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The vision
“Human beings share the same common problems. A film can only be understood if it depicts these properly.”
Legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa
The spotlight
In last week’s newsletter, we explored how climate themes and solutions are beginning to show up more on our screens, from subtle mentions to full-blown plots, and we heard from some of the advocates behind the push to represent climate in Hollywood. But one thing we didn’t mention was that in the course of our conversations, those experts shared tons of shows and movies that serve as great examples of incorporating climate mentions into mainstream viewing.
So, today, we’re sharing a roundup of climate-conscious movies and TV to watch this summer — as recommended by Anna Jane Joyner, the founder and CEO of Good Energy; Samuel Rubin, an impact producer and one of the founders of the Hollywood Climate Summit; and Cyle Zezo, an executive producer and former head of alternative programming at the CW Network. Plus, we’ve got a few recommendations shared by your fellow readers.
You have our full blessing to binge. And please let us know if you check any of these out! We would love to hear your thoughts.
Movies
First Reformed. (Watch on HBO Max.) Anna Jane Joyner’s number one pick was this 2017 drama starring Ethan Hawke as a small-town pastor. In addition to climate anxiety, the film deals with faith, personal crises, and suicide. Without giving too much away, Joyner praised the way this movie refrained from wrapping everything up in a bow, leaving the viewer without all the answers but with a sense of possibility. “I think stories that help us become more comfortable with uncertainty are really, really important,” she says.
Beasts of the Southern Wild. (Rent or buy it on Prime Video.) Set in the Gulf Coast, this 2012 fantasy-drama is the only Oscar-nominated film to acknowledge climate change (despite being hailed as a climate film, Don’t Look Up actually handles it metaphorically). Joyner recommends it for its rich setting, its handling of systemic racism, and adds that “it’s just a gorgeous film.”
Woman at War. (Watch on HBO Max.) This 2018 Icelandic film follows a middle-age choir teacher who becomes an eco-terrorist. It’s a quirky, fun story, Joyner says, with a very compelling main character. “It also, in a very subtle way, points out racial injustice,” she adds, “because there’s this Spanish tourist who’s biking around Iceland, and he keeps getting arrested for her crimes.”
Additional recs from readers
Black Panther. (Rent or buy it on Prime Video.) Even if superhero movies are not your jam, this one is worth a watch. Reader Luke Gliddon recommends both the 2018 movie and its more recent sequel, Wakanda Forever. He calls them “a beautiful mix of solarpunk and Afrofuturism.” (Gliddon also contributed to this ClimateLit post about how educators can use themes from the movie!)
Soylent Green. (Rent or buy it on Prime Video.) This 1973 film is a classic in the world of eco dystopia — and it comes recommended by reader Brian Hart. (If you don’t know the twist, just know that naming a meal-replacement shake after this story was … a choice.)
TV shows
Deadliest Catch. (Watch on Discovery+.) The long-running Discovery-channel reality show is a prime example of seeing climate impacts play out in real people’s lives, says Cyle Zezo. In one recent season, the Bering Sea was closed to fishing because of an unprecedented heat wave. “That affects production, of course, but it also affects these people’s lives,” Zezo says. “Deadliest Catch is not fiction. It’s a real thing happening to people on this show.”
The Hype, Next in Fashion, and Rupaul’s Drag Race. (Watch on HBO, Netflix, and Paramount+, respectively.) If you’re into fashion, these are three more competition-style recs from Zezo. The first two have featured subtle green themes and sustainability-focused contestants — while Drag Race (one of my favorite shows of all time) has done some wonderfully campy climate change-themed challenges.
Abbott Elementary. (Watch on Hulu.) The beloved ABC series about Philly public school teachers has incorporated many climate mentions — something the show’s creator and star Quinta Brunson has said is intentional. “I love that that’s been a part of her approach,” Joyner says. “I also think it’s a little bit indicative of how younger writers and showrunners are approaching it. It’s just such a more integrated part of our lives.”
One Day at a Time. (Watch on Netflix.) This drama-comedy follows a Cuban American family in L.A.; Penelope, a newly single veteran, raises her two teenage kids with the help of her own mother. Again, climate mentions show up in a show geared toward young people. Joyner notes a particular scene “where one of the characters dresses up as Greta Thunberg and the other one’s a melting iceberg, and they get into this funny conversation with the grandmother. It’s a wonderful moment.”
Weeds. (Watch on Hulu or Amazon Freevee.) Sam Rubin calls this show the first example of climate-related storytelling he can remember. When a suburban mother begins growing and selling marijuana to support her family after her husband’s death, hijinks ensue — including the purchase of an EV. “She’s worried that people are gonna be like, ‘What is this woman doing in the middle of the night?’” Rubin says. “She realizes that her drug dealer friend has an electric car, because it’s quiet and it doesn’t make noise.”
Madam Secretary. (Watch on Netflix.) One of Rubin’s favorite shows, this political thriller includes plotlines about climate refugees, managed retreat, and other geopolitical realities. Joyner also consulted on the show in 2018 — and a character in the episode “The New Normal” is loosely based on her.
Additional recs from readers
The Rational Life. (Watch on Netflix.) If you’re down with subtitles (or if you speak Chinese), reader Karen Love recommends this series about a 30-something woman in Shanghai, her love life, and her career in the EV industry. “Last year, I went through a phase of watching Chinese series on Netflix,” Love says, “and I was startled that the first two that I saw had mention of climate change.” (The other was Meteor Garden — a YA rom-com that, despite its climate mentions, Love says she doesn’t necessarily recommend. “Even I couldn’t finish it and I have a high tolerance for vapid storylines,” she jokes.)
Queer Eye. (Watch on Netflix.) OK, this one’s actually from me — one more for the reality TV lovers among us! The latest season of this classic makeover show based an episode (“Sowing the Seeds”) on a young man named Michael who works on a community farm in New Orleans and is hoping to get accepted into an environmental law program. And, fun fact, he was nominated for the show by his boss at Recirculating Farms, Marianne Cufone, who was featured on our 2017 Grist 50 list!
— Claire Elise Thompson
A parting shot
If the Cannes Film Festival has taken over your feed of late, know that the festival isn’t just for hot debuts and runway looks. (Although the runway looks have been giving — here’s director Martin Scorsese with some of the well-dressed stars of Killers of the Flower Moon, one of the most anticipated premieres.) Last week, the Hollywood Reporter hosted a panel on the carbon costs of production. And the festival’s director also said that he would consider letting climate demonstrators onto the red carpet.
IMAGE CREDITS
Vision: Grist
Parting Shot: Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Summer watch list: Climate-conscious movies and TV on May 24, 2023.
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Given America’s penchant for gas-guzzling pickup trucks and SUVs, you might be surprised to learn that the country’s gasoline usage is going down, maybe for good. Even though only about 1 percent of cars on the road today are electric, some say the United States has already passed “peak gasoline” — the pivotal moment when the fuel’s use finally begins a permanent decline after a century of growth.
Gasoline consumption has not fully bounced back to levels seen before local governments began lockdowns in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of people stopped driving to work every day. Back in the pre-pandemic year of 2018, Americans burned an average of 392 million gallons of gasoline, more than one gallon every day for every person in the country. Since that annual peak, a combination of remote work, high gas prices, and fuel economy standards that require that new cars get better gas mileage have diminished demand. To stay profitable, oil refiners have cut back on production.
