fully aware of what was going on.

Brandi Morin:  But the nightmare didn’t end there. Just one month after the Kearl Mine spill, Suncor reported 6 million liters of tailings water that exceeded sediment guidelines were released into the Athabasca River from its Fort Hills oil sands mine. Imperial Oil maintains its spill did not affect nearby waterways or wildlife.

Brad Corson:  Monitoring continues to show there have been no impacts to local drinking water sources, and there is no indication of impact to wildlife.

Brandi Morin:  But the AAR’s own tests indicated the presence of industrial wastewater in a fish-bearing waterbody near the mine, and subsequent testing detected F2 hydrocarbons at levels exceeding the surface water quality guidelines for the protection of freshwater aquatic life. Still, the AER claimed in April there was no indication of a change in drinking water, and no adverse impacts to fish or wildlife had been observed.

Laurie Pushor:  …We have had no test results that suggest any of those compounds have left Waterbody Three.

Brandi Morin:  Chief Adam doesn’t buy that, and he’s not alone.

Francis Scarpaleggia:  The lake, which feeds into a tributary of the Firebag River, also contains naphthenic acids, which are formed from the breakdown of petrochemicals, et cetera.

Heather McPherson:  You are finding toxins outside of the Kearl site, there is an impacted area, and you are continuing to allow Imperial Oil to put tailings into that system.

Brandi Morin:  Chief Adam says his band is preparing a lawsuit against the company in the provincial and federal governments.

Chief Allan Adam:  Regardless of what government forms, or what government’s in place, when your back is up against a circle of a wall, try to find the curve, and I’ll put you there. But right now, that’s where they’re at, and there’s nowhere for them to go.

From ACFN’s point of view, how the justice scale goes, we will find out, because that’s where we’re going. And this is going to court.

Brandi Morin:  Is there a lawsuit launched, or —

Chief Allan Adam:  It’s going to happen, yeah. And it’s not going to look good for anybody, and it’s not going to look good for Canada, and it’s not going to look good for Alberta. But Alberta will fight. But Canada will buckle. And we can’t allow our water to be tainted.

Brandi Morin:  Chief Adam has been fighting this fight for decades. He’s been ACFN’s elected chief for almost 16 consecutive years, and he became internationally recognized for speaking out about the adverse impacts of the oil sands.

Chief Allan Adam:  Climate change has affected our people in more ways than one, with the depletion of our water, the drying up of our ecosystem in regards to one of the largest freshwater deltas in the world.

Brandi Morin:  Celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Neil Young, Jane Fonda, James Cameron, Desmond Tutu, and Greta Thunberg have visited Fort Chipewyan to help amplify the concerns.

Greta Thunberg:  Yeah, we continue the struggle, and yeah, we won’t give up.

Chief Allan Adam:  And neither will we.

Brandi Morin:  Then, in 2018, chief Adam announced he wanted to either buy a stake in Canada’s federally-owned Trans Mountain pipeline, or partner to build another future line.

Chief Allan Adam:  We want to be owners of a pipeline. We think that the pipeline is the most critical component to the oil and gas sector, especially from this region, and if Fort McMurray and Alberta wants to survive, the Athabasca Tribal Council has to be alongside both Alberta and Canada to make it run.

Brandi Morin:  He was labeled a sellout by some people, who claimed he abandoned the cause. But Adam said he couldn’t stop the oil industry, and he was tired of fighting against it, so he switched tactics to ensure his community at least receives long-overdue financial compensation.

Chief Allan Adam:  The sad scenario is that I would have loved to fight, and I still love to fight today, but there has to be a time when you have to draw the line.

Brandi Morin:  Then in 2020, Chief Adam again made international headlines when he was brutally arrested and beaten by RCMP officers in Fort McMurray for an expired license plate. Several months later, charges of resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer were dropped against him, following public backlash when footage of the incident was released [muffled shouting].

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:  We have all now seen the shocking video of Chief Adam’s arrest, and we must get to the bottom of this.

Chief Allan Adam:  If I had my way, in five years, the RCMP should be gone from all Native reserves across the country.

Brandi Morin:  Amidst all this, the chief never gave up caring about what happens to his homelands.

Chief Allan Adam:  Regardless of what and who we say we are, we have to work together as a community to stand as one, and that’s the only way we’ll be able to survive here in this community. How you say it, [speaking Dene]?

[Speaking Dene] means, I love you. I love you. That’s what that means. [Speaking Dene], I love you with all my heart, I guess the old timers would say, back in the day.

They could be giants and walk over us and everything, but you take out their knees, they will fall. Because our treaty trumps everything. We have legal rights, we have legal position, we have legal title, and we never, ever surrendered anything.

Brandi Morin:  What about Premier Smith? Have you ever had any convos with her? Because from what I understand, she was downplaying the seriousness of these spills, and the impacts, and she’s very, very pro-industry.

Premier Danielle Smith:  Nobody wants to feel like they have potentially been drinking water that has been exposed, and I’m pleased to report that none of this spill got into the tributaries.

Chief Allan Adam:  She hasn’t answered my text message that I sent to her when she was running for the Premier’s office and everything, and until today, she hasn’t answered my text. But I know she’s got it, because I have her cell number that goes right to the Premier’s office.

Brandi Morin:  What did you say in the text?

Chief Allan Adam:  I just told her straight out, ‘You want to continue this to go on? Well, then, give us 10% of all revenue sharing within Treaty Eight territory. That’s within a fair reason, and you don’t even have to back pay us. Just pay us up today.’ When times like this are happening, where homes are being destroyed by wildfire and everything and stuff like that because of climate change of development and everything. I raised the alarm years ago when I said that one day we’ll become environmental refugees. Where are we now?

Brandi Morin:  Chief Adam is growing frustrated with the encroaching threats to his community, threats that he believes are linked to industrial development. Like a wildfire that forced the entire community of Fort Chipewyan to be evacuated in May.

Premier Danielle Smith:  The fire danger level remains extreme in the North.

Speaker 8:  Smoke is seen billowing over the horizon as an out-of-control wildfire inches closer to the community. Residents of Fort Chipewyan forced to evacuate.

Speaker 9:  There are only two ways out of Fort Chipewyan: the first by plane. The Canadian Armed forces provided a Hercules aircraft and a convoy of flights took more than 500 people to nearby Fort McMurray. The second way out, by boat. Volunteers shuttled residents late into the night to hotel rooms once they got to safety.

Chief Allan Adam:  I’m Chief Allan Adam, and it’s 4:34. This is the last of the evacuees, and as you see in the background, we got the fire burning. We’re going to stay behind, and we’re going to help protect the community in ways that we can. Don’t worry. Don’t worry about anything. We got this. You guys take care.

Brandi Morin:  The CEO of Imperial Oil apologized for the toxic spills to Canadian lawmakers in Ottawa last April.

Brad Corson:  I am deeply apologetic for what has happened at Kearl. We are committed to correcting this situation and ensuring it does not happen again.

Brandi Morin:  The president of the AER also issued an apology.

Laurie Pushor:  It is clear that neither Imperial nor the AER met community expectations to ensure they’re fully aware of what is and what was happening, and for that, I am truly sorry.

Brandi Morin:  [Drum beating] But the damage is done, and Chief Adam has lost trust in all stakeholders involved.

Chief Allan Adam:  When you look at your grandchildren and everything, and you say, ‘Is that my legacy that’s going to continue to happen?’ And yet, we’re watching our own grandchildren, our own kids, pass away with diseases of cancer and everything, and we can’t do nothing.

15 years ago and everything, when we first brought it out to the public about what was going on here, just because nobody talks about it? It’s still going on, it’s still happening. People are still being diagnosed with cancer, but we live it because it’s our normal.

Brandi Morin:  Back in April, when Chief Adam testified in Ottawa, he learned his father-in-law had been diagnosed with liver cancer.

Chief Allan Adam:  My father-in-law today is going to get his results back. Because they found a big growth in his liver last week, of cancer. And I’m supposed to be with my wife, to be with her, to comfort her when she hears this news. But I’m here giving testimony to all of everybody across Canada about the issue, about what’s going on in our community.

