The basic inanity underscores the malign interest driving one of two major American political parties: $300 million of donations to lawmakers from energy and natural resource interest groups (namely, fossil fuel companies) since 1990 — more than double the amount directed to Democrats during that same period.

On Monday, the Republican National Convention announced its platform, which affirmed that the party is wholly Donald Trump’s. “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” the 16-page document’s headline read. 

The document paid no mind to environmental protection, never mind the 130 million Americans currently trudging through oppressive heat. But it did call to “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY,” a reference to Israel’s U.S.-funded defense system, and to “CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY.”

That the Trump-led, Republican agenda doesn’t mention “climate” is not surprising. In his first term, the former president overturned some 100 environmental regulations, pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, and weakened the Environmental Protection Agency. In April, Trump reportedly promised oil tycoons that he would reverse some of Joe Biden’s climate policies in exchange for a $1 billion campaign contribution. Meanwhile, three of his Supreme Court justices just helped corporate America get even further off the hook from having to respect environmental regulation by overturning the Chevron doctrine, a decades-old legal precedent that directed courts to defer to federal agencies’ interpretation of unambiguous statues. 

“Trump can’t mention it because every last one of his policies would make it worse. He’s essentially running on heating the planet even more,” Bill McKibben, environmentalist and founder of climate groups Third Act and 350.org, told The Intercept.

In an exchange with a young climate activist on the day the GOP’s platform was released, Republican Sen. Katie Britt — framed by the party as “America’s mom” before her memorable “State of the Union” response speech — embodied her party’s dismissive response to the burning of our planet.

“Oh you, look at how dishonest that was. You asked if you could take a selfie and now you’re asking questions,” Britt said to a voter who asked her about money she receives from the oil and gas lobby. Britt proceeded to ask what the voter’s issue was with “Big Oil.”

“I think that the climate crisis is here and getting worse, and you’re being funded by the people who are making that happen,” the activist said.

The senator from Alabama responded evasively, seeming to cheer on more toxic drilling. “Listen, we’ve got to be not only energy independent, but energy dominant. We do it better than anybody.”

Britt did not respond to questions about her plan to address climate change and environmental protection, or about the $197,037 she has received from the oil and gas industries since joining Congress in 2022.

It’s not as if modern Republicans have not engaged with climate. In 2021, Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah, launched the Conservative Climate Caucus in 2021 to educate Republicans on climate policies and legislation. “Don’t be too tough on us, but watch us. I am totally ready to be judged a year from on how much impact we’ve had on the debate,” he said at the time of the group’s founding. 

As it turns out, the effort, which has received favorable media coverage since its inception, has not had much tangible impact. The group’s members have attacked environmental regulations, undermined or simply refused to vote for bills like the Inflation Reduction Act, and taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fossil fuel industry.

The post GOP Platform Doesn’t Mention the Word “Climate” Once — Even After Hottest Year on Record appeared first on The Intercept.

Where children played, the ground bubbled. Birds swarmed, feeding on trash. At one point, a pile of 20 dead dogs and cats were dropped in the yard of the elementary school, just 100 feet away from classrooms. This was no ordinary playground.

A horrific stench of dead rats and decomposing garbage was impossible to escape, recalled Wayne Fields, who still lives in his childhood home opposite the site. “The smell was so bad, during school, after school,” said Fields, a 69-year-old businessman. “It was ridiculous.”

Both of Fields’s parents were teachers at the school. “We used to say that when we turn off the light we can all see each other because we are glowing from the chemicals,” he said.

Despite violating multiple health statutes, the local government was unbothered. “This is a necessary evil. I think we’re doing a very fine job,” then-City Manager William Green said in 1963. Besides, he said, the city poured “glorified perfume” on the garbage every so often.

This “necessary evil” has haunted this Florida community for decades. Sixty years later, the site is overgrown grassland, but contamination at the school still poses a large risk to students’ health. In the last few years, community members have called on the Alachua County school district and state agencies to assess the connection between the contaminated land and health issues in the area.

It is often difficult to show a direct link between a contaminant and adverse health impacts, and no such investigation has yet been done at the school. But for years soil and air testing have consistently revealed evidence of substantial environmental toxins on the property. Levels of the carcinogen benzo(a)pyrene peaked in 2020 at a concentration up to 218 times higher than what is considered safe for direct exposure in residential settings. Researchers, meanwhile, have pinpointed East Gainesville as an asthma hot spot.

For decades, a rotating cast of city, county, and state officials have been aware of the contaminants in the school yard — and have taken little action to address the problem, The Intercept found in an investigation based on hundreds of public and archival documents, government emails obtained through records requests, and interviews with dozens of Gainesville residents.

Alachua County officials have proposed renovations to the school and overseen the removal of some contaminated soil from the property in the last decade, while a local nurse’s advocacy prompted the state health and environmental protection departments to order additional soil testing in recent years. Their primary focus has not been the former landfill but another contaminant discovered decades ago: abandoned oil tanks. Yet what’s needed, former school district employees and community members say, is nothing short of the removal of the school in its entirety, a full cleanup of the site itself, and a comprehensive assessment of the impact of soil toxins on students’ health. Neither the school district nor the Florida Department of Environmental Protection seem willing to go that far.

“Williams Elementary is safe,” said Jackie Johnson, a spokesperson for Alachua County Public Schools, in an email to The Intercept. She added that the school board hasn’t received a formal recommendation to demolish or majorly reconstruct the school and that the district has no current plans to do so. 

District representatives met with the Department of Environmental Protection in January, Johnson said, and “it was made clear that there is currently no health threat to students or staff at the school.”

But just last month, the school board and the environmental protection department approved another round of soil and air testing at Williams.

The state Department of Health “has responded to many community concerns regarding Williams Elementary School,” Paul D. Myers, the department’s administrator in Alachua County, told The Intercept in an email. The state environmental protection department “continues to monitor the successful remediation at Williams Elementary” and will keep working with the school district and city “on any contaminated or potentially contaminated properties,” wrote Kathryn Craver, an external affairs director at the department’s northeast district.

This situation in Gainesville is not an anomaly. Dozens of schools across 35 states sit on or adjacent to former, or currently open, landfills, according to The Intercept’s analysis of news articles, state databases, and public records from across the country. From New York to Ohio, there have been many reported cases of illness, predominantly cancer, from both teachers and students who have attended schools next to hazardous waste. These occurrences tend to be in lower-income communities of color, The Intercept found.

No federal agency prohibits new schools being placed on, or next to, dump sites, or requires schools near landfills to conduct cleanups. In 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency was authorized by Congress to create voluntary school siting guidelines, but these remain discretionary and don’t apply to existing schools.

Florida state law makes it illegal to build a new K-12 school on or adjacent to a known contaminated site unless steps are taken to ensure that children will not be exposed to threatening levels of contaminants. But at Williams Elementary, like other schools in Florida, the contamination surfaced years after it was built.

The lack of regulation to address decades-old problems deepens an enduring crisis of environmental racism.

“We see a really strong pattern where white affluent students are facing significantly less risk at school,” said Sara Grineski, a sociology professor at the University of Utah who studies environmental health disparities. “It’s this long-standing pattern of the devaluing of people of color, pushing them into less desirable spaces.”

Second-Class Citizens

Williams Elementary is named after the Black businessman who built it in the 1930s, seeing a need for a school on the east side of Gainesville. A middle school was built across the field in 1955 — a few years before the landfill was placed in the backyard of Williams.

“We were Black and seen as second-class citizens,” said Gussy Butler, aged 95, one of East Gainesville’s oldest residents. “They weren’t concerned; it was a Black area.”

The dump site was 150 feet away from students sitting in classrooms, and the pollution was made worse by the area’s impractical geography. The east side of Gainesville is lower and has more sensitive wetlands than the west, where economic development has generally been focused.

Local media began covering the dire consequences several years after the landfill was built. “The ditch is filled with black, stagnant water pumped from holes dug to hold the garbage,” the Gainesville Sun reported in June 1963. “The area being filled with garbage is wetter than normal so the odor problems are compounded. The health department conceded that the area is ‘a little too wet for an ideal landfill.’”

Still, the city stood firm. “Many of us and our children have spent many happy hours on top of a landfill,” wrote City-County Health Officer Edward G. Byrne in an op-ed at the time. “I do not believe this will be a major problem for Alachua County for some time to come.”

Yet by the end of that summer, following petitions to the city for relief, the dump was moved to airport land. It was already clear that the implications would be long-lasting. “Building on the filled land is out of the question for 10 to 15 years. As the garbage slowly decays the earth will gradually settle,” a Gainesville Sun article said. “Any building constructed on it probably would be ruined within a short period by the sinking.”

At the end of the decade, the Nixon administration founded the EPA, a pivotal moment in the monitoring of toxic sites. “Some of the reasons we have these situations occurring today is that prior to the foundation of the EPA, there were few, if any, environmental laws that protected human health,” said Claudia Persico, a professor at American University who researches environmental policy.

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Yet, the EPA’s process for identifying so-called Superfund sites — referring to polluted and hazardous locations — has often failed to capture the most deprived communities. The EPA’s national priorities list is “a little bit ad hoc,” said Steph Tai, an environmental law professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “It’s sort of advocacy based, like people have to advocate for something to rise to that level.”

In a chronically underfunded area such as East Gainesville, the landfill’s potential for long-term contamination was quickly forgotten after it was closed. With a lack of resources, people had other concerns. “It just went away,” Fields, who lives across the site, said. “Nobody discussed it.”

Sinking Buildings

At Williams Elementary, the prediction that buildings would sink proved prophetic, even a quarter of a century later. In 1989, the district began constructing a half-million-dollar music and art suite at the school.

“They put Williams at the top of the list because it had been deprived for so long,” said Jennifer Lindquist, a former art teacher at the school for 22 years.

Almost as soon as the new facilities were built, the building began to fall apart. “The crack became straight through the building and through the foundation and everything,” Lindquist said. “It was not sound ground. When they pulled up the borings you could still see decomposing trash.”

In April of that year, city planners — members of a citizen board that reviews land use — found records of the landfill while working on a report. Gainesville city commissioners told the Alachua County School Board to take soil samples. The school board was going to “run a plug down there and test the soil,” Norm Bowman, then planning board clerk, said at the time. “It’s no big deal.”

But the problems extended beyond the remnants of the former landfill. Around the same time, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection found “excessively contaminated soil” on the property that was polluting the groundwater. The contamination was attributed to four underground storage tanks containing heating oil. From the 1960s to 1980s, these were common in rural locations without main gas lines. The school board registered the tanks in 1987 but didn’t know when they had been installed, Craver, from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, told The Intercept in an email.

In 1988, the school district applied for the environmental department’s Early Detection Incentive, which provided state-contracted cleanup to owners of underground petroleum tanks with suspected contamination. The site was assigned a ranking score of 9 out of 10. According to the department, “the higher the score, the greater the potential threat.”

But state officials ultimately decided that excavating the soil was “considered to be inappropriate … because of the high cost due to the depth of contamination.”

There are multiple conflicting narratives on the dates the tanks were removed. State records reviewed by The Intercept state that, as of 1991, three of the four tanks had been abandoned in place. Craver, meanwhile, said that three tanks were removed in 1988, with the other in 1991, but “oil can remain in soil for decades until remediated.”

What’s undisputed is that the tanks had corroded, leaving oil to seep out across the site. Still, the state went quiet for another two decades. This time, both the landfill and the oil tanks were forgotten.

Asthma Hot Spot

DeVante Moody, who started attending Williams in the late 1990s, remembers being teased about his “trash school.” At first he thought it was just typical school rivalry, or because the students sucked at sports.

“The running joke came from the community: ‘Oh, y’all go to the trash school,’” said Moody, now 31 years old and a support technician at the University of Florida hospital network. Like Wayne Fields, whose son also attended Williams, multiple generations of Moody’s family attended the school. His 11-year-old son now attends the neighboring Lincoln Middle School.

Moody recalls “the forbidden area,” a closed-off field the size of a large swimming pool, where students were not allowed to venture. They were never told why. Classrooms sat in trailers beside it, and children ran around the adjacent field at lunchtime.

It wasn’t until years later that Moody discovered it had been a landfill. “They literally meant ‘Y’all go to the trash school’ because it used to be a trash dump,” Moody realized. “So this is not a joke. This is serious.”

Throughout his childhood, Moody, like many of his classmates, had trouble breathing. “We were all just asthmatic children. We just thought it was normal,” he said.

Moody’s respiratory issues were particularly serious, and he was hospitalized twice with collapsed lungs. He distinctly remembers being in the intensive care unit at age 7, turning to his father and asking: “Am I going to die?”

Researchers recently identified East Gainesville as a pediatric asthma hot spot and linked poor health outcomes to racial and economic segregation. Across Alachua County, asthma-related hospitalization rates were nearly three times higher and emergency department visits were six times higher for Black residents than for white residents in 2018. Other research has shown that the hospitalization rate due to pediatric asthma in Williams Elementary’s ZIP code ranks among the worst 25 percent of ZIP codes in the state. The group most deeply affected are Black children aged 5 to 9. 

It’s part of a nationwide trend: A study published by The Associated Press last year found that Black children are more likely to have asthma than kids of any other race in America, mostly due to the influence of past racist housing laws and proximity to pollution.

In 2008, a few years after Moody left Williams Elementary, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection mobilized contractors to test contamination at schools across the county. “The state asked us to quickly go run out to all multiple schools and take soil samples around just to try and make sure that everything’s OK,” said Jesse Brown, senior engineer at Golder Associates, who visited Williams and 20 other schools at the time. “They just wanted a quick snapshot to see what risk each of these sites had.”

At Williams, Brown’s team identified two of the former underground petroleum tanks and took half a dozen soil samples. They didn’t find anything concerning, according to a report the firm submitted to the state environmental agency.

Yet that finding did not appear to sufficiently assuage the agency. Seven years later, the agency reached back out to the Alachua County School Board about Williams Elementary to offer more state funding for research into petroleum contamination. Another contractor was sent out to the school in 2015. Over the next two years, engineers who analyzed soil samples found high concentrations of multiple carcinogenic chemicals and benzo(a)pyrene equivalents, a way of evaluating the overall carcinogenicity of multiple compounds. BaP — which is commonly found in cigarette smoke, exhaust fumes, and asphalt — and BaP equivalents are generally considered safe at concentrations of 0.1 mg/kg. At Williams, analysts detected a level of 7.2 mg/kg. Prolonged exposure to the chemical increases the risk of cancer, as well as asthma, according to scientific studies. 

In general, communities of color suffer disproportionately from environmental toxins. Grineski, the University of Utah sociology professor, said that her research shows that “a district with more foreign born kids and more Black kids has greater concentrations of cancer-causing air toxins than other school districts.”

The state’s health department, which investigates cancer clusters, does not consider East Gainesville to have a higher than normal incidence of cancer. The agency “does not have any data that is indicative of a cancer cluster in the community,” Myers, the department’s administrator in Alachua County, told The Intercept in an email.

Still, Fields, who struggles with various health issues — including trouble breathing since he had a heart attack a couple years ago — strongly believes it to be so.

On a drive around East Gainesville, Fields gave a biography of the generations of homeowners. As he pointed out house after house, he explained how each family had in some way been affected by the disease.

“This neighborhood is mostly made up of widows,” he said.

A Community’s Outrage 

In 2017, two years after the state funded a new round of testing at Williams Elementary, the Alachua County school district issued a press release notifying parents that elevated levels of BaP had been found in the soil, due to contamination from petroleum products.

The district said it would be removing and replacing soil from parts of the school courtyard. Still, school officials assured parents that “the levels found at Williams would not pose a health risk unless there is a lifetime of exposure, which would mean eating or touching the soil every day for thirty years.”

For Moody and Fields’s families, who had lived in East Gainesville all their lives, being in such close proximity daily is not that much of a reach. Yet, Moody, whose cousins attended Williams that year, said that, to his knowledge, his relatives didn’t hear about the contamination at the time. “My family had not one clue,” he said.

The state removed over 2,500 tons of petroleum-contaminated soil from the courtyard and transported it to a waste site in Georgia before the start of the school year in September. A concrete cap was placed over the remaining contaminated soil until it could be excavated in school breaks over the following year. Another 1,000 tons were removed between December 2017 and June 2018.

“Due to this excavation and removal, the accessible soils are no longer an exposure risk,” Craver said.

Meanwhile, the school district held a public forum, titled “Schools of the Future,” where community members could submit anonymous feedback. Many of the comments mentioned the Williams and Lincoln schools — and some referenced the former dump site. “Can Williams Elementary use the surrounding land to increase/renovate since the school was built on a dump site!! This should be a priority!!!” one comment said. “Remove Lincoln and Williams off the dump site,” another person wrote.

With no further action from local officials, community members continued to press the issue. In June 2019, Fields and other residents expressed their frustrations on the area’s history in a public county meeting on plans to expand another dump site in the area.

“What you’re talking about doing, it’s preposterous,” Fields said.

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As Covid-19 hit, others started asking questions. Alexandria Owens, a pediatric critical-care nurse scientist working in East Gainesville, began to look into why so many kids ended up in the intensive care unit with asthma issues.

Poking around online, Owens found the state records about the eroded oil tanks at Williams. She spent hundreds of hours reading documents and compiling data. She wondered if there was a correlation between the toxic soil and the state of children’s health in the area. “Kids end up on life support,” Owens said. “It’s alarming knowing that these types of chemicals can exacerbate asthma.”

Owens had no idea about the former dump site, which is not mentioned in state environmental or health department records. But she started reaching out to the school district in March 2020 about the high asthma rates in the neighborhood and the leaked oil tanks. “I felt like my argument was even stronger because these kids are at a higher risk, let’s actually sound the alarm because Covid-19 is happening,” Owens said. “But that did not happen.”

At every turn, Owens was being stalled. “You don’t need to be calling all these people,” a manager of the Petroleum Restoration Program at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection told her in a phone call in June 2020, according to notes Owens took at the time. “Pediatric asthma wasn’t in our top priority list,” a community programs administrator at the Alachua County Health Department told Owens the following month. (The employee was referencing priorities from a county-level assessment that happens every few years, according to Myers, the health department’s administrator in Alachua County.)

It was Owen’s outreach that ultimately triggered the Florida Department of Health to conduct an assessment at the school. In July 2020, the department published a report stating that it “does not expect the occurrence of health risks associated with exposure to groundwater and soil.” But the report was not comprehensive; the department could not evaluate indoor air quality or assess the impact on students prior to 2016 due to insufficient or unavailable data.

The department said the concentrations of BaP that had previously been found in the soil could create additional health risks if it vaporized into the air. The report recommended that the department continue to assess indoor and outdoor air quality for the presence of the chemical. Owens was relieved an assessment had been done but continued to press state and local officials on the issue.

At times, she grew frustrated with the process. In a July 2021 email outlining an apparent miscommunication between the school district and the state environmental agency about the state’s plans for the school, she wrote that such communication breakdowns “will continue to delay the timely remediation of a problem that could absolutely exacerbate health issues in the children from my community.”

She also felt that, in addition to testing, there needed to be more excavation — and that the school building should be moved.

Stalled Reconstruction

Carlee Simon, who became interim superintendent of Alachua County Public Schools in December 2020, shared Owens’s assessment. Simon had attended Williams as a child, and her parents were teachers in the district, but she knew nothing of the site’s toxicity before starting the job.

Based on the information she got from colleagues and the environmental department and the aged state of the building, Simon soon concluded that the only solution was to rebuild the entire school. “We needed to have the entire building demolished,” Simon said. “Our discussions were how long would it take between us tearing down the building and the soil actually being addressed and ready for us to build on. That was like a massive unknown.”

It was likely going to take years, and the school board was divided. “It was pretty clear that budget priorities of the past shaped that community,” she said. She noted that a new school was built in a wealthier part of Gainesville just a few years earlier. “The first completed school they built was in a highly affluent and influential community, not a dilapidated building on the east side,” she said.

Gainesville’s east side is also still haunted by the decision back in the 1950s to put a dump in a residential neighborhood near two schools. Archival records show that city officials placed the landfill near the schools with the hopes that burying trash in the swampy land would make the land usable in the future. Jennifer Smart, the communications director for the city of Gainesville, told The Intercept the current government couldn’t speak to the school’s environmental problems. “With so much of this timeline reaching back many decades, it’s a historical record in which current City of Gainesville leadership did not participate and have no specific knowledge,” Smart wrote in an email.

Experts told the Intercept that cost-pressed governments often build schools on cheap land. “The tension is often between like there’s concern for student’s health, but also there’s the concern about using public monies for more expensive lands,” said Tai, the UW–Madison environmental law professor. “So a lot of times economic concerns sort of pressure states into still siting schools in toxic areas.”

After multiple disagreements with the board, including on other topics such as how to handle Covid-19, Simon was fired from the job after 15 months — the seventh superintendent to leave the job in the last 10 years. She is now interim dean for the School of Education at the University of Alaska Southeast.

