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In Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, two-thirds of all freshwater in the country sits just 10 to 20 meters below the surface. But since 2020, the military has filled wetlands, driven concrete piles through the aquifer and clear-cut swathes of Latin America’s second-largest rainforest to make way for President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s flagship railway project: the Tren Maya. 

Since the train’s inception in 2018, officials have kept the public in the dark about its environmental impacts. The train cuts through 2.87 million hectares of jungle and over half of its route traverses 177 communally-owned and managed Indigenous territories, but the government still has not divulged the potential ecological effects of the project, especially when it comes to one key resource: water.

“The great question is: what’s going to happen with at least nine thousand piles inside of the aquifer, in karstic [water soluble] soil?” asked Guillermo D. Christy, a water quality specialist and member of Cenotes Urbanos, a conservation and cave science group. Christy and dozens of concerned citizens gathered outside of the train’s fifth tram in Playa del Carmen on June 3 to protest the ongoing lack of transparency about the train’s environmental impacts. “We have the right to know what is going to happen,” Christy said.

The 1,525 kilometer railway consists of seven trams that will whisk tourists and industrial products across five states—Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Campeche, Chiapas and Tabasco—and connect the peninsula to global export markets. Sixteen stations and 12 stops will create new urban centers in rural areas that López Obrador hopes will bring “social and territorial order” to the region by catalyzing real estate, industrial agriculture and tourism development in Mexico’s long-neglected, ethnically Indigenous Southeast. The region has some of the highest rates of poverty in the country. 

Organizations such as the Mexican Center for Environmental Law (CEMDA) and the United Nations (UN) have lambasted the government for launching construction without adequate environmental impact assessments and thereby violating the rights of Indigenous communities to prior consultation and a healthy environment. 

“Where is the water in Mexico? It’s in the Yucatán Peninsula, where Mayan communities are,” said Aldair T’uut’, a Bacalar community member and member of the Assembly of Defenders of the Mayan Territory Múuch’ Xíinbal. “It is very grave that [the military and the government] are violating these environments and these communities—not only for us as Mayans, who they will end up killing, but also because they will kill themselves and the planet. We are in a critical situation in which the climate is changing and in which there will be a tremendous water shortage.”

In 2022, Lopez Obrador declared the project to be a matter of national security to bypass social and environmental safeguards and evade injunctions by Mexico’s own judicial system. A year later, the President announced that Mexico’s Secretary of National Defense, SEDENA would take over construction.

The military’s role in construction has garnered national and international condemnation and has been especially controversial on trams five and six of the train, where the Train’s tracks perforate delicate limestone caves atop the longest underground river in the world and UN-designated Ramsar Convention wetlands of international importance. 

With Lopez Obrador preparing to inaugurate the project in December 2023, calls are growing louder for oversight and adequate environmental impact assessments to protect the country’s freshwater supply. 

Biologists argue that the Yucatan Peninsula already faces myriad threats to water quality. Recent studies have documented the presence of agrochemicals in breast milk as a result of runoff from industrial farming in rural areas of Yucatán state. Meanwhile, in areas of Quintana Roo such as Playa del Carmen, drug consumption and unbridled tourism development have contaminated local waterways with traces of cocaine.
At the same time, the physical damages to caves, aquifers and fragile estuaries from Cancún to Chetumal as a result of the train’s construction have drawn international condemnation and catalyzed widespread protests by environmental groups, Mayan land defenders and concerned members of the general public. 

With the populations of 18 municipalities on the train’s route expected to grow by around 40% by 2030, these groups are begging for an answer to one question: what about the water?

Tram Five: Perforating the Sac Aktun Cave System

On a searing hot June day just before the United Nations International Day of the Environment, protesters stopped construction on the Train Maya’s fifth tram in Playa del Carmen and screamed a message they’d been trying to make clear for years: “You can live without a train; you can’t live without water!”

Since 2022, citizens of Playa del Carmen have walked miles of deforested jungle along tram five of the train to plead for adequate environmental impact statements. They warn that this section of track could contaminate fresh drinking water for over 1.8 million people by collapsing delicate cave ecosystems that connect to the longest underground river in the world, the Sac Aktun cave system. 

Ongoing collapses and contamination from steel piles and diesel could threaten Mexico’s largest reserve of freshwater in a region that already faces severe droughts and overconsumption by tourism. Multiple cave collapses have already been documented. Just this month, an excavator collapsed in the Leona Vicario cave on tram five of the train. 

Grupo México, one of tram five’s main construction agencies, cited the “technical impossibility” of safely constructing the section of the train by the deadline and pulled out of the project in 2023. 

“[Our movement] is not against a train, it is not against development, it is not against the people who are seeking work and health,” explained Octavio del Rio, an underwater archaeologist and member of Cenotes Urbanos.

“It is against where [SEDENA] is constructing it, where they aim to build.”

Tram Six: Bacalar and the Chac Estuary

Further south along the train’s route, just outside of Bacalar’s famous Seven Color Lagoon, the sound of dynamite blasts shattered birdsong and material banks in one of the lagoon’s vital arteries: the Chac Estuary. 

On July 6th, SEDENA began filling a waterway in the 9,500-hectare wetland with more than 5,000 tons of asphalt and railway ballast. They planned to open up a 60-hectare passageway through the estuary, which connects the Bacalar Lagoon to the Rio Hondo and serves as a vital flood prevention mechanism by draining water away from population centers such as Chetumal and Huay Pix. 

Without drainage through the estuary and the savannah alongside it, these areas would be inundated during heavy rains.

As soon as the public got word that SEDENA was preparing to pave over one of the region’s key sources of freshwater without presenting a proposal or impact assessment to the regional government, protests began to stop construction and demand answers. 

According to community members and reporting by El Universal, the military explained that filling the waterway was a temporary solution, but then backpedaled and said that construction workers had begun filling the estuary as a result of “human error.” 

“It’s funny, because then the tubes that they put there were also because of human error—they arrived there by mistake,” T’uut’ explained on the Assembly’s Múuch’ Xíinbal’s radio program, La No-Radio.

“It’s clear that [the military] had the intention to cover the estuary and pass over it, just as they’ve passed above cenotes and caves,” T’uut’ said. 

“It’s a planned error and it’s an error that they have been committing since the beginning of this project, poorly named the ‘Tren Maya.’ Mayans never asked for this train and we don’t want it to pass—not on a bridge, nor flying, nor in our name.”

The Future of Mexico’s Water in the Era of Climate Change 

With the specter of climate change haunting Mexico, Mayan community members like T’uut’ and Alexis Jooy Juuj, who is also a member of Múuch’ Xíinbal, are worried about what the future holds for their culture and for the environment if the train is constructed. 

The Yucatan’s aquifer won’t be able to catch up with massive tourism increases. According to a report released by the Regional Water Program, just five major cities—Mérida, Cancún, Playa del Carmen, Ciudad del Carmen and Campeche—will consume almost as much water as the entire Peninsula by 2030. 

And in Playa del Carmen and Bacalar on trams five and six, pollution in the aquifer, changed water flows, longer droughts due to deforestation and changing rain patterns combined with over-extraction to support tourism threaten to strain supplies even further. 

“We won’t be able to buy [water] with the jobs created by the train,” Juuj stressed. “What they pay us won’t be able to buy what really matters: water.”

The post ‘Can’t live without water:’ Mexico’s Tren Maya rail project faces resistance appeared first on Branch Out.

A wave of new companies are crafting financial incentives to block emissions from oil and gas wells that are near the end of their life spans—and orphaned wells with no clear owners. Yet doubts persist about project oversight and the ethos of the market.

Tyler Crabtree was working in the oil and gas industry in North Dakota, trying to prevent methane leakage from well sites, when he started “soul searching” for a better way to address climate change. He knew it was becoming ever more severe and felt the industry should do more to address it.

“It really opened my eyes to how a lot of operators out there are not spending the appropriate amount of dollars on clean operations,” he said.

Crabtree went on to found CarbonPath, a Houston-based company offering a new class of carbon credits, or offsets, that come from plugging oil and gas wells. He realized that most of the wells in the United States produce relatively little oil and saw an opportunity to incentivize shutting them down early, locking fuel under the Earth’s surface to halt methane emissions that heat the atmosphere at 80 times the rate of carbon dioxide.

CarbonPath is part of an emerging industry that pairs carbon market financing with oilfield service providers to plug wells and generate carbon credits, which it then sells to corporations trying to meet emissions reduction goals and individuals seeking to offset their own negative climate impacts. The new companies are promising to bring verified, high-quality credits into a carbon marketplace that has been fraught with calculation errors and unresolved ethical questions.

“What we’re seeing particularly in the voluntary carbon market is a lot of questions about ‘how can we trust that these carbon credits are real,’” said Martijn Dekker, chief executive of ZeroSix, another Houston-based company offering carbon credits for the “early retirement of oil and gas wells.”

CarbonPath has two different methodologies for generating a carbon credit. The first is for verified plugging of what Crabtree, the company’s CEO, refers to as marginal wells, which produce a small but economically significant amount of oil or gas and typically leak methane. The credit value is determined by an estimation of the potential carbon emissions of fuel left in the ground. Other companies, including ZeroSix and Austin-based ClimateWells, have developed similar methodologies.

“It’s a market-driven solution,” Crabtree said. “If you put a price on carbon that’s acceptable and use the voluntary carbon market, you can incentivize the shutdown of these wells earlier in their lives.”

CarbonPath’s other methodology is for orphaned wells that are inactive, have no legally responsible owner, pose a threat to groundwater, and in many cases are also leaking methane and toxic chemicals. As with the marginal wells, methane emissions from the sites are measured or estimated, and the offset is based on how much methane is prevented from leaking into the atmosphere.

More than 120,000 orphan wells are documented in the United States, according to a study from the Environmental Defense Fund, or EDF, but as many as 800,000 more are thought to exist.

With Limited Funds, Just ‘Scratching the Surface’

At an average price tag of $75,000, plugging oil wells is not cheap. Typically, as wells get older and produce less, they are sold to ever-smaller operators, and when the operators cannot afford to plug the wells, they often abandon them.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in 2021 steered $4.7 billion to state agencies to help plug orphan wells. But Adam Peltz, the director of the EDF’s energy transition program, said there was nonetheless “a huge shortage” of money to get the job done. “We’re only scratching the surface,” he said.

CarbonPath launched its orphan well methodology in May, beginning work on 42 wells in Colorado. Crabtree said he wants to see more oil companies contribute funds to plugging such wells.

Meanwhile, ClimateWells offers emission-reduction credits for plugging oil and gas wells “earlier than they would have been plugged otherwise,” according to its CEO, Reid Calhoon. The company’s methodology factors in both methane and benzene emissions.

He and his team spent two and a half years studying emissions from orphan wells but ultimately decided to offer carbon credits only for shutting down wells that are still producing. Calhoon said he feared that using carbon credit financing to plug the other category could create an “adverse incentive for companies to continue to orphan their wells.” Instead, ClimateWells encourages oil and gas producers to plug wells that are late in their life cycle, thereby preventing them from ever becoming orphaned.

“If our program expands, we believe it stops the orphaning of wells all together,” Calhoon said. ClimateWells’ first project is underway in downtown Los Angeles.

The EDF estimates that more than 565,000 marginal wells are operating in the United States. They represent about 80 percent of all actively producing wells but produce just 6 percent of the nation’s oil and gas supplies, the data show.

Before starting ZeroSix in 2021, Dekker was a vice president at Shell Oil, where he worked for 25 years. ZeroSix is now planning to plug its first wells in July or August and is in talks with a number of oil and gas companies that are considering shutting down their wells early in return for carbon credits, Dekker said.

Demand for quality carbon offsets is high. But Peltz of the EDF, who describes himself as an “intrigued skeptic” on the viability of a carbon market based on plugging wells, said one of his biggest concerns was “additionality.” On the voluntary carbon market, additionality is the principle that financing made available through carbon credits must be used for climate-friendly projects that otherwise would not be possible.

In the case of marginal wells, Peltz is worried about the potential “moral hazard” of subsidizing oil and gas operators to shut them down when those companies are legally obligated to plug them eventually anyway. “There’s kind of a gold rush going on with essentially no oversight,” he said.

With orphan wells, Peltz sees a more clear-cut case for why the carbon financing is “additional”—in theory, it is the only way that those wells will be plugged— but notes a potential crossover with federal funds targeting the most polluting orphaned sites.

Like CarbonPath, the nonprofit American Carbon Registry has developed a methodology for creating offsets from avoided methane emissions by plugging orphan wells. Maris Densmore, the director of engineered solutions at the organization, said it chose to focus only on orphan wells after “questions around additionality” were raised through its peer review process and in public comments.

“We measure how much [methane], we plug it, make sure it’s not leaking anymore, and that’s where the credits are generated,” said Densmore, an environmental geologist. “There’s not a lot of wiggle room on the numbers.”

The methodology is already being used to plug orphan wells in Oklahoma. ClimateWells is looking into using the registry’s method to offer credits.

Beyond the climate benefits of reducing methane emissions, Densmore said the development of a carbon credit market will provide “an opportunity for well pluggers to have a stable and reliable work stream that they can hang their hats on.”

‘A License to Continue Emitting’?

When it comes to the carbon market as a whole, however, there are many doubters. Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that it’s time to start moving away from carbon trading altogether. Beyond what she views as rampant overcalculation of the environmental benefits, she sees offsets as “a license to continue emitting, and it’s hugely damaging.”

While Haya is not familiar with the specifics of the various well plugging methodologies and agrees that many projects associated with carbon markets have accomplished good things, she contends that they fail to acknowledge the urgency of the climate challenge.

“We are in a climate emergency and we don’t have time for false reductions,” said Haya, who has studied carbon credits for 20 years.

Haya finds the calculations for many carbon credits “immeasurable and inherently uncertain” because they “measure emissions reductions against a counterfactual scenario”—namely, projected releases of methane or carbon dioxide—”that never happened.” And Peltz cites an array of unanswered questions about the financing, including “accounting, additionality, perverse incentives and moral hazards.’’

“I don’t think that those factors have been adequately considered and vetted in this rush to bring carbon finance into the well-plugging universe,” he said.

The companies looking to sell carbon credits based on well plugging counter that they have criteria built into their methodologies that makes the offsets verifiably “additional.” Because the marginal wells targeted are currently providing economic benefit to the oil and gas operators, they say, they would not be plugged early without some incentive.

“I have little time for people who want to have the perfect solution, because it may take 20, 30, 40 years to get that perfect solution,’’ Dekker said. “And by that time, the planet’s probably cooked.”

Calhoon of ClimateWells acknowledges the worry that oil operators will simply drill new wells in other places, canceling out any emissions reduction benefit from plugging older ones. In the carbon credit market, this notion is called “leakage,” meaning that the emissions are not prevented but essentially moved.

But he said that ClimateWells relies on research by “leading oil and gas emissions think tanks and institutes to develop custom market leakage accounting.” And he maintains that the “leakage” analysis applied to the operator whose wells are plugged is “precise, very conservative and scientifically peer-reviewed.”

From their progressive names to their accounting methods, the new carbon credit companies are particular about the way their evolving business is framed. Crabtree, for example, said he “hates” the word “offset” because it fails to capture the company’s mission. He prefers to think of CarbonPath as creating “positive climate projects.”

“We’re not carbon avoidance,” he said. “We’re not carbon removal. We’re carbon eliminating. We’re locking it back in the ground.”

The post Carbon credit market seizes new opportunity: plugging oil and gas wells appeared first on Branch Out.

Greenwashing Counterinsurgency: How ‘regenerative’ cowboys are rebranding the frontier of settler colonialism and climate denial

For decades, Rupert Murdoch’s flagship U.S. TV channel – Fox News – has led the charge in denying the reality of climate collapse. Fox has distorted the overwhelming scientific evidence, incessantly lied and denied obvious facts in their coverage, and demonized as “un-American” environmental justice, grass-roots activism, and even mild pro-climate policies.

Fox News was founded on the media power of the “Cowboy President” Ronald Reagan. Before running his own cable news station, Roger Ailes had worked for Reagan, as well as Nixon and George H.W. Bush, and he worked out a theory on the political importance of television performance. This strategy found its application in “Hollywood Cowboy” John Wayne, whom he instructed his candidates to channel in their bids for electoral success. 

After Roger Ailes disgracefully resigned from Fox News in 2016, Rupert Murdoch took over as Executive Director. Today, the billionaire oligarch himself has a new home on the range (345,000-acres, to be precise). Of course, Murdoch’s investments in cattle ranching — much like his holdings in petroleum — are nowhere near the scale of his media empire.

Yet this acquisition may be crucial to understanding the network’s full-spectrum strategy of climate jamming: Murdoch’s $200 million ranch is planning to sell carbon credits. Based on the disproven theory that intensive cattle ranching — done “regeneratively” — sequesters more carbon in the soil than the cows emit as gas, these credits seek to monetize the “natural capital” of this soil carbon. 