Brandi Morin:  I watched when you were testifying to the Environmental Committee in Ottawa, you were talking about the cancers, and you said, nobody ever brings this up anymore. And you said, my own father-in-law is being tested.

Chief Allan Adam:  Well, we got the results back then. But yesterday, because my wife don’t fly, and the water being low—because BC Hydro Site C is filling up right now and reducing our water level—we have a hard time traveling. My wife has to make a decision now, because yesterday, the doctor told us, ‘Expect one month to one year.’

Brandi Morin:  Chief Adam is familiar with the pain of losing loved ones, including his own father, to cancer.

Chief Allan Adam:  I went through that moment, and my dad went through this process. I had to make a decision as a Chief back then. What do I do? Do I run the Nation, or do I step aside? I stepped aside for six months and spent time with my dad.

Everything inside, everything that’s here, will affect people, regardless of what. And my father-in-law lived off the land all his life. He still goes out in the bush today. He’s 88 years old. He just came back yesterday from the bush. Can’t stop him. His love for the land is who he is. And like I said, it all connects together, everything connects. The water, the land, and the people.

[Drumming and singing]

Water’s everything, water’s life. It gives life to everything that we thrive on, everything that we believe the Creator gave to us.

When we were young, when we were growing up, when my mother and dad took us out in the land, we didn’t have a deep freeze, but our deep freeze was right here, and it was fresh. Within the year, I probably take, probably about, maybe four fish. And yet, fish is the healthiest thing that you could eat.

Brandi Morin:  How has your community, the people here, how have they responded to the news of the tailing spills? Are they scared?

Chief Allan Adam:  Yeah, we’re scared. Well, I’ll say that for a fact.

Brandi Morin:  How do you [crosstalk]?

Chief Allan Adam:  My name is Allan Adam. I’m the chief of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. When it comes to the water issue, I am very scared, because it has never been resolved, and it has never been talked about ever since we raised the issue. But it’s still there. The innocent killer. Looks so beautiful, but yet, it’s a killer.

Well, good afternoon, everyone. I just want to pass on a message. My wife lost her father today.

Brandi Morin:  Dr. John O’Connor, who worked as a physician in Fort Chipewyan for nearly 16 years, alerted officials years ago about the disproportionately high rates of both rare and common cancers among community members.

Dr. John O’Connor:  Within the first couple of years, it was sort of plain to me that this community of 1,200 people, had a lot of illness. And then, as I got to know the community more, and trust was established, it dawned on me. It was quite a shock.

Cancer and autoimmune diseases, of a type and number that I really wasn’t seeing in my large practice in Fort McMurray. They hunt, they trapped, and gathered. They were very well established, very self-contained and contented. This made it all the more sort of alarming for me.

As the years went by, it dawned on me that this was probably preconceived. I thought this was something that was already in the vocabulary, in their lexicon, and I just happened to touch a raw nerve with them, because there was no undue alarm. The facts were there for all to see, documented. And not just by me, by the Provincial Health Authority. They were obviously hiding something. They were protecting Big Oil, Big Fossil.

Brandi Morin:  Yeah. When you learned of this big leak that Imperial Oil had covered up for nine months, and then this huge leak that it had earlier this year, and then Suncor a month later, what did you think when you learned that?

Dr. John O’Connor:  My first thought when I heard about these leaks that weren’t reported or were covered up was, ‘Who’d be surprised at this?’ It set me thinking and looking back to the late ’90s. Back then, they had public hearings. And at one of them, Suncor admitted that their oldest pond had been leaking at an alarming rate, for years, directly into the water table.

There are carcinogenic chemicals in these tailings ponds that, individually, are Class One carcinogens for humans and animals. There are chemicals science is unsure of the impact of when they’re mixed, the soup that’s created by these tailings ponds. There’s also, even more alarming, endocrine disruptors that are leaching directly into the environment, into the water, that are impacting fish. And, of course, fish [are] a staple diet in Fort Chip. And, of course, these fish are being caught with missing parts and growths and stuff.

Brandi Morin:  What do you think about children being diagnosed with cancer? You hear of adults and things being diagnosed, but when it’s kids, it’s like, wow.

Dr. John O’Connor:  Cancer in children in a setting like that, Brandi, represents the canary in the mine. The other health issues that are in Fort Chip are red flags. Children getting cancer should be a siren. It should be a four-alarm fire siren. And I don’t hear any concern being expressed by anyone in a position of authority, either federally or provincially.

Brandi Morin:  Do you think that that is to protect the interests of industry?

Dr. John O’Connor:  I think industry is untouchable. It owns this province, controls everything.

Calvin Waquan:  I see this lake as something that teaches me a lot of lessons. It’s my fridge, it’s my classroom, it’s my history book. It’s my solitude.

Brandi Morin:  Mikisew Cree member Calvin Waquan utilizes Lake Athabasca and its river systems on a regular basis. Calvin moved home to Fort Chipewyan after his father was murdered in Edmonton in 2014, because he wanted to reconnect with his ancestral homeland.

Calvin Waquan:  You see the beauty of our community, but that all comes with a cost. And it all comes with the thought of being sick one day.

Brandi Morin:  And even kids are getting cancer?

Calvin Waquan:  Oh yeah, for sure. My son had two friends who recently had cancer, and the same age, 10 years old.

Brandi Morin:  From here?

Calvin Waquan:  From here, yeah, and people recently dying of cancers. And that scares me. It scares my wife.

Brandi Morin:  The rates are incredibly high because of how small this community is.

Calvin Waquan:  It is. It’s astronomical. When someone like Dr. O’Connor or somebody blows the whistle, they get threatened to take their job away, or to silence them because of the almighty dollar, but where’s our share? Where’s the royalties? Where’s something that’s going to create sustainability, something that’s going to create sovereignty for our people?

My wife wanted to move away from here, and me not wanting to be here anymore, but I want to be here with my people and with my granny, and beside my father that I buried nine and a half years ago. Yeah, I could see him out my backyard in my window.

But it’s getting to a point where I don’t know if I want to stick around because young guys like me are dying from cancers, and older people are passing away, and it’s sad to see. And is it the meat? Is it the fish? Is it the air? Is it the plants? It’s everything. It’s the medicines. It’s everything—everything that we trusted in before we are guessing at now. When I’m burying my papa and my uncle and cousins and seeing other people die from rare cancers, bile duct cancers, you can’t tell me there’s something not wrong here.

Brandi Morin:  Does it bother you when you’re out here and you’re trying to enjoy that, and you’re thinking, well, it’s being poisoned?

Calvin Waquan:  Yeah, it gets me sometimes, I guess, when I’m seeing the slicks in different bays and coves. And it shouldn’t be on our minds to second guess if we’re going to eat the fish out of the water.

Brandi Morin:  After he learned of the Kearl tailing spill, Calvin showed up to a town hall held by Imperial Oil holding a water bottle tainted with motor oil and presented it to Jamie Long, Imperial Oil’s vice president of mining.

Calvin Waquan:  Now my kids that are in the back have to live with this for the next generation to come. You know what? I was going to pour this all over the projector so it would leak down the screen. That screen and that lens that I was going to pour the oil on? That fits our traditional way of life, and how you’ve tarnished it. No thanks [applause].

I was pretty riled up, as you can see. And I walked in there pretty calm, and I just told them how I felt, and I guess how my ancestors have been trying to tell people from the beginning. Just like my granny and my kôkom [grandma], Mary Rose said, enough is enough, and I just had enough. I saw my little girl there, my boy. Once industry is affecting the serenity of that and the beauty of this water and these lands, I’m going to stand up and be a warrior for my people today and tomorrow, and for every day to come.

Brandi Morin:  It’s just heartbreaking, though, at the same time.

Calvin Waquan:  Yup.

Brandi Morin:  My God, this is your traditional land. Chief Adam has told me more than once that you’ll be climate refugees.

Calvin Waquan:  Yeah, we will. Yeah. We’re going to lose the way that our ancestors left for us. And they meant for us to walk on the land and the water farther than they did, but not to this extent, to move away from home.

Brandi Morin:  Tân’si [hello]. Hi, Ian.

Ian Peace:  Tân’si [hello].

Brandi Morin:  Ian Peace, an environmental scientist who lived and worked in northern Alberta, including Fort Chipewyan for several years, wrote a thesis about leaking tailings in the oil sands in 2019.