While internal school district emails indicate there were plans to renovate the school in 2021, that has still not happened. A list of reconstruction projects on the school district website dating back to November 2019 describes design plans for four other schools in the district. Williams Elementary, however, is stuck in limbo. According to the website, “the district is drafting the required state application for permission to demolish buildings on the campus.”

Johnson, the school district spokesperson, told The Intercept that the Covid-19 pandemic drastically changed the district’s reconstruction plans: “Facilities projects that have been completed have cost much more than originally expected, affecting the timeline for other proposed projects.” Williams is among the projects that fell by the wayside.

More Testing, More Toxins

Soil and air testing have been a constant at Williams Elementary over the last several years. Since July 2020, state contractors have been deployed to the school at least a dozen times. 

The most alarming results came in November 2020, when soil testing revealed BaP equivalent levels of 21.8 mg/kg in one part of the property: 218 times over the recommended residential limit. (State records show that BaP equivalent levels fluctuated over the next year and a half, dropping down to 7.8 mg/kg in that same area by July 2022 and to 2.6 mg/kg on a different part of the property.)

In a letter to Williams Elementary in December 2020, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection alerted the school that two chemicals, naphthalene and acenaphthene, had been found in the soil. The latter was present at three times the standard level. Exposure to naphthalene by inhalation is associated with hemolytic anemia, damage to the liver, and neurological damage, according to the EPA. In late 2021, the environmental department installed a venting system underneath one of the school’s buildings to mitigate soil concentrations of naphthalene.

Air quality has also been a persistent issue at Williams, and on at least one occasion in 2020, a teacher reportedly complained about it to the principal, according to an email obtained by The Intercept. State contractors, meanwhile, have repeatedly found elevated levels of chemicals in the air at Williams, including chloroform, a possible carcinogen that is often used in industrial processes. 

In February 2021, after Owens’s urging, the state Department of Health released a report sampling six indoor air and four outdoor locations at the elementary school. The department found that it was possible there would be vapor intrusion, which is the migration of chemicals from the soil into the air. The report found that some concentrations of chemicals, including benzene, carbon tetrachloride — which can produce kidney and liver damage — and chloroform were at a level where they could cause considerable health risk through exposure. The health department recommended continued air monitoring.

That same month, a firm contracted by the environmental department reported excess levels of naphthalene in the air, as well as BaP in the soil.

Despite the findings in Gainesville, the state health department touted Williams Elementary as one of its “Success Stories.” Though students and workers at the school had been “exposed to contaminated soil and air,” the post said, they were not expected to develop adverse health effects.

Experts studying air pollution in schools have revealed it has extremely damaging effects on children. “Air pollution can cause what’s called externalizing behaviors, aggressive behaviors in kids,” said Persico, the American University public policy professor. “That causes them to get into fights or to misbehave, and then they’re more likely to be suspended in school.”

An Ongoing Issue 

Despite years of appeals from within the school and the broader community, Williams Elementary is still trying to find a way to get rid of the polluted soil. The school district’s maintenance manager asked the Florida Department of Environmental Protection in an email last May “about the possibility of having some assistance with the removal of the contaminated soil, if and when the Board decides to demo Buildings 1 and 2 at Williams.”

An environmental consultant at the department responded that the agency could investigate and cover the cost of needed remediation if the school board approved renovations or demolition.

The environmental department recently contracted Leah D. Stuchal, a research professor at the University of Florida, to review air testing results from November that revealed excessive levels of chloroform. In February, Stuchal concluded that the excess levels “were not believed to be a result of petroleum contamination” and that monitoring for petroleum contaminants in indoor air was no longer needed. Still, Stuchal recommended continued monitoring for chloroform, of which the source remains unclear.

“The recommendation for continued monitoring of chloroform is because the source is unknown and the population exposed involves children,” Stuchal told The Intercept in an email.

Craver, of the environmental department, said that “out of an abundance of caution,” the agency “continues to maintain a passive venting system and conduct indoor air monitoring.”

The school recently concluded another round of testing, but there are no public records of testing at Lincoln Middle School across the field. And the long-forgotten landfill remains part of the land’s history.

Meanwhile, community members in East Gainesville have been waging a fight against the expansion of a different landfill. Just 2 miles from the schools, it was meant to close in January but has applied to continue operating until 2028. As a local news outlet reported last year, “It’s history repeating.”

“The people in our neighborhoods … I can guarantee you they have experienced enough tragedies,” Fields said in a county meeting on the proposed landfill plans. “It used to be an ongoing joke in our neighborhood, we are all gonna die from cancer because the dump site was right there between Lincoln and Williams Elementary. Well, guess what happened?”

The reporting for this article was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post For Decades, Officials Knew a School Sat on a Former Dump — and Did Little to Clean Up the Toxins appeared first on The Intercept.

“I know what it’s like to see a dead fish that’s been speared,” he said. “I’d never seen anything like this.”

A series of cyclones and storms had battered the region in early 2022, and in the days afterward, the air was still and calm. As Randimbisoa paddled around in his dugout canoe, he recognized the different species and called them by their local names: fiambazaha, saroa, vily, and malemiloha. Overnight, the fish he made his living from, the fish his wife and children ate, the fish that supported the entire lakeside community, were nearly gone.

“It was scary, because we have been eating fish from this lake for so long. We have fed our families, and now it’s polluted,” said Randimbisoa. “We have told our families not to go to the lake.”

Randimbisoa has a theory about what killed the fish. “It’s dirty water from the factory of QMM,” he said.

Lake Ambavarano, where Randimbisoa works, is connected to two other lakes — Besaroy and Lanirano — through a series of narrow waterways. The lakes are adjacent to QIT Madagascar Minerals, or QMM: a mine in Madagascar that’s 80 percent owned by the Anglo-Australian mining and metals behemoth Rio Tinto, and 20 percent by the government of Madagascar. The mine extracts ilmenite, a major source of titanium dioxide, which is mainly used as a white pigment in products like paints, plastics, and paper. QMM also produces monazite, a mineral that contains highly sought-after rare-earth elements used to produce the magnets in electric vehicles and wind turbines.

After the fish deaths, the government of Madagascar’s environmental regulator and Rio Tinto conducted water sampling work. Citing such testing, Rio Tinto says there is no proof that its mining killed the fish. Water sample analysis revealed “no conclusive link between our mine activities and the observed dead fish by community members,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to The Intercept. Those results have not been made available to the public, despite requests by civil society groups and The Intercept.

Now, more than 15 years after QMM became operational, Rio Tinto is facing a likely lawsuit in an English court brought by U.K.-based law firm Leigh Day on behalf of residents of villages near the QMM mine. In a letter of claim, a document that is an early step in a lawsuit in the U.K., the villagers accuse Rio Tinto of contaminating the waterways and lakes that they use for domestic purposes with elevated and harmful levels of uranium and lead, which pose a serious risk to human health. Leigh Day commissioned blood lead level testing in the area around the mine as part of its research into the claim. According to the letter of claim, which was sent on Tuesday, the testing shows that 58 people living around the mine have elevated levels of lead, and that the majority of cases exceed the threshold at which the World Health Organization recommends clinical and environmental interventions, 5 micrograms per deciliter. The claim alleges that the most likely cause of the elevated levels is a result of QMM’s mine processes.

“They and other local families are being forced to consume water which is contaminated with harmful heavy metals.”

“Whilst Rio Tinto extracts large profits from its mining operations in Madagascar, our clients’ case is that they and other local families are being forced to consume water which is contaminated with harmful heavy metals. In bringing this case, our clients are seeking accountability and justice for the damage that has been caused to their local environment and their health,” Paul Dowling, Leigh Day’s lead partner on the case, told The Intercept.

Leigh Day’s blood lead level testing results are a significant development that may for the first time quantify the detrimental health impacts their clients allege are posed by QMM. Surface water pollution and lead poisoning are both global problems, and the case will be watched closely not just by Rio Tinto shareholders, but by global environmental justice advocates in other nations where villagers also accuse industrial giants of polluting their waterways.

“We have received the letter from Leigh Day,” said the Rio Tinto spokesperson, who declined further comment on the allegations. The spokesperson pointed to a published report that states that the company’s recent water analysis had not detected metals, including uranium and lead, that had previously been identified as potential concerns.

Madagascar’s environmental regulator, the National Office for the Environment, or ONE, says it has periodically monitored QMM’s activities over the last decade and has tested the water following past complaints about contamination. “In the face of these accusations, ONE requested several expert analyses … the results of which indicated no contamination of surface waters nor mining sites,” Hery Rajaomanana, ONE’s director of environmental integration and sustainable development, told The Intercept in March.

Rio Tinto, which has over 52,000 employees and saw net earnings of $12.4 billion in 2022, has a troubled track record in Madagascar. Local residents, civil society groups, and media outlets have accused the company of damaging the endangered forest, threatening rare endemic species, forcing villagers off their land without proper compensation, destroying fishers’ livelihoods, and failing to honor its promises to employ local people. Communities have been protesting the mine almost since its inception. Last year, skirmishes broke out in June and lasted more than a week as residents blocked road access to the mine. The government called in the police and army to assert control.

“QMM operates in a highly sensitive area from a water and broader environmental perspective,” wrote the Rio Tinto spokesperson who declined to attach a name to the statements from the company. “We are committed to working to address any specific issues that community members raise, and to engaging in constructive dialogue on how we can mitigate impacts of our operations while generating tangible and sustainable benefits for our host communities.”

The 150-year-old metals and mining giant has been embroiled in scandal for years. In 2020, Rio Tinto blew up two ancient Aboriginal Australian sites to expand its iron ore mining in the region. In 2022, a review conducted by Australia’s former sex discrimination commissioner found that bullying, sexism, and racism were rampant across the company. In March 2023, Rio Tinto agreed to pay a $15 million penalty to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission after accusations surfaced that in 2011 it paid $10.5 million to a friend of the Guinean president to retain iron ore mining rights. Despite this, its Guinea project, the world’s largest and highest-grade new iron ore mine, is scheduled to move ahead this year. The company also plans to build on sacred Indigenous land in Arizona, has been accused of financial impropriety in Mozambique and Mongolia, and is currently facing pressure from investors over water quality concerns at several of its mining sites, including in Madagascar and Mongolia.

In early 2023, two longtime Rio Tinto insiders — Maurice Duffy, a top-level executive coach, and Richard Bowley, a project management mining executive — wrote a series of confidential reports commissioned by the Mongolian government’s anti-corruption regulator. The Intercept obtained two of the draft reports, which outlined allegations about Rio Tinto’s culture of bullying, bribery, and corruption in countries around the world from 2015 until 2023.

The Rio Tinto spokesperson said that the confidential reports have “not been published, and despite requests, we have not had the opportunity to review,” and did not provide an on-the-record response to most of the allegations. The Mongolian regulator did not respond to questions about the draft reports.

According to one of the draft reports, Duffy, a consultant, said he stopped working with Rio Tinto in 2018 because of concerns about the company’s conduct. He said that after his departure, Rio Tinto instructed him to destroy thousands of records documenting ethical issues, among them proof of irregular payments made in Madagascar.

“I reported irregular payments to Rio Tinto. The allegations of irregular payments in Madagascar are based upon information given to me by Rio Tinto employees,” Duffy told The Intercept. “I can only confirm that they were stated as inappropriate and irregular.”

According to the draft report, the company stated in writing to Duffy that it had “regulatory approval” for the destruction to occur, but despite many requests, Duffy has been unable to get details on which regulators gave permission to destroy the documents. Duffy sent photographs of documents being shredded and incinerated to Rio Tinto, as they had requested, the draft report states.

Rio Tinto’s spokesperson wrote, “We take our disclosure obligations extremely seriously and strongly refute any suggestion that this is not the case.”

One of the confidential draft reports offered an unnamed company executive’s perspective on legal challenges: “Our legal strategy is straightforward. FUCK them. Frustrate; Undermine; Cost; Kick into long grass.”

That report also outlined a key part of Rio Tinto’s strategy: using the chaotic nature of election campaigns to the company’s advantage. “Rio key strategy is based on the premise that Politicians always go short term,” the draft report reads. “It’s the nature of the beast, elections years are a good time to strike, and they can rely on their friends to filter the facts and articulate a different narrative.”

2023 was an election year in Madagascar, one of the world’s poorest countries, which rates 145 out of 180 on the global Corruption Perceptions Index. Incumbent President Andry Rajoelina faced a crowded field of opposition candidates, and he won in an election marred by accusations of fraud, low voter turnout, and violence.

Last August, Rajoelina’s top aide was arrested in London, accused of soliciting a bribe from the British mining company Gemfields to secure licenses to operate in Madagascar. Rajoelina fired the aide, who was convicted in a London court in February. Amid that chaos, Rio Tinto was renegotiating its 1998 fiscal agreement with the government. The parties finalized new terms in August 2023. As part of the agreement, Rio Tinto committed money to infrastructure and local community projects. The company hopes to expand into Petriky and Sainte Luce, two additional sites located along Madagascar’s eastern coastline.

Paradise Lost

QMM started exploring for heavy mineral sands around Anôsy, Madagascar, along the southeastern coast in 1986. The region is home to about 800,000 people, with more than 90 percent of rural residents living on less than $1.90 per day.

The area where the minerals were discovered is a unique ecosystem, a littoral forest occurring in the sandy substrates close to the Indian Ocean. Madagascar once had a continuous 1,600-kilometer band of littoral forest along its eastern coastline. Today, it’s estimated that only a fraction of that forest remains intact, like patches of hair on a thinning beard. New species are being discovered there all the time, but many of them are already endangered due to habitat destruction. Yet the region, with its famous lemurs and a concentrated diversity of plant species, remains one of the most important and fragile ecosystems in the world.

It is also one of the most beautiful places in the world. Towering, forested mountains cast shadows on sparkling freshwater lakes that flow through tranquil sandy beaches into the abundant waters of the Indian Ocean. Tiny dugout canoes manned by the region’s fishers dot the waterways. Women wearing mud masks to protect their skin from the sun bake fresh bread that rivals the baguettes in Parisian boulangeries. On clear evenings, the sunsets splash a palette of warm colors into the sky.

Fifty-two-year-old Tahiry Ratsiambahotra is the founder of LuSud, an activist organization that has become a thorn in the sides of the government and Rio Tinto. He grew up in Fort Dauphin but says he relocated to France after the government targeted him for his activism. (The Malagasy government did not respond to questions about LuSud.)

“I love this country,” he said. “I married an Anôsy wife. My children are Anôsy. I have a deep feeling that Fort Dauphin is my life.”

Ratsiambahotra remembers what Fort Dauphin looked like before Rio Tinto came into town. It used to be one of Madagascar’s top ecotourism destinations, attracting avid nature lovers and placid beachgoers alike. Locals talk about the city in terms of “before” and “after” the mine was built. “Before,” Fort Dauphin was a sleepy paradise, dotted with romantically named beach resorts, but it has turned into something grittier. The paint on the exteriors of the hotels is peeling. The forests are being cut down. Trucks spewing black exhaust dominate the roads. “After,” locals say, there are only the haves and the have-nots: the people with cushy jobs who benefit from the mine, and everyone else.

In the 1990s, after learning about Rio Tinto’s exploration of the area, Ratsiambahotra educated himself about the possible risks associated with a large-scale mineral sands project, including the potential for radioactive materials to be released into the surrounding environment, and grew alarmed.

“When I saw that the people in this country don’t have the capacity to understand what kind of impact this project can involve, I felt that as a learned person, I have a responsibility to investigate first and to acquire all the information needed to deeply understand the project, and then share it with the people,” he said.

So, in 1998, Ratsiambahotra started LuSud. In his capacity as founder, Ratsiambahotra says he met with local and national government officials to talk them out of moving ahead with the project.

“When I saw in the Establishment Agreement that the benefit to the Madagascar people was very, very tiny, I was shocked. They tried to exploit the Madagascar people,” he said, referring to the deal between the company and the government. “I asked to meet the Parliament at the time to convince them that this was not a project for us.”

Ratsiambahotra says he also collected 5,000 signatures from local villagers who were against the mine. To build QMM, Rio Tinto would have to buy land and property and displace a number of families. A World Bank assessment estimated that around 1,900 people would be temporarily or permanently displaced.

“They knew if QMM took the land, they were lost. So, they tried to protect the land,” Ratsiambahotra said. “But they were afraid of the government, because they were powerful. So, this is a question. They could fight against QMM, but how to fight against their own government?”

We were “eggs fighting against stones,” said 40-year-old Georges Marolahy Razafidrafara, a resident of Mandramondramotra, the village located closest to the mine.

In the end, the eggs lost the fight. QMM became one of the first large-scale investors in Madagascar in 1998, when the company signed an agreement with the government that allowed for concessionary breaks on taxes, duties, and royalties.

“People didn’t yet understand the ecological impact of the mine,” Ratsiambahotra said. “So, Parliament adopted the agreement.”

“People Were Eating So Well”

Mbola Jeannot is the patriarch of a large family living in a two-bedroom hut in a fishing village on the ocean shore. One day, representatives from QMM came to see him about land needed for the mine’s operations.

“They didn’t bargain,” said Jeannot. “They said, ‘Where is your land? Here? Everyone stand in your portion of land. This is yours? OK, here is your money.’”

Jeannot says he received a check and that he added his thumbprint to the bottom of the document of sales signed by the CEO of QMM, indicating that he read and understood the agreement.

Jeannot couldn’t afford to say no to the money. He felt that “we would have lost our land” either way, he said.

Since then, hundreds of Malagasy people around the region have tried to resist evictions and relocation and to get paid fairly for their lost lands. In 2010, Leigh Day considered taking action against Rio Tinto on behalf of villagers seeking compensation. The process fell apart, however, after many claimants accepted compensation from QMM. Rio Tinto and Leigh Day declined to comment.

The extractive industry watchdog Publish What You Pay conducted a community survey of 368 villagers living around the mine in March 2022. (The global watchdog’s in-country research was done by a coalition of 11 local civil society groups, led at the time by Transparency International’s Madagascar chapter.) The report found that over 90 percent of survey respondents said they had suffered as a result of losing access to natural resources, including their land. A third of respondents said they lost their lands directly to QMM. 60 percent of those surveyed said that they had received compensation from the mining company, 65 percent of whom reported difficulties in collecting this compensation.

This David-and-Goliath dynamic is typical of the company. Rio Tinto wields tremendous influence in Madagascar, which has a gross domestic product of at least $14 billion, less than half the GDP of the state of Vermont. Like other businesses, QMM pays fees to Madagascar’s environmental regulator for monitoring services. According to civil society reports, QMM’s fees come to $30,000-$40,000 per year. “How can we ever expect the ONE to be independent in its assessment when it’s fueled by companies?” said Ketakandriana Rafitoson, the national coordinator of Publish What You Pay Madagascar. (Rajaomanana, of the National Office for the Environment, told The Intercept that “ONE remains totally independent and objective in the realization of its monitoring duties.”)

Before building QMM, the company conducted a series of assessments to determine the potential social, environmental, and economic impacts of the mine on the surrounding area. Baseline water testing from 2001 revealed that the surface water from lakes and rivers surrounding the mine was free from high levels of cadmium, lead, and uranium.

To support its mining operations, QMM planned to construct a weir, or barrier, where Lake Ambavarano meets the mouth of the estuary that connects to the Indian Ocean to control water flows and water level heights. But the company was warned that the weir had the potential to permanently change the occasionally brackish lagoon system into freshwater, which would affect fish and fisherfolk in the region. With support from the World Bank, it also built a port in Fort Dauphin to export raw materials to Rio Tinto’s processing plant in Canada.

Despite myriad concerns by LuSud, the World Bank, and other bodies involved in early impact assessments of the mine, QMM received a legal license to begin operations in 2005. The license covered three mine sites to be mined sequentially under a 100-year lease from the Malagasy government. QMM’s mine and processing facility was built by Fluor, an American multinational engineering and construction giant. Mine managers estimated that at peak capacity, QMM would be able to produce nearly 2 million tons of unrefined ilmenite ore. Ilmenite ore imports to the U.S. were priced at $290 per ton in 2022.

The mine became operational in 2008. The barrier ended up entirely blocking inundations of salt water into Lake Ambavarano. Soon, nearly all the species of fish that thrived in the brackish conditions were gone. The March 2022 Publish What You Pay community survey found that at least 27 fish species appear to have completely disappeared from the lakes since the start of the Rio Tinto mining operation.

Olivier Randimbisoa is one of the lake fishermen affected by the weir. Working as a tour guide, ferrying visitors across the lakes on a white motorboat in his uniform of flip-flops and board shorts, Randimbisoa is always looking for business opportunities to help feed his wife of 16 years and his four children. He also serves as a lake police officer of sorts, checking on people’s nets to ensure they don’t catch pregnant fish or young fish that should be left to grow larger before being caught.