Demand for gasoline this year could end up at around 366 million gallons per day, down 7 percent from 2018, according to analysis provided to Grist by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean energy research and advocacy nonprofit. With recent policies like the Inflation Reduction Act offering a tax credit of up to $7,500 for an electric vehicle and the Biden administration’s new emissions rules — which require two-thirds of new passenger vehicles be electric by 2031 — gasoline demand could decrease almost a quarter by 2030, according to the research group, compared to current levels.
That’s still not fast enough to hit important targets to slash greenhouse gases, says Janelle London, the co-executive director of Coltura, an organization advocating for the end of gasoline. “Scientists are saying that we have to cut emissions from all sources in half by 2030 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, and gasoline use just is not on track,” she said. The majority of the country’s transportation-related carbon emissions come from burning gasoline in cars, trucks, and SUVs. And transportation is currently the country’s largest source of pollution. London says that the fastest way to cut consumption is to target electric vehicle incentives toward “gasoline superusers”: the 10 percent of population that drives the most and guzzles nearly a third of the country’s gas.
That’s not who’s buying electric vehicles right now. The typical EV driver is likely to be among those who drive the least, London said. “The only way we’re going to solve this near-term problem is to get the biggest gasoline users to switch to EVs, like, now, as soon as possible.” California, for instance, is on track for a 10 percent cut in gasoline use by 2030, far from its goal of halving gasoline use by the end of the decade. If superusers in California bought electric vehicles before everyone else, it would result in a steep, 43 percent drop that would move the state much closer to its climate goals.
Grist / Clayton Aldern
London says that federal tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act “could be much better designed,” and she’s not the only one who thinks so. Ashley Nunes, director of federal climate policy at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center, says the credits aren’t necessarily prompting people to give up their gas-powered cars. They’re just adding another vehicle. An estimated 44 percent of households with an electric vehicle have at least two other cars, if not three — nearly all of which run on gas. “First and foremost, I think that electric vehicle incentives should not be given to people who are not turning in their gasoline-powered car,” Nunes said. “We’re not paying for you to add another car in your garage.”
In a study published Wednesday in the journal Sustainable Cities and Society, Nunes and other researchers found that offering blanket subsidies for electric vehicles isn’t an economically effective way of reducing carbon emissions. Targeting subsidies at households with only one vehicle and toward taxi or Uber drivers produces more bang for the federal buck. “You want to target people who drive their cars a lot, because that’s where you see the real emission benefits associated with EVs,” Nunes said.
In some states, there’s new interest in getting frequent drivers to switch to EVs. A bill in Vermont, for instance, would allow the Burlington Electric Department to use funds to help gasoline superusers buy electric vehicles. It passed through the state legislature this month and is headed to Republican Governor Phil Scott’s desk. If signed, it’ll be the first legislation in the country to offer EV incentives specifically to “superusers,” a term coined by Coltura two years ago.
Coltura makes the case that converting the biggest gasoline users into EV owners means less money for gas stations and more for power providers. “Utilities have a huge interest in getting these superusers to switch to EVs,” London said. “Suddenly, they’d be using a lot of electricity, right?” Someone who uses 1,000 gallons of gasoline a year, if switched to an EV, would use about 9,000 kilowatts of extra electricity each year, according to Coltura. Using the average cost of gasoline and electricity in February 2023, that means they’d spend about $1,150 on electricity instead of $3,390 on gas, saving roughly $2,000 a year.
There’s another effort underway in California that would allow superusers to receive more funding, in addition to federal tax credits, to switch. Assembly Bill 1267 would have directed the California Air Resources Board to institute a program that maximizes the reduction in gasoline — and thus the climate impact — for each dollar spent on incentives for superusers. After passing unanimously through two committee hearings this spring with bipartisan support, the bill died last week. (London said that it will likely be reintroduced next year.) The state already has a hodgepodge of programs that help lower-income residents buy electric cars — including one that offers grants of up to $9,500 to replace a gas guzzler with a cleaner vehicle — though they have suffered from a lack of funding.
The superusers who make less than the state’s median income wind up spending 10 percent of their income just on putting gas in their car. “People say you can’t afford an EV,” London said. “If you’re a superuser, you can’t afford to keep paying for gasoline.”
The average price of an electric car is about $59,000, higher than the $48,000 average for all cars. But London says that average EV cost is “irrelevant” since there are cheaper options on the market. “The question is, is there an EV at the price point that I can afford one?” she asks. While the cheapest EV model, the Chevy Bolt, is being discontinued, a new Nissan Leaf starts at just under $30,000, and tax credits can knock the price down further.
Clayton Stranger, a managing director at the Rocky Mountain Institute, said that there was a “compelling” economic case to target superusers with EV incentives, though the savings alone might not be enough to make people switch: The infrastructure needs to be built in rural places to make people feel comfortable driving an electric car, giving them confidence there’s a place to charge if they need it.
And then there’s the other aspect of ending the gasoline era: getting Americans out of their cars and into buses and trains, and onto bike lanes and sidewalks. “We also need to significantly reduce the amount of driving that is done,” Stranger said. “EVs alone don’t get us all the way there.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Gasoline use isn’t falling fast enough. Targeting ‘superusers’ could help. on May 24, 2023.
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In 1984, when Andrew Bader was 5, his parents took him on a cross-country train from California to New York. It was a special trip, one of the last experiences Bader shared with both parents before they split up. Decades later, in 2021, Bader decided to reenact a portion of the trip with his father and 6-year-old son. The plan was for the three generations of Baders to take Amtrak’s Coast Starlight train from the San Francisco Bay Area to Seattle, a 22-hour journey, and then catch a Seattle Mariners game at T-Mobile Park.
“I got from my father a love for baseball, and I was trying to connect that between generations,” said Bader, a Bay Area public school teacher. If all went well, he hoped to repeat the trip every summer, as a new family tradition.
Andrew Bader and his son ride Amtrak’s Coast Starlight train together. Courtesy of Andrew Bader
Bader bought the Amtrak tickets in early May 2021, with a plan to travel in late July. But in early July, he found out that a wildfire had damaged a bridge on the train’s path, interrupting the Coast Starlight route. When he got a refund for his canceled tickets, Bader remembers wondering, “Is this something we’re going to have to worry about every summer?” The Coast Starlight, one of Amtrak’s most scenic routes, was disrupted for a month as the bridge was repaired. Amtrak canceled some trains altogether, while other trips were altered so that passengers transferred to a bus for a portion of the route.
In July 2022, Bader and his son finally got to make the trip they’d planned more than a year earlier. But Bader’s father wasn’t with them — he’d passed away from cancer just a few weeks earlier. Instead of a new family tradition, the trip turned out to be a memorial. Bader lamented the opportunity he’d lost because of the wildfire. “You just feel incredibly frustrated that you’ll never have an opportunity to do those things again,” he said.
Andrew Bader’s son looks out the window of their Amtrak’s Coast Starlight train car. Courtesy of Andrew Bader
For Amtrak riders, canceled trains have become a familiar side effect of the extreme weather fueled by climate change. Earlier this year, historic flooding in California disrupted the Coast Starlight again, for nearly a month, along with other Amtrak routes in the Golden State. In the past couple of years, wildfires, coastal erosion, heat waves, and mudslides have closed or altered routes around the country for days, weeks, or months at a time. The federally chartered passenger rail operator tallied more than 450 disruptions from climate shocks between 2006 and 2019, costing the company $127 million in revenue from 1.3 million lost customers. Last year, Amtrak projected that it would sustain another $220 million in climate-fueled losses over the coming decade.