Earlier that same year, the Murdochs profited from the largest ever sale of soil carbon credits based on this premise. Half of these credits came from Rupert’s personal ranch, the Cavan Station, with the rest from the family-owned Wilmot Station (both in Australia). These stations are managed by the Wilmot Cattle Company, owned by eldest daughter Prudence Murdoch and her husband Alasdair MacLeod.

Hit the button below to read the full introduction to our investigative series:

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Allan Savory and the origins of ‘regenerative’ cattle ranching

The man behind this theory of soil carbon sequestration through cattle ranching, Allan Savory, admits he has “no expertise in climate change” and asserts that his method of carbon sequestration “cannot be peer-reviewed.” Still, he boasts that it is infallible, based on “300 years of European military experience of planning in immediate battlefield situations.” Lacking for qualifications in climate science, Savory makes up for that with an extensive history of his own in counterinsurgency warfare.

After graduating from the University of Natal in Apartheid South Africa in 1955, Allan Savory enlisted as a ranger with the British Colonial Service in what was then the Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) Game Department. During his time in this role, he learned from Native informants the art of tracking large fauna such as elephants and lions. According to Savory’s own memoir, he pursued this position and launched his lengthy career in land management to prepare himself for guerilla warfare.

As the commander of Rhodesia’s top reconnaissance unit, Savory was the regime’s leading field officer in military intelligence and oversaw hundreds of special operations. It was in conjunction with his leadership in “tracking down like wild animals” and murdering Freedom Fighters that Allan Savory began to develop his method of intensive cattle grazing, which he would soon rebrand as ‘Holistic Management,’ strongly influenced by the social Darwinist theory of holism of Apartheid South Africa’s Architect, General Jan Smuts.

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Savory’s grazing system was first implemented by wealthy Rhodesian settlers, with at least 150 ranches using his method by 1969. The government support he received coincided with a massive expansion of Rhodesia’s cattle industry between 1965 and 1972, which was vital to the illegal war effort and busting international sanctions.

After a decade of military-intelligence service, Savory became a leading Rhodesian politician, advocating for a diplomatic settlement with the explicit goal being “to ensure the long-term future of the European in Rhodesia through strong and just government.” 

Savory’s outspoken advocacy for white supremacy was quite clear from his own exposition of his Rhodesia Party platform, as reported by the Oxford University Press in 1974: “that white economic superiority must be maintained, and that the immigration of skilled whites is necessary for the future of the economy; only the extreme difference between white and black wages should be lessened.” 

He also advocated for expanding eugenics, then being implemented in Rhodesia’s death camps. “Savory suggested that one avenue where new efficiency would be displayed was in the creation of a ‘Minister for Population Control’ who would handle the ‘population explosion’ among Africans,” the Oxford University Press reported.

Read more about Allan Savory

A deeper look at the crossover of carbon credits and cryptocurrency

Earlier this year, Branch Out dug into some of the carbon credit registries that are being brought onto the blockchain as tradable cryptocurrency. Some of these new cryptocurrencies are encouraging more cattle grazing using the method developed by Allan Savory, others are using debunked avoided deforestation credits. Virtually all of them undervalue the contributions of Indigenous communities to protecting and restoring their own living forests, while many profit from violating Indigenous rights.

When the emissions trading industry first took off with the launch of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, even the staunchest advocates of carbon market solutions to the climate crisis were steadfast in opposing the inclusion of avoided deforestation credits on principle.

Because these credits rest on speculative projections of hypothetical deforestation, they are prone to many forms of accounting tricks and cartographic manipulation. Elias Ayrey, a PhD in forest resources, published a video explainer last year outlining 21 different ways these credits are regularly manipulated.

From 2019-2021, Ayrey was the Head Scientist at a carbon market startup providing assurances of carbon credit quality in support of market integrity. Yet after two years of having his scientific research on deeply flawed carbon credits routinely ignored, Ayrey chose to resign as head scientist and became an industry whistleblower instead.

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Today, avoided deforestation credits are a five-billion-dollar industry. But in the first decade after the launch of the Kyoto Protocol, their issuance was far from guaranteed.

It would take an enormous collaboration of the fossil fuel industry and its affiliates, stewarded by the World Economic Forum, to remake the rules of the carbon market.

By 2010, Shell Oil was funding the first Verra project issuing avoided deforestation credits, paving the way for the projects and funders to follow. As Verra grew to become the largest registry on the voluntary carbon market, these projects grew to account for 40% of all credits issued by the registry.

Hit the button below to read more about how ineffective and fraudulent carbon credits are being turned into cryptocurrencies to help greenwash some of the biggest corporate polluters in the world:

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Looking forward… Branch Out is launching Climate Wiki this Summer

For many months, Branch Out has been steadily building Climate Wiki in preparation for its public launch. The platform is a knowledge commons for climate education, political organizing, and a library of real-world climate solutions. Stay tuned for more about Climate Wiki, and as always, we appreciate your support on our Patreon.

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This article is Part 1 of 5 of the original Branch Out Series, “Greenwashing Counterinsurgency.”

In the introduction to this series, Branch Out illustrated how the billionaire Murdoch dynasty behind climate-denying NewsCorp is diversifying its tactics with unprecedented sales of soil carbon credits based on “holistic management.”

The man behind this theory, Allan Savory, admits he has “no expertise in climate change” and asserts that his method of carbon sequestration “cannot be peer-reviewed.” Still, he boasts that it is infallible, based on “300 years of European military experience of planning in immediate battlefield situations.” Lacking for qualifications in climate science, Savory makes up for that with an extensive history of his own in counterinsurgency warfare.

Following his graduation from the University of Natal in Apartheid South Africa in 1955, Allan Savory enlisted as a ranger with the British Colonial Service in what was then the Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) Game Department. During his time in this role, he learned from Native informants the art of tracking large fauna such as elephants and lions. According to Savory’s own memoir, he pursued this position and launched his lengthy career in land management to prepare himself for guerilla warfare.

Rhodesia was a British settler-colonial state named after its founder Cecil Rhodes, who made a fortune during the diamond rush in South Africa in the late 1800s. In pursuit of diamonds and land, Cecil Rhodes committed the genocidal murder of millions of Southern Africans. He was furthermore responsible for the displacement of millions of Africans for the occupation by white settlers and the enslavement of millions of Africans on their own land. Cecil Rhodes is notorious as the architect of South African Apartheid.

While in the Game Department, Savory says he “read everything I could about guerrilla campaigns around the world throughout history” and “pumped mercilessly for information” his colleagues with a counter-insurgency background to learn about “tactics, strategies, political control or influence” and holistically “understand guerrilla warfare in depth and not merely from a military perspective.”

Due to his preparation, Savory was an early advocate of the need for the Rhodesian military to prepare for guerilla warfare. In 1960, he “wrote a memorandum to Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the Federation, urging that we train our Federal Army for guerilla warfare, including training army trackers.” Over the next few years, he began teaching Rhodesian soldiers his tracking methods at the invitation of the all-white Special Air Service.

Then in 1965, Allan Savory presented a paper to Rhodesian Army Headquarters suggesting the formation of a Guerrilla Anti-Terrorist Unit (GATU). The purpose of the unit was to recruit persons who would specialize in tracking and infiltrating liberation groups fighting against British occupation. The unit would be populated by soldiers in the all-white Special Air Service (SAS) and local African police. Savory’s plan was approved by the military, and deemed sensitive enough to be classified as top secret.

Although the unit would soon disband due to bureaucratic conflicts, Savory reformed it as the new Tracker Combat Unit (TCU) in 1968. As described by contemporary apologists, the TCU had the mission of “tracking down and annihilating” Native African insurgents, who were fighting to free their homeland of Zimbabwe from the white supremacist settler-colonial state of Rhodesia.

As the commander of Rhodesia’s top reconnaissance unit, Savory was the regime’s leading field officer in military intelligence and oversaw hundreds of special operations. It was in conjunction with his leadership in “tracking down like wild animals” and murdering Freedom Fighters that Allan Savory began to develop his method of intensive cattle grazing, which he would soon rebrand as ‘Holistic Management,’ strongly influenced by the social Darwinist theory of holism of Apartheid South Africa’s Architect, General Jan Smuts.

After the war, Allan Savory recounted his derivation of the grazing technique underlying this method from his combat experience, when he:

“…would track on land that had been grazed by Europeans, and three hours later I would fly to and track on land that had been grazed by natives…”

He noticed the difference in techniques between European and Native grazing. While European grazing was constant over place, African insurgents herded their cattle from field to field as they migrated across the land. Savory called this method “short duration grazing” and sought to ‘mimic’ it for Rhodesia, significant distortions of Indigenous pastoralism notwithstanding.

Before long, the Rhodesian Ministry of Agriculture hired Savory to train Conservation and Extension Service (CONEX) personnel in the application of his system. He also garnered corporate financing from the Rhodesian Cattlemen’s Association to conduct his method’s initial large scale field trials.

Savory’s grazing system was thus first implemented by wealthy Rhodesian settlers, with at least 150 ranches using his method by 1969. The government and industrial support he received coincided with a massive expansion of Rhodesia’s cattle industry between 1965 and 1972, which was seen as vital to the war effort.

This expansion was prompted by the need to offset British and UN sanctions on Rhodesia in 1965. The intensification of cattle ranching and illegal sale of “secret beef” became a highly successful method of sanction busting. Through the more efficient exploitation of Native grasslands, the Savory method supported the Rhodesian government’s military-economic program of increasing illegal beef exports. Like Savory’s work in military intelligence, much of this program was also classified and cloaked in secrecy.

The Rhodesian regime was not called a “cowboy” government for nothing. Wealthy ranchers influenced its policies in many ways, reflecting a lengthy Rhodesian history of promoting the settler cattle industry. As reported by the British Agricultural History Review:

“To market the young colony as an attractive destination for prospective white immigrants, the British South Africa Company-run government presented Southern Rhodesia as a cattle-man’s country. Dairy farming, it announced, would form an important adjunct to the colonial economy and play a vital role in its larger imperial ambitions.”

While settler ranchers received a litany of subsidies and increased their stocking rates via the Savory method, the government systematically excluded the Black majority from these programs. Despite whites making up only 4% of the population, by 1968, settler ranchers owned the majority of the country’s cattle.

With Rhodesian cattle management deepening wealth inequality and starvation, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) responded by “giving primacy to the prior political preparation of the people.” With this emphasis, the Second Chimurenga (‘liberation struggle’) was conducted as a People’s War.

A major element of struggle was the liberation of cattle from big capitalist ranches. Guerillas would enter the ranches under the cover of night and guide the cattle to communal lands freed of settler control. They would then slaughter the cows and quickly distribute the meat to everyone in the surrounding villages, providing much-needed relief for a population being starved under Rhodesian occupation. The small minority of white ranchers who supported the Guerillas had their farms and cattle left undisturbed.

As Savory’s grazing methods were increasingly being adopted by Rhodesian ranchers to illegally help their land sustain intensified sanction-busting beef exports, his tracking methods became a mandatory curriculum for the entire Rhodesian army. Based on Savory’s lessons, the army learned how to hunt down and kill the insurgents whose popular efforts to feed the starving population threatened settler ranches’ illegal profits. 

In January 1973, one month after a particularly notorious farm raid, the new Emergency Powers Regulations gave Rhodesian forces the authority to collectively punish African civilians suspected of aiding and abetting liberation fighters. Abuses included severe torture, beatings, and confiscation of all cattle. Rhodesian forces routinely assaulted entire villages based on speculation, without any regard for facts.

Yet this strategy failed to deter the insurgents’ liberation of cattle, and so exploiting the counterinsurgency rhetoric of “winning over the masses” advocated by Savory, the government undertook forced relocations of at least 240,000 people from liberation-aligned villages into “protected villages.” 

This campaign was accomplished through the mass theft of village cows and forced concentration of Black villagers into camps. Death rates from disease skyrocketed, and slave labor on plantations was mandated. Rhodesian propaganda framed this genocide as a “civilizing” mission, and by 1974 the insurgency was shrinking, violently cut off from its popular base of support.

By this time, Savory had become one of the leading politicians of Rhodesia. He had been elected to the Rhodesian Parliament in 1970 and continued to oversee TCU operations until 1973, when he left the military and resigned from the ruling Rhodesian Front party in protest of their overemphasis on the military dimension of counterinsurgency at the expense of political measures to win ‘hearts and minds.’

Savory went on to revive the ‘Rhodesia Party’ and become its new President, advocating for a diplomatic settlement with the explicit goal being “to ensure the long-term future of the European in Rhodesia through strong and just government.” 

Savory’s outspoken advocacy for white supremacy is quite clear from his own exposition of the Rhodesia Party platform, as reported by the Oxford University Press in 1974: “that white economic superiority must be maintained, and that the immigration of skilled whites is necessary for the future of the economy; only the extreme difference between white and black wages should be lessened.” 

Savory continued in his defense of colonial rule, arguing that “Good government means preventing the rise of agitators who stir-up the apathetic majority of Africans to demand self-government… Under this system (of the Rhodesia Party), there could never be an African majority rule.”

He had advocated for expanding eugenics, then being implemented in Rhodesia’s death camps. “Savory suggested that one avenue where new efficiency would be displayed was in the creation of a ‘Minister for Population Control’ who would handle the ‘population explosion’ among Africans,” the Oxford University Press reported.

He had also argued for segregation, as a so-called ‘moderate’ position: “RP believes in segregated living areas. Only those Africans who have to work in the towns, such as domestic servants, should be housed in the urban areas. Africans working in industry should be housed outside the towns and transported to work. There should be separate wards for the races in hospitals, and in education the state should provide separate schools. People should be allowed to discriminate in their private lives. With swimming pools, for example, a fee could be charged that would ensure that only whites would attend.”

Ultimately, even his ‘stand’ against military escalation was opportunistic. When it suited his party, Savory had denounced the RF’s request for permission to send troops into Zambia as “humiliating,” arguing that “We should have had Vampire jets flying over and made it quite clear to the Zambians that if they fired one shot they would get everything we had back. But our Government was so weak they couldn’t do it.”

As the war increasingly escalated over the next five years, Savory remained an influential figure in Rhodesian politics. The Rhodesian army, trained in his tracking methods, would go on to wage the largest anthrax assault in history, killing hundreds of Black civilians and thousands of their cattle, while Savory conducted ever larger experiments in ‘holistic’ cattle grazing to support settler ranches and Rhodesia’s illegal war economy.

Despite their parallel efforts, by 1977, the Second Chimurenga’s cattle liberation strategy had proven so successful that the economic viability of settler ranching in Rhodesia was “severely threatened by heavy stock losses.” In 1979, the BBC reported:

“Settler land owners and ranchers have lost vast areas which were formerly grazing land to the liberation forces. Large herds of cattle are reported to have been driven either to the liberated or semi-liberated zones. The few that remain in settler hands are now overcrowded.”

Rhodesia fell shortly thereafter.

When the Second Chimurenga overthrew white minority rule in 1979, Savory recounts that its leadership knew very well the central role Savory had played in opposing decolonization. The Selous Scouts alone – founded by Savory’s handpicked trackers as a beefed-up successor to the TCU – was notorious for massacring thousands of civilians throughout the war.