“Before the weir, people were eating so well. They were happy. They were fishing,” he said, carefully captaining the boat through the winding waterways that connect the lakes.

Randimbisoa has been fishing since he was 10 years old. Before the barrier was built, he could choose whether he wanted to catch crab, shrimp, ocean fish, or lake fish. Now, he catches the few species that are still around. Before, he could use any type of net to fish. Now he can only use a net with small eyes attached to a long rope because larger fish are scarce. Before, he could make 100,000 ariary (around $22.40) each day from fishing. Now, he says he’s barely making a fraction of that.

Carefully steering his boat in the shallows, Randimbisoa comes alongside two young men standing in chest-high water near the lake shore. Their arms pump methodically as they haul in a long fishing net. It takes nearly 20 minutes, and as they work Randimbisoa asks them questions. The men say they have been fishing since 7 a.m. In those three hours, they’ve gotten only one small cup of tiny silver fish. They say they can sell that for around 1,500 ariary (about $0.34) at the market. It’s not enough.

When QMM started operating, Randimbisoa says, the company assured him that it would assess how much he earned and compensate him if his work was affected by the mine. For a while, the company made regular payments to community members, but these payments stopped abruptly without explanation, Randimbisoa said. Rio Tinto did not respond to The Intercept’s question about the payments.

In 2019, QMM’s external Independent International Advisory Panel met with the fishers to assess their situations. “It is doubtful that any other community in the area has suffered greater direct damage to its livelihood from the mine’s operations,” the panel concluded. “Accordingly, we recommend urgent steps to remedy their situation.”

The lake fisherfolk are not the only ones affected by the mine. The region is also home for ocean fishermen. This is far more dangerous work. The men go out late at night on flimsy wooden boats that they row past rough breaking waves into deeper waters. The fish are bigger, but so is the risk.

Jeannot is an ocean fisherman. He’s handsome, with stocky barrel legs, a muscular build, and a warm smile that reveals a row of perfectly white teeth. Decades working at sea have kept him strong and healthy. Only the gray curling hairs on his head betray his age of 57 years.

Jeannot has been catching ocean fish and lobster since he was 14 years old. Like most people in the village, he never finished school. When he grew older, he passed his trade down to his sons. His eldest son Jossé Randrianambinina drowned at sea during a fishing expedition in 2015. His body was never recovered, and Jeannot has only one laminated photograph of him taken in 2011.

Jeannot now fishes with his younger son, 38-year-old Randria Mazakazézé, or Zézé for short. Jeannot and Zézé often leave home at 6 p.m. and fish all night in two different areas along the coastline. One of their best spots used to be a small fishing harbor in a natural bay that provides some protection against the strong winds.

But then QMM selected this harbor to build its port. It did so without consultation from the ocean fishers, Jeannot said. When construction on the port began, the fishers were warned that it could take up to 33 months to build. QMM compensated them during the construction period, and the fishers were told they could go back to work once it was completed.

But they were not told that construction of the port would permanently affect the quantity and species of fish in the harbor. Or that they would be permitted to fish there only during specific times when container ships were not using the port.

“In my opinion, our livelihoods have been destroyed,” Jeannot said. “The environment surrounding the port has been destroyed.”

Over the past 18 months, QMM has undertaken a grievance and compensation program with the government of Madagascar and community representatives to address such concerns. “By March 2023, over 5,000 eligible fisherfolk and natural resource users received compensation from QMM, based on the cumulative impact of QMM’s operations for each specific group deemed eligible since operations began,” the Rio Tinto spokesperson said. “Land claimants were deemed not eligible under this process and were managed by a separate process between the land claimants and the authorities.”

Heavy Sands

The QMM mine extracts ilmenite from mineral-rich sands by creating shallow, unlined, water-filled basins between 5 to 15 meters deep. By churning up the sands and passing them through a floating dredge, the mining process filters out the heavier sands, which contain ilmenite. The ilmenite is then extracted using electrostatic processing and shipped to Rio Tinto’s plant in Canada. Despite its small size, Madagascar was the fourth largest exporter of ilmenite in the world in 2022.

The mineral sands also contain radioactive elements, including uranium and thorium. The process of churning the sand allows these radioactive elements to dissolve in the mining water, which is then discharged as wastewater.

The Malagasy regulator requires an 80-meter buffer zone between a mining operation and any ecologically sensitive area to avoid contamination. In 2015, the government regulator approved QMM’s request to reduce this buffer zone from 80 to 50 meters. But in 2017, Yvonne Orengo, director of the Andrew Lees Trust, a charity also known as ALT-UK that works on environmental issues in Madagascar, accused Rio Tinto of breaching the buffer zone based on a series of satellite images she captured using Google Earth.

Rio Tinto initially denied the breach in correspondence with ALT-UK that was reviewed by The Intercept. The company agreed to conduct an independent study and identified a private company called Ozius to carry it out. To ensure an independent review, Orengo enlisted the help of Steven Emerman, a groundwater and mining expert, to conduct his own study. Using Ozius’s data as well as Google Earth images, Emerman calculated that, in addition to breaching the buffer zone, the company had encroached onto the lakebed by 117 meters, bringing the total breach to 167 meters, he said.

In early 2019, QMM announced that it would revise its plans and revert back to the 80-meter buffer zone. It later acknowledged that it had breached the original buffer zone, but only admitted to a 90-meter encroachment.

In mining, materials that are left over after the extraction process — like the mining basin water and scrap sands — are referred to as tailings. Tailings occur in mines around the world, can be highly toxic or radioactive, and should be contained and treated. But in reality, cost-cutting has led to sloppy standards, which in turn has caused a number of global disasters, like a 2019 tailings dam collapse in Brazil that killed 270 people.

The QMM mine relies on a “natural” system, usually referred to as passive water treatment, to treat its mining basin water. It releases the contaminated water into a series of “settling paddocks” to reduce the levels of floating particles, one indicator of water quality. When the water in the paddocks gets too high, the mine offloads the water into naturally occurring wetlands that connect to a nearby river. The idea is that the process of moving through the settling paddocks and wetlands would rid the mining basin water of its more harmful elements and allow safe water to flow into the surrounding environment.

One issue with passive water treatment systems is that they can remove contaminants, like lead and uranium, from process water and store them in the wetland sediment. A later change in wetland water chemistry, such as an increase in acidity, could remobilize those heavy metals back into dissolved form in the water column. “This is why passive water treatment systems are sometimes referred to as ‘chemical time bombs,’” explained Emerman.

Rio Tinto refers to its tailings dam as a berm, or an artificial embankment, and its tailings as process water — and thus denies having any tailings at QMM at all. In response to a question about tailings dam safety posed at the 2022 annual general meeting, Rio Tinto’s former board chair Simon Thompson asserted, “There is no tailings dam at QMM. The berm you refer to is an embankment made of sand which separates the mine from the external environment. … There are no tailings at QMM.”

There have been reports of berm failures at QMM since mining began, resulting in large releases of harmful mine waste. The first two were made in 2010 and 2018, with dead fish appearing in the lakes after the 2018 overflow.

In August 2020, QMM stopped regularly discharging its process water into the surrounding wetlands. The following year, Rio Tinto released a report that concluded that its “natural” filtration system was not working as expected, and excess levels of aluminum and cadmium were being released into the water around the mine.

Two additional berm failures occurred in early 2022, after a series of cyclones and other severe weather events battered the region. Shortly afterward, QMM carried out a controlled water release, authorized by the Malagasy regulator, to mitigate against another accidental berm breach and an uncontrolled incident that “could have significantly impacted the environment surrounding our operation,” Rio Tinto wrote on its website. Dead fish had started appearing in the lakes again, which is what Randimbisoa, the fisherman, had witnessed. In response, the authorities banned fishing, which led to widespread protests from communities living around the mine.

“When the river was polluted, we were not able to fish and all the fishermen were starving,” said Ramartial, a 58-year-old partially blind fisherman who lives on the shore of Lake Lanirano. Ramartial has seven children to feed. The local government “stopped us from fishing for months, and there was no compensation for that,” he said.

In addition to the water analysis QMM and the Malagasy environmental regulator conducted after the 2022 dead fish incident, Rio Tinto also commissioned a South African environmental research center to investigate the causes of the fish deaths. Those results have not been published yet.

In April 2022, ALT-UK also commissioned Stella Swanson, a Canada-based aquatic ecologist and radioactivity specialist, to analyze the potential causes of the fish deaths. She concluded that “the combination of acidic water and elevated aluminum in the water released from the QMM site is the most probable connection between the water releases and the fish kills observed after those releases.”

Rio Tinto maintained that its mining operations were not responsible for the fish deaths. Yet a similar combination of metals and low pH, or acidity, in water has caused fish deaths near multiple other mining sites. In the United States, for example, former lead and zinc mines at the Tar Creek Superfund site in Oklahoma caused environmental devastation and poisoned fish and people living around the mining sites, said Earl Hatley, the co-founder of LEAD Agency Inc., a grassroots environmental justice organization in the state.

With fishing no longer a viable option for single-income families, people have been forced to find other ways to make money.

“Life has gone badly since QMM took the port,” said Flogone Razatihanta, Zézé’s chatty 38-year-old wife. Razatihanta is a charismatic woman with sparkling eyes. A mother of four, she used to work as a fisherman’s wife, helping him sell his catch at the market. Like other fishers, they could make around 100,000 ariary on a good day, she says. Now, she says, that number is closer to 30,000 (about $6.72).

To help the family, Razatihanta joined a women’s weaving cooperative established by a nonprofit with financial support from QMM. Anôsy women are masterful weavers, making everything from baskets to rugs from a local reed called mahampy.

At the studio, which is located on a nearby college campus, dozens of women gather around a few long tables. A leather maker has come from Antananarivo to do some training workshops for them. Razatihanta sits cross-legged on the floor of the adjoining showroom, surrounded by colorful woven baskets. The problem is that she has no market to sell them. The project has provided the skills and training but has failed to connect the women to market opportunities. Zézé and Razatihanta say they are unable to send all their children to school at the same time, because they don’t have enough money.

Another challenge is procuring the high-quality mahampy needed to make the items. Ever since the mine was constructed, the mahampy forests along the water have been degraded, locals say. They don’t produce enough, forcing the women to buy from sellers outside the region.

“We have mahampy but it’s not enough,” said Razatihanta. “We have no access to it anymore.”

Blood and Water

Clean water has long been an issue around the QMM mine, and in recent years, it has become the main issue. Around 15,000 people draw their drinking water from the lakes and waterways around the mine.

Rio Tinto has made numerous promises around water provision for locals. “We believe that access to safe and clean water is a fundamental human right and continue to make this a community development priority,” the Rio Tinto spokesperson told The Intercept.

In July 2022, the company commissioned a global water treatment company to design and construct a pilot-scale unit to treat water using controlled addition of limestone, “so that it complies with the national decree for pH and aluminum concentration,” the spokesperson said. The plant has treated approximately 1,750,000 m³ of water during its first year of operation and will be expanded to a full-scale plant in 2024.

Today, residents complain of a water hierarchy in the area. Water treated in the QMM facility is intended only for the mine workforce and certain communities living close to the mine, QMM explained in its most recent water report.

Water treated in the QMM facility is intended only for the mine workforce and certain communities living close to the mine.

In that report, released at the end of 2023, QMM’s managing director David-Alexandre Tremblay wrote, “we have heard concerns that our operations at Mandena are potentially causing harm to the quality and availability of water,” and emphasized that QMM is trying to address concerns about the transparency and equity of water management.

One strategy is to develop a community-led water monitoring program. “We believe the more we involve the communities in water management, and understand how they use the land and environment, the better our water strategy will be,” said Rio Tinto’s spokesperson.

After Orengo, the director of ALT-UK, discovered the buffer zone breach discovery in 2017, ALT-UK asked Swanson, the ecologist from Canada, to conduct a radioactivity study to determine the presence of radioactive material in the surrounding waterways. The study found that uranium was detectable — in concentrations up to 50 times the WHO drinking water quality guidelines for chemical toxicity — in samples from all QMM’s river water monitoring stations.

“The QMM mine definitely releases more uranium into water on the site, thus creating an enhanced source of uranium to the Mandromondromotra River and Lac Ambavarano,” Swanson wrote in a 2019 memo.

In a response, QMM denied having any impact on the high levels of uranium in the water and claimed that the elevated levels were a naturally occurring result of local geological conditions. “This is not a QMM related impact and is an aspect of the water used by local communities before the commencement of construction or operations at QMM,” the company argued.

But the company has started bringing in water by boat to villages along the lakes anyway. It is also building water treatment facilities and pumps as it attempts to create permanent safe water infrastructure for the local population. These efforts are still underway, with half-completed construction projects dotting the landscape. And they are happening years after the mine became operational, and only after disruptive protests by the residents.

Following Swanson’s radioactivity study, Emerman, the mining expert who studied the breach, conducted his own analysis using data from Rio Tinto and samples collected by local residents. It revealed that the maximum downstream lead and uranium concentrations were 40 and 52 times higher, respectively, than the WHO-recommended standards for drinking water. Emerman also found that lead levels were 4.9 times higher downstream of the mine, and uranium levels were 24 times higher downstream. According to Emerman, these results, and their contrast with the 2001 baseline study, point to QMM as the source of contamination.

Because uranium is highly toxic, inhalation or ingestion can result in decreased kidney function or, in extreme cases, kidney failure. Lead poisoning is a more familiar issue. There is no safe level of lead exposure. Thirty percent of global idiopathic intellectual disability is thought to be a result of lead exposure. While it affects everyone, lead exposure has the greatest negative impact on children when consumed, because it affects neurologic development.

“They put in a lot of safety measures in countries where people are watching. Not in countries like Madagascar, where nobody’s watching.”

“That’s largely because children’s neurological development is still very immature. So, they’re developing neurons, they’re forming millions of them per day. And neural development itself is critical to your long-term cognitive ability,” said Gabriel Filippelli, a biogeochemist with expertise in lead poisoning.

Pregnant mothers exposed to lead can suffer spontaneous abortions. Nursing mothers are also at great risk, because they share the lead with fetuses in the womb, through breastmilk or formula mixed with lead-contaminated water.

Mining source contamination is an all-too-familiar problem. “We know this is a problem with mines. The mine operators know that it’s a problem with mines,” said Filippelli. “So, that’s why they put in a lot of safety measures in countries where people are watching. Not in countries like Madagascar, where nobody’s watching.”

The fisherman Olivier Randimbisoa and his 24-year-old niece Morella Razafimandimby both have young children who have been drinking lake water since they were born. Both say they have a child who is passing blood in their urine, and both blame QMM. Doctors have been unable to determine the source of the problem, and the parents are frantic.

“All we need is to be healthy,” said Razafimandimby.

In this part of Madagascar, which is rife with parasites and water-borne illnesses, it’s difficult to assign blame for any particular child’s illness. The area is deficient in high-quality health care facilities. A visit to a center that the government touts as a top-tier facility revealed a three-room building with a leaking roof and five rotting mattresses. Despite serving dozens of small villages living adjacent to the mine, there were only nurses to see patients, rather than medical doctors. Power was unreliable. Refrigeration was scant.

There were no blood lead levels testing publicly available for the population living around the QMM mine until now. In its new claim, Leigh Day states that blood lead level testing on 58 people living around the mine, among them children, shows elevated levels of lead. Scientific studies have found that children with blood lead levels above the WHO’s threshold of 5 micrograms per deciliter are likely to suffer at least some amount of mental impairment as a result. 

An expert clinical toxicologist working with Leigh Day has recommended ongoing periodic blood lead testing for all 58 of the clients who were tested. For at-risk groups such as children, women of child-bearing age, and those with a blood lead level above the WHO reference level, the expert has recommended additional interventions including clinical monitoring, more frequent blood lead testing, nutritional supplements, and additional antenatal care, where appropriate. One client with particularly high blood lead levels has been advised to undergo chelation therapy, which helps remove pollutants from the bloodstream.

“Rio Tinto continues to make bold public commitments about safeguarding vital water sources and respecting the rights of those affected by its operations wherever in the world they may be,” said Dowling, of Leigh Day. “We trust the company will now stand behind those commitments and engage constructively with our clients’ claims at an early stage to ensure the communities no longer have to rely on polluted water and get the medical attention they need.”

Late last year, Rio Tinto released its QMM Water Report 2021-2023, which included new water sampling data as well as additional information about the company’s developing water management practices. The report showed that all parameters were below the analytical limits of detection upstream and downstream of the mine’s release point during the reporting period. However, Emerman independently assessed the report and expressed concern that Rio Tinto looked only at recent data in isolation and ignored baseline and historical data, used inconsistent detection limits, and even appeared to have two versions of what should be the same dataset. Nonetheless, Emerman concluded that the new data confirmed “the detrimental impact of the QMM mine on regional water quality,” and that it failed to alter his earlier conclusions. 

“As presented in the Water Report 2021-2023, acknowledging the challenges associated with the on-site laboratory analytical processes, we decided in 2021 to use external accredited laboratories to conduct water quality sample analyses and also initiated work to upgrade our on-site laboratory capability and processes,” the Rio Tinto spokesperson wrote in response. “The metal monitoring data presented in this Water Report is based only on external laboratory data obtained from [an] accredited laboratory. In addition to their accredited quality assurance procedures, this facility undertakes water quality analyses with limits of analytical detection that are more suitable for environmental assessment.”

Rio Tinto also published the results of a new radioactivity study that it commissioned. “QMM’s contribution to radiation dose within the community has been assessed and found to be far smaller than the variation in natural background radiation levels and below national and international regulatory limits for radiation,” Rio Tinto wrote in a press release announcing the study results. The study “concludes there is no basis for heightened health concerns around local radiation levels,” the spokesperson told The Intercept, adding that the company is committed to managing radiation, water quality, and working transparently with the regulator and the communities.

“The consequence of being wrong is an increase in the risk of people getting cancer.”

Swanson, the radioactivity expert, independently assessed the study. While commending improvements in monitoring, she nonetheless concluded that “the level of confidence in the conclusions presented in the report cannot be determined quantitatively because of limitations of the study design.” Swanson expressed particular concern about a lack of data from the river during times when QMM process wastewater was being discharged.

“If I were a decision-maker, and I was asking them, ‘Are you 95 percent confident, or are you only 80 percent confident in the results of the study?’, they wouldn’t be able to say,” Swanson told The Intercept. “The consequence of being wrong is an increase in the risk of people getting cancer.”

The Rio Tinto spokesperson wrote that the company has invited Swanson to give her feedback on the report, but that the meeting has not yet happened. “We are keen to discuss Dr Swanson’s views on the report,” the spokesperson wrote. “We remain committed to managing radiation at our operations, and to transparently working with the regulator and the host communities to ensure effective monitoring.”

Work Is Work

Because jobs are scarce in the region, attitudes toward the mine’s presence are complex and often contradictory. People resent the environmental degradation, health problems, and other changes to their way of life that they attribute to the mine. Yet it remains, for many, the only hope they have of escaping poverty and providing a higher standard of living for their children.

“We’ve faced many hardships in life,” said Razatihanta, Zézé’s wife. “My dream is that my husband doesn’t have to work, so he doesn’t have to fish.” Razatihanta wants her sons to get their driving licenses, so they can get jobs as drivers at QMM. “The mine is already there, so what can we do?” she asks. “Whether we like it or not, it’s already operational, so it’s better to send our boys there to take advantage of it and earn a salary.”

Olivier Randimbisoa feels the same way. He has applied to work at QMM three times but has never gotten a job there.

“It doesn’t matter if we’re happy or not happy,” he said. “It’s the government that decided to bring this company here. But work is work. Less than half the population has work. You either work as a fisherman or you work at the mine, and fishing has changed a lot, so I don’t have much choice.”

According to Rio Tinto, QMM currently employs 2,000 people with the with the vast majority being Malagasy nationals and 73 percent coming from local communities.

But Randimbisoa believes that QMM reserves highly skilled jobs and training opportunities only for foreigners or people from the capital, Antananarivo.

“Even if you’re highly qualified, even if you have the best degree in the world, if you’re coming from Fort Dauphin, you get the worst jobs,” he said. “Most people from here are getting lower [paying] jobs, like drivers.”

Georges Marolahy Razafidrafara, who lives in a small bamboo house in Mandramondramotra, experienced this firsthand. He began working for QMM in 2001, before the mine had been built, as an environmentalist taking care of seedlings. In 2005, he was transferred to the mining site, where he helped the geologists with their work.

Razafidrafara says that in 2008, a QMM executive assured villagers in Mandramondramotra that they would be a top hiring priority for the company. Razafidrafara says he did work at the mine on three-month temporary contracts, at times making as much as 250,000 ariary (about $56) per month, but he was never given a full-time job. He says he lived in a state of constant insecurity.