Ian Peace:  We found results from the experiment that we did that would suggest there was process-affected water making its way from the tails impoundment area down to the river. It’s pretty widely agreed that naphthenic acids are the main toxicant of concern. And I did a little bit of number crunching on this, and between Suncor and Syncrude, there is at least 200,000 kilograms per day of naphthenic acids being discharged to tailing ponds. And that is a substance that’s been shown to kill fish in concentrations as low as 20 milligrams per liter.

So here goes all those tailings into the tailings pond, and most of the water drained out the bottom, leaving behind the sludge accumulation. The main contaminant is naphthenic acids, the one that everybody agrees is the biggest concern. It’s expressing to the river in almost the same amounts that are already dissolved into the tailings water.

Brandi Morin:  Do you think that the Alberta government and industry, do you think that they downplay the impacts, specifically, I guess, on the river, and with these leaking tailings?

Ian Peace:  Yeah. Yeah, I think that that’s very clear. You can see that it’s downplayed tactically and strategically. There’s no doubt. They don’t look for a number of compounds, and they don’t look in the areas where they might find it. And it’s been an effective strategy.

Brandi Morin:  There’s a big void when it comes to the knowledge of the combination of the chemicals in tailings, and how those chemicals affect human health.

Mandy Olsgard:  Hello?

Brandi Morin:  Tân’si [hello], Mandy, this is Brandi. How are you?

Mandy Olsgard:  Hi, I am good. Just got a little delayed on my drive, so sorry. I’m going to be in my car.

Brandi Morin:  No, it’s no problem.

Mandy Olsgard is an environmental toxicologist. She studies how chemicals affect people and the environment. She’s worked to assess water contamination for the AER and various First Nation communities throughout her career, including Fort Chipewyan.

Mandy Olsgard:  When they do an assessment so that they can approve an oil sands mine, they assess the risks to human health. There is then no regulatory body that is responsible for community or human health once that project is approved. We only manage human health through the environment —

Brandi Morin:  Wow.

Mandy Olsgard:  …And environmental quality monitoring. So there’s this gap between what we predicted as a risk to human or Indigenous community health, and then how we monitor that during the life of a project. So it’s not shocking that communities are bringing these concerns forward, whether it’s odors from air emissions, deposition of dust, changes to wildlife and plants.

Brandi Morin:  The issue at hand is proving whether the higher rates of cancer are linked to the oil sands. The provincial and federal governments have said multiple water tests they conducted found no evidence of contamination of waterways near the Kearl mine.

Laurie Pushor:  There has been no evidence presented that this reached the waterway.

Brandi Morin:  But the ACFN, the Mikisew Cree, and Meti governments in Fort Chipewyan don’t trust those findings. So they’ve been conducting their own tests at their water treatment plant. Yet, Mandy said those standard water inspections are inadequate because tests for certain chemicals are not conducted.

Mandy Olsgard:  But we’ve never really linked that to how it changed human health and the condition of human health. There’s studies that have shown chemical concentrations are elevated. So that’s why when people come at anyone and say, ‘Oh, but we’re cleaning up the world’s largest oil spill,’ that’s all bunk.

So they’re not. They process the oil sands, and they release different types of chemicals, different forms of those chemicals, and sometimes novel chemicals. They have introduced polyacrylamide and acrylamide into the environment there as use for flocculants in tailings ponds, for things that make the tailings come together and sink to the bottom to clarify the water cap.

Brandi Morin:  Wow.

Mandy Olsgard:  So there’s novel chemicals, there’s increased concentrations. They change the oxidation state of metals — and that’s important, because how bioavailable, how easily a human can absorb something, depends on the oxidation state. So when people are saying, ‘This was natural,’ no, it’s not.

Brandi Morin:  Tar does naturally exist along the Athabasca’s rivers, banks, and tributaries. Its black goo seeping from the shores, has been recorded by local Indigenous tribes for millennia, and as early as the 1700s by settler explorers. But the naturally-occurring tar isn’t what these issues are about.

Mandy Olsgard:  Development changed it fundamentally, and that’s what we need to focus on. Did it change it to the point enough that it’s affected human health? Those increased rates of cancer, mental health? That’s all in there. But I’ve never seen Alberta Health or the provincial government do anything for communities based on that report, or try and figure out why.

Brandi Morin:  I don’t even trust them. Look at what the AER has done, and…

Mandy Olsgard:  I know. I worked there. I don’t anymore. I get it.

Margo Vermillion:  [Singing].

Brandi Morin:  Marco Vermilion is a Dene Cree elder who grew up in Fort Chipewyan. She was shattered to learn of the tailing spills.

Margo Vermillion:  When I heard, actually, about the oil spill, my heart was so sore. When I was little, I used to come down to the waters with pails of water to bring home to drink. It was clean water back then. Everything was so much more healthier.

Today, you look at our water, and it’s sad. You can feel the sadness from them. You can feel that they’re crying for… Sorry, I just get so emotional, because I really believe that our waters are crying for us to help them, like everything else. Everything else that’s connected to the waters, it’s our plants and our trees and our insects. They’re also crying.

I went down to the lake, and as I was walking down the shore, what a beautiful eagle feather that I had found, on my birthday—I was gifted with a feather. Then I thought, well, I’m just going to walk over the hill, so I walked over the hill. Brandi, you wouldn’t believe… You could almost feel that the trees and the plants were in mourning. They were mourning because of the burnt, them being burnt, right?

And I sang for them. I sang, because I really felt their sadness too. So I felt their sadness of the destruction that’s happening to our earth. I think that, you know what? Again, it’s men, it’s human beings that are making all of this destruction happen.

[Drumming and singing] I don’t have no faith whatsoever in industry. How can we in the community have faith in them? They’ve broken promises, their words mean nothing. If they came and they decided to live here in the community and to be amongst us, to experience what it is that we experience, maybe I’ll listen to them.

Brandi Morin:  Exactly. But they were already covering up that spill for months or more before. They didn’t even tell you.

Margo Vermillion:  Yeah, and they didn’t say a word to the community. I don’t know anymore. I mean, you know what? When they investigate their own self like that, nothing really happens. We don’t need scientists to tell us. We have the proof here. We have our elders that talk about the changes that they see. That’s our scientists. But now, today, nowadays, if you don’t have your papers in being a scientist, nothing else is true, right?

Brandi Morin:  Meanwhile, Chief Adam isn’t convinced Imperial Oil has fully contained the Kearl mine leak, and the AER absolved itself of any wrongdoing when it released its report of its internal investigation into the spills in late September. Now, Chief Adam is determined to keep the pressure on industry, the AER, and governments to ensure they rectify their shortfalls.

Chief Allan Adam:  This is a wakeup call for Canada, and this is a wakeup call for Alberta. And this is a downfall for the AER, because they failed to uphold the protection of this community. They created a big mess, and the big mess is going to be, one day, revealed in the courts, and this is where it’s all going to, regardless of… The Alberta government can’t continue to run the AER as its own, what you’d call the gunslinger of the West.

Brandi Morin:  But even the fact that the feds are even considering allowing them to release so-called “treated” tailings into the river, that is unacceptable, as well, you’ve said.

Chief Allan Adam:  It is unacceptable, and we’re not going to accept it. Turn the tap on and find out.

Brandi Morin:  Despite all this, the feds are actually considering adopting regulations for the release of so-called “treated oil sands mining wastewater” into the Athabasca River. The new regulations are expected to be finalized by 2025.

It’s so crazy, because they don’t even know how to deal with the tailings and stuff that they already have. They’re scrambling. ‘What do we do? How do we get rid of this?’ Now, they’re proposing to the government to let them release it, because they say it’s safe and treated now, into the river. They can’t even contain what they have.

It’s astonishing that in such a small, isolated community, pretty much everyone I’ve talked to here has a loved one that’s died from cancer.

Jason Pastor:  Our people don’t really die of old age no more, more of a cancer. People don’t die naturally as they used to. I can’t speak for everybody, but I know on my side of my family, I had about four or five people, my own personal loved ones, that passed away from some cancers, and that made me have mixed feelings about this area.