Savory was thus forced into exile by the new government of Zimbabwe, only to be hailed as an expert in ‘holistic’ cattle ranching by the new pro-Rhodesian government of another settler-colonial state.

~~~

In Part 2 of this series, we will follow Savory into exile where the newly-elected Reagan administration put him to work across the U.S. federal bureaucracy as it enacted massive environmental rollbacks, and Savory attained cult-like status as a “Messiah” promising good news of (holistic) ranching born again.

Version 0.9 of Branch Out’s executive summary of scientific evidence against the Savory Method can be accessed here, with a completed review to be published with the series’ conclusion.

The passages describing the Rhodesia Party platform as advocated by its President, Allan Savory, are quoted from an extensive 1974 Oxford University Press report, based on a combination of Savory’s direct quotes from the contemporary Rhodesian press and an interview with Journalist Helene Barnes.

The post Holistic Counterinsurgency: Allan Savory and the Golden Calf of Rhodesian Land Management appeared first on Branch Out.

As climate disasters accelerate and evidence of the sixth mass extinction continues to pile up, the volume and tenor of NewsCorp’s denial is heating up to jam these signals.

Consider Fox News’ February 2023 report (narrated by the most-watched host on U.S. cable news, Tucker Carlson): THE CLIMATE CULT HAS ONLY GROWN STRONGER. The premise of Carlson’s diatribe is that climate activism is not based on science at all, but is actually “the New Religion of Choice.”

He begins this fear-mongering screed by identifying “their Eden” as “the world before the settlers arrived,” and throws in evident falsehoods like denying that hurricane damage and intensity has increased with global heating. By the end of his rant, he equates the very notion of climate action with the so-called “primitive religions… of the Mayas, the Aztecs,” because preventing climate collapse demands the “sacrifice” of substantially reducing fossil fuel and beef consumption.

But what does Murdoch’s mouthpiece know about sacrifice? During radio appearances over the last decade, Carlson has boasted about the wealth he amassed as a trust-fund kid. When asked in 2008 how he pays his bills, Carlson replied that he’s “extraordinarily loaded” just from “inheritance from my number of trust funds.” Tucker Carlson seems to have inherited both the wealth and the brand of his ancestor Henry Miller, the “Cattle King of California.”

Such a legacy is unsurprising for Fox News’ chief demagogue. In 2015, the network described itself as engaging in a “rhetorical war” to defend the cattle sector from “global warming alarmism,” and used the counterinsurgency rhetoric of waging “an ongoing battle for… ‘hearts and minds'” to deny the industry’s massive emissions crisis.

Strategically, Fox News was founded on the media power of the “Cowboy President.” The company’s first CEO, Roger Ailes, had previously served as the campaign media director for three U.S. presidents: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. Before running his own cable news station, Ailes worked out a theory on the political importance of television performance. This strategy found its application in “Hollywood Cowboy” John Wayne, whom he instructed his candidates to channel in their bids for electoral success. 

After Roger Ailes disgracefully resigned from Fox News in 2016, Rupert Murdoch took over as Executive Director. Today, the billionaire oligarch himself has a new home on the range (345,000-acres, to be precise). Of course, Murdoch’s investments in cattle ranching — much like his holdings in petroleum — are nowhere near the scale of his media empire. 

Yet this acquisition may be crucial to understanding the network’s full-spectrum strategy of climate jamming: Murdoch’s $200 million ranch is planning to sell carbon credits. Based on the disproven theory that intensive cattle ranching — done “regeneratively” — sequesters more carbon in the soil than the cows emit as gas, these credits seek to monetize the “natural capital” of this soil carbon. 

Earlier that same year, the Murdochs profited from the largest ever sale of soil carbon credits based on this premise, in a deal with Microsoft brokered by Regen Network Development. Half of these credits came from Rupert’s personal ranch, the Cavan Station, with the rest from the family-owned Wilmot Station (both in Australia). These stations are managed by the Wilmot Cattle Company, owned by eldest daughter Prudence Murdoch and her husband Alasdair MacLeod.

Until the billionaire couple stepped down to focus on the family ranching business in Australia, they were NewsCorp Australia executives for two decades, with a record of climate denial rivaling Fox News. Yet the Murdoch family ranches claim to have achieved “net carbon sequestration.” 

According to Wilmot, this accomplishment is a result of “holistic management.” The man behind this theory, Allan Savory, admits he has “no expertise in climate change” and asserts that his method of carbon sequestration “cannot be peer-reviewed.” Still, he boasts that it is infallible based on “300 years of European military experience of planning in immediate battlefield situations.”

~~~

In Part 1 of this series, Branch Out unearths the origins of Allan Savory’s theory of grazing in the Rhodesian counterinsurgency. As the white supremacist regime’s leading field instructor in military intelligence, Savory developed “holistic management” through his regular practice of war crimes.

In Part 2 of this series, we follow Savory into exile where the newly-elected Reagan administration put him to work across the U.S. federal bureaucracy as it enacted massive environmental rollbacks, and Savory attained cult-like status as a “Messiah” promising good news of (holistic) ranching born again.

In Part 3 of this series, we explore the international growth of the Savory Network, and how its operations in Argentina have become essential in its efforts to develop its ecological accreditation schemes.

In Part 4 of this series, we return to Turtle Island and Savory’s rise to stardom as a false ‘climate leader’ over the last decade, as he works with big oil and agribusiness to greenwash their operations.

In Part 5 of this series, we conclude with the rise of “regenerative capitalism,” and how the Murdochs have deployed blockchain technology to scale up the Savory Method. As an alternative to “holistic management,” we highlight permaculture as an ethical framework supporting climate justice when rooted in decolonization.

Finally, as an appendix to our reporting, we are releasing an executive summary of scientific evidence refuting the Savory Method. Version 0.9 is available here, with a completed review to be published with the series’ conclusion.

The post Greenwashing Counterinsurgency: How the Murdoch Media Empire is Rebranding its Climate Denial with Cowboy Mythology appeared first on Branch Out.

Their proposal – the Kawsak Sacha (Living Forest) Declaration – was issued by the Amazon Rainforest itself. According to the Sarayaku, it was communicated to their community by the forest through their yachaks (or ‘shamans’), who act as the spiritual intermediaries between the rainforest and its protectors.

As reported by the Ecologist:

Instead of seeing Sarayaku territory as an inert space to exploit for resources, the Declaration describes the rainforest as a living entity with consciousness, constituted by all the beings within it, including those from the animal, vegetable, mineral, spiritual and cosmic worlds.

The Declaration asserts that the territory is subject to legal rights and demands that these rights be upheld. It also declares that the area be free of any type of extractive activity such as oil exploitation, mining, logging and biopiracy.

Across the Kawsak Sacha from Bolivia to Ecuador, the growing recognition of the Rights of Nature is forming a renewed basis for ecosocial governance.

As the Sarayaku community asserts their sovereignty against extractive industries that threaten the Rainforest and their way of life, a growing body of scientific evidence is verifying that Indigenous Land Management is the most effective way to prevent deforestation across the planet.

Hundreds of studies on the effects of Native land reclamation in the Kawsak Sacha have shown that restoring Indigenous Sovereignty over the Amazon has prevented billions of tons of carbon emissions.

Yet, as is so often the case, the reality of climate science threatens those most invested in maintaining the status quo. Unable to deny climate collapse, the fossil fuel industry and their mega-corporate allies have invented their own solution: to claim, in fact, that they deserve “credit” for avoiding deforestation.

From the Living Forest to the Carbon Credit Machine

When the emissions trading industry first took off with the launch of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, even the staunchest advocates of carbon market solutions to the climate crisis were steadfast in opposing the inclusion of avoided deforestation credits on principle.

Because these credits rest on speculative projections of hypothetical deforestation, they are prone to many forms of accounting tricks and cartographic manipulation, not unlike political gerrymandering. Elias Ayrey, a PhD in forest resources, published a video explainer last year outlining 21 different ways these credits are regularly manipulated.

From 2019-2021, Ayrey was the Head Scientist at the carbon market startup Pachama. A core mission of the company is to provide assurances of carbon credit quality in support of market integrity. Yet after two years of having his scientific research on deeply flawed carbon credits routinely ignored, Ayrey chose to resign as head scientist and became an industry whistleblower instead.

This is hardly the first time climate science has clashed with the interests of big business. Today, avoided deforestation credits are a five-billion-dollar industry. But in the first decade after the launch of the Kyoto Protocol, their issuance was far from guaranteed.

It would take an enormous collaboration of the fossil fuel industry and its affiliates, stewarded by the World Economic Forum, to remake the rules of the carbon market. Participants in this WEF consortium included:

1. The Climate Group (an alliance of politicians and companies like British Petroleum, Goldman Sachs, and Starbucks)

2. The WBCSD (whose co-chair at the time was the CEO of Shell Oil, and today includes numerous oil companies)

3. The IETA (the largest lobbying group for emissions trading, whose membership includes oil companies like British Petroleum, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Enbridge, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, and Shell Oil; Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs; and ecocidal ag companies like Bayer-Monsanto and Cargill).

Together, these organizations took over the nascent Verified Carbon Standard in 2006 and launched it through a new non-profit corporation, which they officially founded in 2009 as Verra.

By 2010, Shell Oil was funding the first Verra project issuing avoided deforestation credits, paving the way for the projects and funders to follow. As Verra grew to become the largest registry on the voluntary carbon market, these projects grew to account for 40% of all credits issued by the registry.

Today, the partnership between Shell and Verra is as close as ever. Verra’s expert groups and advisory board include three Shell executives; Verra’s former program director is now a manager at Shell. In turn, Shell remains heavily invested in Verra, purchasing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of carbon credits every year. At the same time, Shell spends $8 billion per year on fossil fuel exploration and extraction.

The Kawsak Sacha and her Protectors have not stood idly by while Shell plays accounting games with the future of our planet. On July 1, 2021, the Kichwa Indigenous Community of Puerto Franco announced that it was taking the Peruvian State to court in defense of its territory claimed by the Cordillera Azul National Park, which has sold the majority of its carbon credits to the European oil companies Total and Shell.

The Kichwa never approved this deal on their sovereign land, let alone the project to begin with. Isidro Sangama, Vice President of the Ethnic Council of the Kichwa Peoples of the Amazon (CEPKA) is calling on the Peruvian State to return the land which was taken from them without consent:

“The State thinks that this territory is in this condition and remains forested due to the care of the National Park, but they forget that in fact this territory has been cared for by Indigenous communities for years.”

CEPKA member Marco Sangama also reported that despite caring for and protecting the forest, the Kichwa community has not benefited from the sale of carbon credits under this project:

The community controls and protects their territory, however they don’t see who is administering the PNCAZ. We understand that this park has benefitted from carbon credits. Despite this, the community has not benefitted, even when they are conserving their lands.

Less than a week after this press release, CIMA (the park manager) publicly hosted a webinar in response to discuss the project along with a law firm, project accreditor Verra, and major oil industry purchaser Total.

Not a single representative of the Kichwa People was invited to participate in the session, prompting an even wider Kichwa federation to issue a joint statement, expressing

deep unease and indignation at the exclusionary and discriminatory vision of the Cordillera Azul National Park in Peru… carried out at the expense of the forests that we have occupied, protected and managed ancestrally, and the violation of our fundamental rights.

And that is how carbon colonialism operates. Through the violation of Indigenous Sovereignty, to cater to the greenwashing bottom-line of corporate polluters, the strange alchemy of carbon accounting is used to transform the Living Forest into a carbon credit machine. As reported by Die Zeit:

The more projects are examined, the clearer it becomes: The rules established by Verra are the problem. If one project bends the rules, all projects bend the rules. Indeed, the rules are not the laws according to which the market works. They themselves are the product. Without the rules, a forest is just a forest. With the rules, a forest becomes a carbon credit machine that makes all those wealthy who sell purported climate protection to large companies so they can claim lower emissions.

Trustless Immutable Credit Laundering

Facing unprecedented scientific critique for the last two months, Verra recently conceded the need to phase rainforest offsets out, although not until 2025.

This decision came in the wake of coordinated reporting by the Guardian, Die Zeit, and Source Material, whose journalists investigated Verra’s rainforest offset schemes and publicized the recent findings of three scientific studies in an accessible form, showing that 94% of these credits are “largely worthless.”

Many of the projects sampled avoided no deforestation at all compared to non-project land. Others over-issued credits by an average of 400%. Such fictitious benefits have allowed Shell Oil, for example, to greenwash its trajectory as “carbon neutral” while making record profits from fossil fuel expansion.

And with the petro-giant pledging in January to invest an additional $450 million in carbon credits, it is only ramping up its commitment to this strategy.

As fossil finance leads the acceleration of corporate demand in the voluntary carbon market today, Verra and its founding fossil-industrial alliances (the WEF, WBCSD, & IETA) are increasingly turning to blockchain technology and cryptocurrency to rebrand Verra’s credits as regenerative finance (ReFi).

Near the end of his omnibus video on forest credit manipulation, whistleblower scientist Elias Ayrey describes how Verra’s crypto partners “take crappy carbon credits, throw them on a blockchain, and don’t tell you which ones are which. They’re recycling them in a money laundering scheme… if you buy a credit on the blockchain, nobody actually knows whether it came from a project that’s crap.”

He gives two examples of crypto startups laundering credits in this way: Flowcarbon and Toucan Protocol. Both of these companies have turned Verra’s forest credits into cryptocurrency, and both are members of the IETA, coordinating jointly with Verra, the WEF, and dozens of the worst corporate polluters.

Flowcarbon is perhaps best known (outside of crypto/climate circles) for its co-founder Adam Neumann, who took off with over $1 billion from the 2019 collapse of his previous startup WeWork, even as the company had to fire 6,000 workers.

Former executives of WeWork describe Neumann as a “cult leader” who exerted centralized control over every aspect of his business. He even went so far as to personally trademark the brand “We” and sell it to WeWork for $5.9 million, until he ultimately returned the money after considerable public outcry.

The “cult leader” has now re-entered the spotlight with Flowcarbon’s upcoming launch of its “Goddess Nature Token” ($GNT), which – as Ayrey describes – pools together a variety of forest carbon offsets in an opaque and haphazard fashion.

Despite hosting an entire initiative on its website named “knowcarbon,” this section provides no knowledge at all about the projects or the carbon which allegedly underlie the $38 million worth of $GNT it has already sold.

But the archive of Flowcarbon’s website shows that among the largest contributors to its pool, one can find hidden within the $GNT such harmful credits as those issued by the Katingan Peatlands Project, which is funded by Shell Oil (the top buyer) and other large polluters such as Delta Airlines, Total Energies, Bentley Motors, Volkswagen, Singapore Airlines, PetroChina International Company, and CNOOC Gas & Power Group.

Since this project began, it has issued credits for land already protected under a governmental moratorium on deforestation, and failed to stop thousands of hectares of ‘protected’ forest from burning up in smoke while additional deforestation has merely leaked out to surrounding areas.

Despite promising to improve community well-being, the project has cut people off from their Indigenous homelands. The majority of villages surveyed in the area reported that changes have been “very negative,” with economic data showing a decline in total household income relative to other villages.

While Flowcarbon has received ReFi’s largest injection of venture capital as it repackages harmful projects such as these, Ayrey describes Toucan Protocol as the worst offender of laundering Verra credits with cryptocurrency so far.

Klima DAO + Toucan Protocol

In terms of sheer credit volume, Ayrey’s measurement is clearly accurate – no other protocol has brought anywhere near as many Verra credits on-chain — meaning onto its crypto blockchain — as Toucan.

With the launch of Toucan’s Base Carbon Ton ($BCT) in Fall 2021, over 20 million carbon credits were turned into crypto tokens in a pool derived entirely from the Verra registry, making up 25% of Verra’s total demand for the year.

The demand for $BCT was driven largely by another crypto token that was launched by KlimaDAO in coordination with Toucan, called $KLIMA. The idea behind $KLIMA was to create a digital, carbon-backed currency by buying all the cheapest Verra credits off the market in what they called “sweeping the floor.”

In April 2022, coordinated reporting from CarbonPlan and Bloomberg described how many of the projects were so low quality even corporate polluters refused to buy them, and they had no market until Toucan and Klima regenerated demand.

The $BCT pool included old Verra credits sold by a fossil gas producer, which issued offsets based on the fallacy of ‘avoiding emissions’ by burning fossil gas instead of coal, despite the former’s greater methane pollution.

Another project manager which received millions in funding via the launch of the $BCT pool was the company behind a Hydropower Dam in India which flooded in 2013, killing thousands of people and displacing thousands more.

In a theory heavily promoted by Toucan and Klima, locking these tokens up in Klima’s treasury would raise the price of carbon credits until corporations were forced to pay more to offset or actually make meaningful emissions reductions.

Instead, the price of $KLIMA fell dramatically. The token is now down over 99.9% from its all-time high. Retail investors who followed KlimaDAO’s promoted model of “cooperative tokenomics” were left holding the bag, but not before billionaire investor and KlimaDAO backer Mark Cuban made off with millions in profits after selling his pre-sale tokens at a massive premium.

In the fallout from the collapse of their “sweeping the floor” strategy, Klima and Toucan split ways and reinvented their respective missions.

Klima, which had purchased the vast majority of $BCT tokenized so far, had no qualms turning around and launching Klima Infinity as an offsetting service, based on the very cheap credits its founding team had only months before argued were being locked up to prevent them from being used for corporate greenwashing.

Polygon, the $10-billion market-cap blockchain on which Klima is based, claimed last year to have become carbon neutral using these offsets.

The Nature Carbon Ton

Toucan, however, was already several months into a new joint venture to rebrand some of Verra’s credits as higher-quality due to their being “nature-based.”

In January 2022, the company stealthily extracted these credits from the $BCT pool, and relaunched them in a new pool called the Nature Carbon Ton ($NCT).

Most of the $NCT pool consisted of the cheapest ‘nature-based’ credits available for purchase on Verra’s registry, due its origins lying in the anonymous “floor-sweeping” executed by $BCT’s biggest original tokenizers (Mark Cuban and a number of anonymous wealthy investors).

And nearly all of them were issued by Verra’s ‘avoided deforestation’ projects.

By the time the latest round of joint reporting publicizing the deep scientific flaws underlying these projects was made known, Toucan Protocol and a new launch partner, Regen Network Development (RND Inc), were already a year into their plan to bridge $NCT to another blockchain network called Cosmos.