One of his responsibilities was giving tours to students and people coming to visit the mine from Antananarivo. As Razafidrafara watched, some of those students got full-time jobs at the mine, while he continued making ends meet on the short-term contracts. “They were all well-treated,” he said, taking a strong drag from his cigarette.

“Rio Tinto doesn’t care about me,” he said. “They’re just here for profit.”

The dichotomy in this town is striking. Just across from Razafidrafara’s house is another home with a brand-new red motorcycle parked outside. A QMM engineer lives there. He has worked at the mine for 10 years, is a full-time employee with benefits, and has sent all his children to university. Critics of the mine say that its divide-and-conquer strategy is highly effective: Those benefiting from the mine will fight to protect it against anyone who wants to see it held to account.

Razafidrafara worries about the water quality, especially because he has a daughter who is still just a toddler. “QMM always says ‘Yeah, we take the water samples to analyze in the lab,’ but we never get the results,” he said. “They always come back and say it’s drinkable, but they truck water into the mine [for their employees].”

The way Razafidrafara sees it, the local population were promised prosperity. Instead, they got poison.

The reporting for this investigation was supported by a grant from Journalists for Transparency, an initiative of Transparency International.

The post Rio Tinto’s Madagascar Mine Promised Prosperity. It Tainted a Community. appeared first on The Intercept.

Welcome to the Miami Seaquarium: one of the oldest oceanariums in the United States, and, increasingly, one of the most notorious. Several animals, including a famed orca whale, have died in its care in recent years, while it has been forced to relinquish custody of numerous other animals amid investigations by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees compliance with the Animal Welfare Act, a federal law that regulates animal treatment in exhibition settings. Against that backdrop, the Seaquarium’s head veterinarian resigned this week — following the departures of three veterinary staffers who quit in protest in recent months — while an animal rights organization recently called for a local police investigation into allegations of animal cruelty at the facility.

Once a classic family outing or school field trip, aquariums, like zoos, have seen their public image collapse over the last decade or so. The 2013 film “Blackfish,” about an orca whale named Tilikum held in captivity at SeaWorld, was pivotal in turning public opinion. The film depicted how the extreme stress inflicted on orcas like Tilikum upon their capture — and subsequent lifetime of captivity and forced performances — cascades into staying trauma and aggression toward other marine animals and even humans. The production helped spur an increasing social awareness about “the physical and psychological suffering of marine mammals,” said Jared Goodman, PETA Foundation general counsel for animal law.

Since then, the public has more meaningfully confronted “just what [animals] have to endure to survive in marine parks,” Goodman said. “They’re not even thriving, it’s just what it takes to survive there. And the public was rightfully outraged about that.”

“We have to stop thinking that we are the only species that matters.”

Naomi Rose, senior scientist of marine mammal biology at the Animal Welfare Institute, put a finer point on it. “If we cannot provide species with good welfare in zoos and aquaria, we should not hold them there,” Rose told The Intercept. “That’s just common sense and respectful. We have to stop thinking that we are the only species that matters.”

In their resignation letters, the Seaquarium’s former veterinary staff who quit in the fall cited a management that has dismissed staff concerns regarding animal care, been delinquent on repaying debts, and kept the facility understaffed.

In early February, an independent veterinarian who runs the animal rights group Our Honor raised alarm about possible animal cruelty violations at the Seaquarium in letters to Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, county commissioners, the local prosecutor, and the city and county police. After touring the facility in January and speaking with recently departed employees, the vet, Crystal Heath, urged local officials to take action against the Dolphin Company, which owns the Seaquarium.

“The executives at The Dolphin Company must be held accountable for these animal cruelty violations,” Heath wrote in her letter, which was signed by 18 other vets from Florida and around the country. “They foster an environment of fear, coercion, and false hope while failing to pay their debts or update their antiquated, crumbling facilities. The Dolphin Company has a history of threatening and retaliating against staff who voice concerns about the lack of care for the animals and dilapidated facilities.”

The Miami-Dade Police Department told The Intercept that it is evaluating the contents of Heath’s letter and is also “aware of USDA oversight and investigation.” The Seaquarium did not respond to requests for comment. In recent public statements, the Dolphin Company has said that it takes animal welfare seriously and that it is in compliance with relevant laws; it has also disputed some findings by federal investigators or taken action to remedy others.

The mounting pressure for local officials to act comes as the county, which owns the site of the facility, has threatened the Seaquarium with terminating its lease over USDA citations for animal welfare violations and for being delinquent on rent payments.

In a statement to The Intercept, Levine Cava said that, while the facility has taken some remedial action, she remains “concerned about the poor quality of animal care that has been repeatedly documented by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) since last year.” She and the county commissioner who represents the Seaquarium’s district are exploring “all the options available to ensure the safety of the animals and the interests of our residents now and in the future,” she wrote. “Our County team is actively working on possible next steps.”

In February, the facility lost its certification with the American Humane Association, which it is required to hold under its lease agreement. Should the county cancel the lease, it would essentially force the Seaquarium to shut down.

“I do think the county is in a really unique position here to do the right thing,” Goodman, the PETA general counsel, told The Intercept. “Certainly our perspective is that they’ve proven unwilling or unable to be fully compliant with the Animal Welfare Act, and that should be a sufficient basis for the county to terminate the lease.”

“These Animals Deserve Better”

At nearly 70 years old, the Miami Seaquarium was one of the first facilities of its kind in the country, predating the likes of SeaWorld. At one point it was the third largest contributor to Miami-Dade County’s revenue through lease and tax payments, yet its star has descended in recent years — evident in public comments about it, statements of disgust from staff who recently departed it, and continuous citations from those who oversee it.

Several staff members have reached a breaking point in recent months. During an inspection last summer, the USDA found that three veterinary technicians had recently resigned — and that there was a single veterinarian on staff. In the fall, another three staff members — an associate veterinarian, a technician, and a veterinary administrative assistant — resigned in rejection of an environment that they said was ill-fitted toward animal, or even staff, care. And now, the facility’s last remaining head veterinarian is on her way out too.

“This news raises even more concerns about the conditions and safety of the animals currently under their care,” Levine Cava, the mayor, wrote in a statement about the head veterinarian’s departure. “Miami-Dade County is taking all steps necessary to enforce compliance with our current lease agreement as we move closer to termination.”

Issues of animal welfare at the Seaquarium have been top of mind for staff who have resigned. “Never in my 14 years working as a Certified Veterinary Technician have I ever had so much dis-pleasure working with someone,” one former staff member who resigned in October wrote in an email to management, calling the company deceitful and greedy. “I don’t know how you can sleep at night lying and prioritizing other things than the animals’ health and wellbeing. These animals deserve better than this and it breaks my heart every night knowing there’s not even a fight in any of you to TRY!”

In internal veterinary journals reviewed by The Intercept, staff expressed an array of frustrations, including butting heads with an outside consulting veterinarian brought in by upper management to care for the beloved orca whale Toki, previously known as Lolita, who died last year. Another journal entry describes a parrot with a history of respiratory illness “continuing to pluck and self mutilate.” The parrot’s treatment was hampered by short staffing at the facility and financial restraints, the entry notes, and due to a “deteriorating” quality of life, its caretakers decided to euthanize it.  One former employee said that they provided copies of those journals to USDA investigators.

The former staff member, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, told The Intercept that upper management pressured staff members to “chaperone the USDA and make sure that they’re on the right path” when officials would visit. Others have raised concerns relating to USDA investigations as well. One employee who was fired in 2022 alleged in a disability discrimination and wrongful termination lawsuit that she was retaliated against after telling a USDA investigator that company management had coerced her to delete a video she captured of poor safety protocols during an “experimental dolphin veterinary examination.” (The Seaquarium has denied her allegations and filed a motion to dismiss the suit; the case is due for trial in September.)

Heath, the Our Honor vet, documented similar concerns in her letter to Miami-Dade County officials. The letter included testimony from a former employee who said that they feared retaliation for reporting concerns within the company or complying with USDA investigations — stifled both by pressure from upper management and strict nondisclosure agreements.

The former employee who spoke to The Intercept said that they also had serious disagreements with management about animal care, many of them stemming from a lack of funds. Higher-ups directed veterinarians to substitute medications when new ones could not be purchased due to unpaid bills, according to the former employee and an internal email reviewed by The Intercept.

At one point last year, the facility had more veterinarians than veterinarian technicians, contra staffing guidelines from the American Veterinary Medical Association, according to the former employee. A shortage of technicians means that veterinarians end up doing tasks — like lab work, nursing care, and grooming — that they certainly could do, but are not always accustomed to after becoming so specialized. “It takes away from what they should have been doing, which is reviewing records, speaking to keepers to make sure that they understand any changes in behavior, things like that,” the former employee said. 

Another former staff member wrote in a November resignation letter that they did “not believe the values of this company align with my own.” The person decided to quit after growing increasingly less comfortable with the medical direction of the company, “with minimal diagnostic equipment, no support staff, and now compromised relationships with outside labs, veterinary colleagues, and veterinary vendors due to delinquent bills.” The concerns about the Seaquarium’s finances are documented in internal communications reviewed by The Intercept. In an email to Seaquarium leadership, veterinary staff noted that outstanding debts to a number of labs and vendors impeded their ability to conduct out-of-house medical tests and that they were unable to purchase vitamin supplements and diagnostic equipment.

The Seaquarium’s management — both the previous Festival Fun Parks, and the current MS Leisure Company (owned by the Dolphin Company) — has been sued by debtors 10 times within the past two years. Seven of those cases — brought by a pharmacy, a contractor that built a whale gate, a novelty toy and gift company, a scaffolding company, a security provider, a marine maintenance company, and a boat lift company — remain open at various stages in the legal process, with the plaintiffs altogether seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Seaquarium. The company filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit involving the whale gate and has not yet filed responses in the remaining lawsuits.

Repeat Inspections

Just since last summer, USDA investigators visited the Seaquarium multiple times and reported troubling findings. In July, investigators found a young dolphin with plastic and “a large piece of cement” in its digestive tract and another dolphin with “multiple bilateral rib fractures.” The USDA also cited the Seaquarium for failing “to maintain a sufficient number of adequately trained employees.” A single veterinarian, the report said, was tasked with caring for 46 marine mammals and hundreds of birds, fish, sharks, and rays.

The following month, Toki died of old age and chronic illnesses, worn by the limited conditions and life the orca whale had been confined to for years. In 2021, for example, USDA reports showed that veterinarians were concerned that the orca was being underfed while being forced to exert herself in training and shows, while medical records showed her suffering from jaw injuries, likely from specific motions in performances.

The Seaquarium kept Toki in the smallest orca tank in North America, commonly referred to as the “whale bowl.” In 2022, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or APHIS, noted in an inspection that Toki’s tank did not meet the Animal Welfare Act’s minimum space requirements.

That acknowledgement was too little, too late, said Rose, the marine biologist. “The tank didn’t suddenly shrink overnight and the space regulations have been the same since 1984,” Rose told The Intercept. “It was surreal.”

“It is an ongoing joke that an animal has to die before APHIS will act,” Rose said, “but in fact even when an animal dies, as Toki did, nothing happens.”

The USDA returned to the Seaquarium in October and found a sea lion in so much pain due to a delayed cataract surgery that she refused to eat, among other animal welfare violations, according to a copy of its report that was obtained by the advocacy group Dolphin Project. (The sea lion was euthanized in January.) In early November, the agency made the report from its July investigation public. Shortly afterward, the Miami-Dade County Parks, Recreation, and Open Spaces office warned the Dolphin Company that it had 45 days to rectify the violations that USDA had flagged. The county “had determined that the Seaquarium is in violation” of its lease agreement, the office wrote. (The Seaquarium appealed the USDA findings, arguing that many of the issues predate the Dolphin Company’s ownership of the facility and that it had taken steps to rectify some violations.)

While the Seaquarium was being scrutinized over the USDA findings, UrgentSeas — a whistleblower organization advocating for the end of animal captivity — filmed a drone video that showed a 67-year-old manatee, Romeo, aimlessly swimming in circles in a small filthy tank. The November 25 video went viral, prompting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to transport Romeo and two other sea cows, Juliet and Charity, to other facilities.

The situation escalated in December, first when the county dinged the Seaquarium with another violation, after USDA inspectors found a shortage of “sufficient number of adequately trained employees.” The Seaquarium quickly filed an appeal with the USDA and the county, contesting the charge. On December 22, the county issued yet another notice of default that cited a list of infrastructure violations and the facility owing nearly $90,000 in past rent. (The Miami-Dade mayor told The Intercept that the Seaquarium has until March 10 to pay up before financial penalties are imposed.)

Days later, Sundance, a bottlenose dolphin whose health USDA investigators raised concerns about last summer, died. The death prompted USDA officials to conduct another inspection of the aquarium on January 9, during which officials cited several Animal Welfare Act violations, including a lack of appropriate veterinary care for 25 animals. The feds returned again on January 17 to find four animals “still in need of immediate veterinary care,” prompting them to issue a notice of intent to confiscate the animals.

On January 21, Levine Cava, the Miami-Dade mayor, warned the Seaquarium that the county had begun “diligently reviewing all necessary actions” to pursue terminating the facility’s lease, citing the recent USDA investigations. She noted that the county was working with the USDA, which said that it had not confiscated an animal in 30 years. “This underscores the gravity of the situation and cannot be taken lightly,” Levine Cava wrote.

Two days later, USDA officials said that the Seaquarium “took necessary corrective action to come into compliance” with regard to the four animals who were in need of veterinary care.

Heath, the Our Honor vet, meanwhile told Miami-Dade officials in her February 5 letter that animals at the Seaquarium were suffering from skin lesions, clouded eyes or cataracts, and signs of distress. She formed those observations when she independently toured and investigated the Seaquarium in January and after reviewing photos taken in early February. Those conditions constitute a litany of animal cruelty law violations, she wrote in the letter.

The Seaquarium’s ability to stave off investigators followed a pattern. Goodman, the lawyer from PETA, said that the facility had been able to “superficially” rectify violations in ways “apparently sufficient for the USDA” over the past several years.

The Dolphin Company took over management of the Miami Seaquarium from another company two years ago. Levine Cava celebrated USDA approval of the deal at the time, calling it “turning the page and beginning a bright new chapter in the Seaquarium’s history.” She said her administration’s priorities included operation of the Seaquarium “pursuant to all applicable federal and state laws and regulations, including the Animal Welfare Act,” gesturing toward a desire to “ensure that these commitments are kept.”

Heath and the other vets pointed to the change in management in their letter to local officials. They entreated the county to shutter the facility and to prevent the management company from transporting animals to another of its facilities. “When The Dolphin Company purchased Miami Seaquarium, like you, we had high hopes that things were going to change, but they have not,” they wrote. “Because of these violations of Florida law, we urge you to use your power not only to revoke the Dolphin Company’s lease but also to encourage law enforcement to pursue the legal action needed to protect the animals.”

The post Federal Probes, Sick Animals, and Fed-Up Vets: The Miami Seaquarium Is on the Brink of Collapse appeared first on The Intercept.

In the year since the disaster, vinyl chloride has also faced heightened scrutiny. But despite a newfound focus on the chemical’s dangers, the market for vinyl products is continuing to grow. Major petrochemical companies are expanding their operations — and the vinyl industry is spending more money than ever before to lobby lawmakers on its talking points.

Vinyl chloride is a key building block for the production of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, a plastic found in a range of construction materials, medical devices, and household items. For decades, environmental advocates have sounded the alarm over PVC, calling it the “poison plastic”: In addition to vinyl chloride, which is classified as a Group A human carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency, PVC contains harmful additives like phthalates and flame retardants. The production process releases massive amounts of greenhouse gases, exposes workers to asbestos and the class of industrial “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, and sends toxic pollutants into front-line communities.

“There’s been growing interest to regulate vinyl chloride, PVC plastic, and its additives at the state level, the national level, and the international level over the last year,” said Mike Schade, a campaign director for Toxic-Free Future, who has co-authored multiple reports on the dangers of producing, transporting, and disposing of vinyl chloride. “We’re definitely concerned that, at the same time as we’re learning more and more about the dangers of vinyl chloride and the chemicals associated with its life cycle, the plastics industry has been expanding in recent years, including the PVC plastics industry.”

Betting on More Plastic

Amid growing calls to phase out fossil fuels, the industry is now betting on plastic — created using petroleum-derived chemicals like vinyl chloride — as a lifeline.

In recent years, OxyVinyls — a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum — Formosa Plastics, and Shintech have announced billion-dollar plans to expand their PVC plastic operations. Four months after the East Palestine disaster, chemical manufacturer Orbia declared its intentions to build a massive vinyl plant in the United States before 2028.

Most petrochemical operations, including PVC plants, are sited in the Gulf Coast region, where marginalized communities bear the brunt of industrial pollution. Exposure to vinyl chloride is associated with an increased risk of liver, brain, and lung cancer, as well as lymphoma and leukemia. When vinyl chloride burns, it can cause even more harm, releasing a highly toxic class of chemical compounds known as dioxins.

A 2023 Toxic-Free Future report noted that at least four low-income communities of color in Louisiana have been forced to relocate due to contamination from the vinyl plastics industry. This includes Mossville, one of the first towns founded by freed slaves in the South. Toxicology tests conducted by the federal government determined that Mossville residents, living in the shadow of pollution from vinyl chloride manufacturers, had elevated levels of dioxins in their bodies.

That testing was completed in 1998. But the devastation wrought by vinyl chloride is ongoing: In January, the EPA released a risk assessment detailing findings of toxic emissions near a Westlake Chemical vinyl plant in Calvert City, Kentucky. After collecting air monitoring data for more than a year, the EPA determined that emissions exceeded the state’s acceptable levels of lifetime cancer risk.

The findings arrive two months after Westlake made headlines for a different reason: The company is investing $134 million to expand its PVC pipe plant in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Yvette Arellano, founder and director of the grassroots environmental justice organization Fenceline Watch, noted that the Houston area has also seen “massive investments” from petrochemical companies in recent years. The 52-mile Houston Ship Channel is already one of the country’s most polluted areas, home to more than 600 manufacturers of plastics and plastic feedstocks.

Last month, Amnesty International released a report that found the severity of toxic pollution in the Houston Ship Channel amounts to a human rights violation.

“The expansion in the Houston Ship Channel is largely fueled by the plastics industry, including PVC and vinyl,” said Arellano. “We’re talking about a public health threat that’s multiplied because of the cumulative impact of these facilities.”

Increased Lobbying

In 2022, OxyVinyls, Shintech, Westlake, and Formosa collectively released more than half a million pounds of vinyl chloride into the air, according to an analysis of Toxic Release Inventory data by Material Research. But as members of the Vinyl Institute, the leading lobbying group for the PVC and vinyl chloride industry, the four companies are fighting hard to convince lawmakers that PVC is safe and sustainable.

While the group has been active on Capitol Hill for decades, it upped its federal lobbying spend to $560,000 last year. According to disclosures, lobbyists met with lawmakers to discuss topics like the regulation of polyvinyl chloride and the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which seeks to reduce the production of single-use plastics. The Vinyl Institute opposes the act, rallying for unproven chemical recycling technologies over source reduction strategies.

At the state level, the Vinyl Institute’s website boasts that it “worked close with state partners to slow down or stop PVC bans around the nation.” Legislation introduced in Maine, California, and New York last year in the wake of the East Palestine derailment sought to ban the use of PVC and other toxic substances in consumer packaging. Maine’s bill quickly died and California’s went dormant; New York’s was referred to the Environmental Conservation Committee earlier this month.

“Our industry is committed to improving our sustainable practices. Over three decades the industry has decreased ambient emissions of vinyl chloride by 87 percent per unit,” the Vinyl Institute wrote in response to questions from The Intercept. “While many unfortunately equate the state of the industry in the 1970s to today, we have made great strides in worker safety and emissions reductions in the five decades since, and part of our state efforts is to ensure lawmakers are making decisions with up-to-date scientific data.”

PVC was also challenged at the international level last year, as the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution convened twice to discuss the proposed Global Plastics Treaty. The European Union and dozens of countries have advocated for a PVC ban.

“Our team was on the ground at these meetings,” states the Vinyl Institute’s site, “to educate delegates on the positive impact that PVC products have on human rights, equity and public health around the globe.”

Fenceline Watch has also been an observer at the treaty discussions, pushing for an approach to plastic management that protects human health and the environment. Arellano noted that the United States has taken a more “business-friendly approach” to the discussions — a “complete opposite stance” from small Pacific Island nations, which must contend with huge amounts of the world’s plastic washing up on their shores.

“A ban on PVC would harm developing nations and undermine the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals,” the Vinyl Institute wrote to The Intercept. “We all agree with the overarching goal of eliminating plastic waste, and the Vinyl Institute is present at these meetings to educate the global community on the importance of PVC products in health care and clean drinking water.”