This is a much bigger problem than the frequent headaches and occasional heartbreak that come with canceled trips. If the United States is going to slash its carbon emissions to net-zero by 2050, as President Joe Biden has proposed, it will require a transformation of the country’s largest source of greenhouse gases: transportation. And that transformation is far less likely if passenger rail, one of the climate-friendliest travel options, isn’t able to withstand the extreme weather its widespread adoption could help prevent.
A recent federal report on decarbonizing the transportation sector said that America will have to “[f]ully leverage the potential for efficient travel modes like rail” to meet its climate goals: On average, Amtrak is 34 percent more energy-efficient than flying for every mile a passenger travels, and 46 percent more energy-efficient than driving. The precise carbon savings vary by route, and depend on whether a train runs on electricity or diesel fuel, but taking Amtrak can be half as carbon intensive as flying. As climate change worsens, Amtrak will be in a unique position to help reduce transportation emissions. But that will require it to figure out a way to guarantee reliable service across the country in the face of mounting disasters, while also expanding service to win over drivers and airline customers who today see passenger rail as either a curiosity or a last resort. And Amtrak will have to do all that without owning most of the tracks it operates on.
“We want to grow passenger rail in America,” said Adie Tomer, who leads the Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank. “Rail is cleaner. But the adaptation need is here right now.”
A landslide above Amtrak rail tracks following heavy rains from a winter storm in San Clemente, California, in March 2023. PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP via Getty Images
Amtrak has been thinking about climate change since at least 2014, when it set up a Climate Resilience Task Group “to explore potential climate risks and respond with recommendations.” To prepare for intensifying weather threats, Amtrak identified measures to reduce its vulnerability to sea-level rise, precipitation, extreme temperatures, and wind. They include relocating buildings and equipment outside of floodplains, raising or flood-proofing buildings, and constructing barriers to keep rising waters away from tracks and rail yards. Bridges could be raised, and stones strategically placed to prevent floating debris from damaging their foundations. Culverts, the tunnels that carry water beneath railroads, could be widened to handle climate-fueled floods, and tracks painted white to lower their temperature and prevent them from buckling during heat waves.
However, Amtrak is hamstrung in its ability to implement these types of changes, as it owns just 3 percent of the tracks it operates on. It can only update infrastructure in the Northeast Corridor: the network of tracks that stretch between Washington, D.C., and Boston, the only major chunk of Amtrak’s rail network that the company actually owns. Not coincidentally, it’s also the only major chunk of the rail network where Amtrak runs its high-speed Acela service — which is faster than regular Amtrak trains, though not so fast by international standards — and where Amtrak effectively competes with flying. The rest of the network is primarily owned by freight companies that move consumer goods and industrial materials from point A to point B, like Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, and CSX.
A train conductor stands next to an Amtrak train at New York’s Pennsylvania Station in February 2018. Spencer Platt / Getty Images
“While weather events on the National Network impact Amtrak services and operations, we do not own most of the assets affected outside of the Northeast Corridor, and therefore would plan and assess vulnerabilities differently,” Olivia Irvin, an Amtrak spokesperson, told Grist.
Amtrak is planning to conduct a national climate vulnerability assessment this fiscal year, to “help us identify prominent climate-related risks by region, evaluate how our operations may be impacted, and identify business practices that position us for greater resilience,” Irvin said. It doesn’t have much room to maneuver: In a 2022 report, the company admitted that it “has limited ability to implement climate adaptation measures on host rail.” The report concluded that attempting diplomacy with the freight companies was its best bet: “Collaboration with partners, as well as the ability to communicate the financial benefit of resilient infrastructure through estimating losses avoided over time, is essential for managing use of externally-owned and shared assets.”
Amtrak’s lack of control over most of the tracks on its routes isn’t just a problem for planning for future climate changes. It’s also a problem for responding to the climate impacts that are happening today. When fires, mudslides, or flooding damage tracks outside of the Northeast, Amtrak is at the mercy of freight train companies to get its trains up and running again. P.S. Sriraj, the director of the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois Chicago, says that the importance of a route to the freight company dictates how quickly tracks get repaired.
Employees of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe train lines protect train tracks with a mobile sprinkler system during the Dixie Fire in Quincy, California, in July 2021. JOSH EDELSON / AFP via Getty Images
Union Pacific, the freight company that owns the Northern California bridge damaged in the wildfire in 2021, rushed to repair it, since Union Pacific considers the route “vital.” But if the damaged track is a section that the freight company leases to Amtrak but doesn’t use for its own trains, then it may balk at the cost of repairs or ask the government to take on the burden of fixing it.
“It’s very easy to say, ‘Oh, the freight railroad owns the track, and so they should be responsible for fixing it,’” Sriraj told Grist. “That really depends on how the lease agreements are drawn up.” After Hurricane Katrina disrupted Amtrak’s Gulf Coast service in 2005, CSX and Norfolk Southern tried to get Amtrak to pay for $440 million of infrastructure upgrades as a condition of restoring service. (The companies eventually reached a confidential settlement allowing passenger rail service to return.)
A spokesperson for the Association of American Railroads, an industry trade group, said that restoring and repairing tracks after disasters is “essential” and pointed out that freight rail companies “collectively invest more than $20 billion annually to maintain and enhance the rail network.” While “[e]ach host-tenant relationship is unique and subject to its own agreement,” the spokesperson said, “freight railroads collectively take substantial steps to increase infrastructure resilience and quickly restore service following a natural disaster.” The industry has also installed seismic, wind, and water detectors along high-risk tracks, the spokesperson added, and replaced wooden bridges with concrete and steel alternatives.
When your flight gets canceled because of bad weather, you can usually book another one within a few hours or days. When a road gets damaged by mudslides, you can generally find an alternate route to get where you’re going. But Amtrak doesn’t have that kind of redundancy built into its system. It operates on a measly 21,400 miles of track around the country, compared to 4 million miles of roads. When parts of that track network go down, the passenger rail company has to either cancel its scheduled service or pile passengers onto buses. That’s what happened when rising sea levels forced the emergency closure of a section of Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner — the coastal route that carries 3 million passengers annually between San Luis Obispo and San Diego in Southern California — last September, and again following a landslide in April. For more than half a year, Pacific Surfliner passengers have had to transfer from the train to a bus, and then onto a different train, in the middle of their trip.
Pink light appears over the Amtrak Surfliner railroad tracks in July 2020 in Jalama Beach, California. George Rose / Getty Images
The patchwork nature of Amtrak’s network means that making the rail operator more climate resilient while also helping it attract more passengers is no simple matter. The bipartisan infrastructure law that President Joe Biden signed in 2021 could help, indirectly. The $550 billion in spending didn’t include any dedicated funding to make railroads more climate resilient, though it did contain $22 billion in grants for Amtrak repairs and some $44 billion in other rail funding. This funding will be largely disbursed by the Federal Railroad Administration, or FRA, an agency within the Department of Transportation.