Brandi Morin:  Water, the life giver, the one necessity Jason and others here make sure to stock up on in bottled form when out on the territory.

Jason Pastor:  You see [inaudible], there’s a whole story I was told, you see, about water. When you’re out of supplies, you usually go home from the bush. If you go berry picking or you go in the bushes, usually, you run out of supplies, you go home. Nowadays, if you run out of water, you have no choice to go home.

Brandi Morin:  The AER declined an interview request, citing the ongoing investigation into the tailing spills. Imperial Oil did not respond to requests for an interview.

I’m Brandi Morin, reporting in the unceded territories of the Athabasca Chipewyan, Mikisew Cree, and Metis nations, for The Real News Network, IndigiNews, and Ricochet Media.

Hundreds of wildfires have plagued Greece over the summer, adding to a list of European countries set ablaze during record-breaking late summer heat waves as global temperatures continue to rise. 

Evros, in the North-East region of Greece, sits along the most popular route for migrants crossing the River Evros from Turkey to the European Union. Reports surfaced on August 22 that 18 burned bodies believed to be migrants were discovered near the Evros capital city, Alexandroupolis. While the country continued to fight the infernos into early September, on Rhodes Island, residents were still grappling with the fallout from a twelve-day-long fight against wildfires in late July that left parts of the island completely devastated. 

First reports of the inferno on Rhodes came on July 18, when strong winds accelerated the spread of fires in the island’s eastern and southern regions. At the time, Eleni Diacogiannis Pelekanos, 60, and her husband Vasili Pelekanos, 60, were at their home in the mountainside village of Asklipio. They had planned to wait out the fires there, hoping the flames would pass by the village like they had in years before, but they didn’t this time. Church bells ringing in the night signaled an emergency evacuation as the rapidly approaching flames began to encircle the village. 

The couple had little time to prepare or pack for the evacuation. “We just ran,” said Eleni. They proceeded down the mountain to the nearest town, Kiotari, where they slept on the beach for three days and watched as Asklipio was engulfed in flames. While evacuation efforts were underway 38 miles away in Rhodes City, where 19,000 tourists and residents were moved from homes and hotels, causing the largest evacuation undertaken by the country. For some residents of Rhodes, Vasili said, there was “No help to bring something, for three days, no food, nothing.” 

Residents of Asklipio and Kiotari who spoke with The Real News said they received little assistance from Rhodes’ government with putting out the forest fires. Instead, they relied on the work of volunteer firefighters like Emanuel Pelekanos, one of Eleni and Vasili’s three sons. Throughout the nearly two-week battle, Emanuel worked to put out as many fires and save as many lives and homes as possible. But one fire he could not put out was in the house of his recently deceased paternal grandmother, Olympia Pelekanos. 

Olympia Pelekanos was gifted her house as part of her wedding dowry in the early 1950s. From the outside, with just one story and three rooms, the home was pretty ordinary looking. Inside, however, it was filled with memories and belongings accrued over the course of an entire lifetime; it was one of the last pieces of Olympia that her family could hold onto, after she died of old age seven months ago. It was there, in that house, that Vasili Pelekanos was born, learned to speak and walk for the first time, and played with his younger sister, Irena, through the years. 

Vasili and Eleni Diacogiannis Pelekanos, an Australian-raised Greek whose family was from Asklipio, were married at his mother’s home in 1983. They worked in the Rhodes’ travel industry, Eleni as a travel agent and Vasili working in hotels, up until they both retired in recent years. While they were raising two sons in the village where Vasili was born, family dinners and holidays were always hosted at Olympia’s home. 

But everything changed when the forest fires that began on Rhodes spread in the over 100-degree heat. The fires even led Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to tell Parliament that the country was “at war” with the inferno. 

When the fires in their area ended on July 28, Vasili and Eleni returned to Asklipio. They found Olympia’s home destroyed. “My son saved a lot of houses, but he cannot save the house,” Vasili said, referring to his mother’s home. 

Olympia’s home now sits in ruins. Her family believes it will cost at least 100,000 euros to repair all of its damages—money that they currently do not have. “It feels like we are living in a country at war. It feels like we are in Ukraine,” Eleni said as she walked through the wreckage. Indeed, the devastation appeared like that caused by manufactured weapons, not by a natural disaster. The home’s entrance, windows, roof, and back wall are all blasted with large, gaping holes. 

“Thank God [Olympia] wasn’t here to see her house has been destroyed. She loved [that house] and she had a lot of stuff in it. And everything was destroyed. There’s nothing left,” said Eleni as she surveyed the charred remains, her voice breaking. 

The only item remaining intact was a single white plate with blue flowers, sitting on a ledge above what used to be the fireplace. Though covered in ash, it had managed to stay in its place, unscathed, as the house was swallowed by flames and leveled to the ground. 

While Eleni spoke about the conditions of the home, what was left of it, her husband waited outside. It was too hard for him to step into the home to see that his family’s history had been destroyed. “Do you want to come in?” she asked at one point, to which Vasili replied with a sigh, “What is there to see? There is nothing left.” 

Workers from the Rhodes government recently came to the house to assess the damages and determine whether or not they could cover some of the losses. But Eleni said that the officials who visited them deemed the house repairable, meaning that they think the family can fix it. Eleni told TRNN that the government offered her no money to help with those repairs.

Eleni and Vasili’s family are not the only ones who have had their lives upended by the wildfires. Back in Kiotari, the couple’s friend John Tsangaris, 75, has been left homeless after the fires razed to the ground the two-story home he had built himself 30 years earlier. “I don’t understand how the fires come to my house, because here there were no trees,” said Tsangaris at the site of his destroyed home. “It was only grass here, and I had about ten olive trees. And they’re gone.” 

Tsangaris, too, fled to the beach near his home as the fires raged through Kiotari. He already knew his home had been destroyed the day the blaze began. “I saw a big fire on the other side [near the house]. I thought, ‘That was my house.’” Having two stories, Tsangaris’ house was larger than most in Kiotari. He said that distinction let him know that the fires had swallowed his home. 

“I was in a really bad way. I was upset about the fires. I couldn’t understand why [the government] could not stop the fires,” he said.

Tsangaris believes that Rhodes’ government will not give him any financial assistance to rebuild his home, which he said will cost around 250,000 euros in repairs. Instead, he is relying on funds that his son and ex-wife in Switzerland have already agreed to give him to try to rebuild his home and his life. But that kind of financial help from family is a luxury that others in Kiotari do not have. 

At the once-prominent restaurant Angelaki Taverna, 27-year-old Dmitris Chatzifotis is lost. He doesn’t know what his options are after the fires destroyed his family restaurant. “I grew up in this restaurant. From [the time I was] a small kid, I take [control] of the money, I keep the business,” Chatzifotis said. “I keep people here. People come here to sit together with me, to speak. It’s not only a restaurant.” 

Almost everything inside the restaurant has been destroyed. A laptop and cash register on what was once the host desk are now completely melted, and looters eventually came at night to steal anything that was salvageable, including a refrigerator. When the fires initially ended, Chatzifotis believed that he might get 2,000 euros from the Rhodes government, nowhere near the 200,000 euros he needed for repairs and to buy new equipment. But now he believes he will not receive any money. 

“I don’t have feelings, believe me. Sometimes, I say I won’t open again. Other times, I think I hope to get some money to open again. We don’t know, because we don’t have the support from the government,” said Chatzifotis. 

“ Here [we had] fire for 12 days and nobody came. You don’t have feelings,” he added. 

According to Greek authorities, around 10 percent of Rhodes was damaged by the summer wildfires. In Rhodes City, few traces that any wildfires occurred are present, and life seems like it has been unfazed. But down the road in Kiotari and Asklipio, one sees nothing but scorched earth. On the Kiotari beach a few cars that were completely destroyed by the fires sit next to melted sun chairs stacked together by restaurant workers during the cleanup effort. The tourist industry in Rhodes has continued to suffer since the fires ended. Even the visitors who return to the island cannot make up for all that was lost in just two weeks. 

The once-green trees covering the rolling mountains near the two villages have been badly burned. While some survived, they’re all gray now, with no leaves intact. In the forests surrounding Asklipio sit plots of charred land where Eleni once had a vast amount of olive trees—part of the dowry she received when she married her husband decades before. 