Meanwhile, the petrochemical industry is ramping up efforts to undermine the EPA: In 2023, the Vinyl Institute sued the agency over an order it issued under the reformed Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA. The EPA designated 1,1,2-trichloroethane, a potentially carcinogenic chemical used to create vinyl chloride, as a “high priority” for risk evaluation and instructed companies to perform new toxicity tests on birds — something the Vinyl Institute has called “unnecessary,” “unjustified,” and “improper.”

That hasn’t stopped the EPA from putting vinyl chloride itself in its crosshairs. On December 14, the agency announced it had added the chemical to its list of priorities for formal review under the TSCA, a step that could potentially lead to an eventual vinyl chloride ban.

“We really need to be transitioning away from toxic petrochemicals and dangerous petrochemical plastics like vinyl, especially when we know there are viable, safer alternatives,” said Schade. “I think the tide is beginning to turn, and I think the East Palestine disaster this last year was a real wakeup call.”

The post Vinyl Chloride Industry Keeps Expanding Despite East Palestine Disaster appeared first on The Intercept.

Louisiana sued the EPA on December 19, alleging that the federal agency had failed to properly respond to the state’s sprawling Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request sent by former state attorney general Jeff Landry.

Court filings note that the public records case is related to another, ongoing lawsuit brought against the EPA by Landry, a staunch advocate for the oil and gas industry who now serves as Louisiana’s governor. Shortly after Landry’s suit was filed, the EPA dropped its probe into the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s permitting practices, which advocates say disproportionately impact Black residents in Cancer Alley.

News that the state has sought to obtain such an array of communications as part of its efforts prompted allegations of intimidation from many of the Black residents who were targeted. It has also raised press freedom concerns for media organizations included in the request, described by FOIA experts as extremely unusual. 

“The Louisiana attorney general’s office protects industry more than they protect the people,” said Sharon Lavigne, a resident of St. James Parish who has long fought industrial proliferation in her community and whose emails were targeted in the request. “Maybe that’s why they got all of these emails, just to see what we’re doing and to see how they can stop us.” 

Landry filed the request on June 29, 2023, just one day after the EPA announced it was dropping its Cancer Alley civil rights investigation. 

The request seeks all records since March 2021 regarding “environmental justice in Louisiana, the Industrial Corridor in Louisiana,” and “the area called Cancer Alley.” It lists six advocates by name, all of whom are Black, as well as the organizations Rise St. James, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, and several other community and law groups who have represented Cancer Alley residents.

Due to the expansive nature of the request, the EPA said it would take more than a year to locate and provide all the records. Louisiana then sued to compel the agency to move more quickly.

The Louisiana attorney general’s office declined to answer questions from The Guardian and The Intercept over why it had requested such information, but filings in its FOIA lawsuit accuse the EPA of “prodigiously leaking information to the press” and allowing environmental advocacy groups to hold undue influence on decisions. 

An environmental law group said the attorney general’s accusations of external influence were hypocritical, noting that Landry’s office previously hired petrochemical lawyers to represent the state in its negotiations with the EPA. Those same lawyers were simultaneously representing one of the companies at the center of the EPA’s civil rights investigation, the Taiwanese petrochemical giant Formosa.

Landry’s request specifically seeks records containing mention of Formosa, as well as the Japanese firm Denka. Both companies are at the heart of ongoing campaigns and litigation in the region. Lavigne’s group, Rise St James, has been instrumental in thus far stopping Formosa from building a massive, multibillion-dollar plastics plant in their parish. A Louisiana appeals court recently reinstated Formosa’s air permits, overturning a 2022 ruling.

The request also asks for emails with national and local media including MSNBC, the Washington Post, and The Advocate, specifying nine journalists by name.

“We’re concerned that the State of Louisiana is abusing [FOIA] law to prevent reporters from engaging in newsgathering on matters of public interest.”

The co-author of this article, The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland, was one of the named journalists. “We are deeply concerned by what appears to be an attempt to intimidate journalists and interfere with their ability to report on alarming matters of environmental injustice — in particular, the dangerous toxicity of air in predominantly Black areas of Louisiana,” said Guardian U.S. general counsel Kai Falkenberg. “FOIA is an essential tool for informing the public on the workings of government, but in this case, we’re concerned that the State of Louisiana is abusing that law to prevent reporters from engaging in newsgathering on matters of public interest to readers in Louisiana and around the world.” 

The EPA declined to answer questions from The Guardian and The Intercept, citing ongoing litigation, but it provided the 940 pages of documents already handed to the Louisiana Department of Justice. Further releases are scheduled for February 2.

The documents, many of which were heavily redacted, contain typical requests for comment from several journalists, internal EPA discussions over drafting and scheduling, and EPA exchanges with environmental lawyers and nonprofits, including a list of the attendees at a meeting of leading Cancer Alley advocates.

Public records law in the U.S. dictates that, with certain exemptions, communications by or with local, state, and federal employees must be made available to the public. The law is intended to preserve government transparency.

David Cuillier, director of the Freedom of Information Project, said that requests for communications between the government and citizens, including journalists, are not uncommon. But those requests are typically made by other journalists, law groups, or members of the public — not state governments. 

“It’s totally weird and rare for a government agency to request, one, records from another agency, and, two, all the communications about these advocates and citizens and journalists,” Cuillier said.

Bill Quigley, longtime director of Loyola University New Orleans’s Law Clinic, also noted that “it is not at all common for states to sue the federal government over FOIA disputes.”

In a previous survey, Cuillier and his colleague found that only about 2 percent of public records requests are made by another government agency. Cuillier argued it would be in the best interests of Louisiana’s Department of Justice to be transparent over the FOIA’s purpose. Otherwise, he said, it gives the appearance that the state is “spying on political opponents.”

An environmental group likewise said that the requests, while lawful, would have a chilling effect on local advocates’ efforts — including those not specifically named by the request. The group, which asked not to be named, suggested the records request is an attempt to shift the narrative, framing the EPA as suspect, rather than polluters themselves.

Robert Taylor, an 83-year-old lifelong resident of St. John Parish who leads a grassroots group fighting against pollution linked to Denka’s plant, said it was “frightening” and “horrible” to know the state government had targeted his emails. 

“It’s certainly intimidation. What other reason could there be for it?” Taylor said.

Louisiana’s lawsuit against the EPA’s Cancer Alley investigation is ongoing and expected to advance to the Supreme Court. In a recent hearing, Judge James D. Cain, appointed by former President Donald Trump, rejected the EPA’s motion to dismiss and appears ready to side with Louisiana, citing “the whims of the EPA and its overarching mandate.” Cain, who is also presiding over Louisiana’s FOIA lawsuit, issued a ruling on January 23 temporarily blocking the EPA from enforcing some aspects of civil rights law in Louisiana.

Troy Carter, Louisiana’s lone Democrat in Congress whose district includes the Cancer Alley region, urged the state government to drop both lawsuits against the EPA and its pursuit of records. 

“This would remove any need for these citizens’ private conversations with the government to be disclosed,” Carter said. “The First Amendment protects the right to free speech. The government should not have any appearance of targeting private individuals in a manner that could inhibit freedom.” 

The post “Certainly Intimidation”: Louisiana Sues EPA for Emails With Journalists and Cancer Alley Residents appeared first on The Intercept.

The infamous 85-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is one of the nation’s most polluted corners; residents here have spent decades fighting for clean air and water. That fight escalated in 2022, when local environmental justice groups filed complaints with the Environmental Protection Agency, alleging that the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality had engaged in racial discrimination under the Civil Rights Act. In a watershed moment, the EPA opened a civil rights investigation into Louisiana’s permitting practices. 

But just when the EPA appeared poised to force the LDEQ to make meaningful changes, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry — now the state’s governor — sued. Landry’s suit challenges a key piece of the agency’s regulatory authority: the disparate impact standard, which says that policies that cause disproportionate harm to people of color are in violation of the Civil Rights Act. This enables the EPA to argue that it’s discriminatory for state agencies to keep greenlighting contaminating facilities in communities of color already overburdened by pollution — such as in Cancer Alley — even if official policies do not announce discrimination as their intent. 

Five weeks after Landry filed his suit, the EPA dropped its investigation, effectively leaving Cancer Alley residents to continue the struggle on their own.

“It was devastating,” recalled Sharon Lavigne, founder of the grassroots organization Rise St. James. For her work spearheading the fight to stop polluters in Cancer Alley, Lavigne is regarded as a figurehead of the environmental justice movement. Now, it appears that Landry’s suit could have a reverberating impact far from her hometown, as the EPA backs down from environmental justice cases across the country.

In Flint, Michigan, advocates say that Landry’s suit has already led to the collapse of their own chance at justice. This month, the EPA dropped a Houston case in the same way, without mandating any sweeping reforms. Attorneys told The Intercept they are concerned about the possibility of similarly disappointing outcomes in Detroit, St. Louis, eastern North Carolina, and elsewhere.

Experts say that the EPA appears to be shying away from certain Civil Rights Act investigations in states that are hostile to environmental justice, due to fears that Landry’s suit or similar efforts could make their way to the conservative Supreme Court. If that happened, the court appears ready to rule against the EPA — a verdict that could not only undermine the agency’s authority, but also significantly limit the ability of all federal agencies to enforce civil rights law.

“The lawsuit does not just challenge the EPA’s investigation and potential result of our complaint,” said Lisa Jordan, an attorney who helped file the Cancer Alley complaint. “It challenges the entire regulatory program.”

“Dystopian Nightmare”

The EPA is tasked with ensuring that its programs act in accordance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funds from employing discriminatory methods and practices. The agency has never actually withheld funding due to discrimination, but by 2021, a change seemed to be in the air: Under President Joe Biden’s administration, the EPA began to process and pursue over a dozen Title VI environmental justice cases in at least nine states, including Louisiana. 

In October 2022, the EPA issued a letter detailing evidence of racial discrimination in the Louisiana DEQ’s practices, signaling the agency was prepared to issue its second-ever finding of discrimination. A few months later, after more than a year of negotiations, the EPA released a draft agreement that contained landmark reforms. Among other changes, the reforms would’ve required the LDEQ to analyze whether pollution would disproportionately affect people of color when making permit decisions.

Lavigne said she hoped the EPA would “protect us more than our local officials.” EPA Administrator Michael Regan even visited Cancer Alley himself.

Then Landry sued. Referring to the EPA’s pursuit of environmental justice as a “dystopian nightmare,” Landry’s suit argues that the EPA can only enforce the Civil Rights Act in cases where state policies are explicitly racist — and that imposing the disparate impact standard merely ensures that “emissions are affecting the ‘right’ racial groups.” The suit decries the EPA as “social justice warriors fixated on race.”

Gov. Jeff Landry’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An EPA spokesperson said they could not grant interviews about the Landry suit since the litigation is still pending, but that the “EPA remains committed to strengthening our civil rights compliance work and to vigorous enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.”

Lavigne said she received a phone call from Regan’s staff the day after the EPA backed down and withdrew the draft of the negotiated agreement. They told her the EPA dropped the case “because they were trying to protect the Title VI program.” That response supports previous reporting suggesting that the EPA worried Landry’s suit could wind its way to the Supreme Court, prompting a devastating verdict.

The conservative Supreme Court has already greatly curtailed the EPA’s regulatory authority in recent cases over greenhouse gases and wetlands. And the EPA dropped its case the same week that the Supreme Court gutted affirmative action — a ruling that signaled the court’s antipathy toward the consideration of race by federal agencies. As no state has policies that explicitly announce discriminatory intent, virtually all the EPA’s Title VI cases rely on the disparate impact standard. If a conservative Supreme Court threw out that standard, it would crush the EPA’s ability to pursue environmental justice. 

Jordan, the attorney, told The Intercept she worries the EPA will now only conduct investigations in states that are “relatively friendly” to environmental justice and are unlikely to sue the agency, effectively abandoning the communities that need federal protections the most.

“Other states, like Louisiana and Texas, that are known to be discriminatory in their environmental programs, are the ones that would sue,” said Jordan. The EPA, she added, is “throwing Louisiana communities under the Title VI bus.”

And the EPA’s reversal still might not work in its favor. At a motion hearing on January 9, the EPA said it dropped its investigation due to procedural deadlines, not Landry’s suit. Still, the agency argued that the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana should dismiss the case in light of the dropped investigation. 

“It’s cheaper to move the people.”

Judge James D. Cain Jr., appointed by former President Donald Trump, will soon decide whether the case can continue. During the hearing, he made several statements that showed sympathy to Landry’s arguments. 

“It’s cheaper to move the people,” said Cain, according to a transcript of the hearing reviewed by The Intercept. “Why don’t the EPA just move the people? You’re going to shut the facilities down? I mean.”

Cain continued: “My last check, pollution doesn’t really discriminate based on race.”

“A Slap in the Face”

Whether or not Landry’s suit moves forward, environmental justice advocates are already seeing ripple effects. In August, the EPA abruptly backed down from another investigation — this time near Flint.

Flint’s case was strikingly similar: Plaintiffs alleged the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, had violated Title VI by issuing air pollution permits to an asphalt plant in a low-income Black community. Residents of the area were already experiencing high rates of hospitalization for asthma when the permit was granted, and air pollution from asphalt plants has been associated with increased risk of asthma attacks.

After months of negotiations and weekly meetings between the EPA, EGLE, and the advocates who filed the complaint, the EPA seemed to be thinking about “a transformational framework for addressing environmental justice issues,” recalled Nick Leonard, executive director of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, which co-filed the complaint with Earthjustice on behalf of residents.

But then, the EPA suddenly withdrew the draft of the negotiated agreement, instead signing a watered-down version that appeared to rubber-stamp EGLE’s policies. In the new draft, EGLE agreed to minor adjustments, such as providing a single air sensor to the community and updating its public outreach materials. The agreement does not require EGLE to conduct cumulative impact analyses, which means the agency still does not have to consider whether it’s issuing permits to polluters in already-polluted areas.

The reversal was crushing to those involved in the case. Nayyirah Shariff, director of the organizing coalition Flint Rising, said that “six months of our life and hundreds of hours” were essentially wasted when the negotiations were torpedoed. Having had childhood asthma herself while growing up in the Flint neighborhood, they called the EPA’s abandonment “a slap in the face.” A letter to EGLE co-written by Shariff and others called the new agreement “unjust and damaging” and warned that “Michigan certainly should not be following Louisiana’s lead.”

Though the EPA’s new agreement with EGLE was not made public until August 10, Shariff and Leonard told The Intercept that the EPA changed course at the end of June, within days of the EPA dropping its Cancer Alley investigation. As with the Louisiana case, the EPA didn’t provide a clear reason for its decision.

Leonard believes the EPA is specifically nervous about taking up litigation that would force state agencies to adopt rules around disparate cumulative impacts. The EPA will likely keep pursuing simpler procedural points, he said, like ensuring easier access to public meetings and translation services. But he fears they’ll no longer pursue more sweeping reforms.

“We were sort of just blindsided by how the conversation changed right around the time the Louisiana case came out,” said Leonard. 

When asked about the EPA’s choice to reverse course on the Flint case and other Title VI investigations in the wake of Landry’s suit, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the circumstances of the Louisiana investigation “do not apply to other pending EPA Title VI complaints.” The spokesperson added, “EPA is moving urgently, with an unprecedented commitment to advancing environmental justice. … The lived experiences of impacted communities must be central in EPA decision-making.”

Ted Zahrfeld, board chair of the St. Francis Prayer Center, one of the groups that sued EGLE and participated in ensuing negotiations, dubbed the neighborhood on Flint’s outskirts “Asthma Alley.”

“This Louisiana decision — or catastrophe, I would call it — happened, and within a few days, the EPA told us: ‘Well, there’s going to be a new agreement,’” said Zahrfeld. St. Francis Prayer Center sits directly across from the asphalt plant and has long been a source of refuge for the community. Now, in light of the EPA’s reversal, Zahrfeld wonders what he will say to people who come through the center’s doors. “What do I tell those parents? What do I tell that kid? The EPA is supposed to be protecting them — what are they doing?”

“A Chilling Effect”

Participants in environmental justice cases in Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Missouri all expressed concerns that Landry’s lawsuit had left them vulnerable.

Blakely Hildebrand, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, called Landry’s arguments against disparate cumulative impact “extremely concerning.” Hildebrand spearheaded a complaint around hog operations in Duplin County, North Carolina, which aimed to call the EPA’s attention to biogas, a fuel sourced from hog and other animal waste that pollutes surrounding air and water.

Hildebrand noted that Duplin is “located in the Black Belt, where formerly enslaved people settled — that’s where the industry chose to consolidate its operations.” Some of those breathing the polluted air in Duplin, she added, “have had their land passed down generation to generation, dating back to when their ancestors were emancipated.” This parallels Cancer Alley, where petrochemical plants sit in the footprint of plantations. Now, Hildebrand is not only worried for the Duplin case, but also for “environmental justice work throughout the southeast.”

“There are absolutely concerns based on what we saw in Louisiana,” Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee told The Intercept. Menefee has been part of a Title VI investigation into the growing number of concrete batch plants in Harris County’s Black and Latino neighborhoods, where Black residents are 40 percent more likely to die of cancer than the average Texan.

“When you’re in a red state like Texas, where the state environmental regulatory body has pretty much allowed industry to have free rein …we’re incredibly vulnerable,” said Menefee. “That last line of protection is going to be the EPA.” In November, he told the Houston Chronicle he hoped the EPA “would put the hammer down.”

But on January 2, after nearly a year of negotiations, the EPA announced they were closing the Texas case too. Just like in the Landry suit, the Texas Commission on Environment Quality accused the EPA of overreach, and the case was closed without any changes requiring the state to account for cumulative disparate impacts.

Menefee noted that the Texas regulatory agency recently approved another concrete crushing plant, this time across from a hospital, and again near neighborhoods of color already polluted by concrete plants. He said the agency told hundreds of objecting residents it was “not taking into account race.”

Leonard, of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, noted that while the EPA’s fears of a Supreme Court decision undermining their authority are well-founded, advocates and attorneys have always known that the agency would face pushback, should it decide to take more forceful action on civil rights enforcement. “They seem to not have been prepared for that inevitability,” he said.

Andre Segura, vice president of litigation for Earthjustice, attended the motion hearing for Landry’s suit on January 9. He said he had the impression that “the Department of Justice is treating this case very seriously,” but like Leonard, he noted that the pushback against the EPA’s efforts should be no surprise. “They’re going to challenge these fundamental tools” of civil rights enforcement, Segura said, referring to industry and political actors. “This is expected.” 

To Shariff of Flint Rising, Cancer Alley is emblematic of environmental justice struggles nationwide, as “a community that has been marginalized and abused for decades.”

“If they can’t get justice? Then it’s just a chilling effect for every other environmental justice community across the country,” they said.

Nevertheless, residents of sacrifice zones say that in the face of the EPA’s absence, they’ll continue the fight on their own.

When Lavigne, of Rise St. James, told EPA staff at the end of June that her community was upset, she was told they’d come down to give an explanation. That meeting never happened. But she did recently get a call from EPA head Regan — to alert her that, despite her objections, the EPA had decided to hand more authority to LDEQ. In the final days of 2023, the EPA announced that Louisiana will now be allowed to issue permits for wells that inject carbon underground, something she and her organization strongly oppose.

Still, Lavigne said she’ll ensure “the community gets what they need,” regardless of the EPA’s inaction. “We’re all we’ve got.”

Correction: February 2, 2024
This article misspelled the name of the Harris County attorney. His name is Christian Menefee, not Chris.

The post The EPA Is Backing Down From Environmental Justice Cases Nationwide appeared first on The Intercept.

It was hunting season in Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest, and the Marine sniper was alone on a backcountry trail more than an hour’s hike from his vehicle. He carried a camouflage Remington rifle and was in sight of an elk herd when a grizzly bear emerged from the brush. In a series of audio and video recordings from that autumn day in 2015, he narrated what happened next:

“I just got attacked by a grizzly.”

“I fucking laid into him.”

“I don’t want a big bear like that where I hunt.”

“I’m smoking him.”

“This is destiny. That bear attacked the wrong man.”

Finally, after tracking down the federally protected grizzly he had shot, seeing blood along the way, he said, “Looks like I found a dead bear.”

Kneeling over the dead grizzly with his rifle in hand, the man took selfies and recorded a narration of his wilderness adventure. The bear’s coat was splattered in blood. The Marine cut off one of its claws then continued his hunt, spending two more nights in the woods.

It wasn’t until he completed his hunt several days later that he reported the bear’s death, as required by federal law. By then, investigators were already on the case, alerted to the grizzly’s killing by an anonymous tipster who had encountered the Marine during his trip. The Marine kept the bear claw as a souvenir, the tipster told investigators, according to their report.

The Marine, on reserve duty at the time, told U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents that the bear charged him. The killing was in self-defense, he said. He was “happy for the experience and thought it was pretty cool.” After killing the bear, the Marine admitted, he went on to kill an elk that he did not tag, ignoring his legal obligation to register the kill with state officials who issue a set number of hunting licenses each year. His plan, he told investigators, was to illegally use his tag for a future hunt.