Michael Johnsen, the Federal Railroad Administration’s senior advisor on climate and sustainability, says the agency will be looking to invest that money in projects designed to handle a warmer world. “FRA wants to make sure that when we build something, we build it to last 100 years,” he told Grist. The Biden administration announced in January that funding from the law will go toward two train tunnel improvement projects in the Northeast, and Johnsen said his agency wants to make sure “those are being built to withstand projected climate impacts.”
The bipartisan infrastructure law also contains funding for a broader strategy that the experts Grist spoke to said is essential both for driving up ridership and for setting resilience priorities: shoring up intercity rail service in corridors that connect urban centers with an economic connection to one another, often thanks to shared industries. The “sweet spot,” said Robert Puentes, the president and CEO of Eno Center for Transportation, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C., is “about 400 to 500 miles, where it’s too short to fly, too long to drive.” Chicago, Columbus, and Pittsburgh fit the bill, for instance, as do Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. Investments in such corridors could allow Amtrak to attract more riders with frequent, reliable service, and would also help the company and policymakers target climate resilience efforts effectively. Amtrak has proposed expanding service along many of these corridors and hopes to use some funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law to do so; some smaller, private passenger rail companies have also proposed service filling in these gaps.
“It’s important that we designate actual priority corridors where we expect to have significant service,” Tomer said. “Those then become the rail corridors to have the utmost environmental protection.”
Of course, there’s still the problem of Amtrak not controlling the tracks it runs trains on. The solution there, Tomer and Puentes said, is for state governments to step in to play a more active role in resolving conflicts between passenger and freight companies — and, if necessary, buy up the tracks in the public interest. This approach has already seen enormous success in North Carolina and Virginia, both of which have taken active roles in expanding their rail networks. The states saw train ridership reach all-time highs last year, even as national Amtrak ridership was still flagging from the pandemic. Virginia’s two-decade effort to shore up train service has “transcended any partisanship,” a rail advocate told the Washington Post in 2021, since lawmakers on both sides of the aisle “wanted to bring better rail service to their communities.” The state’s strategy has included taking over hundreds of miles of tracks.
“If the freight rail companies cannot collaborate in terms of capital investments with the public sector to build corridors that can allow trains to move at international high speed rail standards, then the government needs to do it itself,” Tomer said. Rail workers have called for nationalization of the railroads, and many observers have argued that publicly owned tracks could reduce the likelihood of environmental and public health disasters like the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
Ultimately, it will take not just federal funding, but also ambition from states to help Amtrak reach its full potential as a disaster-resilient climate solution — and to attract passengers who might not even consider it as an option today. Right now, Sriraj said, Amtrak is “for those that really do not have any other option, and then it’s for those that yearn for the nostalgia of train trips. So it becomes a very exclusive, very small segment of the population that looks towards Amtrak as opposed to that being in the public consciousness.”
For Bader, the Bay Area school teacher, nostalgia played a big role in the train trip he planned with his son and father. But he says that when he’s planning trips and pulls up Google Maps, the first thing he does is check to see if taking the train is possible.
“I would embrace any sort of train option over any sort of long car ride,” Bader said. “I would love to take trains over great distances to places that right now flying is the only option.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Service Advisory on May 24, 2023.
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The Biden administration has put a pause on plans to erect a copper mine in Arizona on land known as Oak Flat, a site sacred to the San Carlos Apache and other Indigenous nations in the area.
The U.S. Forest Service has told a federal court it is not sure when an environmental impact statement could be approved, an action which would set off the land swap allowing Resolution Copper, a British-Australian company owned by Rio Tinto and BHP, to continue with the development of the mine. The statement had been promised for this spring, but the agency now doesn’t have a set timeline.
The Biden Administration and the Forest Service will be using this time to further consult with the San Carlos Apache and other tribes that have voiced opposition to the project.
Located about 40 miles from Phoenix, Oak Flat sits atop the third-largest deposit of copper ore in the world. The mine could produce up to 40 billion pounds of copper over 40 years and provide 1,500 jobs and millions in tax revenue and compensation.
For nearly a decade, tribal leaders in Arizona have fought to save Oak Flat and keep the ceremonial grounds free from mining projects and other disturbances. Local Indigenous peoples and religious organizations have filed briefs in support of The Apache Stronghold, a coalition of Apaches and their allies.
Their argument: The mining industry is infringing upon the religious freedoms of Indigenous peoples in the area who look to Oak Flat, or Chi’chil Bildagoteel, as holy land.
The initial 2014 federal legislation that would have transferred Oak Flat from the Tonto National Forest to Resolution Copper stipulated that 60 days after the environmental impact statement was completed, the land swap would occur no matter what the statement results indicated.
Members of the San Carlos Apache Nation and other activists gathered In Washington, D.C., in July 2015 to protest the a section of the National Defense Authorization Act that would turn over parts of Oak Flat to a foreign copper mining company.
Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images
In 2022, the Forest Service asked the Bureau of Land Management to review the environmental impact statement. Suggestions from the BLM included incorporating more robust information about the effects the mine would have on groundwater, and the stabilization of the tailings dam in Skunk Camp, a river located southeast of the mine.
According to E&E news, Joan Pepin, a Department of Justice attorney representing the Forest Service, wrote in a letter last week to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that the agency is conducting a “thorough review of the consultation record, and environmental and other associated documents, to ensure compliance with the applicable laws, regulations and policies.”
Ismail Royer, a director at the Religious Freedom Institute, an organization that stands with the Apache Stronghold, said the Biden administration needs to officially stop the land transfer and respect the religious freedoms of Indigenous peoples.
“Our concern is that they continue to stand by some very wrong interpretations of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment, which do not fully acknowledge the right of people to practice their religion and they do not fully acknowledge the harm to the religious rights of the Apache tribe,” he said.
Oak Flat has been used as a religious site to connect Indigenous peoples to their faith, families and natural world since before colonization and European contact. Royer said he believes the current government needs to not only stop the mining project for good, but acknowledge the violation of human rights he and the Apache Stronghold say occurred.
“We would like to see a formal acknowledgement and repudiation of their constricted understanding of human rights which is implicated here,” Royer said. “There’s billions of dollars involved here and the last thing that any of these people care about are the human rights of the Native American people.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden administration pauses copper mining project on Oak Flat, a sacred Apache site on May 24, 2023.
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It’s no secret that most of these PET bottles, named for the polyethylene terephthalate plastic they’re made of, are never recycled. Many end up on beaches or in waterways, where they degrade into unsightly plastic shards and fragments that threaten marine life. But blighted beaches are only the tip of the iceberg. According to a new report from the nonprofit Defend Our Health, PET plastic bottles cause hazardous chemical pollution at every stage of their life cycle.
“Plastics have a terrible health burden on the population,” said Mike Belliveau, Defend Our Health’s executive director. He urged the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, to place more stringent limits on the use of toxic chemicals, and called on beverage companies like Coca-Cola — named the number one plastic polluter for five years running by the Break Free From Plastic coalition — to replace at least half of their plastic bottles with reusable and refillable container systems by 2030.
“The beverage industry has to be responsible and held accountable for the supply chain impacts of their plastics,” Belliveau said.
The report begins at the end of the plastic life cycle, with littered PET plastic bottles that release cancer-causing pollutants and heavy metals into the environment. Although industry trade groups like to advertise PET as “100 percent recyclable,” the reality is that 70 percent of bottles are never collected for recycling. Instead, they’re dumped, sent to landfills, or incinerated, causing air pollution that disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color. Of the remaining 30 percent, Defend Our Health estimates that only one-third are turned into new bottles; the rest are either wasted during the recycling process or “downcycled” into lower-quality plastic products like carpeting.