In anticipation of $NCT’s second launch on Cosmos, several other blockchains in the network voted to offset their emissions through retiring Toucan’s $NCT credits on-chain once available.

These votes were a part of RND Inc’s Cosmos ZERO initiative, an offsetting project with the goal of helping Cosmos achieve net zero emissions.

RND Inc recommended the Nature Carbon Ton for this function, describing the token as “a premium digital carbon basket of nature-based projects” consisting of “nature-based carbon credits that have verifiable ecological, social, and economic benefits” that were “selected by Regen Network for their premium quality.”

When the methodological flaws of $NCT’s underlying Verra credits were publicized this January, Toucan Protocol’s official response failed to even recognize that its Nature Carbon Ton is based on these methodologies.

Two weeks later, RND’s response partially acknowledged this, but did not provide any evidence of the $NCT’s verifiable ecological, social, or economic benefits.

Instead, RND reiterated its blanket policy that “credits issued by Verra standards can be issued, traded, and retired on the Regen Network blockchain.”

After reassuring its readership – including prospective buyers of Toucan’s $NCT tokens – that only 2/13 projects of the $NCT pool were included in the analyzed sample (Florestal Santa Maria + Pacajai), RND then cited its inability to verify the quality of these projects as a reason to include them:

“because there is no additional data publicly available by which we can further analyze the quality of these projects’ outcome claims, the team at Regen Network feels comfortable proceeding with including these projects in the NCT tokens that will be issued by Toucan protocol on the Regen Network blockchain.”

However, there are three major fallacies with this rationale for approving Toucan’s $NCT:

1) Verification: including projects based on unverifiable data is fundamentally contrary to how RND marketed the $NCT and the Regen Registry’s stated mission of “maintaining the environmental integrity and scientific rigor necessary to ensure projects developed against its credit classes and methodologies are of the highest quality.”

2) Measurement: while the Florestal Santa Maria Project and Pacajai Project are only 2 of 13 contributors to the $NCT pool, together they make up 54% of its total credit volume as the two largest projects tokenized in the basket.

3) Reporting: there is highly relevant publicly available evidence by which to analyze – and reject – both of these projects as well as the NCT Pool as a whole.

$NCT Project #1: Florestal Santa Maria (37%)

The largest issuer in the $NCT pool is Florestal Santa Maria (FSM), a Brazilian project largely funded by fossil transit companies like Delta + GOL Airlines. Supplying 861,000 credits, it composed 37% of the original pool of $NCT tokens.

In the assessment of whistleblower Elias Ayrey, the FSM is no exception to the manipulation which plagues these projects. In his analysis, through ‘leveraging up’ its baseline, the project’s credits are overissued by ~300%. That means even if everything else was sound with the project, 2/3rds of its ‘offsets’ are fictitious.

But this one doesn’t even try to hide its colonialism. As documented by the World Rainforest Movement, the project’s own text describes its chain of custody issuing from acquiring the land from the federal and state government in 1975 as part of an explicit program of colonization. Verra read this document in full, and approved it.

That was during the Brazilian Military dictatorship of 1964-1985, when vast swathes of Amazonian forestland (including the project area) were stolen from Indigenous Nations through a devastating genocide that killed hundreds of thousands of people – as previously reported by Branch Out in 2020.

This violent colonization and privatization of land intensified deforestation in the region, literally paving the way for the threats to the forest that exist today. And in 2017, the original proponent of FSM (Lunardelli), a logging company, had its certification by the Forest Stewardship Council revoked due to:

“violations of labor laws, damage to the forest caused by timber extraction, including logging in areas of permanent preservation – strictly protected by law – and the lack of many management plans and procedures that should be part of its so-called “sustainable forest management.”

In the last few years, FSM’s chain of custody has extended with a new project manager taking over. Although FSC certification has yet to be restored, cryptocurrency is now facilitating the majority of FSM credit purchases.

A prominent marketer of this “fire sale” is Moss, a core methodology developer of the $NCT with RND and Toucan and a close partner of KlimaDAO. Today, multiple former associates of Moss are now directly involved in operating the FSM project.

By its own admission, Moss has “made a lot of money purchasing cheap carbon credits” which it internally recognized as low-quality, only to advertise them as “high-quality” and re-sell them Wolf of Wall Street-style for vastly greater sums.

$NCT Project #2: Pacajai (17%)

The second largest contributor to the $NCT pool is the Pacajai Project (17%), one of four linked projects in the Xingu region of the Amazon. Rather than being implemented in the neighboring forestland most in need of protection, these projects are located safely away from logging activity.

As in many other Verra projects where projects use deforestation in neighboring areas as a “baseline,” the more deforestation progresses nearby, the more carbon credits the project managers can sell and make a profit from.

And in the project area itself, the managers have set up a massive network of surveillance towers across Xingu Indigenous Land, which they explicitly describe as being operated “to create a big brother atmosphere in the region.”

In the name of avoided deforestation, they are policing Xingu Land Stewards and prohibiting them from practicing cultural burns in the project area, a vital component of their traditional agroforestry method of shifting cultivation.

Shifting cultivation in swiddens prepared via periodic burning is a successful and ecologically regenerative agroforestry system long practiced by Indigenous peoples throughout the region.

Yet like other Indigenous practices of controlled burning throughout the world – which have been shown to reduce wildfire risks by safely consuming dry fuel – it has been demonized as ‘primitive’ and inherently harmful to the environment.

As moisture levels and available land decline due to climate collapse and deforestation, Xingu scientists Yakuna Ullillo Ikpeng and Tariaup Kayabi have helped develop an updated method of Assisted Natural Regeneration.

Along with their co-authors, they propose adapting traditional shifting cultivation and cultural burns to increased fire sensitivity, while emphasizing the production of biochar to “animate the regeneration” and “help the earth to become dark.”

Towards Biocultural Regeneration

Indigenous Peoples across the Kawsak Sacha have cultivated biochar-rich soils for over 9,000 years. As documented in books like Sacred Soils, it was only the devastating genocide and invasion of European colonization which forced the collapse of the Indigenous Biochar Cultures in the Amazon.

Biochar is the only proven method of organically sequestering carbon in soil for thousands of years. Its scientifically recognized status as the negative emissions strategy “at the highest technology readiness level” can turn colonial presumptions about civilization, carbon, and deforestation on their head – when valorized in support of Indigenous Sovereignty.

Far to the west of the Xingu region of the Amazon, the Sachamama Center for Biocultural Regeneration is working to restore the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of making rich black soil with biochar amongst the Kichwa people of Lamas.

The importance of their work and leadership is systemically undervalued by a carbon market system designed by Verra and its corporate allies to serve the interests of fossil fuel companies, big corporations, and speculative profit.

All the big money for ‘rainforest conservation’ near the Sachamama Center flows instead to the Shell-funded Cordillera Azul National Park, where the Kichwa people continue to fight for the reparation of their lost income and stolen land. These Verra credits are being resold through Toucan’s Nature Carbon Ton.

Getting companies like Shell Oil to invest ‘regeneratively’ will never establish climate justice after decades of ecocide and denial. Instead, climate finance must prioritize climate reparations – already promised in 2009 by wealthy nations in the amount of $100 billion/year, and yet to be delivered.

With over 90% of excess carbon emissions directly linked to neo-colonial wealth inequality, ensuring that regenerative finance is reparative is not simply a ‘co-benefit.’ Over 400 Indigenous Nations are calling for their land rights to be restored across the Kawsak Sacha, as the planet’s largest jointly governed sanctuary of culture and life. Climate science –  rooted in 10,000 years of TEK – shows their management of this land is necessary to avert planetary disaster.

~~~

Full Compendium of Works Cited

~~~

Disclosure: Branch Out received funding from the Regen Network’s community pool process, through which $REGEN token-holders voted 99.71% in favor of our Climate Wiki proposal which included vetting ReFi tokens. This report publicized some of our results ahead of Climate Wiki‘s planned summer launch.

At the time of publication, we held a portion of the $REGEN allocated through this process. After starting a discussion thread on Regen Network’s public forum in a futile attempt to prevent the $NCT from launching prior to addressing the issues identified in this article, we sold the remnant of our $REGEN. 

The post The Living Forest Declaration and the Carbon Market Shell Game appeared first on Branch Out.

Texas’ business-friendly reputation and abundance of energy have made it a magnet for these mining companies. Indeed, state officials have embraced bitcoin entrepreneurs, with interim ERCOT CEO Brad Jones telling Bloomberg that the electrical grid operator plans to make Texas a leader in crypto mining over the next decade. 

Legislators sealed the deal in 2021 by formally recognizing digital assets as legal tender through House Bills 1576 and 4474. But with the grid failure from Winter Storm Uri, mounting criticism of bitcoin mining’s environmental impact, and the recent bankruptcy of FTX, the fate of this industry and its impact on the environment and economic development of rural Texas remains unclear.

The boom has undoubtedly brought jobs and investments to rural areas. Texas cities such as Fort Stockton, Rockdale, McAdoo, and Corsicana have rapidly become crypto mining hubs. However, much of this boom stems from China’s recent ban on cryptocurrency that caused companies to jump ship and flee to Texas in 2021. Additionally, many of these companies received lucrative tax breaks from county judges. 

Most of these facilities mine bitcoin and essentially profit from the difference in the value of the coin and the price of electricity. Thus, miners have flocked to numerous parts of Texas in search of the cheapest energy, often hooking up to fossil fuel power plants. In Granbury, Texas, Compute North announced plans to build a 300MW mining facility right next to a gas plant. 

An interagency report from the White House strikes a more moderate, yet still alarming, tone, noting that ERCOT’s demand response program to pay crypto miners to shut down operations during peak electricity demand establishes “misaligned incentives between crypto-asset miners and grid operators.” Indeed, in many cases these demand response programs would not be necessary in the first place without the increased energy demand from crypto mines. 

Nevertheless in mid-November, one week after the major crypto exchange FTX lost billions of dollars in customer assets and filed for bankruptcy, the Texas Blockchain Council wrapped up a two-day conference featuring speakers such as Ted Cruz and Andrew Yang, with the council president Lee Bratcher proclaiming that crypto growth needs “light touch regulatory frameworks that protect consumers and provide clarity for businesses.”  

In contrast to the bold claims coming from the Texas Blockchain Council at the AT&T Conference Center in Austin, officials from economic development organizations and rural Texas cities were more pragmatic at “The Future of Rural Texas” conference occurring over the same two-day period 400 miles away in Lubbock. During a panel on job growth, Lillian Salerno, Rural Development State Director for Texas at USDA, noted that economic development experts in Texas prefer “about 2 or 3 companies instead of betting the entire farm, so to speak, on one big employer.” 

Other panels focused on the need to attract young people, invest in broadband, fund public schools, continue to invest in Texas’ powerful agricultural sector, maintain healthcare facilities, and support numerous other initiatives to promote sustainable economic development. Although no panelists explicitly spoke out against crypto, none echoed the bullish megaphone of the crypto summit in Austin. This cuts to the heart of the tension between rural Texas and the crypto industry: how “decentralized” can this industry truly become?  

Some crypto experts, along with environmental groups Greenpeace and Environmental Working Group, advocate shifting from the Proof-of-Work validation method currently used by bitcoin miners to the less energy-intensive Proof-of-Stake model to reduce the carbon intensity of mining operations. Ethereum, the second biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization behind bitcoin, recently converted to a Proof-of-Stake validation method. Additionally, miners say crypto mining in West Texas can stimulate the growth of renewable energy by providing a market for the excess wind energy that would otherwise go to waste. 

Still others go so far as to argue that such mining operations empower marginalized communities by giving them the opportunity to accrue wealth outside of a financial system that has historically excluded them. However, as Public Citizen Texas director Adrian Shelley put it in a debate at UT Austin, “1/10 of one percent of the [crypto] companies…own 50% of the mines” in Texas, and their use of renewable energy actually dis-incentivizes ERCOT from investing in transmission to bring affordable, clean energy to population centers. 

Arguments that crypto mining empowers rural communities mirror the energy poverty narrative propagated by the oil and gas industry—the claim that fossil fuels are necessary to alleviate global suffering and elevate human prosperity. Indeed, in known fossil fuel propagandist Alex Epstein’s blog, “Energy Talking Points,” he goes so far as to say that the “fastest way to decrease energy poverty and overall poverty is to…reject any proposal to outlaw reliable fossil fuels and nuclear in favor or unreliable ‘renewable’ energy.” 

Yet Bitcoin has its own 1%. And today, the majority of wealth held in several of the top cryptocurrencies is concentrated in the hands of only a few entities–not unlike the modern financial system. From the disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried to Elon Musk, who has announced plans to build a solar-powered bitcoin mining operation in Texas, billionaires have become experts in selling new crypto schemes as a ‘public good’ to accelerate their accumulation of capital.

In some ways, it is no surprise that crypto mining has exploded in Texas. The lone star state prides itself on nurturing a mythologized pioneering spirit through free enterprise, with the booming tech industry successfully appropriating this romantic vision for its own purposes. But after decades of continued disinvestment, it remains to be seen whether the roughly three million rural Texans will embrace crypto mining as a silver bullet solution. As companies rush in to gobble up cheap Texas energy and secure highly volatile digital assets, they face a populace that has been burned for decades from the boom-and-bust cycles of fossil fuel dependency. Their future in rural Texas is anything but certain.

The post The Cryptic Promise of Bitcoin Mining in Rural Texas appeared first on Branch Out.

“The ocean is already a climate solution for us,” states ocean-climate policy expert Jean Flemma, who also contributed to the Blueprint for Ocean Climate Action. “It’s been absorbing our greenhouse gas emissions, along with the heat being generated from those emissions, for all of industrial time.” Essentially, if it wasn’t for the ocean, the climate impacts we’re already seeing today would be incredibly worse.

Congress Passes Climate Bill

As President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law this past week, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer stated, “To the tens of millions of young Americans who have spent years marching, rallying, and demanding that Congress act on climate change, this bill is for you.” 

The Inflation Reduction Act is historic in the sense that it is the largest spending package passed in the U.S. that addresses the global climate crisis, with approximately $406 billion designated for alternative energy and climate change programs over the next ten years. It is estimated that the clean energy projects included in the package will reduce emissions by up to 40% by 2030. With Biden promising to reduce our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions 50% by 2030, this ten-year plan is meant to kickstart the United States reaching its goals.

Although this is a start, it will still keep the U.S. behind in meeting the commitments proposed in the Paris Climate Accord. Along with this, the bill also makes some appalling compromises with fossil fuel development that will directly impact coastal, low-income, and communities of color in the Gulf South and Alaska by creating even more opportunities for drilling on federal lands and waters. Because of the many compromises made with the top Democratic recipient of fossil fuel money Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), many climate activists see dark times ahead and recognize that more must be done. 

“We live in an age of advocacy where leading with hope is more critical than ever – that’s why the Inflation Reduction Act feels so controversial to me as a young environmentalist,” said Mina Adabag, a Youth Leadership Council member for EarthEcho International and founder of the Greater Twin Cities High School Environmental Coalition. “It’s difficult to translate the profound hope that this decision inspires while also acknowledging the immense work that still needs to be done, particularly due to the environmental justice compromises made within the act.” 

‘The ocean is our greatest ally’

 “A healthy ocean is essential to all life on earth,” states Nicolas Lama, a fellow EarthEcho Youth Leadership Council member and student at Columbia University. As temperatures continue to rise, our most powerful tool for carbon sequestration, the ocean, is bearing the brunt of our actions. 

The world has lost over 14% of our coral reefs in the last decade. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, the ocean’s acidity has increased over 25%. This altered chemistry is causing ocean life that utilizes calcium carbonate, such as corals, to survive, but it is also causing oysters, clams, and crabs, to slow down their growth and even die because of their dissolving calcium carbonate structures. 

The average heat of our ocean, which determines processes such as currents, sea level rise, and migration routes for marine life that millions of people rely on for food and income, has steadily risen since the 1950s – and over 90% of the excess heat we have generated from greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed and stored within our seas. These catastrophes greatly influence loss of biodiversity and changes in weather all over the planet, but also take away more opportunities for climate mitigation and solutions. 

Lama further emphasized that “in environmental conservation, our ocean is too often framed solely as a victim of climate change. Instead, the ocean is our greatest ally against climate change, and prioritizing ocean-based climate solutions is crucial to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” 

‘Biden has the goals’

The Biden administration has expressed the need to prioritize the ocean as a climate solution. On World Oceans Day in June 2022, Biden celebrated by announcing a plethora of notable steps his administration will take to both conserve our oceans and utilize oceans in order to fight against the climate crisis. Some of his ocean climate related goals include:

• Deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 

• Protect 30% of our Ocean by 2030 

• Achieve Zero Emissions from International Shipping by 2050 

• Reduce U.S. Emissions by 50% by 2030.  