The Marine, whose name is redacted in the report, had a history of legal infractions, the agents soon discovered, including a warning from a Wyoming wildlife law enforcement officer for harming or killing a kit fox. They seized his recording devices. Besides photos of the dead bear and elk, they found pictures of a bald eagle carcass. The Marine claimed he had nothing to do with the bird’s death.

Killing an endangered or threatened species in self-defense is not a crime. Cutting off a grizzly’s claw for a souvenir, however, is a clear violation of the Endangered Species Act and associated regulations. In their incident report, the feds determined that the Marine had likely violated a slew of federal and state laws.

The hunter was found guilty of wasting an elk under a Wyoming state law and ordered to pay a $640 fine. A federal prosecutor, however, declined to bring charges under the ESA. The Marine faced no consequences for desecrating a protected grizzly bear.

A Failure to Protect

Steve Stoinski was one of two Fish and Wildlife Service agents who interviewed the Marine. Based out of Lander, Wyoming, Stoinski had spent much of his adult life investigating wildlife crimes in the American West before retiring in 2020. He remembers the case well — especially the Marine’s shifting version of events.

“Parts of his story were just too hard to believe,” Stoinski recalled in an interview with The Intercept. “One minute he’s underneath it, shooting it. The other minute, he’s not being touched by it and firing a shot two feet away but couldn’t hit it.” Still, the Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute was no surprise. Stoinski knew he and his partner were facing an uphill battle. The dismemberment of the bear was apparently not compelling enough for the U.S. attorney’s office to take the case. And with no direct witnesses and a victim that couldn’t speak even if it were alive, it would be next to impossible to disprove the claims of self-defense.

“You can’t charge people what you think they should be charged with,” Stoinski said. “You can only charge them with what you can really prove beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The Marine’s case is hardly an anomaly. Despite the Endangered Species Act’s fearsome reputation as a powerful tool for securing environmental protection, an Intercept investigation drawn from nearly 4,000 pages of Fish and Wildlife Service case files reveals that when it comes to grizzly bears, federal prosecutors rarely bring criminal charges under the landmark law. (The accounts of grizzly bear killings in this article are drawn from those case files, which The Intercept obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.)

The Endangered Species Act turns 50 years old this year amid a growing global crisis of biodiversity loss and increasing attacks by right-wing lawmakers who see predator control as a front in the battle over states’ rights. In theory, a law that the Supreme Court has called “the most comprehensive legislation for the preservation of endangered species enacted by any nation” would serve as a critical bulwark against further ecological damage. Under Section 9 of the statute, Congress declared it illegal to kill, harm, harass, or otherwise “take” protected species; prohibited the transport or possession of such animals or their body parts; and established civil and criminal penalties for violators, including imprisonment of up to a year. Investigations into suspected ESA crimes fall to special agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service, which sits within the Department of the Interior. The investigators hand their files off to Justice Department prosecutors, who make the final call on whether to bring a case.

The factors that shape those decisions, however, reveal the limits of the country’s most famous conservation law. From 2015 through 2022, according to the records reviewed by The Intercept, the Fish and Wildlife Service completed 118 investigations for violations of the ESA stemming from the killing or harming of grizzly bears in their primary range in the Lower 48: Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. Fourteen involved bears preying on livestock, while 74 others involved claims of self-defense, most stemming from hunters encountering bears in their habitats. Many of the cases contain evidence to support such claims. At least a dozen, however, show clear and, in some cases, flagrant ESA violations — from hunters admitting to stalking grizzlies before killing them, to dismembering animals for trophies, to describing efforts to cover up their kills. And yet only five of the cases led to criminal penalties under the ESA, and only two led to a prison sentence, one of which was overturned on appeal.

Grizzly bears were added to the endangered species list in 1975 and are currently considered a threatened species. An iconic symbol of American wilderness and a conservation success story, the bears are beloved by millions of people around the world. That adoration makes grizzlies a revealing barometer: If the ESA is failing to protect even them, what hope is there for the many imperiled species that don’t have a well-funded army of human defenders?

A Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson, in response to a series of questions from The Intercept, said the agency “prioritizes the investigation of take of ESA-protected species domestically and abroad,” including grizzly bears, and “works effectively and efficiently with state partners across the country.” (The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.)

In his corner of Wyoming, Stoinski said, the story of the grizzly bear over the half-century since the ESA’s passage shows how the law’s lofty goals continue to clash with ingrained cultural beliefs. “It’s a rural area — lots of ranching influence, that Western cowboy mentality, if it isn’t in the greatest interest of cattle, then it needs to be removed from the landscape,” he said. “That generally seems to be the way some people operate — shoot these bears, shovel, and shut up about it.”

The experiences of seasoned federal agents like Stoinski raise serious questions about the nation’s commitment and ability to uphold the ESA. In the case of the grizzly bear, the data and associated case reports obtained by The Intercept show a federal government that has failed to robustly enforce the historic statute despite evidence that it is being flouted on the ground. The upshot is diminished security for grizzly bears, current and former federal officials say, a downstream consequence of the Fish and Wildlife Service losing its way — chasing headline-making cases that span the globe while letting its domestic operations wither.

“They’re stuck spinning their wheels, trying to spend most of their time on these international smuggling cases, when they have so many incredible cases in their backyard that are just considered ‘game warden’ cases,” said one Interior Department official. The official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said that this dynamic has huge implications for the grizzly bear: “They might as well be delisted right now with how we’re acting.”

No Deterrence

Over the course of more than three years, starting in 2015, Stoinski led a probe into another grizzly killing in the Shoshone National Forest. His investigation of the so-called Barbers Point grizzly (a reference to the 4-year-old sow’s kill site) culminated in a nearly 300-page case file — and one of the only ESA convictions in the records reviewed by The Intercept.

At points, Stoinski’s report reads like a dark episode of the popular “Yellowstone” TV show, with confidential informants passing on word of incriminating barroom boasts and a pair of offenders making every attempt to bury evidence of their crimes — sometimes literally.

A week after a pair of motorists discovered the dead bear on the side of the road, Stoinski made a critical break in the investigation: A source turned in an audio recording surreptitiously obtained at a bar 30 miles south of the kill site.

In the recording, a man boasted of killing the bear, which was well known to locals and not considered a problem animal. He described how he and a friend encountered the bear twice — harassing and throwing rocks at her on the first occasion, then killing her on the second. “I don’t give a fuck. I would have been in jail by now if they would have found out about it,” the man said as he pulled up photos and videos to show other bar patrons. “There are so many of those cock suckers around here, I don’t give a fuck anymore. Fuck them!”

The recording led Stoinski to two residents of Dubois, Wyoming: 27-year-old Kelly J. Grove, the man on the tape, and 25-year-old Matthew John Brooks.

When Stoinski first interviewed Grove, he denied having anything to do with the grizzly’s killing. “As much as I would have fucking loved to, I didn’t shoot that fucking bear,” Grove said — though he applauded whoever did: “They should be given a gold medal.”

Stoinski continued to pursue the case, interviewing witnesses and collecting evidence. In the summer of 2018, Grove and Brooks pleaded guilty to violating the ESA. In their plea agreement interviews, the duo said they decided to kill the bear to improve the poor hunting season they’d been having. Late one night, they staked out the site where they had seen the bear guarding an elk carcass. To prevent GPS tracking, the men turned off their cellphones and stuffed them in the console of the vehicle. When the bear emerged, they stepped out in the dark, each armed with a rifle. Brooks fired. The bear wheeled and headed back for the trees, where it let out a dying moan. The two men left the scene, but not before dusting the tracks left by their vehicle. Weeks later, they made a midnight journey to a remote creek where they buried Brooks’s rifle and the paperwork associated with the weapon.

Brooks admitted to prosecutors that he pulled the trigger and said it was the most irresponsible period of his life. Grove was less contrite. When asked why they killed the grizzly, he responded, “Because we hate bears up there.” He added, “I thought it was great! Another dead bear!”

A federal judge ordered them to pay thousands of dollars in restitution, temporarily revoked their hunting privileges, and placed them on unsupervised probation for five years. 

If the intent of ESA prosecutions is to deter future violations of wildlife laws, it didn’t work on Grove. Just a few months after his sentencing, he was convicted on charges related to deer and elk poaching under Wyoming state law. The federal judge in the Barbers Point case then revoked his probation and sentenced him to six months in prison — half the maximum sentence allowable under the ESA. (Grove declined to comment for this story. Brooks did not respond to a request for comment.)

Like the handful of other convictions, the Barbers Point case broke from the typical trajectory of grizzly investigations in the West. As the Fish and Wildlife records reveal, most cases die the moment that a human — typically a hunter creeping around bear habitat at dawn or dusk — describes their fear during a bear encounter.

Making ESA cases more difficult still is a long-standing Justice Department policy requiring the government to prove that a suspect knew they were killing an endangered or threatened species when they did the deed. Known as the McKittrick policy — named after a Montana poacher who was convicted under the ESA for killing a Yellowstone wolf — the rule was established in 1999 as the result of a winding legal fight that made it all the way to the Supreme Court. Among conservationists and wildlife investigators, it is derisively known as the “I thought it was a coyote” rule. When it comes to bears, if a hunter kills a grizzly but claims they thought it was a black bear, for example, the case is often dead on arrival.

In 2013, two environmental groups sued the Justice Department over the policy, arguing that it was fueling the unlawful killing of Mexican wolves. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately dismissed the claim because the plaintiffs were not able to cite “any specific instance where the DOJ has declined to prosecute a wolf killing because of the McKittrick policy.”

When it comes to grizzlies, however, federal prosecutors declined to take on at least 18 cases under the ESA from 2015 to 2022 based on such claims of mistaken identity, according to the documents obtained by The Intercept.

In one of the most explicit examples, a rancher living near Big Timber, Montana, buried three bullets in a grizzly bear that had wandered onto his property in 2016. He told law enforcement officials that he went out to investigate a disruption in a cattle enclosure on his property in the early morning and encountered a bear. It was dark out, and he said he didn’t know what kind of bear it was, but he shot at it first when it started moving toward him and again when it began approaching his girlfriend. He only realized it was a grizzly, he said, after the bear bled out on the property.

Fish and Wildlife Service investigators later discovered several discrepancies in the rancher’s story and concluded that he “shot the grizzly bear in defense of his cattle and not necessarily in defense of his life.” The prosecutor who reviewed the case agreed that the rancher’s account was “implausible,” “inconsistent,” and “suspect in numerous respects.” Nevertheless, the Justice Department declined to bring charges. The reason was clear. “The primary difficulty we would encounter,” the prosecutor explained in an email, “is proving that [the rancher] knew he was shooting a grizzly bear.”

The difficulty of ESA enforcement also stems in part from the nature of the law itself. Despite its hefty maximum fine of $100,000 and potential year in prison, conviction under the ESA is a federal misdemeanor. The same Justice Department attorneys tasked with bringing such cases are responsible for enforcing every other federal crime. While a Fish and Wildlife agent’s most important investigations might fall under the ESA, a prosecutor’s priorities are different. Given their finite resources, public demand, and the potential for career advancement, government attorneys are structurally incentivized to chase felonies involving human victims over misdemeanors involving animals.

“Their priorities are felony prosecutions,” Stoinski said. “So when we show up and we say, ‘Yeah, we’ve got this misdemeanor whooping crane case,’ they hear misdemeanor; it’s almost like a switch, because they don’t have the time or resources.”

Alternative Methods

Given the hurdles federal agents must overcome to bring an ESA case, they’ve found other means to seek justice for poached grizzlies. Sometimes, that means assisting in cases that will be taken up by state, rather than federal, prosecutors.

In 2021, for instance, Fish and Wildlife investigators teamed up with Idaho game wardens after a bullet-riddled mother grizzly was found in a river on the western edge of Yellowstone National Park. It was the third such killing in just seven months. The public demanded answers. While regional nonprofits pulled together a $40,000 reward for information leading to the killer — or killers — local and federal officials went to work. They collected nearly 50 bullet casings from the scene and obtained a warrant allowing them to zero in on phone activity in the area. The warrant paid off. Phone data led investigators to a man who had traveled to and from the scene, repeatedly visited the Idaho Fish and Game department’s online ad seeking information on the bear’s killer, and attempted to sell 1,000 rounds of ammunition — the same kind found at the scene of the crime — weeks after the shooting. The man told state police that his father had joined him in killing the bear; they were arrested and pleaded guilty to state charges. 

Whether such state-federal collaboration will continue across the West is an open question. In 2021, the Fish and Wildlife Service circulated an internal briefing saying that its state counterpart in Montana would no longer investigate grizzly kills without a federal agent present.

Federal agents facing challenging ESA cases often turn to the Lacey Act, a law passed in 1900 prohibiting the transportation of illegally killed wildlife that includes felony penalties. The files reviewed by The Intercept describe one such case in Montana, in 2017, in which a man turned up at a hunting camp bragging of shooting a grizzly and rolling it off a cliff. He was said to be “smiling” and “looked proud” as he showed off photos and video of the bear, investigators wrote. “In one video the bear was still breathing,” agents noted, adding that the man “did not mention anything about self-defense while he was showing everyone pictures and video.”

Investigators ultimately discovered that the bear’s front claws had been removed with a knife. An autopsy revealed that a bullet had obliterated the bear’s spine, paralyzing it — likely explaining why the shooter could take smiling selfies while the animal was still alive. Investigators soon identified the killer as a 35-year-old man from Marion, Montana. In an interview with the feds, the man claimed the bear charged him. He acknowledged ignoring his legal obligation to report the incident and admitted his attempted cover-up. “I rolled the dice on whether I’d ever see you guys or not, and obviously it didn’t pay off,” he said. When asked why he dismembered the bear, the man cited his “straight up hatred for these things.”

“I basically said, ‘Hey, fuck you.’ And I cut his claws off,” he said. “I wanted to keep them as a memento.”

Facing a challenging self-defense claim under the ESA, federal agents instead pursued a Lacey Act charge for stealing the bear’s claws. The man was convicted, placed on probation for three years, and ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution.

The case files reviewed by The Intercept account for only a portion of the total grizzly killings in the Northern Rockies between 2015 and 2022 — they are the ones the authorities know about. Chris Servheen, the president and board chair of the Montana Wildlife Federation, said that while the Fish and Wildlife Service’s case count of 118 is “a big number,” the death toll is undoubtedly higher.

“Illegal kills are certainly happening out there across the landscape,” Servheen told The Intercept. “The implications are serious because they’re ongoing.”

For nearly three decades, Servheen was the top Fish and Wildlife Service biologist responsible for grizzly recovery in the Lower 48. Having seen the application of the ESA in grizzly cases up close, he believes federal agents do their best with what are often difficult crimes to solve — taking place in remote locations, among distrustful communities, with victims that cannot speak — but in the vast reaches of the West, there’s only so much they can do.

At the time of his 2016 retirement, Servheen was a prominent supporter of turning grizzly bear management over to the states. In 2021, a wave of Republican-sponsored, anti-predator legislation — rooted, as he sees it, not in science but in politics — changed his mind. He’s been fighting for the grizzly’s continued federal protection ever since.

“If the grizzly was ever delisted, I worry that the illegal kills would increase,” he said. The state’s posture would send a message. “There’s going to be a certain category of the public that would feel that it’s easier now, it’s more relaxed now, I can just kill ‘em,” Servheen said. “The feds aren’t involved.”

“Animal Prejudice”

In some pockets of the West, biologists and wildlife officials say, an old anti-predator adage still reigns: shoot, shovel, and shut up.

Anti-predator hate is bound up in a long, complicated relationship going back to the beginning of westward expansion. In the early days of the nation’s founding, predators were a problem to be eradicated, mostly with guns and poison. As cultural attitudes toward ecology, wildlife, and conservation shifted over the course of a century, predators’ standing in the eyes of millions of Americans did too. Those shifts in thinking were foundational to the passage of the ESA, while also becoming a central conservative talking point in the West — symbolic of a country disowning its heritage and traditions to serve the interests of a coastal liberal elite, and of the federal government’s tyrannical disregard for states’ rights. The animals that most symbolized that shift — wolves, grizzlies, and the like — thus became avatars for a particular political class. Stoinski calls it “animal prejudice”: when frustrations over human politics are grafted onto animals. It came with the territory. Sometimes, he even heard it from his colleagues working in state agencies.

“Those animals die without a sound and the only voice they had was ours,” Stoinski said. “I was happy to champion grizzlies, even against the opposition of some of my state counterparts who are not fans of protecting them anymore.”

“Those animals die without a sound and the only voice they had was ours.”

Stoinski, articulating a complaint echoed by every current and former federal wildlife official that spoke to The Intercept, argued that the near-total absence of grizzly killing prosecutions speaks to a larger, more fundamental problem for the future of conservation: a multidecade failure on the part of Fish and Wildlife Service leaders in Washington to grow and adapt their agency in the face of difficult political, cultural, and environmental circumstances.

While major conservation initiatives have rescued grizzlies from extinction, their continued recovery hinges on human tolerance. In the nearly five decades since the bears became a protected species, human presence in grizzly habitat, clamoring by conservative lawmakers for the feds to relinquish management to the states, and the number of unsolved grizzly killing cases have all grown. At the same time, the number of federal agents conducting investigations on the ground — never more than 250 — has stayed the same.

“The only day I knew that we were close to 250 was the day I graduated the academy” in 1998, Stoinski said. “We had 248.”

“We never got that close in the next 25 years of my career,” he continued. “We were losing people as fast as we could hire them. On a good day, we probably had 200, and I did the math — 49 of those people were supervisors or managers of some sort, not even carrying a caseload anymore.”

When Stoinski arrived in Lander — having cut his teeth in Colorado, Alaska, and Wisconsin — he was one of two agents responsible for running down every grizzly poaching case in Wyoming, he said. The Justice Department had four assistant U.S. attorneys in the local office, focused mostly on the nearby Wind River Indian Reservation, and one prosecutor handling the wildlife docket for the entire state.

At first, Stoinski said, things were manageable. The prosecutor was motivated, and they got along well, but then a job opened up at a judge’s office and he left. A second prosecutor soon followed. Neither post was refilled. In Stoinski’s final years on the job, there were just two prosecutors in Lander responsible for everything the feds brought in: Homeland Security human trafficking cases, FBI agents investigating missing and murdered Indigenous women, Drug Enforcement Administration drug war operations, and finally, the Fish and Wildlife cop looking into dead bears.

According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency has two special agents in Idaho, two in Wyoming, and three in Montana — a total of seven agents covering more than 328,000 square miles, much of it rugged backcountry wilderness.

“I was one agent doing 18 different cases at one time,” Stoinski recalled. “I don’t know how detectives do it in cities — if you got like 10 homicides, does one guy do all the homicides himself, or do they got a team of people? Usually, I’m just an army of one, coordinating with state people to help.”

As the Justice Department presence contracted, Stoinski’s responsibilities expanded. “The last two years of my career, we were so shorthanded, I was covering southern Wyoming, western Colorado, and all of Utah,” he said. “By myself for two years.” Stoinski had wanted to be a game warden as far back as he could remember. While he still believed in his mission, making a meaningful impact felt impossible. “I was just fried,” he said. “I couldn’t get big picture things done. I was just fighting brush fires.”

Rivers of Resentment

David J. Mattson and his wife Louisa Willcox live in southwest Montana, where bears venturing out from the protected confines of Yellowstone National Park run into an increasingly human-inhabited patchwork of public and private lands. The couple has made grizzly recovery their life’s work, with Willcox a full-time conservation advocate and Mattson one of the country’s leading scientific experts on grizzly habitat use.

The pair sees the “dead bear problem” — their term for the absence of accountability in grizzly killings — as a product of factors in both the ecosystem and the institutions of wildlife management, which are exacerbated by culture war politics.

In recent years, grizzlies have experienced reduced access to key food sources, Mattson explained. With declining populations of cutthroat trout, for example, the bears have increased their predation on ungulates, like elk, which they find by zeroing in on the areas where humans hunt and seeking out the animals they kill. Grizzlies have also descended from the remote high elevations where critical white bark pine populations have dwindled into areas where they can prey on livestock instead. In both cases, Mattson argues, bears are pursuing “anthropogenic meat” — that is, meat with a connection to humans — which can have deadly consequences.

“There are now two causes that account for probably 30-plus percent of the known and probable mortalities, and that’s conflicts over livestock — depredation — and encounters with big-game hunters,” Mattson told The Intercept. “It’s all plausibly linked to the demise of foods that kept bears out of harm’s way.”

As the bears’ diets have shifted, legal battles over their protected status have led many in the West — especially conservative lawmakers — to argue that grizzlies as a population are recovered and that the only thing keeping them under federal management are out-of-state environmentalists and well-funded nongovernmental organizations.