With global plastic waste generation expected to triple by 2060, experts say recycling infrastructure is unlikely to keep pace. Recent research also shows the recycling process may unintentionally incorporate toxic chemicals into recycled toys, kitchen utensils, and other products, potentially putting consumers at risk.
Chemical releases also occur further up the PET bottle supply chain, when bottles are sitting on the shelf. Independent testing suggests that virtually all plastic bottles leach chemicals into the beverages they hold. These chemicals include antimony from antimony trioxide, a cancer-causing catalyst used to speed up the production of PET plastic. A 2022 analysis from Defend Our Health found antimony in Diet Coke, Honest Tea, Dasani, and other Coca-Cola products at concentrations exceeding California’s safe drinking water standard.
In response to Grist’s request for comment, Coca-Cola said all of its products are safe and have been approved by regulators everywhere it operates. “Consumers can be assured that our products are safe and of high quality,” a spokesperson said.
The rest of the report focuses on feedstocks, the chemical building blocks of PET. The production of monoethylene glycol, for example — one of PET’s main ingredients— causes some 68,000 pounds of the carcinogen ethylene oxide to be released into the air annually, and is the country’s leading source of pollution from 1,4-dioxane, a probable carcinogen. Processing and refining oil and gas to make other plastic feedstocks — chemicals like ethylene and para-xylene — can emit particulate matter, smog-producing volatile organic compounds, and aromatic hydrocarbons. The extraction of that oil and gas itself causes the release of more than 1,000 chemicals, some of which may have health unrecognized health impacts.
A Formosa Plastics plant in Point Comfort, Texas.
Mark Felix / AFP via Getty Images
“We’re just barreling forward with a lot of these chemicals without understanding the implications for human health,” said Roopa Krithivasan, Defend Our Health’s director of research and a coauthor of the report. She said the burden of chemical pollution falls most heavily on marginalized communities, including poor people and people of color who live near fossil fuel extraction sites, plants that produce PET or its chemical components, and waste incinerators. According to Defend Our Health, people of color make up nearly two-thirds of those facing serious cancer risk from living within six miles of ethylene oxide emissions from a petrochemical plant.
“Our future is in the crosshairs,” Yvette Arellano, executive director of the Houston-based environmental justice organization Fenceline Watch, told reporters on Monday at a press conference for the report. “As a woman of color in the extreme-right Southern states captured by oil interests, we’re disenfranchised and disproportionately affected. Many including myself are diagnosed with infertility, babies are affected in the womb even before their first breath, and even after can potentially be diagnosed with developmental issues, neurological issues, immune issues.”
Belliveau said the EPA has done a good job identifying these disparities, but a “terrible” job correcting them. In general, he said the agency should do more to regulate plastic-related chemicals — like by adopting a federal limit for 1,4-dioxane in drinking water, enacting stricter standards for ethylene oxide pollution, and setting rigorous pollution standards for other plastic-related chemicals. Companies could help, too, by voluntarily replacing hazardous chemical additives with safer alternatives.
The EPA did not respond to Grist’s request for comment in time for publication.
More broadly, however, Belliveau wants to see fewer plastic bottles being produced in the first place. States like California are beginning to nudge companies in this direction by requiring some single-use plastics to be eliminated and replaced with reusable systems — like soda fountains and bottle refill stations — but green groups say the private sector has to step up as well. Defend Our Health wants soda makers like Coca-Cola to sell at least half of their beverages in reusable or refillable packaging by 2030 — a target twice as ambitious as Coca-Cola’s current goal.
In fact, Coke appears to be backsliding on its reuse commitment: In its latest sustainability report, the company said refillable packaging accounted for only 14 percent of the products it sold in 2022, down from 16 percent the year before. Based on Coca-Cola’s reported sales volume, the nonprofit Oceana estimates that the decrease means that the company generated 5.8 billion additional single-use bottles over the past two years, in place of reusable packaging.
Coca-Cola “has a history of not meeting its promises,” Matt Littlejohn, Oceana’s senior vice president of strategic initiatives, told Grist. He said the Defend Our Health report, which Oceana was not involved in, highlights how important it is for Coca-Cola to fulfill and exceed its existing targets — “not only for the ocean’s health, but for all of our health as well.”
Coca-Cola did not respond to Grist’s request for comment about its reuse targets.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Plastic bottles harm human health at every stage of their life cycle on May 23, 2023.
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After more than a year of intense negotiations, the states along the Colorado River have reached a deal to solve one of the most complex water crises in U.S. history. The solution to this byzantine conundrum is deceptive in its simplicity: pay farmers — who collectively use 80 percent of Colorado River deliveries — to give up their water.
Representatives from Arizona, Nevada, and California announced on Monday that they had agreed to reduce their states’ collective water usage by more than 3 million acre-feet over the next three years. That equals around a trillion gallons, or roughly 13 percent of the states’ total water usage. Under the terms of the deal, cities and irrigation districts in these so-called “Lower Basin” states will receive around $1.2 billion from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, in exchange for using less water. Most of the reductions are likely to come from farming operations.
Many had anticipated a more painful resolution to the crisis. Rather than taking mandatory cuts and losing out on billions of dollars from crop sales, irrigators in the southwest will get millions of dollars to reduce their water usage for just three years — and will cut their usage by less than half of what federal officials demanded last year.
This rosy outcome is only possible because of a wet winter that blanketed the river basin with snow and stabilized water levels in its two main reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Thanks to the ample runoff, the states could lower their target enough that the federal government could afford to compensate them for almost all of it.
This deal also resolves a key dispute between Arizona and California, the two largest water users on the river, which have clashed over how to respond to the water shortage. California has argued that Arizona should take the most cuts as the most junior user on the river, while Arizona argued that the cuts should be spread more evenly between all the states. The disagreement caused negotiations to drag out for months, and it’s only thanks to the payout from the federal government that they reached an accord.
These compensated cuts are larger than anything the river states have ever implemented before, but they are temporary, a Band-Aid for a crisis that is not going away any time soon. When the three-year agreement expires in 2026, the states will have to come back to the table again and address the elephant in the room: If water use is growing, and the river’s size is shrinking, some people are going to have to make do with less — not temporarily, but for good.
“This is a step in the right direction but a temporary solution,” said Dave White, a professor at Arizona State University who studies sustainability policy. “This deal does not address the long-term water sustainability challenges in the region.”
The basic blueprint of the deal is not new. Federal and state agencies in the Colorado River basin have tried to pay farmers to use less water before, but they have had difficulty scaling up these compensation measures. That’s in part because many farmers view the measures as an affront to their industry, even when they’re compensated. When a group of states in the river’s Upper Basin relaunched a dormant conservation program earlier this year, offering farmers money to leave their fields unplanted, just 88 water users across four states ended up participating.
The other issue is that conserving water is expensive. In order to convince farmers to plant fewer acres, officials need to give them more money per acre-foot of water than they would have made from selling crops on a given field. In California’s Imperial Valley, the “salad bowl” region that grows almost all the nation’s winter vegetables, irrigation officials have paid growers to invest in technology that makes their farms more efficient. But farmers in the valley have balked at the idea of taking money to leave their fields unplanted, especially as vegetable prices have remained high.