The ocean was not entirely left out of the IRA which includes some historic investments, such as $2.6 billion for coastal restoration and $3 billion to help decarbonize U.S. ports and shipping systems. Coastlines provide a natural buffer for climate mitigation and adaptation, and if ports were a nation, they would be the eighth largest emitter of greenhouse gases globally, so these initiatives would help against the climate crisis.

On the other hand, the Democrat’s bill also opens 600 million acres of oceans to leasing for offshore drilling. In order to hold the Biden administration accountable in reaching its climate goals, a coalition of almost 100 ocean conservation organizations developed a plan outlining steps Biden can easily take without the approval of Congress. The plan aims to put the ocean at the forefront of these conversations and provide meaningful opportunities for communities on the frontlines.

“Biden has the goals, but there’s a lot more that must be done in order for them to be achieved,” said Jean Flemma, an ocean-climate policy expert, co-founder of Urban Ocean Lab, director of the Ocean Defense Initiative, and contributor to the Blueprint for Ocean Climate Action: Recommendations for the Ocean Policy Committee. “The ocean isn’t just impacted by climate change, but it’s a source of climate solutions, and that’s where we really started to think about how we could advance ocean-climate solutions as one aspect of addressing the climate crisis.”

This Blueprint for Ocean Climate Action is a 37-page package of recommendations that was sent to the Biden administration this summer to consider, advance and incorporate the power of the ocean into a comprehensive ocean climate action plan. By doing so, the administration could make even greater progress toward slowing down climate change, mitigating its effects, and protecting coastline communities. 

When elaborating further on why they created the Blueprint, Flemma states, “It’s about protecting the ocean so that it continues to do these life-sustaining things for us, such as supplying our oxygen. But then there’s also the things that people are starting to recognize as ocean-based solutions, such as offshore wind.” Twelve additional key policy areas were sent to the White House:

12 Key Policy Areas included in the Blueprint for Ocean Climate Action:

• Expand Responsibly-Sited Offshore Wind 

• Phase Out Offshore Drilling and Support the Just Transition to Renewable Energy 

• Promote Green Shipping and Ports 

• Protect Blue Carbon 

• Reduce Plastic Pollutions and Emissions 

• Support Climate Ready Fisheries 

• End Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing and Human Rights Abuses in the Seafood Sector 

• Advance Marine Protected Areas 

• Enhance Coastal Resilience 

•  Minimize and Address Ocean Acidification 

• Evaluate Ocean-Based Carbon Dioxide Removal 

• Prioritize Public Engagement

‘Stop offshore drilling’

“The very communities that are being impacted by climate change, which is obviously driven by fossil fuels, are also the ones who rely on the jobs that come from offshore oil and gas,” states Flemma. “This is how they make their living, feed their families, and send their kids to school.”

The blueprint also recognizes the need to take care of fossil fuel sector workers, and it aims to address historic environmental injustices in the transition to renewable energy. “We need to stop offshore drilling, because that’s exacerbating the climate crisis, and advance responsibly-sited offshore wind instead, which gives us energy and provides [safer] jobs at the same time that it reduces the amount of emissions we’re generating,” said Flemma.

The blueprint also aims to stop the potential offshore drilling expansion in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, which is incredibly inconsistent with the Biden administration’s commitments. The oil and gas industry is already sitting on over 8 million acres of unused offshore leases, according to the Blueprint. 

The group of experts made a final recommendation of a new 5-year Plan with no offshore lease sales. The most recent 5-Year Plan, which allows areas of the outer continental shelf to be leased to fossil fuel corporations, expired this past June, and a new one for 2023 – 2028 is currently being drafted. A public comment period is open until October 6th, 2022 for members of the public to sign up and give the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management input on the need for renewable energy, stopping offshore drilling and protecting frontline communities.

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Democrats compromise on climate goals to pass Inflation Reduction Act

The U.S. House of Representatives voted 220 to 207 Friday, passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) along partisan lines. The bill, which passed the Senate on Sunday now heads to President Biden’s desk to be signed into law.

The climate change portion of the legislation has drawn mixed reactions from environmental groups and communities at the frontlines of the climate crisis. The Inflation Reduction Act will reduce U.S. emissions 40% from 2005 levels by 2030, according to an Energy Innovation report. While the bill has been praised as the most significant investment ever made to transition the U.S. electrical grid from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources, the bill has also been criticized for not going far enough and for also potentially fast-tracking additional fossil fuel infrastructure such as drilling on federal land and water, pipelines and oil and gas export terminals. 

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“The bill would require the Interior Department to offer at least 2 million acres of public lands and 60 million acres of offshore waters for oil and gas leasing each year for a decade as a prerequisite to installing any new solar or wind energy. If the department failed to offer these minimum amounts for leasing, no right of ways could be granted for any utility-scale renewable energy project on public lands or waters,” said the Center for Biological Diversity in a press release. More than 350 conservation and community groups signed a letter urging Democrats to drop this requirement, but they were ignored.

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Heatwave sweeps globe as politicians backslide on climate pledges

In July in the United States, 28 states issued Heat Advisories or Excessive Heat Warnings, according to the National Weather Service. In the past months, 359 high-temperature records have been set or tied in the United States, and more than 700 records for the highest overnight low temperatures were set or tied, according to a report in Axios citing data from NOAA. In the past 30 days, those numbers are more than 1,400 and 2,800, respectively. 

The ongoing heatwave illustrates how interconnected the global climate truly is, as it worsens drought in the United States, shuts down reactors in Europe, melts glaciers in Asia, and causes famine in Africa. Additionally, in Greenland, satellite imagery shows ice sheets melting at a rapid rate, as temperatures have been in the 60s, according to the Independent. The heat reportedly melted nearly six billion tonnes of ice in only three days, scientists said. 

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Murders of Bruno Pereira, Dom Phillips spotlight Amazon deforestation ahead of Brazil election

On June 5, 2022, Indigenous rights advocate Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips ventured to the heart of the Amazon Rainforest and never were seen again.

The murders of Pereira and Phillips have brought renewed attention to the fight to defend the Amazon rainforest from profiteering interests of corporate agriculture, mining, and oil and gas, in addition to smaller-scale illegal fishing and hunting. While Brazilian authorities have painted the murders as a somewhat random act of violence, local Indigenous groups are claiming the victims were targeted by organized crime because of their work defending the Amazon.

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The U.S. House of Representatives voted 220 to 207 today, passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) along partisan lines. The bill, which passed the Senate on Sunday now heads to President Biden’s desk to be signed into law. The spending package focuses on climate, prescription drug pricing for Seniors, and various tax reforms. In total, it authorizes $739 billion in spending over 10 years, but it actually reduces the federal government budget deficit by $100 billion via establishing minimum corporate tax rates. 

The climate change portion of the legislation has drawn mixed reactions from environmental groups and communities at the frontlines of the climate crisis. The Inflation Reduction Act will reduce U.S. emissions 40% from 2005 levels, according to an Energy Innovation report. While the bill has been praised as the most significant investment ever made to transition the U.S. electrical grid from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources, the bill has also been criticized for not going far enough and for also potentially fast-tracking additional fossil fuel infrastructure such as drilling on federal land and water, pipelines and oil and gas export terminals. 

Fossil Fuel Giveaways

In order to get the Inflation Reduction Act through the U.S. Senate, the Democrats had to appease their most conservative members, Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). Manchin in particular worked to undermine the climate goals by ensuring that the fossil fuel industry received benefits from the legislation. Manchin has made hundreds of thousands of dollars from his son’s coal business, and he has received more than $800,000 in campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry so far this election cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org.

In a move that the Center for Biological Diversity described as a “Manchin Poison Pill,” the legislation requires that the federal government offer leases for oil and gas drilling in order to also offer leases for wind or solar projects on federal land or water. The bill would require 600 million acres of federal waters to open for offshore drilling over ten years in order to continue with the construction of offshore wind. 

“The bill would require the Interior Department to offer at least 2 million acres of public lands and 60 million acres of offshore waters for oil and gas leasing each year for a decade as a prerequisite to installing any new solar or wind energy. If the department failed to offer these minimum amounts for leasing, no right of ways could be granted for any utility-scale renewable energy project on public lands or waters,” said the Center for Biological Diversity in a press release. More than 350 conservation and community groups signed a letter urging Democrats to drop this requirement, but they were ignored.

Manchin is also reportedly working on a side-deal weakening environmental review requirements for permitting fossil fuel infrastructure projects such as pipelines and export terminals. Although this deal is not built directly into the Inflation Reduction Act, the side deal is expected to be pushed through Congress next month and could fast-track fossil fuel projects such as the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which goes through West Virginia, and the Enbridge gas export terminal that would destroy a sacred Karankawa Kadla site in Texas.

Climate-Related Spending

In total, the IRA invests more than $400 billion into climate-related projects, mainly in the form of tax credits for private companies and consumers. The majority of this money aims to boost the amount of wind and solar energy in the U.S. grid by giving tax credits to renewable energy producers delivering power to the grid, as well as companies manufacturing batteries and wind and solar power components.

Although the amount of climate-related spending has been reported as $370 billion, the actual number will be about $406 billion according to a breakdown of the bill provided to Branch Out by the BlueGreen Alliance, a solutions-oriented group that aims to unite labor and environmental organizations. 

“This bill will create good-paying union jobs across the country while driving down the emissions causing climate change. It will be a game-changer in growing clean energy, revitalizing manufacturing, and building resilient communities,” said BlueGreen Alliance’s Executive Director Jason Walsh in a statement. The group estimates that the Inflation Reduction Act will create 9 million jobs over the next ten years.

Cleaning up the Grid

The single biggest impact of the IRA is that it will incentivize energy providers to invest in cleaner forms of energy such as wind and solar. In total, those tax incentives are estimated at $127 billion to make these investments more lucrative. More than half the job creation resulting from the Inflation Reduction Act will be in the clean energy industry, according to the BlueGreen Alliance.

Additionally, $30 billion in the IRA will incentivize the production of nuclear power by extending a tax credit that rewards nuclear power companies for the energy they supply to the grid. Although nuclear power does not produce any greenhouse gasses, it does produce radioactive waste that lasts millions of years and damages the health of humans and ecosystems. Although they may be relatively safe if the waste is safely stored, history shows Nuclear power plants are vulnerable to natural disasters such as the tsunami that caused the Fukushima meltdown in Japan, or man-made disasters such as the war in Ukraine which currently threatens the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear plant as Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have been fighting nearby, according to Democracy Now. 

The bill also includes funding for rural electric co-ops and adding additional transmission lines. Adding transmission lines will improve the efficiency of existing wind and solar power. In many areas across the country that have large amounts of solar and wind generating capacity, such as Northwest Texas, the transmission capacity has not kept up so some of that energy is wasted. 

Transportation

One of the major transportation initiatives in the IRA is the $4,000 and $7,500 rebates for used and new electric vehicles. For qualifying individuals and families, these rebates will help make electric vehicles more affordable. The bill, however, has zero funding for building high-speed rail or directly expanding public transit, although it contains components that may incentivize the production of electric buses. 

The original Build Back Better Act, on the other hand, would have invested $10 billion each in building high-speed rail and in improving public transportation to allow for increased mobility in urban areas without requiring the use of a car. The auto-focused approach of the IRA has been criticized by public transportation advocates including the group Transportation for America.

“Most of the infrastructure funds included in this bill represent the same broken status quo approach that led to such high transportation emissions in the first place. Transit is entirely absent. … We need electric vehicles, and we need to drive less overall. The Inflation Reduction Act invests heavily in the former while ignoring the latter,” wrote Abigail Grimminger of Transportation for America, in a blog post. 

The IRA also includes funding for the development of low-emissions aviation fuel, grants for reducing emissions at ports and shipping channels, building electric vehicle charging stations and production of alternative fuels, or biofuels. Biofuels, however, have been criticized as a greenwashing technique that allows companies to continue building gas infrastructure rather than investing in clean electric alternatives.

Manufacturing and Construction

The manufacturing portion of the IRA also focuses primarily on clean energy with the goal of bringing the supply chain for clean energy technology to the United States rather than relying on the manufacturing capacity of other countries such as China. Additionally, about $13 billion will go toward the development of hydrogen fuel, and this provision has been the target of criticism due to possible unintended consequences of burning hydrogen fuel. 

A recent study by the Environmental Defense Fund highlighted that hydrogen fuel “could be worse for the near-term climate than the fossil fuels it would replace” because “hydrogen leaks increase the amounts of other greenhouse gases such as methane, ozone and water vapor.” While the industry promises that leaks will be minimized, the strong emphasis on hydrogen in the IRA is a key part of what won over Manchin, who is seeking to use fossil fuel infrastructure and production in West Virginia as the basis for one of four national hubs for the production of “clean hydrogen.” It has also won the support of U.S. oil giants, such as Exxon Mobil’s CEO who applauded the IRA’s hydrogen tax credit and Chevron which is planning to invest $2.5 billion in hydrogen over the next decade.

The IRA will make it easier to build energy-efficient buildings that employ various water conservation techniques. It does this through tax credits and rebates that are also aimed at making energy-efficient appliances more affordable for the average person. The $48 billion that goes toward buildings will largely benefit private consumers and developers who choose to use energy-efficient features. The bill did not include any money for public buildings like schools, which were proposed to receive about $80 billion in the original Build Back Better Act.

Land and Agriculture

Sustainable farmers can also benefit from the Inflation Reduction Act. $21 billion goes to fund various programs within the Department of Agriculture that reward farmers who employ techniques that will increase the carbon storage capacity of the soil. The programs help farmers plant cover crops, put up fences to prevent overgrazing, and the influx of funding will make the programs more accessible to farming communities. 

Black farmers, however, have pushed back on this approach which opens grants which used to be exclusively for Black farmers to repair decades of antiblack discrimination up to the entire farming community. John Boyd, President of the National Black Farmers Association told the New York Times that President Biden “went back on his commitment to help Black farmers.” The original program faced legal challenges from white farmers and banks, and now any farmer who can prove to the government that they experienced discrimination may qualify for the program.

Another $26 billion goes to various pollution cleanup efforts as well as land and water conservation. This money includes block grants meant to benefit environmental justice causes cleaning up communities that have been most impacted by pollution from the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries. The Build Back Better Act had proposed about $79 billion for these projects, including $30 billion for a Civilian Climate Corps jobs program that would employ people on pollution cleanup and conservation projects. The program was completely scrapped from the Inflation Reduction Act.

The Path Forward

The dominant narrative in the climate action community was expressed by Drilled podcast host Amy Westervelt who concluded her summary of the Inflation Reduction Act by writing “it’s a helluva lot better than nothing.” There is also a general agreement that the IRA should have gone further, and the fight for bolder action continues. 

“Today, we celebrate the power of organizing. But the science of the climate crisis does not grade on a curve – and it’s clear that the IRA is not enough,” said Sunrise Movement Executive Director Varshini Prakash in a statement. “As Americans across the country suffer right now from record flooding, crippling droughts, and deadly heat waves, we need President Biden, Congress, and elected officials at every level of office to treat this crisis like the emergency that it is.”

Perhaps the harshest criticism of the Inflation Reduction Act came from Indigenous People who have been resisting the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure on their sacred land. In an interview with Democracy Now, Tara Houska, an Indigenous lawyer and founder of the Giniw Collective who has been fighting the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, said: “it’s doubling down on fossil fuels to get to renewables. And even the renewables, we have to acknowledge the fact that renewables themselves, it’s still going to be extraction. It’s still going to be the model that the fossil fuel and extractive industry wants, which is new mines in new places, which means our people, Indigenous people, which means Black and Brown people continue to disparately experience the effects of extractive industry. It means that mining companies are showing up in our backyard.”

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An unprecedented heatwave has broken records on multiple continents this summer, spreading wildfires, drought, death, and other disruptions throughout the globe. Although heatwaves occurred before fossil fuel emissions reached dangerous levels, the severity of the summer 2022 heatwave, which has swept through every major region of the world, is a result of human-caused climate change, and it comes just as many politicians have either failed to live up to the pledges of the Paris Climate Accords or even taken steps to ramp up the production of fossil fuels, the main driver of the ongoing climate collapse.

United States

In the United States, 28 states issued Heat Advisories or Excessive Heat Warnings last week, according to the National Weather Service. In the past week, 359 high-temperature records have been set or tied in the United States, and more than 700 records for the highest overnight low temperatures were set or tied, according to a report in Axios citing data from NOAA. In the past 30 days, those numbers are more than 1,400 and 2,800, respectively. 

In California, the heat has contributed to yet another devastating fire season, with the Oak Fire in Mariposa County near Yosemite National Park already burning more than 18,000 acres since it started on Friday, July 22. The fire is 26% contained as of Tuesday evening, and it has threatened 2,700 structures and forced about 6,000 Californians to evacuate, according to the Sacramento Bee. 