Whether grizzlies are truly recovered is a complicated question. The top scientific body tracking grizzly populations in the U.S., the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, where Mattson served as lead investigator from 1983 to 1993, tracks four fragmented populations of grizzlies in the Lower 48. Altogether, the four populations contain about 2,000 individual bears — up from the brink of extinction 50 years ago, but down from the estimated 50,000 bears that roamed the continent when settlers first marched West two centuries ago. Mortality records compiled by the team, meanwhile, show 456 known and probable grizzly bear deaths between 2015 and 2022 in the Greater Yellowstone region alone, with causes ranging from illegal killings, self-defense killings, and vehicle strikes to natural deaths and the killing of problem bears by government officials.

Numbers like that make fulfillment of the ESA’s ultimate aim — full recovery of imperiled species to their historic home range — difficult to imagine. “In terms of just looking at the science, to ensure long-term population viability in meaningful terms, you’re talking about ensuring that bears are going to be around almost certainly for 400 years,” Mattson said. That would require breeding between contiguous grizzly populations of as many as 2,500 to 9,000 bears. “We’re not even close to that in any of the populations we have,” Mattson argued. “Not even close.”

Population numbers are just one variable that goes into the federal government’s decision to keep an animal listed. States seeking to manage an animal population on their own must also show that they have a responsible regulatory structure in place to ensure continued recovery. It is on that point that Mattson and Willcox are most concerned.

In February, the Fish and Wildlife Service said that it would spend 12 months reviewing petitions from Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho calling for the delisting of grizzlies under the ESA. Should the states prevail, it would open the door to legalized hunting seasons across the Northern Rockies.

Related

Lauren Boebert Waved Around Pictures of Dead Babies in Her Call to Gut the Endangered Species Act

The petitions are part of a wave of ESA-related, predator-centered GOP action in the West. Republicans are not only demanding that the Fish and Wildlife Service delist grizzlies through the ESA administrative process, but also backing federal legislation that would circumvent the scientific deliberation required under the ESA altogether and delist gray wolves nationwide — Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert’s “Trust the Science Act.” 

While state and federal authority has long been contested, the balance of power has recently shifted. All three Northern Rockies states are now led by Republican governors backed by Republican legislatures who argue that the ESA has for too long served as a Trojan horse for paternalistic liberal intervention in the West. Now in the political driver’s seat, they are passing measures to slash the populations of large predators throughout the region, from wolves to mountain lions. Should grizzlies lose federal protection, conservationists fear the bear would be next. “Management of grizzly bears under the auspices of the Endangered Species Act has become so symbolically identified and tangled with the culture wars,” Mattson said, “that there’s just this manifest displacement of resentments onto bears.”

In the 1980s, Willcox recalled, the federal government understood that grizzly bear extinction was a real possibility. Given the stakes, federal authorities were willing to confront illegal grizzly killing, despite the social and cultural costs involved.

“That kind of stuff doesn’t happen now,” Willcox said. “And that’s because the fear, the concern, about potential extinction is gone.” In its place, she argued, is an anger that’s been bubbling for years: “Now you’ve got that river of resentment flowing into the river of resentment that’s the ultra-right crowd, increasing the decibel level of the anti-bear movement.”

Ambitions Abroad, Neglect at Home

It’s true, says Doug McKenna, a retired Fish and Wildlife investigator: Agents working grizzly killing cases face serious challenges — but they aren’t insurmountable. An experienced investigator can navigate the hurdles, provided they have two things: local connections and support at headquarters. And there was a time, he said, when agents on the ground had both.

McKenna grew up in Montana, went to college there, and became a state game warden in the 1980s, shortly after grizzly bears were added to the endangered species list. He was then recruited to join the feds and spent the next two-and-a-half decades working Fish and Wildlife cases from the Northern Rockies to the desert southwest before retiring in 2012.

In his more than 30 years of wildlife law enforcement, McKenna observed a steady, disturbing turn by Fish and Wildlife Service leadership away from domestic wildlife enforcement and toward flashy cases with international ties.

When McKenna became a federal agent in the late 1980s, the Fish and Wildlife Service was placing agents in remote, one-person stations across the region. McKenna spent a decade working out of one such outpost in New Mexico. He would ride deep into the Gila Wilderness on horseback, searching for poachers along the New Mexico–Arizona borderline. “I knew all the locals,” he said. Those bonds were critical. “You have to have the locals and the state game wardens on your side,” he said. “They’re generally in the know about the different suspects and places people frequent.”

“The powers that be, they came in and they wanted to centralize everything. That’s kind of an FBI concept, and it doesn’t work in wildlife enforcement.”

The method worked well, but around 2010, McKenna noticed a change. Agents were being called back from their posts — in Victorville, Flagstaff, Yuma, and elsewhere — and told to report to cities across the West.

“The powers that be, they came in and they wanted to centralize everything,” he said. “That’s kind of an FBI concept, and it doesn’t work in wildlife enforcement.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service defended the evolution of enforcement and investigative strategies in recent years. “The methods used by state and federal enforcement to obtain and investigate allegations of illegal take have changed and developed over time but are generally considered to be an improvement over strictly employing backcountry patrols,” a spokesperson for the agency said in an email. “The advent of cell phone, GPS, and satellite technology — as well as the availability of aircraft to reach remote areas — has increased the speed with which reports of take are received and can be acted upon.”

The desire McKenna sensed among leadership — to reshape the agency in the image of its more high-profile counterparts, projecting a modernized institution with a global reach — was real. And it wasn’t going away.

In 2013, during a visit to Tanzania, President Barack Obama announced an executive order establishing a new task force of 17 federal departments and agencies to train law enforcement personnel and park rangers across Africa. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s law enforcement agents would play a key role in the $10 million global initiative. The agency’s attaché program, a first-of-its-kind State Department-backed initiative unveiled in 2014, further propelled the international shift.

Washington’s new embrace of international wildlife enforcement claimed its first high-profile win in Operation Crash, a sprawling effort that bundled multiple investigations targeting the illicit trafficking of rhino horns under the same umbrella. The first arrests came in 2012 and snowballed from there. The operation soon became the largest Fish and Wildlife Service investigation in history, pulling in more than half of the agency’s special agents and involving its every office in the country.

By 2017, the Justice Department claimed Operation Crash had led to nearly 50 convictions and the recovery of roughly $7.8 million. That same year, Edward Grace, who designed and headed the investigation, was appointed assistant director of the Office of Law Enforcement at Fish and Wildlife Service, where he remains today.

It was a career-making case for Grace and an era-defining moment for the agency. In a 2018 interview, Grace likened his agents’ casework to that of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, or the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations wing. “We use informants, we use undercover operatives, we use the same investigative techniques you’ll see in the investigation of another commodity,” he said. “Instead of having cocaine as a commodity, you have rhino horns.”

None of the current or former officials who spoke to The Intercept questioned the importance of targeting the illicit, international wildlife trade. What they did take issue with was seeing their agency pluck personnel from a small pool of stateside investigators and then leave those positions unfilled — as though the United States, having somehow transcended its struggles with poaching and wildlife conflict management, now had agents to spare.

“I trained game rangers, and I did investigations,” McKenna said of the attaché program. The work was “fine and dandy,” he said. “But I think the priority needs to be the domestic wildlife, especially the threatened or endangered species, because that’s ours.”

The Interior Department official who spoke to The Intercept said the same. “They’re pushing so hard for agents to work these cases with criminal networks and international smuggling rings, which are great, but the agency doesn’t have the capability to do it like [Homeland Security Investigations] does,” said the official. For animals like grizzly bears, the official argued, there’s now an absence of proactive deterrence in the field: “People go out and they know there’s no one out there looking.”

Another former Fish and Wildlife Service official, Ed Newcomer, served 20 years with the agency before retiring in 2022. Rising through the ranks in Southern California, he became an expert in international wildlife trafficking and was appointed the agency’s attaché for southern Africa in 2015.

The problem went deeper than his former employer simply deprioritizing its domestic mandate in favor of a foreign one, Newcomer argued. It was a failure on the part of the service’s leadership to keep up with times and, specifically, to push Congress for the resources the agency needs to address domestic wildlife crimes with the same urgency that it now does abroad.

“Nobody is doing any long-term strategic thinking in the leadership at the Office of Law Enforcement,” Newcomer said. “We have not expanded our agent force, at all, since 1983. Forty years. We have not asked Congress to expand our agent force, despite the fact that we have taken on a hugely new and much different mission.” While the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and Drug Enforcement Administration have national programs to draw new recruits to their mission, he added, “we have a very half-assed one. It’s in name only.”

A Fading Flame

Despite progress in recent decades, the grizzly bear still walks a delicate line in the West. While the crush of human development shrinks its habitat, the animals are continually run down on highways and gunned down in fields and forests. Meanwhile, frustrations in local communities — the kind that can lead to bears being poached — continue to fester.

“I am concerned that the Fish and Wildlife Service is going to work itself into irrelevancy because they’re not getting enough done.”

Recently, Stoinski bumped into one of his old tribal counterparts at a local store in Lander. The game warden was frustrated. There were more and more grizzlies on the reservation and no support from the Fish and Wildlife Service to be found. For Stoinski, it was a testament to the regrettable reality of his final years as a federal agent. “We’re neglecting our state counterparts who need help. We’re neglecting our tribal counterparts,” he said. “They’re pulling people off to do these international things. Guys are sitting in their offices now looking on the internet for someone trafficking in some wildlife commodity, instead of being on the ground where the bears and the wolves and the eagles and all the other critters are living.”

“It’s just a huge disservice,” Stoinski said of the agency’s priorities. “I am concerned that the Fish and Wildlife Service is going to work itself into irrelevancy because they’re not getting enough done.”

Hanging up his badge didn’t come easy for Stoinski. The veteran investigator had hoped to leave the state of conservation better than he found it. “You want to pass that torch to somebody,” he said. “You want to see them carry it, and you hope you’re leaving it in good hands.” He isn’t sure he did. “I think that’s the biggest regret I have about retiring — am I leaving it in better hands than I got it in?” he said. “I feel like the answer has become no.”

This project was made possible in part by support from the Fund for Environmental Journalism.

The post Grizzly Bear Poachers Flout the Endangered Species Act — and Get Away With It appeared first on The Intercept.

Not long after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her shock 2018 primary, Saikat Chakrabarti and Corbin Trent ventured to Washington, D.C., to scope things out. Both had started as volunteers on the first Bernie Sanders campaign, worked their way up the skeleton crew, then left to found what became Justice Democrats, and then threw themselves full time into electing Ocasio-Cortez in her primary campaign against Rep. Joe Crowley. 

Now they had made it to Washington as AOC’s chief of staff and communications director, and the first question everyone they ran into asked them was the same, a question born of both curiosity and a sense of competitiveness: What committees does Ocasio-Cortez want to be on?

Several members of Congress gave advice related to her “legacy” twenty or thirty years down the road. What does she want her legacy to be? She should figure that out first, they told Chakrabarti and Trent, and then work backward from there to figure out what committees she needs and what alliances she must form to make that legacy a reality.

I met both men in the lobby of the Hyatt on Capitol Hill, and they relayed their revulsion at the notion. “Twenty years?” said Trent. “Christ, if we’re still here in twenty years, we’ll be total failures.” 

“We have, like, a decade to turn this entire thing around,” said Chakrabarti, who was evangelizing about a book on the World War II mobilization that turned a peacetime economy into a wartime industry capable of producing the armaments, ships, planes, bombs, and vehicles that defeated fascism. “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II,” written by Arthur Herman, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, focused, as its subtitle suggests, on the role of business in winning the war. But the book itself teaches a different lesson: that it was Franklin Roosevelt who used every tool at his disposal to engineer the top-to-bottom redevelopment of the economy. The same would have to happen this time, Chakrabarti suggested. Let that be AOC’s legacy.

Despite Nancy Pelosi’s unwillingness to stop the party from raising money from the fossil fuel industry, the incoming speaker had been early in warning of the dangers of climate change, and the first thing she did when she took the House in 2006 was create a select committee on the climate with real teeth and subpoena power and then appoint then-Rep. Ed Markey, a true believer, to chair it. She also backed her ally Henry Waxman, another climate hawk, in his successful effort to oust the Big Auto–friendly John Dingell Jr. from the chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee, specifically so Waxman could ram through a climate bill.

He did so, at significant electoral cost to Democrats in swing seats, and the House passed the bill, only to see it die without a vote in the Senate. President Barack Obama had declined Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s suggestion to use budget reconciliation — a 50-vote process — to pass the climate bill. Had the country started that year in reducing carbon emissions, the picture a decade later would have looked much different.

What happened to that climate committee? Chakrabarti and Trent wondered. Given the history, they both said, it seemed reasonable to push for it to be rebuilt and be the vehicle to turn the Green New Deal from a vision into legislative text, so that if and when the party took power fully in 2021, they’d have a bill ready to go.

Creation of a Green New Deal Committee became the central demand of the occupation of Pelosi’s office, though the method had been a gamble. On a personal level, Pelosi didn’t want to be pushed into doing anything, lest it chip away at the image of toughness she had effectively cultivated. She went out of her way to belittle the Green New Deal. “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” she told reporters. “The green dream, or whatever they call it. Nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”

The “green dream” had started as a Google Doc put out by Sunrise, AOC, and the other groups behind the march on Pelosi’s office, and while the idea of a Green New Deal took off, the document itself came in for immediate criticism, both from the AFL-CIO, which warned that it would cost union jobs in the fossil fuel and pipeline industries, and from climate justice activists, who thought it didn’t go far enough in redressing the systemically racist impacts of climate change and pollution.

Moving from dreamland to Google Doc to a congressional resolution (which is significantly short of legislation) required much more compromise than might be expected in an aspirational document.

Work on it began in December 2018, before AOC had any staff. The joke was that Evan Weber of Sunrise, who had made the fateful ask that Ocasio-Cortez support the sit-in, was her interim legislative director. The first task was to find a co-sponsor in the Senate, and they immediately ruled out anybody potentially running for president, a good chunk of that chamber. “We knew if we had a presidential candidate, it would just be their thing, and we wanted it to be everybody’s thing,” said Weber.

After the Sunrise protest, Ocasio-Cortez had felt isolated, having gone out on a radical limb on her own, breaking all sorts of norms and customs in Congress. Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts was one of the few who reached out to her with an encouraging word, congratulating her on what she’d done and probing her about the new youth movement.

Markey was facing reelection in Massachusetts, with rumors that Rep. Joe Kennedy or Attorney General Maura Healey might challenge him. As a senator, Markey was liked well enough, but he’d been in Congress since 1976 and knew he was vulnerable to the question of why he deserved another term. What was he fighting for?

Recalling Markey’s service as chair of the previous special climate panel, and his authorship of Waxman-Markey — the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 — the only major climate bill ever to clear a chamber of Congress, Ocasio-Cortez asked him to be her lead sponsor in the Senate. He eagerly accepted.

By mid-January, working closely with Sunrise, which coordinated with outside groups, AOC’s office had consulted an endless number of organizations, including the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, the BlueGreen Alliance, Climate Justice Alliance, and New Consensus, the think tank backed by Chakrabarti and helmed by Zack Exley, where Rhiana Gunn-Wright, an up-and-coming radical policy writer, was taking the lead in drafting the resolution.

An exchange between Sunrise and the NAACP was indicative of the difficulties they faced. A week before the unveiling, an NAACP official, Katherine Egland, wrote to Sunrise. “It isn’t that we want or expect a perfect bill or resolution, but that we are fundamentally opposed to carbon capture sequestration, by any name or concept; and we are vehemently against any form or theory of carbon taxing, credits, dividends, etc,” Egland wrote. For the NAACP, carbon capture and sequestration — the idea that emissions could be captured or sucked out of the air and sequestered back into the ground — was seen as a scam by the fossil fuel industry to continue to burn coal in Black neighborhoods and call it clean. “We unapologetically believe that these two particular proposals will do more harm than good — especially as it relates to the very people it proposes to uplift. ”

Sunrise’s Weber forwarded the note to Markey’s and AOC’s teams. “Wanted to make sure you both had this from the NAACP. My opinion is that it would be very bad to not have them with us, and their concerns will be shared by other environmental and climate justice advocates as well,” Weber wrote, recommending that they remove the “true cost of emissions” bullet — which, to many in the know, Weber understood, signaled “carbon pricing.”

Putting a price on carbon allows renewables to compete on a more level playing field, as carbon is now asked to pay for its pollution rather than sticking the public with the tab. But this setup also raises the price of gas and utilities, and no amount of credit or rebate scheme is enough to persuade people, the NAACP worried, that they won’t be paying more at the pump to satisfy the vanity of environmentalists. The Yellow Vests protests in France in 2018 had sounded the death knell for such an approach, as it became clear the working class weren’t willing to pay for what they saw as a problem they hadn’t created. 

When it came to carbon pricing, an NAACP resolution had cast it as insufficient to the scale of the crisis, while putting too much burden on Black communities. Lost on nobody involved was the NAACP’s significant support from the fossil fuel industry, whose leading companies sponsored the group’s conventions and otherwise kicked in support.

Yet dropping some form of carbon pricing could risk losing supporters on the left, who would see the resolution as mere wish-casting. “This is the kind of response we will likely get if we keep the carbon pricing thing as is,” Chakrabarti wrote in a subsequent email to Weber about the NAACP response. Carbon pricing was dropped.

The final document was a result of wheeling and dealing the likes of which hadn’t been done by the left in Washington since Lyndon B. Johnson was president, and the final product had a stunningly broad coalition behind it. The unveiling of the resolution was set for February 7. “We got everyone in the right place. We had the Big Greens lined up, and they were happy because AFL was in a good place,” said Weber. “AFL-CIO was planning to put out a positive statement on the whole thing.”

And then came the FAQ — and the cow farts. “We spent months really carefully negotiating between all these interests,” Weber recalled years later. “Honestly, this is like one of my biggest political regrets, is what happened around the FAQs.”

Several things happened around the frequently asked questions document the office prepared, but what first set the resolution veering off course, Weber said, was an article in Politico — or, as Weber called it, “pain-in-the-ass-fucking-Politico.” (I started my political journalism career at Politico and can confirm that it is a pain in the ass.) 

The story, based on sources who had seen a late version of the resolution, landed on Monday, February 4, and was headlined, “Green New Deal Won’t Call for End to Fossil Fuels.” The story came from frustrated elements on the left of the climate world who insisted that the only rational path forward was to shut down the burning of fossil fuels and worry about the rest later. Weber understood the irony: Nearly everyone in the Sunrise leadership came from the divest-and-shut-it-down side of organizing. These were their people, and now they were getting attacked by them. The Sunrise team was barely into their mid-20s and were already being called sellouts.

“It’s the movement that many people in Sunrise came out of, but our whole thesis was that that kind of campaigning was ineffective both because it was an unpopular message with the public — that saying no to everything doesn’t actually give people something to believe in — and it was really bad for coalition building,” Weber said, noting that it’s impossible to get labor on board with a policy position that will eliminate jobs, even if you promise a world full of other types of jobs in the future.

Indeed, the Politico story — as if to make Weber’s point — quoted the policy director for the climate group 350.org (where some of the Sunrise brass had started their careers or journeys into activism) criticizing the resolution for using the term “clean,” which indicated a “keep the door open” approach to carbon capture and sequestration, allowing fossil fuels to continue to be used.

The rationale for the blanket opposition to any carbon technology is a bit elliptical. The carbon industry supports investment in clean-tech infrastructure cynically, as a way to stave off its own demise, the argument goes, and the technology isn’t actually able to do what its proponents have claimed it will one day be able to do. 

But there are kinks in the logic. If a technology’s current state equaled its promise, both wind and solar would have been shut down long ago and we would never have seen the exponential technological bursts that have led both to become cheaper sources of energy than fossil fuels. It also ignores the reality that carbon capture technology does work — at least at a small scale and in theory. Whether it can be scaled fast enough to meet the crisis is an open question, but it’s not out of the question.

The Politico article also quoted Sean McGarvey, president of the North America’s Building Trades Unions, saying that oil and gas industry jobs paid solid, middle-class wages while work in the renewable field still did not. “They’re talking about everything except the workers that are doing the work,” he said.

McGarvey made the comments at an event alongside Mike Sommers, a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, who gleefully drove in the wedge, claiming that one-third of construction jobs are in the oil and gas industry.

Spooked by the article, AOC’s team began walking away from some of the concessions they had made. But instead of rewriting the resolution, they began tweaking the FAQ and other material that described it. Where the resolution left room for carbon tech and the possibility of nuclear power to play a role, for instance, the FAQ blasted the concepts.

