A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Environmentalists “care” about the planet SOOO much…… October 28, 2016

…….that they have absolutely no problem trashing the environment in order to show how much they care.  In point of fact, all this “caring” has absolutely nothing to do with the environment, or immigrants, or health care, but is always and entirely about growing the power of the Left.  Everything else is, at a fundamental level, a lie.

Take, for instance, the months-long standoff going on in North Dakota between a company seeking to build an oil-pipeline – proven for over a century to be THE most reliable, safe, and environmentally-friendly manner in which to transport oil (among many other things) – and left-wing radicals and their Native American dupes, who demand the pipeline not be built so that oil and gas pumped from the Bakken formation in western North Dakota can continue to be transported by rail, which is the most dangerous, prone to failure, and environmentally un-friendly means of transporting oil.

To show how much they care about the environment, leftists and their Native American friends have squatted on private land for months, preventing construction, while leaving heaping mounds of trash and even lighting piles of old tires on fire for good measure.  Because nothing says “I care deeply for the environment” like trashing pristine prairie and filling the sky with thick clouds of acrid, black smoke.  Oh, they also destroyed valuable construction equipment and several private automobiles:

Wo, that prairie looks really, really dry.  Not a cloud in the sky.  What would have happened if those flames ignited a brush fire that burned out of control?

The environmentalists care so very, very much about their fellow man and the good of creation, at least one of them opened fire on police and national guard who were sent to evict them from this privately-owned land:

Law enforcement officers dressed in riot gear and firing bean bags and pepper spray evicted protesters Thursday from private land in the path of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, dramatically escalating a monthslong dispute over Native American rights and the project’s environmental impact.

In an operation that took nearly six hours, hundreds of armed state and local police and National Guard — some on foot and others in trucks, military Humvees and buses — pushed past burning barricades to slowly envelop the camp.

No serious injuries were reported, though one man was hurt in the leg and received treatment from a medic.

Donnell Hushka, a spokeswoman for the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, said 117 protesters had been arrested as of 8:15 p.m. Thursday. She said Morton County will be using other jails to house people……

……..Among those arrested was a woman who pulled out a .38-caliber pistol and fired three times at officers, narrowly missing a sheriff’s deputy, State Emergency Services spokeswoman Cecily Fong said. Officers did not return fire, she said.

Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier said the camp had been cleared by nightfall although police were still dealing with protesters on the perimeter. Though officials earlier said they planned to turn the site over to private security, Kirchmeier said police would stay for now.

“We’re not leaving the area,” he said. “We are just going to make sure that we maintain a presence in the area so the roadway stays open, and to keep individuals from camping on private land.”

Opponents of the pipeline over the weekend set up camp on private land owned by Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners, which is working to complete the 1,200-mile pipeline to carry oil from western North Dakota to Illinois. The route skirts the Standing Rock Reservation and the tribe says it could endanger water supplies and disturb cultural sites. The state of North Dakota says no sensitive cultural sites have been found in the area.

I have personal experience of how much tribes want to guard and defend the sacredness of the land they occasionally wandered through in their previous nomadic existence.  A long time ago, I worked for FMC Phosphorous Chemicals Division in Pocatello, ID.  The plant, built right after WWII, was on tribal land.  The plant was also one of the worst environmental disasters in the entire United States.  Decades of extremely lax handling of waste effluent from the production of elemental phosphorous – one of the most toxic, dangerous chemicals known to man – including the burying of at least 11 complete railroad tank cars completely filled with a toxic sludge of mud, water, and phos, had made the place into what was, at the time, the worst Superfund site in the country.  FMC fought tooth and nail to keep from having to remediate the site.  But guess what?  So did the Bannock-Shoshone tribe on which the plant was located, because they feared implementation of long-delayed remediation would cost them jobs.  And, in the end, it did.  Once the EPA finally won its suit against FMC, the entire plant was shut down in 2000.

That was the place where I had the pleasure of experiencing my boots catching on fire after walking through the furnace building, having the soles melt off after standing on a thin metal grate for too long above 2000+ degree slag coming off the furnaces, and getting a nice phos burn on my arm.  Earlier workers got to learn about phossy jaw, a horrific disease caused by long exposure to elemental phosphorous, that literally dissolves the bone structure of a body from the inside out.

At any rate, the local tribe showed themselves to be motivated by just the same kind of self-interest as anyone else.  When it came down to a choice between relatively good paying jobs in an economically depressed area or protection of the environment, they sided decisively with the former for years.  Of course, now that the jobs are long gone they have become supremely concerned about the environment, as instead of properly remediating the site, the entire thing was just paved over after FMC pulled out.  The tank cars are still in the ground, slowly deteriorating, as is thousands of tons of slag and other products of decades of slipshod production (for comparison, a Monsanto plant in Soda Springs, which makes the same product, has long been lionized as a very well run plant from an environmental perspective).

Now, the tribal groups in North Dakota are not those in Idaho.  The circumstances are different.  So perhaps the comparison is unfair.  But I have a sneaking suspicion this is really a well-orchestrated shakedown of Energy Transfer Partners, the builders of the pipeline, seeking more “concessions” meaning $$$ in order to make this “problem” go away.  This has been a prime means through which leftist groups obtain funding, aside from being on Uncle Sam’s very generous gravy train, that is.  I guess the tribal land in North Dakota is too remote to make a go of casino building.  Shakedowns in the form of guaranteed employment of tribe members was another way FMC bought off tribal support of its environmental problems.

On a broader level, as to why scores of leftist activists have been camped out on the North Dakota prairie for days or weeks at a time, we can rest assured they are being very well-paid for their trouble.  This is about increasing the cost of fossil fuel production to make chimera like “alternative energy” seem more competitive.  And, it’s a shakedown for more funding, this time from a private company.  All of these things serve the interest of the Left generally and the specific individuals involved.

The rest is just smoke and mirrors from my vantage point.  But maybe I’ve grown a bit jaded in gaging the motives of those on the Left.