“Water is a valuable asset, and I think people are nervous about parting with it, because it kind of suggests that you don’t really need it after all,” said George Frisvold, an extension specialist at the University of Arizona who studies agricultural policy. “I think there’s real concern that this is voluntary now, but it could come back and bite you.”
The Biden administration has resolved those issues for the moment by offering a very generous price for conservation under the new deal. The compensation arrangement in the new deal works out to about $521 an acre-foot on average — three times the price in the Upper Basin pilot program and almost twice the conservation rate in the Imperial Valley’s program.
Frisvold says these payments will be hard to maintain over the long term.
“We have a bunch of IRA money to pay for this right now,” he told Grist. “But is this going to be an ongoing thing? It’s kind of up in the air.”
Until recently, these experimental conservation programs were just that — experiments. But over the past two years, as a once-in-a-millennium drought has all but emptied out the river’s two main reservoirs, the river states have scrambled to cut their water usage and stop draining the river. It is all but impossible to do that without using less water for agriculture.
The Biden administration kicked off the scramble last summer by delivering an ultimatum to the river states. While testifying before Congress in June, a senior official from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation ordered the states to cut their water consumption by between 2 and 4 million acre-feet, or as much as a third of the river’s normal annual flow. The administration threatened to impose unilateral water cuts if the states couldn’t reach a deal on their own.
The states tangled for months over who should shoulder the burden of reducing water usage. The so-called Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico pointed the finger at Arizona and California, which together consume the majority of the river’s water. Meanwhile, representatives from California insisted that legal precedent shields the Golden State from taking cuts and that Arizona should bear the pain. (It isn’t clear whether the other four states on the river’s Upper Basin will make any corresponding reductions.)
In the end it was a very wet winter rather than a diplomatic breakthrough that helped ease tension between the states. Thanks to historic snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, it’s likely that water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead will stabilize this summer, even if just for a few months. This plentiful runoff has made the worst-case outcomes for the river much less likely and has given the states some breathing room to negotiate smaller cuts.
The new target was just small enough to make voluntary conservation feasible with the money from the Inflation Reduction Act: In the final hours of the debate over the bill last year, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona negotiated a $4 billion tranche of funding for “drought response.” That money will anchor the deal for the next three years, but it’s unclear whether payments will continue after that.
The big question now is what happens at the end of 2026, when the conservation deal will expire and when states and tribes will gather to negotiate the river’s long-term future. At that point, the river’s water users will once again debate the big questions that this deal has allowed them to punt on: How much water use can a shrinking river support? Who should use less water to account for the river’s decline? How can the government make whole the tribal nations that still don’t have their water?
Even amid the relief surrounding Monday’s deal, some water officials were already looking ahead.
“This proposal protects the system in the short term so we can dedicate our energy and resources to a longer-term solution,” said Brenda Burman, the manager of the Central Arizona Project water authority, which delivers water to Phoenix and Tucson, in a press release. “There’s a lot to do and it’s time to focus.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline At last, states reach Colorado River deal: Pay farmers not to farm on May 22, 2023.
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This article was produced in partnership with The Intercept.
Their protest encampment razed, the Indigenous-led environmental movement at North Dakota’s Standing Rock reservation was searching for a new tactic. By March 2017, the fight over the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline had been underway for months. Leaders of the movement to defend Indigenous rights on the land — and its waterways — had a new aim: to march on Washington.
Native leaders and activists, calling themselves water protectors, wanted to show the newly elected President Donald Trump that they would continue to fight for their treaty rights to lands including the pipeline route. The march would be called “Native Nations Rise.”
Law enforcement was getting ready, too — and discussing plans with Energy Transfer, the parent company of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Throughout much of the uprising against the pipeline, the National Sheriffs’ Association talked routinely with TigerSwan, Energy Transfer’s lead security firm on the project, working hand-in-hand to craft pro-pipeline messaging. A top official with the sheriffs’ public relations contractor, Off The Record Strategies, floated a plan to TigerSwan’s lead propagandist, a man named Robert Rice.
“Thoughts on a crew or a news reporter — or someone pretending to be — with a camera and microphone to report from the main rally on the Friday, ask questions about pipeline and slice together [sic]?” Mark Pfeifle suggested over email.
Activists participate in a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline March 10, 2017 in Washington, DC. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe held the event with a march to the White House to urge for halting the construction of the project.
Alex Wong / Getty Images
A security firm led by a former member of the U.S. military’s shadowy special forces, TigerSwan was no stranger to such deception. The company had, in fact, used fake reporters before — including Rice himself — to spread its message and to spy on pipeline opponents. The National Sheriffs’ Association’s involvement in advocating for a similar disinformation campaign against the anti-pipeline movement has not been previously reported.
The email from the National Sheriffs’ Association PR shop was among the more than 55,000 internal TigerSwan documents obtained by The Intercept and Grist through a public records request. The documents, released by the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board, reveal how TigerSwan and the sheriffs’ group worked together to twist the story in the media so that it aligned with the oil company’s interests — seeking to pollute the public’s perception of the water protectors.
The documents also outline details of previously unreported collaborations on the ground between TigerSwan and police forces. During the uprising at Standing Rock, TigerSwan provided law enforcement support with helicopter flights, medics, and security guards. The private security firm pushed for the purchase by Energy Transfer of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of radios for the cops. TigerSwan also placed an order for a catalog of so-called less-lethal weapons for police use, including tear gas. The security contractor even planned to facilitate an exchange where Energy Transfer and police could share purported evidence of illegal activity.
An email obtained by The Intercept and Grist sent by Mark Pfeifle on March 7, 2017, to a TigerSwan contractor. Public record via the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board
Meanwhile, communications firms working for Energy Transfer and the National Sheriffs’ Association worked together to write newsletters, plant pro-pipeline articles in the media, and circulate “wanted”-style posters of particular protesters, the documents show. And the heads of both the National Sheriffs’ Association and TigerSwan engaged in discussions on strategy to counter the anti-pipeline movement, with propaganda becoming a priority for both the police and private security.
“It is extremely dangerous to have private interests dictating and coloring the flow of administrative justice,” said Chase Iron Eyes, director of the media organization Last Real Indians and a member of the Oceti Sakowin people. Iron Eyes was active at Standing Rock and mentioned in TigerSwan’s files. “We learned at Standing Rock, law and order serves capital and property.”
Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, whose jurisdiction in Morton County, North Dakota, abuts the Standing Rock reservation, said collaboration with pipeline security was limited. “We had a cooperation with them in reference to the pipeline workers’ safety while conducting their business,” he said in an email. “TigerSwan was not to be involved in any law enforcement detail.” (TigerSwan, Energy Transfer, and the National Sheriffs’ Association did not respond to requests for comment.)
Native American protestors and their supporters demonstrate against work being done for the Dakota Access Pipeline near Cannon Ball, North Dakota in September 2016.
Robyn BECK / AFP via Getty Images
Rice, the TigerSwan propagandist, had posed as a news anchor for anti-protester segments posted on a Facebook page he created to sway the local community against the Standing Rock protests. But when Pfeifle, the sheriff group’s PR man, suggested pretending to be a reporter at the Native Nations Rise protest, Rice was unavailable. Pfeifle found another way to tell the pipeline and police’s story: a far-right news website founded by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Pfeifle wrote to Rice: “We did get Daily Caller to cover event yesterday [sic].”