“Yes, we are calling for a full transition off fossil fuels and zero greenhouse gases,” the answer read, going beyond the carefully negotiated resolution. It continued:

Anyone who has read the resolution sees that we spell this out through a plan that calls for eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from every sector of the economy. Simply banning fossil fuels immediately won’t build the new economy to replace it—this is the plan to build that new economy and spells out how to do it technically. We do this through a huge mobilization to create the renewable energy economy as fast as possible. We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero.

“Farting cows and airplanes.” Trent’s plainspoken, no-bullshit approach, and his frustration with and contempt for the norms of Washington, D.C., had helped him slash and burn his way through the swamp. Trent and Ocasio-Cortez’s team were trying to have it both ways: to expose the absurdity of the zero-emissions approach. How will you fully eliminate cow farts? Or campfires? How to replace a fleet of jet-fueled airplanes with electric ones when the latter didn’t exist yet?

Weber lamented that the retreat away from the compromise they had agreed upon came in the face of everything they’d done to reorient their politics toward coalition building, reaching the masses, and expanding the tent of environmentalism with the aim of actually passing a Green New Deal. “We believe that really deeply in our bones. It was one of the whole reasons why we broke off 350.org and the rest of these groups and started Sunrise in the first place, and we were really thrilled to find alignment with AOC and the New Consensus folks,” he said. “And basically, the second this Politico article hit, we sort of got scared, and I think it was eve-of-launch jitters.”

Overconfidence had crept in, as AOC and Sunrise had become the It kids of Washington. “I think we had done such a good job, up until that point, of massaging the language that there was kind of an arrogance of, like, ‘We can actually appease everyone here,’ instead of sticking to our guns and making a real choice about charting a different direction and keeping our eyes on the prize,” Weber said. “And so, the decision was made by AOC’s team to write that FAQ, and they very rapidly and haphazardly put it together without any sort of process, like the one that we went through to write the resolution.”

The FAQ brought up carbon capture specifically, asking, “Are you for CCUS [carbon capture, utilization, and storage]?” The resolution plainly left the door open for that technology, and Trent, in the Politico article, had even reiterated as much. But the FAQ document got weaselly, and instead of referring to the resolution, it stepped back to ask what its authors believed, which is a different question: “We believe the right way to capture carbon is to plant trees and restore our natural ecosystems. CCUS technology to date has not proven effective.” The answer leaves wiggle room for CCUS tech but is clearly trying to close the door — not what unions were looking for. The FAQ document added that while the Green New Deal didn’t ban fossil fuels or nuclear fuel, it might as well: “The Green New Deal makes new fossil fuel infrastructure or nuclear plants unnecessary.”

The AFL-CIO, which had prepared a supportive statement, was livid, and issued a skeptical statement instead. Major environmental groups like the Sierra Club panicked. Fox News delighted in the entire affair. “We just fucking served them up this thing on a silver platter,” Weber said of Fox. “They go wild with the cow farts and the antinuclear and all this sort of stuff. We lose the support of AFL-CIO, they are freaking out. Their freaking out almost caused these Big Greens to pull out of the thing at the last minute. This is all happening while the press conference launching the thing is taking place. It’s just a total shitshow disaster. Months of some very delicate planning, years of strategic thinking and correction for mistakes, sort of gone in like, less than forty-eight hours.”

“In kowtowing to this small corner of the left who was literally fighting over words and phrases, even though we are all basically aligned on the goals, we threw a lot of that away.”

But the PR stayed strong. At the press conference outside the Capitol, Ocasio-Cortez pulled off one of her more impressive jujitsu moves when a reporter asked her about Pelosi’s swipe that it was just a “green dream or whatever they call it.” AOC disarmed the attack by adopting it. “No, I think it is a dream,” she said, going on to defend the Green New Deal as the full aspiration of the public.

From there, the Green New Deal took off on two separate tracks. On one, it was ridiculed by the right and dismissed by Democratic leaders as unserious. But on the other, it became a global sensation.

The Canadian government adopted a version of the Green New Deal, as did the Spanish government. The German government, unfamiliar with the American context of FDR’s New Deal, mixed up the words and pledged to implement a New Green Deal. And Democratic presidential candidates from the center to the left rushed to embrace it. Joe Biden, who would go on to become the Democratic nominee and then president, rejected the moniker as part of his effort to differentiate himself from the progressive wing, but the context of his platform was wildly more ambitious than anything Hillary Clinton had put out in 2016 and became even more so after he named AOC and Sunrise head Varshini Prakash to a committee charged with crafting his climate agenda.

The capitulation to the environmental left had set back the cause of winning over organized labor and the party’s center, but the entire effort succeeded in reshaping the climate zeitgeist. “One of the main things we wanted to accomplish was to have Green New Deal be one of the questions that gets asked in a debate,” said Trent. “And we far and away achieved that goal. Like, the Canadian government is running Green New Deal shit. It literally took it across the world. And so, I felt like it was an accomplishment. I really don’t think [Ocasio-Cortez] does. I think she was embarrassed by the Green New Deal. She didn’t feel like it was serious enough,” he said. “That’s not what she wanted to do.”

He noted that AOC pivoted after the rollout to something she called the Just Society series, a suite of six pieces of legislation that addressed housing, immigration, criminal justice reform, and other progressive priorities. “She wants to do the serious work of Congress, getting things in the record, on the record in committee, and things like that,” Trent said. She was there to help the party succeed in living up to its principles, she believed, not there to tear it down, and was frustrated that her colleagues and the party leadership couldn’t see it. What she wanted, said Trent, was “that they’d accept her as a sort of normal rep, that she would be one of the team. That just wasn’t never gonna happen.”

Trent said he would often warn Ocasio-Cortez that because of the way she had burst onto the scene, and because of the threat she represented to others, her hope of being accepted as a member in good standing would always be frustrated. “Disarming will not make them happy,” he said. Even if she left politics and became merely an influencer or an MSNBC talking head, he argued, they’d still hunt her until the end of time. “The funny thing is it still wouldn’t prove to her that it won’t work,” he said. “ ‘I just have to get a little smaller, so nobody thinks I’m a threat. Okay. Sorry again, guys. Sorry again for all this trouble.’ ”

Her staffer Dan Riffle, who served through the first two years, also watched the burn-it-down image that had developed around AOC clash with her more conciliatory approach to her colleagues. “Despite her having beaten Joe Crowley and her public-facing persona,” Riffle said, “she is a very conflict-averse person, more so than a normal person I think. And you add in all of the very real shit that she has to deal with and the very difficult decisions that she’s faced with as a then-twenty-nine-year-old female.”

At the end of her first term, AOC produced and posted a video noting all her accomplishments, and the Green New Deal gets roughly as much time as the fact that she “Introduced more amendments than 90 percent of freshman lawmakers” and “cosponsored 78 pieces of legislation that passed the House, 14 that were signed into law.” “If you go back and look at the stuff she actually focuses on, to me it’s not the really fucking useful stuff she did,” said Trent.

The rollout of the Green New Deal and Trent’s screwup with the cow farts opened up a rift between the two, even as they stayed bonded through their shared experience of the campaign and AOC’s launch to stardom. “My dad used to always talk about how Peyton Manning was good at never blaming other people on the team—took the blame and gave away the credit,” Trent said. “[Alex] used to love to talk about how—well, not love, but she would literally throw me under the bus all the time for fucking up that rollout, as she put it, or she’d say things like ‘Well, it didn’t go as smoothly as we’d like.’ ” 

The Green New Deal rollout bundled together all the contradictions at the heart of Ocasio-Cortez’s politics and personality, tying her up in knots. In a profound way, she had found herself in a tortured position: a consensus builder and a people pleaser thrust into the role of rebel; a science fair champion, a congressional intern, and a loyal progressive Democrat cast as a burn-it-down radical because she had come from outside the system — had been forced to come from outside, because there was no other way in. And she was cast as unrealistic— a green dreamer — because she grasped the reality of the crisis.

The post The Rise and Rollout of AOC’s Green New Deal appeared first on The Intercept.

Reuters is one of at least seven major news outlets that creates and publishes misleading promotional content for fossil fuel companies, according to a report released today. Known as advertorials or native advertising, the sponsored material is created to look like a publication’s authentic editorial work, lending a veneer of journalistic credibility to the fossil fuel industry’s key climate talking points.

In collaboration with The Intercept and The Nation, Drilled and DeSmog analyzed hundreds of advertorials and events, as well as ad data from MediaRadar. Our analysis focused on the three years spanning October 2020 to October 2023, when the public ramped up calls for media, public relations, and advertising companies to cut their commercial ties with fossil fuel clients amid growing awareness that the industry’s deceptive messaging was slowing climate action.

All of the media companies reviewed — Bloomberg, The Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Politico, Reuters, and the Washington Post — consistently top lists of “most trusted” news outlets. They also all have internal brand studios that create advertising content for major oil and gas companies, furnishing the industry with an air of legitimacy as it pushes misleading climate claims to trusting readers. In addition to producing podcasts, newsletters, and videos, some of these outlets allow fossil fuel companies to sponsor their events. Reuters goes even further, creating custom summits for the industry explicitly designed to remove the “pain points” holding back faster production of oil and gas. (Disclosure: Co-author Matthew Green was formerly a Reuters climate correspondent.)

With United Nations climate talks underway in the United Arab Emirates, oil and gas companies have been sponsoring even more advertorials and events with media partners than usual, primarily designed to portray the industry as a climate leader.

“It’s really outrageous that outlets like the New York Times or Bloomberg or Reuters would lend their imprimatur to content that is misleading at best and in some cases outright false,” said Naomi Oreskes, a climate disinformation expert and professor at Harvard University. “They’re manufacturing content that at best is completely one-sided, and at worst is disinformation, and pushing that to their readers.”

Spokespeople for Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Reuters, and the Washington Post told us that advertorial content is created by staff members who are separate from the newsroom, and their journalists are independent from their ad sales efforts (Politico and The Economist did not respond to requests for comment). But the independence of these outlets’ journalists is not in question; what’s important is whether readers understand the difference between reporting and advertising. And according to a growing body of peer-reviewed research, they do not.

“It tarnishes the reputation of that news outlet. So it’s baffling to me why newsrooms are continuing to pursue this.”

A 2016 Georgetown University study, for example, found that advertorials are confused for “real” content by about two-thirds of people. Another study, conducted in 2018 by Boston University researchers, found that only one in 10 people recognized native advertising as advertising rather than reporting.

Michelle Amazeen, the lead author on the Boston University study, found that those who did recognize sponsored content for what it was thought less of the outlet they were reading. “It tarnishes the reputation of that news outlet,” Amazeen said. “So it’s baffling to me why newsrooms are continuing to pursue this.”

Crafting “Climate Narratives”

This year’s 28^th annual U.N. climate negotiations — known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP28 — are currently being held in Dubai, the largest city in the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s top oil-producing countries. Presided over by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the head of the UAE’s state-owned oil company, Adnoc, it is the most industry-influenced COP yet.

Fossil fuel companies are seeking to preserve their business models by promoting carbon capture and storage, hydrogen power, and carbon offsets as viable climate solutions, even though the technologies are on track to do little more than extend the life of the fossil fuel industry. As COP28 president, Al Jaber backed these technologies in the leadup to the summit.

The enormous influence oil and gas executives are wielding at COP28 has thrown commercial partnerships between media outlets and the fossil fuel industry into sharper focus. Climate reporters at every outlet we analyzed have diligently covered the challenges that the industry’s so-called solutions face, but when that reporting is placed alongside corporate-sponsored content touting the technologies’ benefits, it leaves readers confused.

In addition to the Reuters Plus podcast produced this year for Aramco, the New York Times’s T Brand Studio created “the Energy Trilemma,” a 2022 podcast for BP about how high-emitting industries are decarbonizing — but not by reducing the development or use of fossil fuels. Bloomberg Media Studios, meanwhile, created a video for Exxon Mobil touting hydrogen power and carbon capture and storage, or CCS. In the video, Exxon CEO Darren Woods says the company is “ready to deploy CCS to reduce the world’s emissions” but leaves out the fact that the company also plans to increase annual carbon dioxide emissions by as much as the output of the entire nation of Greece — news Bloomberg’s own climate reporters broke.

Reuters Events offered to help corporations hone their “climate narrative” at COP28 via opportunities to secure “exclusive interviews,” seats at high-level roundtables, coverage on the Reuters website, exclusive dinner invites, and a Reuters presence in corporate pavilions at the Dubai expo center where negotiations are held.

The media plays a fundamental role in shaping both policymakers’ and the public’s understanding of climate issues, according to Max Boykoff, who contributed research and analysis to the most recent climate mitigation report from the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “People aren’t picking up the IPCC report or peer-reviewed research to understand climate change,” he said. “People are reading about it in the news. That’s what shapes their understanding.”

“Vast Sums of Money”

The fossil fuel industry’s attempts to extend its social license by buying friendly advertorials and other sponsored content date back to 1970, when Mobil Oil Vice President of Public Affairs Herbert Schmertz worked with the New York Times to create the first advertorial. The company proceeded to run these pieces, which Schmertz described as “political pamphlets,” in the Times every week for decades — a program that Mobil Oil extended to dozens of other outlets. A peer-reviewed 2017 study of Mobil and then Exxon Mobil’s New York Times advertorials found that 81 percent of the ones that mentioned climate change emphasized doubt in the science.

The advent of “brand studios” inside most major media outlets over the past decade has supercharged such content programs. Now many publications have staff dedicated to creating content for advertisers, and the outlets market their ability to tailor content to their readership. These offerings come at a higher cost than traditional ad buys, making them increasingly important to for-profit newsrooms facing a crisis in the traditional revenue models. And fossil fuel companies have been happy to pay.

“They wouldn’t be spending vast sums of money on these campaigns if they didn’t have a payoff, and it’s well documented that for decades, the fossil fuel industry has leveraged and weaponized and innovated the media technology of the day to its advantage,” said University of Miami researcher Geoffrey Supran, a co-author of the 2017 advertorial study with Oreskes. “It’s sometimes treated as a historical phenomenon, but in reality, we’re living today with the digital descendants of the editorial campaigns pioneered by the fossil fuel industry — the old strategy is very much alive and well.”

“It’s well documented that for decades, the fossil fuel industry has leveraged and weaponized and innovated the media technology of the day to its advantage.”

As their content marketing about the journey to net zero continues to get bigger and better, oil majors’ investments in fossil fuel development have only increased. A peer-reviewed study comparing oil majors’ advertising claims and actions, published in the journal Plos One in 2022, found that while the companies are talking more than ever about energy transition and decarbonization, they are not actually investing in either. “The companies are pledging a transition to clean energy and setting targets more than they are making concrete actions,” the study’s authors wrote.

Reporters at the publications we reviewed often cover this disconnect between advertising and action. Their employers, however, then sell the space next to those stories for industry-sponsored takes that research shows many readers take equally as seriously.

Taking a page from Schmertz’s book, the WP Creative Group — the Washington Post’s internal brand studio — describes on its website how it goes about “influencing the influencers.”

In 2022 alone, Exxon Mobil sponsored more than 100 editions of Washington Post newsletters. Throughout 2020 and 2021, the Post also ran a series of online editorials for the American Petroleum Institute, the most powerful fossil fuel lobby in the U.S., including a multimedia piece that argued renewable energy is unreliable and fossil gas is a needed complement — talking points that the paper’s news reporters often debunk. During this time, the Washington Post editorial team published Pulitzer Prize-winning climate reporting and expanded its climate coverage.

Over the past three years, the Financial Times has also created dedicated web pages for various fossil majors, including Equinor and Aramco, along with native content and videos, all focused on promoting oil and gas as a key component of the energy transition. In that same period, Politico has run native ads more than 50 times for the American Petroleum Institute; organized 37 email campaigns for Exxon Mobil; and sent dozens of newsletters sponsored by BP and Chevron, the latter of which also sponsors Politico’s annual Women Rule summit.

According to data from MediaRadar, the New York Times took in more than $20 million in revenue from fossil fuel advertisers from October 2020 to October 2023 — twice what any other outlet earned from the industry. That number is due largely to the paper’s relationship with Saudi Aramco, which brought in $13 million in ad revenue during that three-year period, via a combination of print, mobile, and video ads, as well as sponsored newsletters.

The revenue figure does not include creative services fees paid to the Times’s internal brand studio. New York Times spokesperson Alexis Mortenson said that the studio creates custom content for fossil fuel advertisers in print, video, and digital, including podcasts, and promotes it to the New York Times audience via “dark social posts”: advertisements that cannot be found organically and do not appear on a brand’s timeline. Mortenson noted that the Times also allows fossil fuel companies to sponsor some newsletters, provided they are not climate related.

“I feel like it’s really important not to beat around the bush and to just recognize these activities for what they are, which is literally Big Oil and mainstream media collaborating in PR campaigns for the industry,” said Supran. “It’s nothing short of that.”

“Gross,” “Undermining,” and “Dangerous”

Of all the outlets we reviewed, only Reuters offers fossil fuel advertisers every possible avenue to reach its audience. Its event arm even produces custom events for the industry, despite counting “freedom from bias” as a core pillar of its “trust principles,” which were adopted to protect the publication’s independence during World War II.

Since Reuters News, a subsidiary of Canadian media conglomerate Thomson Reuters, acquired an events business in 2019, the distinction between the company’s newsroom and its commercial ventures has become increasingly blurred. Reuters’ in-house creative studio produces native print, audio, video, and newsletter content for multiple oil majors, including Shell, Saudi Aramco, and BP, while Reuters journalists routinely take part as moderators and interviewers and propose guest speakers for Reuters Events.

In a media kit for “content opportunities in the upstream industry,” Reuters Events staff offers to produce webinars, white papers, and live-event interviews for those hoping to get in front of its “unrivalled audience reach of decision makers in the oil & gas industry.” For its Hydrogen 2023 event, Reuters Events produced a companion white paper on the top 100 hydrogen innovators, which it then used to market the event in various other outlets. Topping the list of innovators were key event sponsors Chevron and Shell.

Reuters Events also stages fossil fuel industry trade shows aimed at maximizing production of oil and gas, and it creates digital events and webinars for vendors in the fossil fuel supply chain looking to connect with oil and gas companies. In June, Reuters Events convened hundreds of oil, gas, and tech executives in Houston for Reuters Events: Data Driven Oil & Gas USA 2023, a conference held under the banner “Scaling Digital to Maximize Profit.”

“Time is money, which is why our agenda gets straight to key pain points holding back drilling and production maximization,” the conference website said.

In December 2022, Reuters ran an event sponsored by the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, a lobby group that includes many of the world’s largest oil companies, to discuss the “major part” fossil fuel companies “play in ensuring a sustainable energy transition.” During the event, industry talking points were tweeted directly from the Reuters Events Twitter account.

Other news outlets, including the Financial Times, The Economist, and Politico, have held their own climate-focused events, sponsored by petrochemical majors like BP, Chevron, Eni, and Shell.

“Business-to-business publishers always had an events revenue stream, but consumer-facing news publications didn’t really get into the events business until digital advertising became commodified,” media analyst Ken Doctor said. Now events represent 20 to 30 percent of revenue for some publications. Doctor called them a “thought-leader exercise” for the advertisers. “There are only a few top media brands out there, and if you are associated with any of them, there is a lot of tangential brand building benefit to that.”

“How can we expect people to take our climate coverage seriously after everything these oil companies have done to hide the truth?”

Climate reporters at the outlets we reviewed, who requested anonymity to avoid professional repercussions, described the practice of selling advertorials and event sponsorships to fossil fuel companies as “gross,” “undermining,” and “dangerous.”

“Not only does it undermine the climate journalism these outlets are producing, but it actually signals to readers that climate change is not a serious issue,” one climate reporter said.

Another journalist at a major media organization said the outlet had undermined its credibility by striking commercial deals with oil and gas companies with a long history of casting doubt on climate science. “Where is our integrity? How can we expect people to take our climate coverage seriously after everything these oil companies have done to hide the truth?”

This article was reported in partnership with DeSmog and The Nation.

Additional reporting: Joey Grostern.

The post Leading News Outlets Are Doing the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Greenwashing appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endless Violations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Permitting Polluters 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The state has since appealed his ruling.

A National Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Publicly Subsidized Failure

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

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

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

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

“The math doesn’t work out.”

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

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

A Regulatory Shell Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fixer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Amazing, Isn’t It?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friends in High Places

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adnoc Becomes an Oil Major

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hazardous Items, We Have None”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Significant Noncomplier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How the Plastics Industry Is Fighting to Keep Polluting the World

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

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

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

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

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

Aggressive Expansion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was all it took.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A Precious Resource”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tickled to Death”

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of the bills passed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Larger Casualty Event?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1863

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

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

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

1896

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

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

1912

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

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

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

1956

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

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

1969

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

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

1977 – 2003

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

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

Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cyanide Bombs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Years of Hell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Family Fights Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thick as Pudding

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

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

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

“Their lobbying power makes or breaks Wildlife Services.”

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

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

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

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

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

There was one problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Dennis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate and Pollution Concerns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dog and Pony Shows”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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