“I can’t believe it. They’re all gone,” she whispered as she walked through the lots of land for the first time since the fires ended. She shed a few tears in the process as she tried to count how many olive trees had been burned—four here, ten there. She was told she could receive payments for the ones that had been killed.

The olive trees helped Eleni connect to her great-grandparents, who had planted the seeds decades before she was born. The ground here is rugged, filled with rocks and dry dirt, making it extremely difficult to dig deep enough to plant the trees. 

“Back in those days, they didn’t have the equipment we have nowadays,” Eleni said. They used to come from the village on foot and put all the equipment on their donkeys. If they were lucky [enough] to have donkeys.” 

Eleni was raised to love her olive trees, to take care of them, pruning their branches to help them grow larger. “My grandfather didn’t like pruning the trees because he felt like we were cutting something off him,” she said. 

Some of Eleni’s olive trees were spared from the fires, and in the places where they did not survive, she plans to plant more trees to keep her family history tied to the land. “It’s something that we have to do. And I want to plant new trees because I want to pass them on to my descendants.”

“My boss used to say to everyone, ‘Welcome to our paradise.’ Now I said, ‘Welcome to my burnt paradise.’ But it’s going to become a paradise again,” she added.

This story was co-produced by The Real News, Ricochet Media, and IndigiNews.

In Nevada’s remote Thacker Pass, a fight for our future is playing out between local Indigenous tribes and powerful state and corporate entities hellbent on mining the lithium beneath their land. Vancouver-based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine at Thacker Pass, but for more than two years several local tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action. The Thacker Pass Project is backed by the Biden administration, and companies like General Motors have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the project, looking to capitalize on the transition to a “green energy economy,” for which lithium is essential. While it is a vital component in the manufacturing of electric vehicles and batteries, though, there’s nothing “green” about mining lithium. Ending our addiction to fossil fuels is urgently necessary, but the struggle of the local tribes around Thacker Pass reveals the dark side of a “green revolution” that prioritizes profits and consumption over everything (and everyone) else.

In this feature documentary, Thacker Pass – Mining the Sacred, award-winning Cree/Iroquois/French multimedia journalist Brandi Morin and documentary filmmaker Geordie Day report on the Indigenous resisters putting their bodies and freedom on the line to stop the Thacker Pass Project. 

Thacker Pass – Mining the Sacred was co-produced by Ricochet Media, IndigiNews, and The Real News Network.

Pre-Production: Brandi Morin, Geordie Day, Ethan Cox, Andrea Houston, Cara McKenna, Eden Fineday, Maximillian Alvarez, Kayla Rivara

Studio Production: Geordie Day

Post-Production: Brandi Morin, Geordie Day, Ethan Cox, Andrea Houston, Cara McKenna, Eden Fineday, Maximillian Alvarez, Kayla Rivara

Transcript

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] Rugged. Serene. A vast stretch of parched desert in SoCal Northern Nevada captivates the senses. The low desert valleys are wide and expansive. I’ve been trying to get down here for over a year because this beautiful landscape is about to be gutted. One valley here contains “white gold” lithium and lots of it, the new commodity the world is racing to grab to try to save itself from the ravages of climate change. Vancouver-based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine which will operate for the next 41 years. It sits inside an extinct supervolcano basin named the McDermott Caldera, formed over 16 million years ago. The company is backed by the Biden administration and touts General Motors as its biggest investor, $650 million to be exact. But for more than two years, several local tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action.

In June, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the US government did not violate federal environmental laws when it approved the mine. Soon after that ruling, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department raided and dismantled an Indigenous resistance camp named Ox Sam, forbidding land defenders and water defenders from accessing the construction area. When I showed up, construction workers immediately called security [end of voiceover].

How’s it going?

Security Guard:  Good. How are you?

Brandi Morin:  Good. I’m Brandi.

Security Guard:  You’re Brandi?

Brandi Morin:  Brandi, yes.

Security Guard:  All right, nice to meet you.

Brandi Morin:  We’re journalists. How are you?

Security Guard:  Good. From where?

Brandi Morin:  We’re actually from Canada. We’re on assignment with Ricochet Media, IndigiNews, and The Real News. So, we’re doing a story about Thacker Pass and Indigenous opposition to it. So, we wanted to come and check it out.

Security Guard:  It’s all good. Just so you know, this whole dozer path, all the way to the creek up over the hill, that is private property. But yeah –

Brandi Morin:  Oh. So, right here?

Security Guard:  – I see you’re not on it, so no, you’re fine. This is a BLM road.

Brandi Morin:  Right. So, are you here all the time, security? Do they have this because of the blockaders and stuff? Do they have security to make sure that people aren’t coming to obstruct? Or is that –

Security Guard:  I’m not sure what you’re asking.

Brandi Morin:  – Are they employing security here full-time?

Security Guard:  That’s something you could ask Lithium Americas.

Brandi Morin:  Oh, okay.

Security Guard:  I can give you their phone number.

Brandi Morin:  Okay.

[Voiceover] That same security guard followed us down the highway [end of voiceover].

We want to go to Thacker Pass.

Security Guard:  Oh, that’s it.

Brandi Morin:  Yeah. And is that more Lithium Americas construction site as well up there?

Security Guard:  Yeah.

Brandi Morin:  Okay. I might just drive up to the gate. Okay. Thanks.

Security Guard:  Thank you.

Brandi Morin:  He was totally following us, although he’s trying to act nice to tell us where the road is, but he’s following us.

[Voiceover] A lot is at stake here for the company, its investors, and a myriad of government and business interests looking to capitalize on the transition to a “green energy economy” for which lithium is essential. It is costing over $2.2 billion to build the Thacker Pass mine. But don’t let the prospect of green energy fool you, this mine will stretch to nearly 6,000 acres and dig an open pit to a depth of 400 feet. The project requires tailings piles and processing facilities, including a sulfur plant. The sulfur is, itself, a waste byproduct from oil refineries and it will be trucked in by the tons and burned every day at the mine site. The project will also use more than 1.7 billion gallons of water per year in the driest state in America.

BC Zahn-Nahtzu:  Oh hey.

It’s like the end game for us as humans, not even me as an Indigenous person. And that treaty acknowledges that two-thirds of Nevada is Shoshone land which, of course, it’s not anymore. They’ve used it for nuclear testing and they always want to do toxic waste storage and open-pit mining now. It’s the wrong thing to do to the animals, to the plants, to the Earth. We keep tearing up the planet where we live as a whole, whether it be other types of mining or logging and oil extraction, fracking; It’s all shortsighted.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] She’s speaking about the rush to get off fossil fuels and transition to so-called “greener alternatives.” While ending our addiction to fossil fuels is, of course, urgently necessary, the voices of the local tribes here are getting lost in the politics of what green energy actually means. While it’s an essential component used in electric vehicles and batteries, there’s nothing green about mining lithium. Mining is mining, no matter what the resource being extracted is. It’s always going to be devastating to the environment.

BC Zahn-Nahtzu:  This helps get us through a lot of winters. Its common name is Indian rice grass. See these little seeds?

Brandi Morin:  Yeah.

BC Zahn-Nahtzu:  They’re really, really, highly nutritious. That was my whole thing with Thacker Pass: It’s like you go out there and you don’t see anything. Well, that’s because you don’t know how to look, you don’t have the right eye.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] BC says the mine will desecrate the spiritual connection she has with her traditional territories. And she’s spoken out to protect it at the mine site. Now, Lithium Americas is suing her and six other land and water protectors, in civil court over allegations of civil conspiracy, trespassing, and tortious interference. The suit seeks to ban them from accessing the mining area and make them financially compensate the company [end of voiceover].

 I wanted to ask you about the charges that you’re facing. What are they? And when did you find out?

BC Zahn-Nahtzu:  Oh, man. I don’t even remember. Is it civil something? Trespassing? It’s something about disobedience. I don’t know. I didn’t read the papers. I threw them in a drawer. And to think that it’s going to be a big open-pit mine is hard. And that’s our ancestral homeland. That’s our bones and our blood; deep, deep in that soil. I can almost see what’s really there on the other side of the spiritual curtain when I’m there. But you can feel them out there with you. And to be looking at the same stars and seeing the same moon and knowing that my kids’ kids will never see those stars from that same place, honestly, I don’t think we’re going to be able to stop them. There are 500 lithium mines coming. I wanted my descent on record as an Indigenous mother.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] It was gut-wrenching to hear her say that, yet inspiring. Despite the insurmountable odds, she’s still willing to put it all on the line to try and save her sacred territory.