The idea of working with police was baked into Energy Transfer’s arrangement with TigerSwan. The firm’s contract for the Dakota Access Pipeline specifically assigned Tigerswan to “take the lead with various law enforcement agencies per state, county, state National Guard and the federal interagency if required.”
Cooperation between Energy Transfer’s security operation and law enforcement, however, began even before TigerSwan arrived on the scene. A PowerPoint presentation from Silverton, another contractor hired by Energy Transfer, described its relationship with law enforcement as a “public private partnership.” The September 2016 presentation said that a private intelligence cell was “coordinating with LE” — law enforcement — “and helping develop Person of Interest packets specifically designed to aid in LE prosecution.”
Multiple documents make clear that part of the purpose of Energy Transfer’s intelligence collection was to support law enforcement prosecutions. A September 2016 document describing TigerSwan’s early priorities said: “Continue to collect information of an evidentiary level in order to further the DAPL Security effort and assist Law Enforcement with information to aid in prosecution.”
The collaboration extended to materiel. TigerSwan operatives realized soon after they arrived that local law enforcement lacked encrypted radios and could not communicate with state or municipal law enforcement — or with Dakota Access Pipeline security, according to emails. Energy Transfer purchased 100 radios, for $391,347, with plans to lease a number of them to law enforcement officers.
”We want them to go to LEO as a gift which represents DAPL’s concern for public safety,” wrote Tom Siguaw, a senior director at Energy Transfer, in an email.
During large protest events, TigerSwan and police worked together to keep water protectors from interfering with construction. On one day in late October 2016, the day of the protests’ largest mass arrest, Energy Transfer’s security personnel “held law enforcement’s east flank” and supported sheriffs’ deputies and national guard members with seven medical personnel and two helicopters, named Valkyrie and Saber.
After the incident, TigerSwan planned to set up a shared drive, where law enforcement could upload crime reports and charging documents and TigerSwan could share photographs and pipeline opponents’ social media. Documents show other instances where TigerSwan set up online exchanges with law enforcement. In a February 2017 PowerPoint presentation, TigerSwan described plans to use another shared drive to post security personnel’s videos and photographs, taken both aerially and on the ground during a different mass arrest.
A slide from a February 2017 PowerPoint presentation made by TigerSwan obtained by The Intercept and Grist. Public record via the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board
A Dakota Access Pipeline helicopter also supported also supported law enforcement officials during one of the most notorious nights of the crackdown, when police unleashed water hoses on water protectors in below-freezing temperatures in November 2016. By morning, police were in danger of running out of less-lethal weapons — which can still be deadly, but are designed to incapacitate their targets. TigerSwan and Energy Transfer again stepped in.
TigerSwan founder James Reese, a former commander in the elite Army Special Operations unit Delta Force, reached out to a contact at the North Carolina Highway Patrol. North Carolina had recently used TigerSwan’s GuardianAngel mapping tool to respond to uprisings in Charlotte, in the aftermath of the 2016 police killing of Keith Scott. (A spokesperson from the North Carolina Department of Public Safety said the agency does not currently have a relationship with TigerSwan.)
Reese sent a list of weaponry sought by North Dakota law enforcement to an officer from the Highway Patrol. The list included tear gas, pepper spray, bean bag rounds, and foam rounds. The official referred Reese to a contact at Safariland, which manufactures the gear.
“We will purchase the items, and gift them to LE,” Reese told the Safariland representative. “We need a nation wide push if you can help?”
Meanwhile, another TigerSwan team member sent the Minnesota-based police supply store Streicher’s an even longer list of less-lethal weapons and ammunition. “Please confirm availability of the following price and ship immediately with overnight delivery,” TigerSwan’s Phil Rehak wrote.
Rehak told The Intercept and Grist his job was to procure equipment — including for law enforcement. “I would be given an order by either somebody from TigerSwan or maybe even law enforcement, being like, ‘Hey, can you find these supplies?’” He said he doesn’t know if the less-lethal weaponry was ultimately delivered to the sheriffs.
“I am not aware of any radios for Morton County or any less lethal weapons from Tiger Swan,” Kirchmeier, the Morton County sheriff, told The Intercept and Grist in an email. “I dealt with ND DES for resources.” (Two other sheriffs involved with the multiagency law enforcement response did not answer requests for comment. Eric Jensen, a spokesperson for the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services, said the agency had no arrangement with TigerSwan or Energy Transfer to provide less-lethal weapons, and that they wouldn’t have knowledge of any arrangements between law enforcement and the companies.)
The “partnership” went both ways, with TigerSwan sometimes viewing law enforcement weapons as potential assets. In mid-October 2016, as senior Energy Transfer personnel prepared to join state officials for a government archeological survey to examine the pipeline route, three law enforcement “snipers” agreed to be on standby with an air team, according to a memo by another security company, RGT, that was working under TigerSwan’s management. A Predator drone was listed among “friendly assets” in the memo.
TigerSwan routinely shared what it learned about the protest movement with local police, but most of what the documents describe in the way of reciprocal sharing — from law enforcement to TigerSwan — came from the National Sheriffs’ Association.
In March 2017, the sheriffs’ group helped the South Dakota legislature pass a law to prevent future Standing Rock-style pipeline uprisings, the documents say. To support the effort, the Morton County Sheriff’s Office sent along a “law enforcement sensitive” state operational update from the North Dakota State & Local Intelligence Center. National Sheriffs’ Association head Jonathan Thompson forwarded the document to TigerSwan executive Shawn Sweeney. Thompson recommended Sweeney look at the last page, which included a list of anti-pipeline camps across the U.S.
TigerSwan also recruited at least one law enforcement officer with whom it worked on the ground. In November 2016, Reese requested a phone call with Major Chad McGinty of the Ohio State Patrol, who had acted as commander of a team from Ohio sent to assist police in North Dakota. By February 1, McGinty, who declined to comment for this story, was working for TigerSwan as a law enforcement liaison, earning more than $440 a day.
TigerSwan’s contract also mandated that the firm help Energy Transfer tell its story. The firm was expected “to help turn the page on the story that we are being overwhelmed with over the past few weeks,” according to a document from mid-September 2016.
Energy Transfer’s image was in trouble early on. Critical media coverage of Standing Rock grew dramatically in early September after private security guards hired by the company unleashed guard dogs on protesters. A flood of reporters arrived on the ground to cover the protests. Social media posts routinely went viral. The narrative that took hold portrayed the pipeline company as instigating violence against peaceful protesters.
Energy Transfer recruited third parties to spread its messaging and counter the unfavorable storyline. At least two additional contractors — DCI and MarketLeverage — joined TigerSwan in trying to burnish Energy Transfer’s image. TigerSwan recruited retired Major General James “Spider” Marks, who led intelligence efforts for the Army during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and served on TigerSwan’s advisory board, to write favorable op-eds and deliver commentary. (Marks did not respond to a request for comment.) With its veneer of law enforcement authority, the National Sheriffs’ Association would become Energy Transfer’s most powerful third-party voice. Representatives for DCI and MarketLeverage and Marks did not respond to a request for comment.
Together, TigerSwan, the National Sheriffs’ Association, and the public relations contractors formed a powerful public relations machine, monitoring social media closely, convincing outside groups to promote pro-pipeline messaging, and planting stories.