Fire has been a problem beyond California, including in Texas, where highs have been over 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The extreme heat has pushed the electrical grid to its limits as people crank up their A/C units, with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) warning Texans to conserve energy and be prepared for rolling blackouts. The Texas grid hit an all-time high for electricity demand this month, leading some energy providers to raise rates.

“Furious doesn’t cover it,” reflected one Twitter user from Collin County, Texas whose electricity bill was nearly $600. Other homeowners in the area reported bills as high as $900 and increases of more than $200 from the previous month, despite following ERCOT’s recommendation of keeping A/C units set at 78 degrees. 

With climate change directly impacting Americans’ pocketbooks, there have been renewed calls for the Biden administration to take effective action. On July 20, President Biden signed executive orders that will devote $2.3 billion to expanding offshore wind, establishing air-conditioned public spaces for people to cool off, and providing modest assistance to low-income families to cool their homes. The actions, however, stopped short of declaring a climate emergency, and so far the Biden administration has shown reluctance to pressure Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) to support any lasting climate-related legislation in Congress where he is the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. 

Military budget: $840 billion
Semiconductors: $52 billion
Police expansion: $37 billion
Climate change: $2 billion pic.twitter.com/D319FgOfwC

— Adam Best (@adamcbest) July 24, 2022

The U.S. Congress also announced a plan to spend $37 billion on policing. Mass incarceration is also a climate change issue, and extreme heatwaves often impact incarcerated people more severely than the general population. A recent report in Truthout documents how U.S. prisons routinely lack adequate air conditioning, if they have air conditioning at all. Since 1998, there have been 23 documented deaths of incarcerated individuals due to extreme heat, but heat-related illnesses are not always properly documented.

Europe

Meanwhile, in Europe, the heatwave is also wreaking havoc on the electrical grid in France, where six nuclear power plants have been forced to reduce their output because the river water used to cool the reactors has become too hot. As a result, half of France’s nuclear reactors went offline, according to the Express. 

Europe already faces a major energy crisis due to the ongoing war in Ukraine. In retaliation to sanctions by the United States and other NATO member states, Russia has cut the amount of natural gas it sends to Europe through the NordStream pipeline. In response, Germany has restarted previously closed coal power plants to make up for the loss of Russian gas at a time when climate scientists are warning we have to stop burning fossil fuels, especially coal, as fast as possible to avoid ever-worsening heatwaves and other extreme weather events.

At least 30 fires have been stamped out across Spain since Sunday as Europe suffers from an intense heatwave. On a train from Madrid to Ferrol, passengers found themselves between a forest fire with flames on each side of the train.https://t.co/vtpvdef4At pic.twitter.com/DPsBOlL3aq

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) July 18, 2022

In the United Kingdom last week, extreme heat took a toll on transportation. Workers had to spread road grit over the streets out of fear they may melt. People were urged not to take public transportation because train tracks may warp in the heat. Schools moved classes online. Concerned citizens also took the opportunity to protest the drivers of climate change, with the group Doctors of Extinction Rebellion (XR) staging a demonstration at the JP Morgan building in London. 

In a press release from Doctors of XR, Dr. Juliette Brown, a Consultant Psychiatrist who took part in the action, said: “This week may see the hottest day in recorded history in the UK, putting my patients – people with dementia and with serious mental illness – at very high risk from heat stress. It’s absolutely my professional duty to sound the alarm just as so many other health workers, scientists, activists and leaders are doing. By continuing to profit from fossil fuel interests JP Morgan are knowingly fueling this climate crisis.”

The heat in the UK has defied climate models by the country’s Meteorological Office, which predicted the high temperatures hitting the UK this week would be expected in 2050. Instead, those predicted temperatures are coming nearly 30 years early — a sign that many climate change models may be underestimating the speed at which the earth is already warming.

On the left is a 2020 Met Office prediction of what a 2050 summer heatwave could look like.

On the right is a BBC weather forecast made this morning, for this coming Tuesday.

The Climate Crisis is real and it’s happening now. Wake the f**k up. pic.twitter.com/9ZMMIrveFY

— Cai Parry (@CaiParryUK) July 15, 2022

Africa and The Middle East

Around the Persian Gulf, extreme humidity paired with the heat to raise the “feels like” temperature to 126 degrees in Doha, Qatar not during the heat of the day, but at midnight after the sun has long gone down, according to data from the University of Maine. This comes just weeks after a heatwave mostly affecting Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Kuwait sent actual temperatures into the 120s earlier in July.

The most humid place on Earth, the Persian Gulf has scorching water temperatures as high as 95F (35C).

The capital of Qatar, located along the Persian Gulf, currently has a mind-blowing “feels like” temperature of 126F at midnight.

Next level humidity. pic.twitter.com/nTsLyaRV9B

— US StormWatch (@US_Stormwatch) July 22, 2022

The heat also impacted Egypt and the rest of North Africa. Last week, as temperatures soared across the Mediterranean Sea region, fires broke out across Morocco and have burned about 25,000 acres so far, forcing thousands to flee their homes and causing two deaths. In response, the government of Morocco announced a plan to spend $28 million mitigating the effects of the fires and restoring vegetation, according to the North Africa Post.

The most severe impacts, however, are being felt in the Horn of Africa and particularly Somalia, where four consecutive failed rainy seasons have ushered in the region’s worst drought in four decades. The famine induced by this climate shock has rendered 89 million people “acutely food insecure,” as children die of starvation, and an estimated 1.5 million children under the age of five are expected to face acute malnutrition by the end of the year.

Somalia is on the brink of famine because of a deadly drought gripping east Africa.

Seven million people are threatened by starvation and thousands have died.@PeterAdamSmith, @rooITV and @andyrex54 have this special reporthttps://t.co/51p81HF0cV pic.twitter.com/zBpp9dZKEJ

— ITV News (@itvnews) July 25, 2022

As climate change continues to impact Africa, many Africans are ramping up the pressure on their governments to stop fossil fuel expansion. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Greenpeace Africa and Extinction Rebellion recently delivered a petition with more than 100,000 citizens’ signatures asking President Félix Tshisekedi to stop auctioning off wildlands to the oil and gas industry, and cease the creation of any new oil and gas operations in the country. 

In a statement, Justin Mutabesha of the Association des Jeunes Visionnaires RDC said: “With the auctioning of oil blocks, local communities are being held hostage by political-economic elites. The exploitation of Congolese oil implies the disappearance of immense parts of the biodiversity on which 100 million people depend for fishing, agriculture and other traditional practices. It also involves the continued neglect of alternatives to renewable energy. We say no to this sale.”

Asia

Further to the East, the heatwave affecting India and Pakistan began with an abnormally hot Spring season when temperatures in Delhi, a city with double the population of New York City, hit 100 degrees for 85 days out of a 100-day stretch, according to the New York Times. In Pakistan, the extreme heat in May accelerated the melting of the country’s 7,000 glaciers and hurt its ability to grow key crops such as wheat, which has historically been an important export for Pakistan’s economy. 

A tailor and resident of Lahore named Muhammad Junaid told reporters with Al Jazeera: “We have no money to buy an air-conditioner. We rely on fans and cheap coolers … but when there is no electricity for several hours, we have nothing to stay cool with. We just have to live with it.”

Now India and Pakistan have moved into the monsoon season, which is also more severe because of climate change, but the current July 2022 heatwave has  severely impacted China. Almost 70 cities have declared severe heat warnings impacting tens of millions of people. Reuters is reporting that in Xinjiang Province, an area roughly twice the size of France, the government has warned people of the dangers posed by flash floods and mudslides caused by melting glaciers.

Tipping Points

The ongoing heatwave illustrates how interconnected the global climate truly is, as it worsens drought in the United States, shuts down reactors in Europe, melts glaciers in Asia, and causes famine in Africa. Additionally, in Greenland, satellite imagery shows ice sheets melting at a rapid rate, as temperatures have been in the 60s, according to the Independent. The heat reportedly melted nearly six billion tonnes of ice in only three days, scientists said. 

The effects of rising sea levels could also be seen last week in Hawaii where historic 20-foot waves swelled along the coast, drenching homes and businesses, flooding roads, disrupting an oceanside wedding, and yes, delighting local surfers. “It’s the largest it’s been in several decades,” a Honolulu-based National Weather Service official told NBC News. 

This is nuts. Thought the wave had been destroyed. Obviously not! pic.twitter.com/GCJOmvDRV0

— CARVE Surfing Magazine (@CarveMag) July 20, 2022

While the surfers may be happy right now, the long-term impacts of sea-level rise will be damaging for humanity as tens of millions of people living in coastal regions face displacement and the destruction of their homes. As increased heat also increases the severity of wildfires, those fires release even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further driving climate change forward, leading to more extreme weather and sea-level rise. The dangerous situation is made worse by governments that encourage continued expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, such as the Conoco Phillips Willow Project in Alaska and offshore drilling in the UK’s North Sea, and proposed expansion of gas export terminals in Texas that also threaten sacred Indigenous land. 

Food sovereignty

With climate change raising temperatures around the world, people are increasingly looking for ways to stay cool, which can be especially challenging in cities where what’s known as the urban heat island effect already makes “concrete jungles” much hotter than rural areas and actual jungles. The bigger but less immediate challenge humans face, however, is the impact continued heatwaves will have on agriculture and the global food supply chain. 

We may find some hope in the fact that holistic solutions can address both of these issues via incorporating food forests and permaculture design into rethinking how our cities work. A 2019 case study from South Korea found that four simple “street-level” techniques could effectively reduce urban heat: “green walls, sidewalk greenways, reduced-albedo sidewalks and street trees.” Of these techniques, the very trees missing from so-called “concrete jungles” were found to be the most effective. 

Choosing tree species that are adapted for high heat is critical, and depending on the climate, fruit and nut trees may also be suitable. Indigenous people have long used place-based regenerative agriculture techniques to enhance food security and food sovereignty. Many of these techniques also have a positive impact on the climate, by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and putting it back in the soil. 

In addition to agroforestry and green urban design, Indigenous leaders such as Winona La Duke have emphasized the role of hemp agriculture in reversing climate change and supporting Indigenous food sovereignty. At the 4th Annual Indigenous Hemp Conference last year, La Duke said: “In our prophecies, we talk about the time of the seventh fire, and this change – we have a choice between a scorched path – well worn – and a green path. There’s no time like the present to see the clarity of that moment. And if anything is the green path, it is this hemp path that can do anything that fossil fuels can do.”

The post Heatwave sweeps globe as politicians backslide on climate pledges appeared first on Branch Out.

Pereira and Phillips are not even the most recent to lose their lives; Virgilio Trujillo Arana, a 38-year-old Indigenous Uwottuja leader was executed in Venezuela after receiving death threats related to his work protecting the Amazon. In Brazil, political violence has been on the rise leading up to the Presidential election this fall between far-right Jair Bolsonaro and former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, from Brazil’s Worker’s Party. 

The murders of Pereira and Phillips have brought renewed attention to the fight to defend the Amazon rainforest from profiteering interests of corporate agriculture, mining, and oil and gas, in addition to smaller-scale illegal fishing and hunting. While Brazilian authorities have painted the murders as a somewhat random act of violence, local Indigenous groups are claiming the victims were targeted by organized crime because of their work defending the Amazon.

Who are Phillips and Pereira?

Bruno Pereira had become somewhat well-known in Brazil for his work researching the Amazon and advocating for Indigenous rights and more robust protection of the region. In particular, Pereira led expeditions to the Javari Valley, the region with the highest concentration of isolated Indigenous Tribes, and he brought local Indigenous people together with the World Wildlife Fund on a project to digitally monitor the area against illegal activity. He was leading the largest expedition into the Javari Valley region in 20 years when he was removed from his position as the head of Brazil’s National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI) by officials in the Jair Bolsonaro administration. 

Dom Phillips is a British journalist who had been visiting Brazil since the 1990’s and after writing about Brazilian DJs in the 2000s, he began working as a correspondent for The Guardian and the Washington Post, among others, and was focused on environmental topics by the late 2010s. His reporting for The Guardian on illegal deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has been nominated for numerous awards, but it also put him at odds with the Bolsonaro administration, because his reporting often highlighted the negative impacts of Bolsonaro’s pro-business policy regarding the Amazon. 

Pereira and Phillips first ventured to the Javari Valley together in 2018 — the same year Bolsonaro ascended to power after former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was barred from running in the election due to corruption charges that were later thrown out when The Intercept discovered that the prosecution lawyers and Judge Sergio Moro conspired behind the scenes to secure a conviction. Lula has been released and is now leading Bolsonaro by 10 points in polls for the presidential election later this year. 

How did they die? 

With the political tide shifting, government officials, from local police to Bolsonaro himself, have tried to downplay the significance of Phillips and Pereira’s deaths and possible links to organized crime in the Amazon region. The bodies were discovered on June 15 when one of the suspects in police custody confessed and led the police to the site where Phillips and Pereira were buried. Despite the fact that police continue to make additional arrests related to the murder, the federal police claim there is no organized crime involved.

Brazil’s Vice President Hamilton Mourão has claimed Phillips was “collateral damage” in a killing targeting Pereira. Mourão implied that the attack was a random act of violence fueled by alcohol; “In my assessment, it must have happened on Sunday. On Sunday, Saturday, folks drink, they get drunk – the same happens here in the poorer areas, in the outskirts of the big cities,” he said.

The Indigenous organization UNIVAJA, however, cast doubt on the official narrative. “The cruelty of the crime makes clear that Pereira and Phillips crossed paths with a powerful criminal organization that tried at all costs to cover its tracks during the investigation,” said UNIVAJA in a statement.

UNIVAJA also wrote a letter elaborating on the organized crime operating in the Javari region that had formed a “composition of a gang of professional fishermen and hunters, linked to drug traffickers, who illegally enter our territories to extract our natural resources and sell them in neighboring municipalities. But measures were not taken fast enough. That is why today we are witnessing the murder of our partners.”

Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro also deflected blame back to Phillips and Periera themselves, saying they were on an “adventure that wasn’t to be recommended.” Bolsonaro may be right were he pointing out of the dangers of land defenders in the Amazon, but his own policies are making the Amazon more dangerous and accelerating the destruction of the Amazon and its people. 

In a statement, Greenpeace Brazil said the deaths were “a direct result of the agenda of President Jair Bolsonaro for the Amazon, which opens the way for predatory activities and crimes… in broad daylight.” 

Patterns of Violence

For Indigenous people, protecting biodiversity on the frontlines of their communities has brought them face-to-face with the barrel of a gun throughout colonial history. In the Amazon Rainforest, the story has been especially bloody in the past several decades, as mining industries, agribusiness, illegal fishing and oil and gas have sought to operate further in the rainforest. 

In December 1988, Chico Mendes was killed in the Amazon following his union activism and opposition to clearing the rainforest. Mendes has become a symbol for conservation in Brazil, but while his name is on government buildings, the government still cannot guarantee the safety of land defenders, Indigenous advocates and journalists. 

This pattern of violence is part of the global catastrophe of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two Spirit, which continues to go underreported, especially near fossil fuel pipeline construction sites in the United States and Canada. Additionally, the murder of Phillips echoes recent murders of journalists around the world including Jamaal Khashoggi and more recently, Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed by Israeli soldiers in May. 

Global Consequence

The deaths of Phillips and Pereira are a potential scandal for Bolsonaro at the time he faces an uphill battle to win re-election. On the issue of the Amazon, there is clear contrast between Bolsonaro, who has cheered on the development of the Amazon no matter the cost, and Lula, who as President was able to reduce deforestation while expanding the economy and has pledged that protecting the Amazon will be one of his top priorities if elected again. 

“We will fight environmental crimes … and we will ensure protection of the rights and territories of Indigenous people against the advance of predatory activities,” said Lula while campaigning last month. The lead up to Brazil’s election on October 2, 2022 has come to include more fatal political violence when prominent union organizer and treasurer of Brazil’s Worker Party Marcel Arruda was shot at his own 50th birthday party by an off-duty police officer who shouted “Here is Bolsonaro” during the attack. 

The stakes of the Brazil election are high for the entire planet. The Amazon deforestation rate for the first half of 2022 was 80% higher than the same period in 2018, with an estimated 1,500 square miles lost already this year. Fires have also continued to rage through the rainforest, with 2,500 hotspots recorded in June — a record for that month since 2007. Brazil’s role in managing the lungs of the planet is especially important right now because according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report, every 10th of a degree of warming will make a difference in humanity’s ability to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. 

For now, the Indigenous people of Brazil continue to fight back, and have called on international supporters to boycott Brazilian deforestation products. In response to recent events, Indigenous Land Defenders have led protests calling for stronger protections of their home and a thorough investigation of the murders of Pereira and Phillips. Kura Kanamari, a leader from the Kanamari people from the Javari Valley Indigenous territory, told demonstrators in Atalia Do Norte, a town near the Javari Valley, “We don’t want war with anyone. All we want is our peace and for our lands to be respected because our supermarket is in the lakes, the land and the forests. If this is all destroyed, our isolated relatives will go hungry.”