BC Zahn-Nahtzu:  I don’t care if people don’t like me, or the corporations… Or I look like I’m [sniffles] doing nonsense. I do what I think is right. That’s all I can do.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] There’s another more chilling reason the mine area is sacred. The native tribes call Thacker Pass by its Paiute name: Peehee Mu’huh, meaning “rotten moon.” The name stems from a massacre that happened there, before European contact, in a crescent-shaped area of the valley. Elders have passed down the tale of the bloody killings of Paiute men, women, and children, by an enemy tribe over generations. They say attackers gutted the dead and threw their insides onto the sagebrush. When the bodies were discovered by Paiute men who had been away hunting, the stench of the rotting flesh was so strong, that they named the spot Rotten Moon. The violence only got worse, of course, when the colonizers arrived.

Dean Barlese:  It was a really rugged time. The military came through and killed. To save bullets, a lot of times, they would take the young people and bash in the back of their heads. And I know that because our oral history says this is how the military caught our people and treated our people. They fought hard against the military. They didn’t want to lose their land. And the government, military, wanted to get rid of the Paiute people, so they massacred them wherever they found them. It was a five-year war. Snake War, they called it.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] He is also facing charges from Lithium Americas.

Dean Barlese:  There you go. Go ahead and… You probably understand that better than I could. They’re restraining us from prayer, keeping us from praying up there. We’re still in the Indian wars. I made that statement before too. Our Indian wars continue, not only here, but everywhere. I sang songs but I’m standing here because our ancestors are here. We’ve got to defend them. We’ve got to protect them. And then, these little whirlwinds would come down the road, or go up the road towards the security camp where you were standing. And we knew our ancestors were there then because they showed themselves. And we were laughing. The big, old whirlwind made the security guards scatter. Our people must be upset about this because we still have that belief that our spirits are the whirlwinds that come around; They come to check on us. I’d give my life, like my grandpa did, like the old people did, to protect this place.

Dorece Sam:  When we came to find out that our family was massacred there, we were there because we wanted to protect the land.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] Dorece is a direct descendant of Ox Sam: One of the only survivors of the 1865 massacre at Sentinel Rock near the mines’ waterline.

Dorece Sam:  Well, for somebody that’s connected to Mother Earth, they can feel things. Like me, myself; I can feel things out there. I was up in prayer at Sentinel Rock. I heard an old man sing, an old, old man. And I lay there and I tried to listen and listen to see if I could identify the song or hear any words in there that I could understand.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] She too is facing charges for protecting her homelands.

Dorece Sam:  At first, I got scared because I’ve never been to court like this before. But then, I kept on praying, kept on smudging. And now, I believe that they’re a waste of paper. A waste of aim and waste of paper. So I am like, I’m going to let Creator take care of it. I built a fire outside of my home and I threw all the paperwork, the TPO and the lawsuit, everything, I burned it in there, in the fire.

They’re doing it to try to hush us up because I know, in the TPO, they ask that we not post about them or anything on social media. They’re trying to silence us so we don’t say anything or go out there. And by doing that, they’re violating the Religious Freedom Act; by not allowing us to go up there.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] Her children and grandchildren know about their mother’s work protecting Peehee Mu’huh.

Dorece Sam:  Like I always tell my kids, the best way I can describe to them – And my grandchildren – I said all the things that people are doing with mining and stuff like that, it makes Mother Earth heavy. And she’s hurting and she’s tired. And I was telling them that every time she goes to take a deep breath, that’s when the Earth shakes. The Earth moves. And she’s crying and she’s tired of all this mining.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] Her own tribe, the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone, signed a community benefits agreement with Lithium Americas in 2022. It’s the closest reservation to the mine site. It’s also the poorest in the region. Lithium Americas says the support for the project stems from the tribe’s desire to gain economic benefits.

Dorece Sam:  It’s hit with a slap lawsuit. And that’s the commitment that I made to protect this place. It’s in my heart, to protect that place. It means a lot to me.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] I attempted to reach the Fort McDermott Paiute Shoshone leadership for comment on several occasions but they didn’t call me back. Dorece says her community wasn’t fully consulted.

Dorece Sam:  They didn’t notify the people. They didn’t tell anybody what was going on. And so now we have our current chairman, his name is Arlo Crutcher. He’s totally for this mine. He is ignoring everybody and everything.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] Lithium Americas declined an on-the-record interview but provided background information stating the Fort McDermott Tribe rejects the claim that there were massacres at Peehee Mu’huh. Get that. The company is trying to tell the natives what their own history is but other Fort McDermott elders know the stories of the massacres.

Myron Smart:  They came over to Santa Rosas and then they ended up out here where Thacker Pass is, and over there by, I think they call that the Centennial Peak. They happened to camp out there. When the soldiers finally came over the mountain late in the evening, they massacred the whole village there. They massacred women and children.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] Even though the company denies the massacre happened at Peehee Mu’huh, the Bureau of Land Management holds records of it in its archives.

Michon Eben:  Why wasn’t the massacre mentioned in the historic properties treatment plan? Why weren’t these massacres mentioned in the record of the decision? Why wasn’t it mentioned in the Environmental Impact Statement? Why wasn’t it mentioned in the cultural resources inventory? We had to bring it up. The Surveyor? That was in the Bureau of Land Management’s own documents. They didn’t even have that in any of their documents. So, when they say well, we’ve proven in court… It’s junk science. They didn’t do their complete analysis and left this out. It’s a coverup. It’s been a coverup and they’re closing their eyes to it.

Lithium Nevada’s corporation attorney has implied that the tribes are lying about the sacredness of Peehee Mu’huh, calling these sacred sites “allegedly sacred areas of Thacker Pass.” This is not “allegedly.” This is not lying. Come on. How we’re treated less than, our dead are treated less than… That’s why nobody cares that there are unmarked burial grounds because it doesn’t say “historic cemetery.”

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] The Reno-Sparks Indian Colony along with the Burns Paiute Tribe, were plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management, over lack of consultation on the mine project. After a judge ruled largely in favor of Lithium Americas in February, the tribe filed a new lawsuit along with Burns Paiute and the Summit Lake Paiute Tribe.

Michon Eben:  You cannot dig 400 feet deep. You cannot destroy wetlands. You cannot destroy ecosystems. You can’t destroy the natural habitat of the sage grouse. You cannot do the destruction and take gallons and gallons of water in the driest region and tell us that that’s good for electric vehicles. Electric vehicles you still have to plug into the grid; That’s still part of fossil fuels.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] The mine will burn around 11,300 gallons of diesel fuel a day for onsite operations and almost as much for offsite. Carbon emissions from the site would be more than 150,000 tons per year: Roughly 2.3 tons of carbon for every ton of lithium that’s produced. If reclamation is possible, it won’t be realized until, at least, 2162. There’s more. There are concerns over potential impacts on Indigenous women and girls with the arrival of Lithium Americas housing units for construction workers.

Michon Eben:  What’s really scary is part of the Environmental Impact Statement. If you are bringing in any type of man camp, and I’ll explain what a man camp is, but if you’re bringing in a man camp and you’re placing that near public land and you are disturbing the land, then you need to be doing a study for where that man camp is going. That didn’t happen in the Environmental Impact Statement. When you have to hire 1,000 men to build a lithium mine, you’re not going to hire 1,000 men locally; You have to bring in men from other places. Those men are usually young men. They bring in illegal activities and illegal drug activities. This is where the missing and murdered Indigenous people come in. The 30-40 miners that are out of there right now working, are coming into their local stores, asking them, where are all the pretty girls? Because they’re coming without their women.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] Recently, Michon’s own safety was in question.

Michon Eben:  Because I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t paying attention. So, I opened the door. I noticed a gentleman sitting over here because this is where our shuttle comes, and I heard a helicopter. Well, there are a lot of helicopters here because we have Careflight. The hospital’s right here. I’m used to helicopters. So, I hear a helicopter, I open the door. I open the door and I look and here comes a helicopter coming straight at me, right above the power poles.