Off the Record Strategies, the public relations firm working for the National Sheriffs’ Association, coordinated with the opposition research firm Delve to track activists’ social media pages, arrest records, and funding sources. The companies sought to paint the protesters as violent, professional, billionaire-funded, out-of-state agitators, whose camps represented the true ecological disaster, as well as to identify movement infighting that might be exploited. Both companies were led by Bush Administration alumni. (Delve did not respond to a request for comment.)
Framing water protectors as criminals was a key National Sheriffs’ Association strategy. ”Let’s start drumbeat of the worst of the worst this week?” Pfeifle, Off the Record’s CEO, suggested to the head of the sheriffs’ group in one email. “One or two a day? Move them out through social media…The out of state wife beaters, child abusers and thieves first… Mugshot, ND arrest date, rap sheet and other data wrapped in and easy to share?”
The result was “wanted”-style posters — called “Professional Protestors with Dangerous Criminal Histories” — featuring pipeline opponents’ photos and criminal records, which Pfeifle’s team circulated online and routinely shared with TigerSwan. The National Sheriffs’ Association repeatedly asked TigerSwan to help “move” its criminal record research on social media, and TigerSwan repurposed the sheriffs’ group arrest research for its own propaganda products.
Pfeifle also made summary statistics of protesters’ arrest records and a map of where they were from. The color-coded map came with a running tally of the number of protesters. The details collected by Pfeifle then began showing up in blogs and remarks by police to reporters. One piece by KXMB-TV, a television station in Bismarck, North Dakota, repeated almost verbatim statistics summarizing the number of protesters arrested and their criminal histories, noting that “just 8 percent are from North Dakota.” Neither Delve nor Pfeifle responded to requests for comment.
An email obtained by the Intercept and Grist sent by Mark Pfeifle sent to TigerSwan employees.
Public record via the North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board
Naomi Oreskes, a science historian who has researched the fossil fuel industry’s communications strategies, said the attempt to frame environmental defenders as criminals was consistent with a long trend of attempts to discredit activists. However, it was also “particularly noxious,” she said, because the energy industry has pushed for stronger penalties against trespass and other anti-protest laws. “They make it harder for people to engage in peaceful protest,” said Oreskes. “People are arrested and they say, ‘See, those people are criminals.’”
DCI, which got its start “doing the dirty work of the tobacco industry” and helped found the Tea Party movement, was also a key player influencing media coverage, placing op-eds and distributing them. In one exchange between DCI partner Megan Bloomgren, who would later become a top Trump administration official, and Reese, Bloomgren sent a list of 14 articles “we’ve placed that we’ve been pushing over social media.” The articles ranged from opinion pieces in support of the pipeline in local newspapers to posts on right-wing blogs.
Oreskes said using opinion articles this way is a common strategy pioneered by the tobacco industry, among others. “You push that out into social media to make it seem as if there’s broad, grassroots support for the pipeline,” said Oreskes. ”The reader doesn’t know that this is part of a coordinated strategy by the industry.”
MarketLeverage, another Energy Transfer contractor, also spent a considerable amount of its resources tracking social media and boosting pro-pipeline messages. In the weeks following the dog attacks, for instance, Shane Hackett, a top official with MarketLeverage, suggested highlighting a Facebook post by Archie Fool Bear, a Standing Rock tribal member who was critical of the NoDAPL movement. (Neither DCI nor MarketLeverage responded to requests for comment.)
“We need to exploit that shit immediately while we have a chance,” a TigerSwan operative wrote in in response to an email from their colleague Rice, the chief propagandist.
Hackett suggested creating creating a graphic out of the tribal member’s post and having “other accounts share his post with the same hashtags.” Rice provided the social media text and hashtags, including, “Respected Tribe Members Call Attention to Standing Rock Leadership Lies and Failures #TribeLiesMatter #NoDAPL #SiouxTruth.” Obscure social media accounts then repeated the exact language.
“These people who are trained to use whatever publicity they can for their advantage
they’re going to do what they want anyway,” Fool Bear told The Intercept and Grist. “They don’t live in my shoes, and they don’t believe in what my beliefs are. If they’re going to take what I say and manipulate it, I can’t stop them.”
Off the Record Strategies and the National Sheriffs’ Association didn’t just focus on issues of law-breaking. The association parroted some of the same messages that TigerSwan — as well as climate change deniers in Congress — were trafficking. Notable among them was a right-wing conspiracy theory that the environmental movement was “directed and controlled” by a club of billionaires.
The National Sheriffs’ Association also tried to undermine the credibility of well-known advocates Bill McKibben (a former Grist board member) and Jane Kleeb, who founded the environmental organizations 350.org and Bold Alliance, respectively. Pfeifle circulated memos on the two movement leaders. “McKibben is a radical liberal determined to ‘bankrupt’ energy producers,” said one, adding, “McKibben will join any protest because he enjoys the fanfare.” Another memo said, “Kleeb admitted her pipeline opposition was about political organization and opportunity, not the environment.”
Kleeb and McKibben expressed bemusement at TigerSwan and the sheriffs’ association’s fixation on their work. “It’s all pretty creepy,” McKibben said in an email. “I live in a county with a sheriff, and it seems okay if he tracks the speed of my car down Rte 116, but tracking every word I write seems like… not his job.”
The sheriffs’ group also listed the nonprofit organizations Center for Biological Diversity, Rainforest Action Network, and Food & Water Watch as “Extremist Environmental Groups” — a pejorative used by some conservative government officials, including from the Trump administration.
“Campaigning against corporations driving our climate crisis and human rights violations is not extremist,” said Rainforest Action Network executive director Ginger Cassady. Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the association’s flyer contained “categorically false” information about the organization — a sentiment repeated by others mentioned throughout TigerSwan’s other records.
“We would urge the Sheriffs’ Association to focus on its own responsibilities instead of attempting to undermine well-meaning organizations like ours,” added Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch’s executive director.
Both the National Sheriffs’ Association and TigerSwan took pride in meddling in tribal affairs. Reese enthusiastically encouraged his personnel his personnel to spread a story that the Prairie Knights Casino, run by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, was discharging sewage into the Missouri River Watershed. Meanwhile, the sheriffs’ association worked with TigerSwan to push a story about a drop in revenue at the casino. In an email to TigerSwan’s Rice, Pfeifle noted that the issue had been raised at a recent Standing Rock tribal council meeting.
“We moved this story on front page of Sunday Bismarck Tribune and in SAB blog Friday, playing perfectly into the ‘get-out’ narrative going into next week,” Pfeifle wrote to Rice a few days later, referring to the conservative Say Anything Blog. “Please help echo and amplify, if possible.”
Using newsletters and news-like web sites to discredit pipeline opponents’ concerns as “fake news” was a top tactic for both TigerSwan and the National Sheriffs’ Association. The irony of the strategy was not lost on its protagonists.
Over WhatsApp, in June 2017, Rice, the propagandist, chatted with Wesley Fricks, TigerSwan’s director of external affairs, about a possible response to a Facebook video in which an unnamed reporter described recently published news reports on TigerSwan’s tactics. They would post it on one of the astroturf sites Rice created and describe it as “fake news.”
“That will cause a few people’s brains to explode,” Rice wrote in a WhatsApp message. “fake news calling fake news fake which is calling other news fake?”
Frick replied, “One big circle.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How an energy giant helped law enforcement quell the Standing Rock protests on May 22, 2023.
