** THE KINDER MORGAN BAILOUT IS A DECLARATION OF WAR BY CANADA AGAINST INDIGENOUS PEOPLES **
A declaration of war has been issued against Indigenous peoples in Canada by the federal government. By bailing out Kinder Morgan’s investment in the Trans Mountain pipeline, Canada has announced its ongoing intention to violate Indigenous title, law and jurisdiction, as well as the constitutional rights of Indigenous peoples, and all protocols of international law protecting Indigenous peoples’ homelands and right to consent to development on their lands.
Kinder Morgan purchased the pipeline for $600 million dollars. They sold it for a return of almost 650 percent for a product that proved faulty only a few days ago. Canadians are increasingly complicit in this swindle because they are all part-owners now. But Canadians have legal, moral, and treaty obligations to respect Indigenous jurisdiction, especially in light of what is to come. So the strategy must remain the same: we must devalue the pipeline by blocking its construction by any means necessary and supporting those who do.
Indigenous peoples from affected nations along the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion have already been arrested and violently removed from the path of destruction that will expand tar sands production and multiply tanker traffic and the risk of pipeline spills through their watersheds.
While there is much talk in the federal government about respecting Indigenous rights, not only does the pipeline bisect the lands and waters where Indigenous Peoples practice their right to hunt, fish, trap, pick berries, and sustain themselves, rendering those rights vulnerable to the imminent threat of a spill, its direct contribution to climate change already cuts these rights off at the legs.
Furthermore, the law itself and the deployment of police forces must be an object of scrutiny in the protection of Indigenous rights. Canada’s use of legal and police forces to repress Indigenous peoples is widespread and goes hand-in-hand with extraction. It is done in conjunction with corporations like Kinder Morgan, where the risk of Indigenous rights to commercial profit is mitigated through state police criminalizing Indigenous land defenders.
When we write that this is a declaration of war, we mean it literally. The military will be called. But the threat is not only the criminalization of land and water defenders protecting their territory from pipeline construction, but from the harmful corollary effects of pipeline construction, such as the ‘man-camps’ that are being established in four locations along the route. As the Women’s Declaration Against Kinder Morgan Man Camps reads: “Today, wherever man camps are set up, we face exponential increases in sexual violence. As development results in the destruction of our land base and our food sovereignty, it also drives up food and housing prices. This further intensifies our economic insecurity and we are forced into even more vulnerable conditions”.
Indigenous jurisdiction is collectively held. This means the deals Kinder Morgan has made with individual bands do not replace the need for engagement with the nation as a collective, as the proper title and rights holder on a territorial basis. Canada now bears the risks from the company’s failure to obtain consent from the appropriate jurisdictional authority. They are now the ones operating illegally, not the Indigenous land defenders.
It is the national pattern to use criminalization, civil action, and other penalties to repress Indigenous resistance to these policies by bringing to bear the weight of the law and police forces against Indigenous individuals and communities. The widespread surveillance of Indigenous peoples – e.g. the “hot spot” reporting system established under Harper, or the RCMP’s Project SITKA that monitored “Aboriginal public order events’ – is also part of a pattern of intimidation and risk mitigation. The use of incarceration is a long-term strategy to contain Indigenous rights within the carceral state, rather than see them asserted on the ground.
It is the failure of Canada to find peaceful measures to resolve this fundamental conflict that must be examined. Indigenous blockades are not acts of civil disobedience, but encounters between Indigenous and settler law.
And they should be dealt with as political conflict between Nations through diplomacy, not by security forces. Together, we will shut it down.
I’m watching Doomsday Preppers. These people have an unbelievably bleak view of humanity, like, I’m just saying my family survived the complete disintegration of Lebanese civil society without shanking their neighbours for water or stockpiling hand grenades.
If your reaction to a foreseen future economic collapse is to set traps and stockpile guns to kill your neighbours who want some of your huge food stock, you are broken and I have no idea how to fix you.
Shout out to Bruce in episode 8 who is building a shelter for his local community including an area specifically for children and thinks too many Preppers focus on personal survival instead of reconstructing communities. Bruce isn’t broken. Just kooky.
“There is something fundamentally conservative in the prepper impulse: to create a stockpile in one’s basement rather than work toward a system that could help ensure community-wide safety. Embedded in the prepper ethos is a deep distrust of public systems, fueled by the belief that we’re one cataclysm away from a Hobbesian state of unrestrained every-man-for-himself (and-his-family) competition…
Of course, the nightmare SHTF [shit hits the fan] situations these new preppers imagine are already happening—to people whose wealth and status don’t protect them. Low-income individuals and communities of color are far more vulnerable to the consequences of the natural and political disasters we are all already living through. New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward remained desolate and stripped of services for years after Hurricane Katrina; armed men knocking on doors and stopping cars of people trying to escape dangerous weather at checkpoints is already a reality for undocumented people in the United States.
Disaster preparation doesn’t have to be a purely private undertaking that happens at the family or individual level. During the early 1960s, landlords took part in what the New York Times called a “fallout shelter drive.” The Army Corps of Engineers identified over 17,000 buildings across the city, which they “equipped with federally provided survival kits—costing roughly $2.40 per person—that featured aspirin, toilet paper, tongue depressors, appetite-suppressing hard candies and ‘Civil Defense Survival Rations,’ i.e., animal crackerlike biscuits.” No champagne or artisanal chocolate here, but the program provided enough space to accommodate nearly 12 million New Yorkers.