Brandi Morin:  What?

Michon Eben:  Just above the power poles. And then it comes over here and it comes right here; Right above the power poles. Their door was already open but what they were doing is they’re hanging out. They’re so close, I could see them. The door was open and I could see somebody going, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, because I could see the flash of the light. And then, I realized, oh fuck, they’re taking my picture. I got scared, but that’s what it was. And then I got mad and I thought oh, little old me. Who am I? How come people got to take a picture of me? What gives anybody the right? And then, you think, okay. Well, I do know the President and the Department of Interior, they do want this mine because… You know.

Brandi Morin:  They think it’s the answer.

Michon Eben:  They think it’s the answer to combat fossil fuels. Even though, electric vehicles you’re still going to plug into the grid; That goes to fossil fuels.

Brandi Morin:  Michon says the worldview of lithium production is deceitful.

Michon Eben:  It’s not going to save the world. So, you’re seeing movie stars advertising electric vehicles. People are getting brainwashed about electric vehicles. You cannot mine your way out of a climate crisis. You can’t do that. You can’t destroy the Earth to save the Earth.

Brandi Morin:  If you could speak with Secretary Haaland about what’s happening in Peehee Mu’Huh, what would you say to her?

BC Zahn-Nahtzu:  I would tell her, to wake up. We need you. You’re a Native American. Your Mother Earth should mean something to you. Like I said, wake up and we need your help.

Brandi Morin:  What about the Biden administration?

BC Zahn-Nahtzu:  Us Native Americans have been here since time immemorial. It means it’s time for us to take our land back. Go dig somewhere else.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] I asked tribal members for permission to visit the sacred site at Sentinel Rock. Although security told us a few days before we couldn’t cross the road to access it, I did anyway. After all, they’re on unseated land. As I began to get closer to the rock where Paiute and Shoshone tried to run for their lives in 1865, my chest started heaving. The heartache here was overwhelming [end of voiceover].

I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Everything that they had to go through. You feel the pain that’s here.

[Voiceover] As temperatures soar across the West, putting one-third of Americans under excessive heat alerts, elders, like Dean, are not surprised. He says it’s only going to get worse. And extractive industries are accelerating the threat to all who live on Mother Earth.

Dean Barlese:  The property we have… Before this, there was a great flood. Then there was a wind, and then the ice and snow that destroyed the world destroyed the humans. The last one, we’re in that time already. And our old people say this world’s going to burn; It’ll burn up. White people, they continue to destroy. And we’ve gone beyond where we can come back. They don’t see it; They don’t see their children, their grandchildren, their great-great-grand… They don’t look ahead like we do. We look seven generations ahead and leave things the way they are for future generations. But they don’t see that.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] The mine is expected to be up and running by 2026. Meanwhile, land and water defenders say they’ll continue to pray it can be stopped.

I’m Brandi Morin, reporting for The Real News, Ricochet Media, and IndigiNews in the unseated territories of the Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe Tribes in SoCal Nevada.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Sep. 4, 2023. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

As the first-ever Africa Climate Summit kicked off in Nairobi, Kenya on Monday, an analysis by the humanitarian group Oxfam found that rich nations have delivered just a small fraction of the aid that East African nations say they need each year to meet their climate goals.

Unlike rich countries that account for a disproportionate share of planet-warming greenhouse gas pollution, East Africa has contributed “almost nothing” to global carbon emissions that are driving record-shattering heat worldwide, Oxfam’s new report notes. In 2021, according to one recent estimate, the average North American emitted 11 times more carbon dioxide than the average African.

The World Meteorological Organization pointed out Monday that Africa is responsible for less than 10% of global carbon emissions.

Yet “East Africa is one of the world’s worst-hit regions by climate change and is now experiencing its worst climate-induced extreme weather, fueling an alarming hunger crisis,” Oxfam’s report states. “Over 31.5 million people are currently facing acute hunger across Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and South Sudan.”

Those countries, which suffer billions of dollars worth of climate-related damage each year, have said they will need at least $53.3 billion annually to meet critical targets under the Paris Climate Agreement. According to Oxfam, wealthy countries provided just $2.4 billion in aid to East African nations in 2021.

More broadly, Oxfam noted, high-income countries pledged that they would provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to help lower-income countries fight climate chaos.

“Oxfam estimates that in 2020 the real value of financial support specifically aimed at climate action was only around $21 billion to $24.5 billion—much less than officially reported figures suggest,” the group’s report states.

Fati N’Zi-Hassane, Oxfam’s Africa director, said Monday that “even by their own generous accounts, polluting nations have delivered only pittance to help East Africa scale up their mitigation and adaptation efforts.”

“Nearly half the funds (45%) they did give were loans, plunging the region further into more debt,” N’Zi-Hassane added.

Climate finance is expected to be a major topic of discussion at the Nairobi summit, which comes after months of scorching heat on the continent.

“Africa is seen as a sunny and hot continent,” Amadou Thierno Gaye, a research scientist and professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, told Bloomberg in July. “People think we are used to heat, but we are having high temperatures for a longer duration. Nobody is used to this.”

The Associated Press reported Monday that “there is some frustration on the continent about being asked to develop in cleaner ways than the world’s richest countries—which have long produced most of the emissions that endanger climate—and to do it while much of the support that has been pledged hasn’t appeared.”

Mohamed Adow of Power Shift Africa told AP that “we have an abundance of clean, renewable energy and it’s vital that we use this to power our future prosperity. But to unlock it, Africa needs funding from countries that have got rich off our suffering.”

In addition to calling on rich nations to contribute the aid they’ve promised to support Africa’s renewable energy transition, African civil society groups are urging their leaders to reject fossil fuel expansion, specifically warning against the completion of TotalEnergies’ East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP).

A recent Human Rights Watch report warned that more than 100,000 people in Uganda and Tanzania are set to “permanently lose land to make way for the pipeline and Tilenga oilfield development.” One analysis indicates the pipeline could result in 379 million tonnes of planet-warming emissions over its lifespan—more than 25 times the combined annual emissions of Uganda and Tanzania.

Zaki Mamdoo, coordinator of the Stop EACOP Coalition, said Monday that “the African Climate Summit could provide the platform needed for the continent to dramatically shift its trajectory and future—from one that is set to bear the brunt of climate collapse, to one of energy security and prosperity driven by decentralized and people-centered renewables.”

“For this to happen,” said Mamdoo, “African leaders will need to rise to the occasion and make firm commitments to significantly upscale renewable energy developments while resisting and withdrawing any and all support for exploitative and destructive projects like the East African Crude Oil Pipeline.”

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Aug. 17, 2023. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

As the Hawaiian island of Maui is reeling from the deadliest U.S. wildfire in over a century, the Hawaii Supreme Court on Thursday is set to hear fossil fuel giants’ request to dismiss a climate liability lawsuit filed by the City and County of Honolulu on Oahu.

Honolulu leaders sued companies including Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Sunono in March 2020. Just seven months later, Maui County followed suit, launching a case against those and other Big Oil firms. Both complaints mention worsening wildfires.

“The average air temperature in the city is currently warming at a rate that is approximately four times faster than the warming rate 50 years ago,” the Honolulu complaint states. “Warming air temperatures have led to heatwaves, expanded pathogen and invasive species ranges, thermal stress for native flora and fauna, increased electricity demand, increased occurrence and intensity of wildfire, threats to human health such as from heat stroke and dehydration, and decreased water supply due to increased evaporation and demand.”

The Maui filing explains that “wildfires are becoming more frequent, intense, and destructive in the county. As climate changes, stronger El Niño events become more frequent. El Niños alter Hawaii’s weather patterns, bringing wetter summers which in turn provide prime conditions for fast-growing grasses and invasive species, followed by prolonged periods of drought and hotter average temperatures, which desiccate vegetation thereby increasing the fuel available for fires.”

“The county’s fire ‘season’ now runs year-round, rather than only a few months of the year,” the 2020 document adds. “In 2019, called the ‘year of fire’ on Maui, 26,000 acres burned in the County—more than six times the total area burned in 2018.”