The post Murders of Bruno Pereira, Dom Phillips spotlight Amazon deforestation ahead of Brazil election appeared first on Branch Out.

Over the past several weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered a series of hot-button rulings demonstrating the power of the court’s conservative majority to exert control from sea to rising sea. While the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that overturned the precedent of Roe v. Wade has sparked the most outrage and attention, the court also issued extremely significant rulings impacting the methods the EPA can use to fight climate change and Indigenous Nations’ ability to independently prosecute criminal cases against their people.

SCOTUS deals blow to carbon emissions enforcement in West Virginia v. EPA ruling

SCOTUS ruled in favor of the fossil fuel industry in the case of West Virginia v. EPA. The 6-3 decision will harm the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to protect the environment by enforcing limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants using Section 111D of the Clean Air Act.

The narrow majority opinion mandates that section 111D of the Clean Air Act does not give the EPA constitutional authority to tell power plants how much carbon dioxide they can release; instead, the court delegated that authority to Congress. The majority opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, however, does not completely eliminate the EPA’s ability to enforce environmental protections aimed at greenhouse gases, nor does it make addressing the climate crisis impossible.

For concerned citizens and organizations fighting to enact effective climate policy in the United States, there are still many options as pointed out by Drilled Podcast host Amy Westervelt in her piece, “Even in the Worst-Case Scenario with West Virginia v EPA, We Still Have Pathways to Climate Action.” Westervelt points out that in addition to various sections of the Clean Air Act, there are still many ways to reign in U.S. emissions such as using the EPA authority to protect Americans against particulate matter, using the Toxic Substances Control Act, federal legislation, executive orders, the Defense Production Act as well as structural changes in the government system, such as packing the courts, reforming the filibuster or revolution.

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Indigenous Sovereignty weakened by precedent set in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta

The 5-4 ruling in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta will give states increased legal authority over crimes committed against Native people on tribal land where the accused is a non-Native person. “The Supreme Court’s decision today is an attack on tribal sovereignty and the hard-fought progress of our ancestors to exercise our inherent sovereignty over our own territories,” said National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) President Fawn Sharp.

The majority opinion written by Justice Kavanaugh breaks hundreds of years of precedent by giving state law enforcement agencies increased authority over Sovereign Native land. In the dissenting opinion, Justice Gorsuch wrote, “where this Court once stood firm, today it wilts.”

The Indigenous Nations situated in Oklahoma were at the center of the case, but the ruling could affect all Tribal Nations across the portion of Turtle Island known as the United States, despite serious questions about whether SCOTUS has authority over this matter as opposed to Congress, which can pass treaties with sovereign nations. A statement from the Cherokee Nation said, “the Court failed in its duty to honor this nation’s promises, defied Congress’s statutes, and accepted the ‘lawless disregard of the Cherokee’s sovereignty.’”

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‘We are not alone’: abortion care access in a collapsing climate

Following the 6-3 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, states such as Texas will soon enforce ‘trigger laws’ that automatically ban abortion in the wake of the ruling. Abortion care bans unfairly target the poor and working-class, as more privileged people can afford to take time off work and travel out of state in order to access abortion care.

With climate collapse threatening the future, many people are having second thoughts about bearing children in the first place. In August of 2021, the IPCC released its starkest warning for humanity yet, stating that global temperatures are likely to surpass the 1.5 degree Celsius mark within two decades. This report warns of a bleak future, taking many people’s thoughts of children off the table.

Warmer temperatures, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, droughts, and other more intense natural disasters are wreaking damage on the mental health of young folks. In a recent study conducted in ten countries with 10,000 participants ages 16 to 25, 45% of those surveyed said that the climate crisis has “negatively affected their daily life and functioning.”

“It’s too unethical to bring a child into this world,” states Grace Doleshel, a young activist from Washington, who has made a pact with her partner not to have kids. “It’s basically setting the child up for an unhealthy life of physical and mental issues… I don’t ever want to subject someone to that if I don’t have to.”

“When so many people are struggling to take care of themselves not only mentally, but also with increasing economic disparities,” says Julia Nicholson, environmentalist and reproductive justice activist based in Texas, “forcing people to go through unwanted pregnancies is beyond cruel.”

Even for people who choose to start having children, climate change may actually harm people’s ability to reproduce. According to a UCLA study, “days with a mean temperature above 80 degrees Fahrenheit cause a large decline in birth rates 8 to 10 months later.” The study also presents evidence that warmer weather harms fertility and reproductive health.

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The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the fossil fuel industry in the case of West Virginia v. EPA. The 6-3 decision will harm the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to protect the environment by enforcing limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants using Section 111D of the Clean Air Act.

The narrow majority opinion mandates that section 111D of the Clean Air Act does not give the EPA constitutional authority to tell power plants how much carbon dioxide they can release; instead, the court delegated that authority to Congress. The majority opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, however, does not completely eliminate the EPA’s ability to enforce environmental protections aimed at greenhouse gases.

The ruling has immediately drawn strong rebuke from leading environmental organizations. Earth Justice Senior Vice President Sambhav Sankar issued this statement: “The decision will have far-reaching implications and will compromise the ability of federal agencies to use science-based information to combat climate change and protect public health. But this decision still leaves room for the EPA to act on its duty to take on carbon pollution from power plants, and the agency must act quickly and issue a new carbon emission reduction rule as soon as possible.” 

The case was brought by West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, joined by about a dozen additional Republican Attorney Generals and the North American Coal Corporation, and Westmoreland Mining Holdings, LLC. The fossil fuel industry and its allies began legal proceedings for what eventually became West Virginia v. EPA in 2015 following the adoption of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) by Obama’s EPA. 

The CPP was adopted around the same time as the Paris Climate Accords in an effort to bring down emissions from the U.S. power generation sector, which accounted for 32% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in 2021. 

Under the Trump administration, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt withdrew the CPP and attempted to replace it with a different rule that was more lenient on the fossil fuel industry. The Trump rule, however, has also been revoked, and the EPA under President Biden has not issued any rule attempting to regulate the carbon emissions of power plants. 

The case is unprecedented in that the plaintiffs are taking action against the EPA for EPA rules that are not on the books. The plaintiff’s goal was to stop any EPA rulemaking, such as the Clean Power Plan that utilized Section 111D from ever taking effect in the future. Essentially, rather than ruling on the constitutionality of any existing law, the court preemptively stopped the Biden EPA from implementing this particular strategy for fighting the climate crisis. 

Although the ruling right now is limited, the precedent could be applied to other heavily-polluting sectors of the fossil fuel economy, such as fracking in the Permian Basin. The EPA recently began efforts to limit methane pollution in America’s largest oil and gas producing regions of West Texas and New Mexico by declaring counties to be in violation of ozone pollution limits under Section 107 of the Clean Air Act. 

As the EPA’s move in Texas has already prompted a response from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott who blamed the EPA and Biden for high gas prices, the EPA’s moves in Texas and around the country are likely to face additional court challenges. The narrowness of the West Virginia v. EPA decision does not stop it from being used as precedent to shift the ability to protect the environment from the EPA to Congress. 

For concerned citizens and organizations fighting to enact effective climate policy in the United States, there are still many options as pointed out by Drilled Podcast host Amy Westervelt in her piece, “Even in the Worst-Case Scenario with West Virginia v EPA, We Still Have Pathways to Climate Action.” Westervelt points out that in addition to various sections of the Clean Air Act, there are still many ways to reign in U.S. emissions such as using the EPA authority to protect Americans against particulate matter, using the Toxic Substances Control Act, federal legislation, executive orders, the Defense Production Act as well as structural changes in the government system, such as packing the courts, reforming the filibuster or revolution. 

Upon the release of the ruling, youth climate action organization Zero Hour urged that it is not time to give up hope on the fight, and instead called on President Biden to take the climate crisis more seriously. “We’re fighting to take down the fossil fuel industry and take back our rights to clean air and a liveable planet. This fight is not over. President Biden retains the authority to take much needed climate action through executive powers,” said Zero Hour Executive and Policy Director Zanagee Artis.

The post SCOTUS deals blow to carbon emissions enforcement in West Virginia v. EPA ruling appeared first on Branch Out.

It was Friday, June 24th, 2022, and earlier that morning, the United States Supreme Court had overruled the landmark 1973 decision Roe v. Wade and the 1992 decision Parenthood v. Casey. Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban sparked the latest Supreme Court ruling, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, where the Court ruled that the right to access abortion care is not federally protected. With the 6-3 ruling by a conservative majority, nearly 50 years of established abortion rights across the nation were upended, directly impacting more than 135 million people.

Herring told her own story of having an unhealthy pregnancy and needing abortion care in order to save her own life in 2017. “They turned a healthcare procedure into a choice, a ‘choice’ that cost me $2700 and only 4 days to pay out of pocket because I wasn’t allowed to use my health insurance for this healthcare procedure.” She detailed the trauma she experienced navigating anti-choice laws and stigma five years ago, and how the Supreme Court decision threatens the lives of anyone in a situation similar to her story.

This monumental Supreme Court decision has taken away cis women’s, trans men’s and many nonbinary people’s rights to make decisions over their own bodies and access life-saving abortion care, leaving each individual state to decide the fate of its citizens. Many states, such as Texas, have passed “trigger laws” that will swiftly ban abortion care within weeks of the official ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

“Once I heard the news, I was in disbelief,” said Jessie, a thirty-year-old resident of Corpus Christi, Texas, where a trigger law will go into effect 30 days from the ruling. “I thought, ‘this can’t be real, and I had to do something,’” she said at a reproductive rights rally as protestors screamed “My Body, My Choice!” all around her.

The group of six Republican-appointed Justices, however, are not the only thing impacting people’s reproductive health choices. Abortion care rights and access are also issues within the climate crisis. Now that abortion rights are threatened nationwide, marginalized communities that have always been on the frontlines of these fights are facing added pressure.

Pollution and Pregnancy

Heavy oil and gas refineries, military bases, and extractive industries all negatively impact the environment and surrounding communities. More often than not, these are poor communities and communities of color. According to various studies, many of those who live near environmental contaminants experience a higher inability to get pregnant, high rates of preterm labor and stillbirths if they are able to get pregnant in the first place, lung development issues for the fetus, as well as detrimental health concerns for the parent.

The same communities that are exposed to pollutants and other environmental disasters not only experience disproportionate reproductive issues, but they also typically have less access to life-saving abortion care. About 60% of folks who receive abortion care are Black and Brown people, who already undergo geographical hurdles and economic disparities in attaining these procedures.

Of those seeking abortion care in Mississippi, 74% are Black, even though they make up only 39% of the population. There is only one abortion care clinic in the entirety of this Southern state —  Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization. In addition to having borne the brunt of pollution and limited abortion care access in Mississippi, the Black community is also negatively impacted by the extreme weather resulting from climate change. During Hurricane Ida in 2021, for instance, people of color were by far hit the hardest.

According to Dr. Robert Bullard, known as the “Father for Environmental Justice,” Black folks are less likely to own a car, making it extremely difficult to escape climate disasters, such as floods and hurricanes, and to drive to a clinic willing to offer abortion care.

Extreme Weather and Abortion Care Bans

Abortion care bans unfairly target the poor and working-class, as more privileged people can afford to take time off work and travel out of state in order to access abortion care. As trigger laws go into effect, we are likely to see increased travel at the same time that we desperately need to significantly reduce carbon emissions. While they are most shielded from the direct impacts of a changing climate, wealthy people are responsible for an excessive share of greenhouse gas emissions.

Unaffordable housing is another factor pushing poorer populations to places not only farther away from clinics, but also more prone to the increasing number of deadly wildfires. The 2017 California fires destroyed multiple clinics. Hurricane Harvey also forced clinics to shut down in 2017, and Hurricane Ida caused two of Louisiana’s three abortion care clinics to shutter in 2021. These climate change-induced catastrophes left folks around the country scrambling to get the care they urgently needed.

With climate collapse threatening the future, many people are having second thoughts about bearing children in the first place. In August of 2021, the IPCC released its starkest warning for humanity yet, stating that global temperatures are likely to surpass the 1.5 degree Celsius mark within two decades. This report warns of a bleak future, taking many people’s thoughts of children off the table.

Warmer temperatures, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, droughts, and other more intense natural disasters are wreaking damage on the mental health of young folks. In a recent study conducted in ten countries with 10,000 participants ages 16 to 25, 45% of those surveyed said that the climate crisis has “negatively affected their daily life and functioning.”

“It’s too unethical to bring a child into this world,” states Grace Doleshel, a young activist from Washington, who has made a pact with her partner not to have kids. “It’s basically setting the child up for an unhealthy life of physical and mental issues… I don’t ever want to subject someone to that if I don’t have to.”

“When so many people are struggling to take care of themselves not only mentally, but also with increasing economic disparities,” says Julia Nicholson, environmentalist and reproductive justice activist based in Texas, “forcing people to go through unwanted pregnancies is beyond cruel.”

Even for people who choose to start having children, climate change may actually harm people’s ability to reproduce. According to a UCLA study, “days with a mean temperature above 80 degrees Fahrenheit cause a large decline in birth rates 8 to 10 months later.” The study also presents evidence that warmer weather harms fertility and reproductive health.

Indigenous Communities on the Frontlines 

Indigenous people have long respected the autonomy of childbirth and embraced abortion care and reproductive health options. Abortion care bans are yet another way the United States continues to erase the cultures and practices of Indigenous communities. At the same time, the experience Indigenous people have resisting U.S. government control provides perspective for the current moment.

Kristen Herring also spoke to this at the rally in Austin: “I’m Lumbee of the Lumbee Tribe in North Carolina and I remember the atrocities my family has had to live through and if they can go through that, I can live through this! We are here together fighting in solidarity and we are not alone!”

Now that abortion care access is severely dismantled across half the country, descendants of European settlers are now fighting to open abortion care clinics on Tribal lands, since they are Sovereign Nations. Indigenous abortion care rights advocates are noting how these white people are currently advocating for reproductive health facilities on Native land, even though they expressed no interest in supporting this before and currently show no motivation towards addressing the environmental and climate injustices Tribal Nations face.

Indigenous communities today are survivors of enslavement, abuse, murder, and genocide, as corporations still extract natural resources from Sacred land, destroy vital water management practices, and mistreat Native folks as commodities. There is also a large increase in sexual violence and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, girls and Two Spirit close to “man camps,” large company-owned housing units that are used by people who work in the oil fields. Indigenous Peoples have long known how sexist and patriarchal violence underlies the assault on Mother Earth, and the climate intersection of the recent abortion care ban only further demonstrates this dynamic.

The reproductive rights of cis women, trans men and nonbinary people across the country, predominantly poor people, communities of color, and Indigenous folks, are inextricably intertwined with the climate movement – and the fight for justice continues. If you or a loved one are able and willing to give, or if you are in need of reproductive care, check out abortionfunds.org.

The post The fight to access abortion care in a collapsing climate appeared first on Branch Out.

Karankawa Kadla fight to protect sacred land, water against Enbridge’s fossil fuel expansion in Texas

A group of close to 100 concerned community members and Karankawa Kadla Indigenous people gathered in Corpus Christi, Texas, on Saturday, April 23, under the banner “Stop Enbridge.” The group came together to act against Enbridge’s plan to expand a crude oil and liquid natural gas (LNG) export terminal off Corpus Christi Bay near Ingleside, Texas. Expanding the terminal would require dredging near the ecologically sensitive Redfish Bay and disturbing the culturally significant Karankawa archaeological site known today as McGloin’s Bluff. 

Karankawa Kadla is the name mixed descendants of Texas’ Indigenous Karankawa people have taken for the Tribe. The Karankawa Kadla are not a federally recognized Tribe, which excludes them from certain legal rights and protections granted to other Indigenous groups. The Karankawas lived around the Texas coastal bend before Spanish settlers invaded the land. The Karankawas were able to survive for a long time despite colonizers attempting to take their territory. 

Enbridge is a Canadian-based fossil fuel pipeline operating company that has become infamous for its Line 3 Pipeline project through Anishinaabe land and Mississippi river headwaters in Northern Minnesota and Manitoba, Canada. In September 2021, Enbridge purchased the Ingleside Energy Center Terminal from a much smaller company Moda, just weeks after the Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend, the Karankawa Kadla and a local environmental group filed a legal action to stop the terminal expansion.

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Steven Donziger released from house arrest — read about the mainstream media blackout on Chevron’s prosecution of the civil rights lawyer

Steven Donziger was released from more than two years of house arrest last month, following his trial and conviction for contempt of court. An alliance of Nobel laureates, environmental groups, human right groups, celebrities, independent media and others had formed calling for Donziger’s release.