Preppers’ doomsday scenarios typically hinge on an acute, almost cinematic event—the city floods, the bomb goes off, the virus mutates. The crisis is unambiguous, a clear moment at which the old world falls away and it’s time to batten the hatches or set off in the mobile hive. What they don’t seem to prepare for is the slow creep of social and economic precarity, the erosion of niceties and norms, the sea level inching higher so slowly your feet are wet before you realize you ought to have packed a bag.”
I think what bothers me most about the preppers on that show is how wealthy they are. They could use some of that money toward building a resiliant community and still have plenty for their families.
Australia has the highest extinction rate in the world, while declining populations are affected by habitat loss as well as introduced creatures such as cats, foxes and rabbits going feral and killing native species across the vast continent.
Fossil fuels have long been the precursor to plastic, but new research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and European collaborators could help send that era up in smoke—carbon dioxide, to be exact.
Produced almost entirely from burning fossil fuels, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have risen from 280 parts per million in the pre-industrial era to about 410 PPM today. That trend, combined with the finite supply of fossil fuels, has pushed researchers to explore methods for producing plastic from CO2 rather than petroleum or natural gas—recycling CO2 just as plastic is now.
Nebraska’s Vitaly Alexandrov and colleagues have now detailed a catalyst-based technique that can double the amount of carbon dioxide converted to ethylene, an essential component of the world’s most common plastic, polyethylene.
It was “blind luck” said Ray Sorenson, a retired petroleum geologist, regarding how he first came across Eunice Foote’s name. Sorenson, whose basement in Oklahoma is full of more than 300 pre-Civil War era technical books, discovered Foote’s name sometime in 2010.
Sorenson had found copies of the Annual Scientific Discovery by David A. Wells, and “I really liked them, and started collecting them,” he told ThinkProgress. It was while reading the 1857 volume that he stumbled upon Foote.
As he quickly realized, Foote was the first scientist to make the connection between carbon dioxide and climate change. She discovered CO2’s warming properties in 1856, more than 160 years ago and three years before John Tyndall, a British scientist who has widely been credited with first establishing the connection between increased global temperatures and carbon dioxide.
But for a number of reasons — chief among them the fact that she was a woman — Foote’s name was until recently lost to history, a minor footnote within climate science.
“I knew just enough about the history of climate science,” Sorenson said of his ability to grasp the significance of the name and date. “I recognized that it was something that had been missed by historians,” he explained, “and I felt she deserved recognition.”
In January 2011, Sorenson published his findings in the journalAAPG Search and Discovery as an independent researcher. “I’ve had more response to that than anything else I’ve ever written,” he said.
I posted links to a couple of stories about the intentional delay by the EPA (and perhaps other federal agencies) to delay the issuance of a report about the high levels of the toxic chemicals polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl, better known as PFAS, in the drinking water of millions of Americans. These chemicals were used for decades in the manufacture of nonstick pans, water-repellent clothes and firefighting foam (think teflon), and have been linked to increased risks of kidney cancer, thyroid problems, high cholesterol and hormone disruption, among other issues. The withheld study tells us that the chemicals endanger human health at levels far lower than what the EPA says is safe.
Earlier this year, EPA staff met with chemical industry representatives (including the American Chemistry Council, a trade association) to discuss the chemicals after a White House official privately suggested to those officials that the study on the substances might be a “public relations nightmare.” Hence, no release of the study. Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and the House raised the alarm, leading to this “summit” meeting yesterday (May 21).
Then this dust-up at the meeting with reporters. Excerpt from the Think Progress story:
On Tuesday morning, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt greeted a crowed of nearly 200 at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. The attendees were there for a national summit on polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances — also known as PFAS, a class of chemicals linked to potentially serious health impacts with long-term exposure.
But absent from the summit’s introductory statement were reporters from several news outlets, including the Associated Press, CNN, and E&E News. One reporter with the Associated Press was allegedly forcibly removed from the EPA headquarters after trying to enter to report on the summit.
The altercation reportedly occurred after EPA security told the reporter that they could not enter the building to report on the summit. When the reporter asked to speak to a public affairs representative with the EPA, a security guard reportedly“grabbed the reporter by the shoulders and shoved her forcibly out of the EPA building.”
Other reporters were allowed to attend the event — breaking with the EPA’s history under the Trump administration of not inviting reporters to cover agency events or announcements live — but were asked to leave after the first hour, which included introductory remarks by Pruitt as well as an explanation of the science of PFAS from the director of the EPA’s Office of Pollution Protection and Toxics and a representative from the American Chemistry Council, the main trade association for the chemical industry.
Scott Pruitt later relented, and allowed reporters back in to the summit, including today’s sessions.
“We are seeing what scientists have predicted for years. The temperatures in the Arctic are off the chart. This matters for the rest of us because this is the time of year when the Arctic ice should be growing. But it isn’t growing like it should. So, this summer, there will be less ice and more open waters that will lead to more warming … What is particularly frightening is that this is happening in a La Nina year, when if anything, the Earth should be a little bit cooler than normal … If this isn’t a clarion call to take action, I don’t know what is.”
A tweet of a graph comparing the expectations vs. actual commitments we have made in light of the past three climate accords. Really eye opening. Thought you’d like to see and share. 🙂
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