Three years after the filings, the Northern Hemisphere is enduring a summer of unprecedented heat that scientists say “would have been virtually impossible” without the burning of fossil fuels, and Lahaina, the former capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, was leveled last week in a Maui County fire that killed at least 106 people—a death toll expected to rise, with over 1,000 missing—and caused over $5 billion in damage.

Denise Antolini, a retired University of Hawaii law professor and supporter of the plaintiffs, told The Guardian that the fires affecting the 50th U.S. state “underscore the importance” of climate liability suits, which seek damages from fossil fuel giants.

The Honolulu case calls out the companies for “their introduction of fossil fuel products into the stream of commerce knowing, but failing to warn of, the threats posed to the world’s climate; their wrongful promotion of their fossil fuel products and concealment of known hazards associated with the use of those products; their public deception campaigns designed to obscure the connection between their products and global warming and the environmental, physical, social, and economic consequences flowing from it; and their failure to pursue less hazardous alternatives.”

Antolini said that “if the truth had been known about climate change, if the truth had been allowed to be known by Big Oil, Hawaii might have had a different future,” telling the newspaper that while the climate emergency isn’t the sole cause of this summer’s fires, it “set the table” for the destruction.

Thursday’s hearing before the state Supreme Court “is an incredibly important milestone in the case because it determines whether or not the case will proceed to discovery, to further motions, and to trial,” she added. “So it’s a go or no-go point.”

The high court’s hearing for the Honolulu case is scheduled to begin at 10:00 am local time and will be livestreamed on YouTube.

“The deadly fires in Maui underscore how urgent it is to make polluters pay for fueling the climate crisis,” the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) said Thursday. “The people of Honolulu and Maui deserve their day to put Big Oil on trial.”

As for the Maui case, Emily Sanders, CCI’s editorial lead, wrote for ExxonKnews on Tuesday:

Maui spent years defeating the industry’s numerous attempts to move the case out of state court, where it was originally filed. The county is now awaiting a decision from a judge that could make it the third community—after Honolulu and Massachusetts—to enter the pretrial phase of a climate accountability lawsuit against Big Oil. That means the people of Maui would be one step closer to their rightful day in court to hold fossil fuel companies accountable.

Another ongoing Hawaiian climate case was launched last year by youth from the islands of Hawaii, Kauai, Maui, Molokai, and Oahu against the Hawaii Department of Transportation and its director, the governor, and the state.

“While in many ways Hawaii has been a leader in recognizing and setting goals to address the climate emergency, progress is slow because of the unconstitutional, and uncooperative, actions of the state Department of Transportation,” said Andrea Rodgers, senior litigation attorney at Our Children’s Trust and co-counsel for the youth plaintiffs, at the time.

Our Children’s Trust also represents youth plaintiffs for a similar constitutional climate case in which a Montana judge on Monday sided with 16 young residents who claimed that the state violated their rights by promoting fossil fuel extraction. Julia Olson, founder of the nonprofit law firm, called the ruling “a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation’s efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos.”

This story originally appeared in Jacobin on Aug. 2, 2023. It is shared here with permission.

We have entered uncharted territory when it comes to climate breakdown, after climate agencies declared the first week of July as the hottest week ever recorded. The hottest week on record comes in the wake of the hottest June on record. And all of the warmest eight years ever recorded have come since 2015, with 2016 being the warmest ever, followed by 2019 and 2020.

Skeptics might argue that these records have only been kept for a small portion of human history — global temperature records only date back to the 1850s. But the UN confirmed that over the course of July, fourteen days have recorded global surface air temperatures higher than 17 degrees Celsius — an increase that has not been seen over the course of the last 125,000 years.

Heatwaves brought astonishing temperatures to southern Europe, with Almeria, Spain, experiencing a temperature of 44 degrees Celsius. Rome experienced its hottest day ever, with temperatures reaching 41.8 degrees Celsius, and temperatures of 45.3 degrees Celsius in Catalonia also broke records. Wildfires spread through Portugal and Greece as a result of extreme heat, and fires raged in Italy, Croatia, and Turkey.

This comes on the back of the astonishing scenes in North America, where Canadian wildfires blanketed the region in smoke. And a heat wave that swept across the southern United States brought record-breaking temperatures to parts of Arizona, Texas, and California, with temperatures in Phoenix peaking at 118 degrees Fahrenheit, or 47.8 degrees Celsius.

Toward the start of this year, parts of South Asia recorded temperatures of up to 45 degrees Celsius, though they often felt higher due to humidity. Climate change made the heat wave at least two degrees hotter than it otherwise would have been.

Ocean temperatures have risen sharply too. In Florida, ocean temperatures reached a shocking 38.4 degrees Celsius — at least six degrees above what should be expected, in what could be a record-breaking rise in ocean temperatures. NASA recently observed that the oceans are changing color as a result of this phenomenon. Unsurprisingly, record-high ocean temperatures have led to record-low sea ice coverage in Antarctica.

Rising temperatures are already killing thousands of people. The scientific journal Nature recently released a study showing that up to sixty-one thousand people died last year as a direct result of heat waves across Europe. In the United States, extreme heat is already the top annual weather-related killer — and 104 million people were placed under heat alerts last week as a result of rising temperatures.

These deaths due to extreme heat are just part of the picture. Already, air pollution causes 6.7 million premature deaths each year. And extreme weather events, like floods, wildfires, and droughts, are becoming more likely — weather-related disasters have increased fivefold over the last fifty years, leading to two million deaths and $4.3 trillion worth of economic damage.

More than 90 percent of these deaths occurred in the Global South. Those forced to bear the consequences of global warming largely caused by the Global North are those least able to bear the economic and health consequences. As Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, passionately attested in Glasgow in 2021, the rich world has been astonishingly slow to provide aid to those places on the front line of the fight against climate breakdown.

And things are only going to get worse. Scientists are now extremely concerned that temperatures will breach the limit of 1.5 degrees above preindustrial temperatures set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change earlier than expected. The break could come as early as next year.

A leading climate scientist told the BBC last week that it was likely the scientific community had severely underestimated the rapidity and severity of climate breakdown. If current trends continue, the earth’s temperature is likely to reach 3 degrees above preindustrial levels over the next century, which would bring catastrophic damage to the ecological systems upon which human life on Earth depends.

The greatest obstacle to our ability to tackle climate breakdown is, of course, a capitalist economic system that views the earth’s natural wealth as a “free gift” to be exploited for private gain. We have known for some time that one hundred companies are responsible for around 70 percent of global carbon emissions.

In fact, scientists at firms like ExxonMobil were aware of the damage that would be caused from burning fossil fuels as far back as the 1970s. But rather than bringing this information to the public’s attention, studies were buried, research budgets cut, and billions poured into lobbying and climate denialism. The company is now facing court cases across the United States as a result of the cover-up.

One study has demonstrated the direct consequences of the emissions released by the biggest fossil fuel companies, showing that BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Total, Aramco, and Chevron are collectively responsible for $5.3 trillion worth of damage likely to emerge from climate breakdown between 2025 and 2050. The companies owe the world — and particularly the poorest nations — $209 billion in annual climate reparations as a result.

So, what is stopping us from taking on the power of the big fossil fuel companies?

Clearly, these firms and the coterie of lobbyists, lawyers, and politicians that support them are very well-organized. But the forces opposing them are not. Rather than banding together to demand that the big fossil fuel companies pay for the damage that they have caused, most people seem to believe that the only way to fix climate breakdown is to stop using plastic straws, take the bus, or go vegan.

This individualistic understanding of the problem, and the potential solutions, is by far the greatest challenge that the climate movement faces. Yet leading climate campaigners can often be found playing up to this dynamic by blaming working people for their “carbon footprint” —a concept that was developed by BP to shift the blame for climate breakdown onto individuals.

No one person caused climate breakdown. While the wealthy are disproportionately responsible, no one group caused climate breakdown. Climate breakdown is the direct result of an utterly unsustainable economic and social system that gives most people no choice other than to pollute in order to survive.

The only way to change this is to transform the very foundations of our society — from the infrastructure we use to travel, live, and work, to the ideologies that allow us to make sense of the world. Alongside capital, individualism is perhaps our greatest enemy in this fight.