In 1993, Donziger won a landmark lawsuit against oil giant Chevron in Ecuador over the company’s alleged role in the pollution of the Amazon Rainforest and poisoning of Indigenous people. Chevron retaliated, and Donziger ultimately spent 993 days under house arrest. He was found guilty of criminal contempt of court by a U.S. judge after a private law firm connected to Chevron took over the prosecution of the case. But you won’t hear much of anything about this story on U.S. mainstream media. Why not?

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Science Desk

Things aren’t looking good. On the heels of the newest IPCC Report, and a climate activist setting himself on fire outside the U.S. Supreme Court, we are seeing a devastating heatwave impact India, Pakistan and neighboring areas. On top of that, a new report from Inside Climate News, dubbed the “Apocalypse Papers,” shows the reality of biodiversity loss and what it’s like to be a scientist right now.

Support Independent Climate Journalism

The mission of Branch Out is simple: Fight for climate justice with truth and trees.

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The action was led by the Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend (IPCB), with a coalition of organizations coming to show support, including For the Greater Good, Fenceline Watch, Texas Campaign for the Environment and The Sunrise Movement. Many Karankawa people testified, sang, played drums and prayed as part of the action. The group chanted “Protect Karankawa Land! Protest Enbridge, take a stand!” “From North to South and East to West, the people united will never rest,” and other slogans, before a series of speeches were given. 

Chiara Sunshine, a proud Karankawa Kadla from the Hawk Clan, led many of the chants and songs before giving a powerful testimony to the crowd:

“They [Enbridge] want to profit off of the undeniable devastation that this would cause to the land, the ecosystem, our swimming and crawling relatives, and to us, the Karankawa Kadla. The land they want to build on is sacred to us. It is where my relatives from the coyote clan journey to pray and gather in thanks and it is where our ancestors left their tools, pottery [and] artifacts for us. It is a tangible piece of our lineage that connects us to that land, and we have been connected to this land living on it, protecting it for at least the last 2000 years. Enbridge, you have no right to take this from us. You have no right to continue to push Indigenous peoples off of their homes. Enbridge, you are a settler on Karankawa land and we do not want you here where you will only exploit the land and their people of their so-called resources until she is husk dry. And then what will you do? When you have sucked the land dry when you’ve grown your business at the cost of your own peoples’ futures?”

Karankawa Kadla

Karankawa Kadla is the name mixed descendants of Texas’ Indigenous Karankawa people have taken for the Tribe. The Karankawa Kadla are not a federally recognized Tribe, which excludes them from certain legal rights and protections granted to other Indigenous groups. The Karankawas lived around the Texas coastal bend before Spanish settlers invaded the land. The Karankawas were able to survive for a long time despite colonizers attempting to take their territory. 

By the mid-19th century, however, most Karankawas had been forcibly displaced, attempted to integrate within the larger population, or been killed by white settlers. Stephen F. Austin, who Texas’ capital city is named after, once called the Karankawa “universal enemies of man” and said “there will be no way of subduing them but extermination.” The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum has recognized that the Karankawas were targeted in a deliberate genocide by white settlers. Even today, many Texans do not know that Karankawa people still exist. 

The Karankawa Kadla, however, have persisted, continuing to bring scattered relatives from across Texas and other parts of the United States into their efforts to stop Enbridge. Love Sanchez is a cofounder of Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend and has become a leader of the resistance to Enbridge and other destructive corporate pollution of land and water. In an interview with Branch Out, Sanchez spoke about the need for everyone to be conscious of the land they occupy and to support Indigenous People fighting to protect it: “Learn whose land you’re on and see if they’re going through anything. Help them. See if they’re struggling with something there.” 

Enbridge

Enbridge is a Canadian-based fossil fuel pipeline operating company that has become infamous for its Line 3 Pipeline project through Anishinaabe land and Mississippi river headwaters in Northern Minnesota and Manitoba, Canada. In September 2021, Enbridge purchased the Ingleside Energy Center Terminal from a much smaller company Moda, just weeks after the IPCB, Karankawa Kadla and a local environmental group filed a legal action to stop the terminal expansion.

Enbridge’s track record includes multiple instances of misleading the public and mistreating Indigenous water protectors. The company has run deceptive ads in Michigan where it used the image of a NOAA scientist to claim Enbridge closely monitors water quality impacts. In Minnesota, Enbridge did not deliver on the number of local jobs it had promised the community to create. Moreover, the company has a history of lying about safety precautions that can directly impact water quality.

The Ingleside Energy Center sees some of the highest volumes of fracked LNG and crude oil exported through its terminal in the entire United States. It can store 16 million barrels at once and its export facility is capable of loading 1.5 million barrels each day into massive ships docked in the Gulf of Mexico, according to Tank Storage News. Moda announced plans to expand the terminal by constructing a new pier on McGloin’s bluff. 

The Army Corps of Engineers approved the permit under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act to allow Enbridge to dredge 43 acres of seabed near Redfish Bay, which would disturb roughly 3.9 million cubic yards of sediment. Dredging is when large amounts of sediment are moved from the seafloor to make a certain section deeper. It is necessary for the expansion of the terminal because the ships that come to carry crude oil and LNG are extremely large. 

Lawsuit

Love Sanchez told Branch Out that the Karankawa Kadla had testified to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), Texas’ State environmental agency, asking them not to approve dredging permits for the Ingleside Energy Center. TCEQ did not listen, and after it approved the permit, it went to the federal level for final approval. 

Sanchez spoke about how the enormous ships that come to the terminal, known as Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs), kick up silt that covers the seagrass. “The seagrass is really important to our marine life here and our marine life is sacred. They survived just like we did! You got the Redfish, Trout, tiny organisms and basically, the entire ecosystem depends on each other, so as the sea beds are getting destroyed by the ships, it’s also gonna be destroyed by the dredging.” 

After the Army Corps of Engineers approved a permit for Moda to dredge near Redfish Bay, three groups, the Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend, the Karankawa Kadla and Ingleside on the Bay Coastal Watch Association, brought a lawsuit against the Army Corps to try and stop the permit. Only a few weeks later, Enbridge, a company with years of experience fighting lawsuits from Indigenous Rights and Environmental groups, bought the Ingleside Energy Center from Moda for $3 billion and began fighting the suit. 

The lawsuit alleges that “expansion will have significant impacts on the environment, the surrounding community, and the public interest” and points to the impact of dredging on “diverse seagrasses and estuarine wetlands.” While the litigation is ongoing, the lawsuit has been successful in delaying the project. But in August 2022, construction can begin again unless the permit is legally struck down. 

McGloin’s Bluff

McGloin’s Bluff is the historic site of a Karankawa Settlement, and there are numerous culturally significant archaeological items that remain to this day. The Texas Archaeological Society knew about the artifacts at McGloin’s bluff dating all the way back to 1963 when it published the findings of archaeologist James Corbin. 

According to a report in the Texas Tribune, in 2006, the Texas Historical Commission sent a letter to the Port of Corpus Christi Authority stating that the site is eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places and urging the port authority not to allow any development of the site. In 2008 – ‘09, about 40,000 artifacts from the Karankawa village were recovered and sent to a lab at the University of Texas at San Antonio, but countless thousands of pieces of Karankawa history may remain at the site. 

When talking to Branch Out, Love Sanchez said it is devastating to think about the loss of historical cultural artifacts important to the Karankawa Kadla. Although Enbridge has told the community that they will not disturb the land on McGloin’s bluff, Sanchez does not take Enbridge at its word, and she is convinced that it will disturb the archaeological site to construct a new pier:

“They [Enbridge] tell us they’re not going to be dredging on the land, they are there’s no way. They’re going to have to construct a new pier. They’re going to do construction on the land. That’s a lie when they say ‘we’re not going to do anything.’ You’re going to have to dredge in new piers into the land to be able to come out to the water. So we really hope those acres are protected.” 

‘Stop Fossil Fuels’

Chiara Sunshine also spoke about the important connection the Karankawa Kadla feel with their ancestral land and the history inherent in the artifacts on McGloin’s bluff. “My people who have lost nearly everything to colonization and corporate greed have one tangible piece left and it’s this. This land is our spirit, our past, present and future, and I refuse to sit idly by while you snatch the opportunity to even see this land out of the hands of our future generations,” she told the crowd gathered in Corpus Christi on Saturday. 

In addition to threatening the local ecosystem and the Karankawa Kadla, Enbridge’s expansion of the Ingleside Energy Center will accelerate the climate crisis. By doubling the export capacity of fossil fuels at the largest U.S. export terminal, Enbrige’s plan encourages more fracking and drilling by the fossil fuel industry. This could not come at a worse time for the Earth’s climate, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report just last month warned that every tenth a degree of global warming matters, and continuing to burn fossil fuels at the current level will make achieving the goals of the Paris Climate Accords impossible. 

Chiara Sunshine also evoked how the Karankawa Kadla struggle fits within the context of climate change and the need to stop fossil fuel projects, especially those threatening Indigenous land and water. “Stop fossil fuels. Stop the continued erasure of my people and all other Indigenous peoples. We have been here and we are still here, and we, as our ancestors did, will continue. We will not give up without a fight,” Chiara said on Saturday. 

By resisting Enbridge’s expansion of the Ingleside Energy Terminal, the Karankawa Kadla are playing a crucial role in preventing more fossil fuel expansion, in addition to protecting their land and history. They remain defiant against the corporate-led destruction of their land, as Love Sanchez told the crowd, “Enbridge, this is your eviction notice from the Karankawa Kadla.”

Resources

https://stopenbridge.com/

https://karankawas.com/

Indigenous Peoples Instagram

The post Karankawa Kadla fight to protect sacred land, water against Enbridge’s fossil fuel expansion in Texas appeared first on Branch Out.

In 1993, Donziger won a landmark lawsuit against oil giant Chevron in Ecuador over the company’s alleged role in the pollution of the Amazon Rainforest and poisoning of Indigenous people. Chevron retaliated, and Donziger has spent more than 720 days under house arrest. He was recently found guilty of criminal contempt of court by a U.S. judge after a private law firm connected to Chevron took over the prosecution of the case. But you won’t hear a thing about this story on U.S. mainstream media. Why not?

 Mainstream Media Narrative

As Donziger was awaiting the judge’s verdict last summer, Branch Out checked several mainstream media outlets for their coverage of Steven Donziger’s trial, and to our surprise, there was virtually nothing. Popular online media brands including Democracy Now!, Breaking Points, The Majority Report interviewed Donziger, but mainstream liberal media like CNN and the New York Times never mentioned him or his story. 

When Branch Out first wrote about Donziger on our substack in July 2021, the New York Times’ most recent piece about Mr. Donziger had been published in 2013. Several of these articles (and this one in particular) implied he is “slightly crazy,” and outlined Chevron’s case that Donziger allegedly bribed judges and acted as a ghostwriter on reports that became key evidence. According to a Chevron spokesman quoted in the article, Donziger did nothing less than “create… this fiction of massive environmental contamination.”

Following Donziger’s sentence for criminal contempt of court in October 2021, NYT published an article in their Dealbook Newsletter criticizing environmental advocates who had made him a hero. It was written by Joe Nocera, who had previously expressed his support for the Keystone XL Pipeline. In his article, Nocera painstakingly critiques the valorization of Donziger, yet he failed to mention the astounding duration of Donziger’s house arrest, the potential conflicts of interest of Judges Kaplan and Preska, or the fact that the private law firm appointed to lead the contempt prosecution also has a direct financial relationship with Chevron. Moreover, Nocera never discloses his own conflict of interest that his wife has run public relations for the law firm Boies Schiller, which has also represented Chevron and was involved in the original Ecuador case.

Pollution in Ecuador

Steven Donziger’s legal battles with Chevron began with a class action lawsuit in Ecuador where he represented Indigenous tribes whose land and water had been poisoned by oil drilling and pipeline operations at the Lago Agrio oil field. To this day, pollution remains a major problem in the ecologically critical Amazon Rainforest. At the time, the oil operation was run by Petro-Ecuador, a nationalized oil company, and Texaco, which was sold to Chevron in 2001 while litigation was ongoing. Ecuador initially ordered Chevron to pay an $18 million settlement, but this was later cut in half by Ecuador’s supreme court, although the verdict was reaffirmed.

In retaliation, Chevron went to the U.S. and then the international courts in order to make its case that Donziger organized massive fraud to secure a judgment against Chevron. The International Court of Arbitration in the Hague eventually ruled in favor of Chevron in 2018, and meanwhile, the company had sent its legal machine after Donziger, starting the latest legal battle back in 2013.

Chevron Retaliates

In the process, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, a former tobacco industry lawyer who owned Chevron stock at the time of the ruling, ordered Donziger to turn over his cellphone and computer to Chevron, which Donziger argued is unconstitutional and a violation of the attorney-client privilege. He appealed the judge’s ruling and refused to turn over his electronics, so the judge responded by charging him with criminal contempt of court, a federal misdemeanor charge.

Kaplan then chose U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska, and she sent criminal contempt of court charge to the relevant public prosecutor in the U.S. Southern District of New York. The prosecutor, however, declined to bring the charges to court, so the judge was allowed to appoint a private law firm, Seward and Kissel, to prosecute the case. Though unusual, this practice is not unheard of, but what is unprecedented in this case, is that Seward and Kissel also has an ongoing financial relationship with Chevron. Now, a private law firm is leading the U.S. government prosecution of a human rights lawyer, keeping him shackled at his home for more than two years awaiting trial for a misdemeanor charge which normally would not even result in jail time upon conviction.

“The decision marks a sad day for the rule of law, for our democracy, and for our planet,” Donziger said in a statement after he was found guilty. Regardless of possible mistakes made in the 1993 lawsuit, it is true that no one else in history has ever been held for years in house arrest for a misdemeanor while being prosecuted by corporate lawyers with ties to a multinational oil and gas company.

Conflicts of Interest

Donziger has received an outcry of support from human rights and environmental groups, many well-known celebrities and 68 Nobel Laureates calling for his release. Several U.S. Congresspeople have also spoken up about the issue. With so much drama, spanning decades and continents, it seems like the exact type of story that a journalist at the New York Times would want to cover through every twist and turn.

Donziger recently weighed in on why he thinks that the New York Times has not covered his house arrest, saying that NYT uses the same lawyer who leads Chevron’s case, Theodore Boutrous Jr:

“One explanation I have as to why the New York Times is ignoring this critically important story of this corporate attack on a human rights lawyer is that its main outside lawyer is the lawyer who’s being paid by Chevron to attack me, and the New York Times needs to come clean,” Donziger told The Hill on their popular YouTube show, Rising.

The New York Times, however, has additional conflicts of interest. First, there’s Robert Denham, who sits on the board of directors for both Chevron and NYT. Second, there is the fact that Chevron has often advertised in the Times. All of this comes on top of the fact that Ted Boutrous has a long history of representing Chevron in addition to other corporations.

In 2007, the LA Times called Boutrous a “hired gun of the highest caliber.” Indeed, he has represented major automakers that wanted to avoid vehicle emissions standards in California, multiple oil and gas companies that needed defense against pollution claims, as well as retail giant WalMart and major media companies. He is also a prominent member of the Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major corporate donor.

Media Bias

The mainstream media blackout of Steven Doniger’s house arrest is a case study of why certain stories get covered versus others and the far-reaching influence of the fossil fuel industry. We cannot see behind the curtain to be sure if Chevron directly pressures media to skew coverage one way or another, but big oil has a close relationship with corporate media, and Branch Out is hardly the first to question if it impacts news coverage.

A study by Media Matters examined coverage of the fossil fuel industry on May 26, 2021 —  A day that a Dutch court ordered Shell to reduce its emissions by 45%, and at the same time, Chevron’s shareholders voted to mandate the company slash its emissions. The study found that CNN ran two segments on the news which aired in the middle of the night. During their primetime shows running that week, however, CNN ran 50 ads from Chevron pushing a narrative that the company is doing its best to fight against climate change.

Power and Profits

The media bias favors Chevron every step of the way. The case of Steven Donziger has been widely covered by independent media, but favorable coverage is a red line for many mainstream media outlets. Chevron also holds influence in the legal system itself, with money to hire the world’s best attorneys and donate to influential organizations such as the Federalist Society. The result is perhaps not an overt mandate for CNN editors to blackball Donziger, but rather an avoidance based on fear, because Chevron has used Donziger as an example to show the world how powerful the company is.

Chevron’s deep pockets allow them to exert influence over media companies and some of America’s most cunning legal minds. Recently, Jennifer Rearden, a key lawyer with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher where she worked with Boutrous on Chevron’s case, was nominated by President Biden to serve as a federal judge for the Southern District of New York. If appointed, Rearden will serve as a judge in the same district where her law firm successfully prosecuted Donziger.

At the same time, calls for Biden to pardon Donziger have gone unanswered. In a statement, Amazon Watch called Biden’s lack of action a “dark stain on his alleged claims to respect human rights.”

The post Mainstream media blackout on Chevron’s prosecution of Steven Donziger, explained appeared first on Branch Out.