Shock: Fracking Used to Inject Nuclear Waste Underground for Decades

TruthStream Media | Mar 4, 2015 | Aaron Dykes and Melissa Melton

Unearthed articles from the 1960s detail how nuclear waste was buried beneath the Earth’s surface by Halliburton & Co. for decades as a means of disposing the by-products of post-World War II atomic energy production.

Fracking is already a controversial practice on its face; allowing U.S. industries to inject slurries of toxic, potentially carcinogenic compounds deep beneath the planet’s surface — as a means of “see no evil” waste disposal — already sounds ridiculous, dangerous, and stupid anyway without even going into further detail.

Alleged fracking links to the contamination of the public water supply and critical aquifers, as well as ties to earthquake upticks near drilling locations that are otherwise not prone to seismic activity have created uproar in the years since the 2005 “Cheney loophole,” which allowed the industry to circumvent the Safe Drinking Water Act by exempting fracking fluids, thus fast tracking shale fracking as a source of cheap natural gas.

Now, it is apparent that the fracking industry is also privvy to many secrets of the nuclear energy industry, and specifically, where the bodies are buried, err… dangerous nuclear waste is buried, rather — waste that atomic researchers have otherwise found so difficult to eliminate.

Truthstream uncovered several published newspaper accounts from the Spring of 1964 concerning a then-newly disclosed plan to dump nuclear waste produced by the atomic energy industry into hydraulic fracturing (fracking) wells using a cement slurry technique developed by Halliburton & Co. The top two fracking companies in the nation at the time were Halliburton and Dowell, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical.

And here we thought fracking was a relatively new industrial phenomenon growing in popularity over just the last couple of decades. Boy were we wrong. Revealed within these articles is Halliburton’s long-standing relationship with the secret government and deep ties between the oil and nuclear industries.

Teaming up with the U.S. Government and Union Carbide Corp., who operate nuclear materials divisions at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee, Halliburton was then credited with “solving” the radioactive waste problem faced by America’s secretive nuclear industry. Dumping waste via fracking had apparently been going on since 1960, according to the reports, but was only made public here in 1964.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Each of the articles Truthstream found carry the same account under different headlines, with four of them using identical copy, and the fifth, published in the San Antonio Express, slightly rewritten based upon the same source information. The photo captions of each story also add some useful tidbits:

These ran in the:

April 19, 1964 edition of the Great Bend Tribune,
the April 22, 1964 edition of the Warren Times-Mirror,
the April 26, 1964 edition of the Lubbock Avalanche Journal,
the May 3, 1964 edition of the San Antonio Express News (original)
and the June 15, 1964 edition of the Denton Record Chronicle.

The story read, in part:

“Two techniques originated by the petroleum industry for its own uses are expected to solve a major problem in the development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The problem is the disposal of dangerous, sometimes deadly, radioactive waste by-products.”

“Researchers at Halliburton Co’s. Technical Center here working with Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists, have combined the oil well cementing technique with the hydraulic fracturing production stimulation technique to entomb radioactive wastes in an impermeable shale formation a thousand feet underground.”

“The method used at Oak Ridge begins by mixing the waste with a cement slurry, pumping the mixture down a hole drilled into the Conasuaga shale and then fracturing the shale to create a horizontal crack. The crack fills with the mixture to form a thin, horizontal sheet several hundred feet across. The mix sets to permanently hold the radioactive waste in the formation.”

“Union Carbide Corp., which operates facilities at Oak Ridge for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and Halliburton, which provides specialized oil field services such as cementing fracturing worldwide, have collaborated on the project since 1960.”

The mix remained liquid for 48 hours before it was supposed to permanently set and remain there, entombed, forever.

The articles make clear that the Atomic Energy Commission was preparing to use fracking as a means of disposing of nuclear wastes at additional facilities, with Oak Ridge being simply one of the largest, and the first to publicly disclose these out-of-sight disposal procedures:

“Oak Ridge has a radioactive waste disposal problem typical of the nation’s nuclear sites. Each year about four million gallons of waste, including such fission products as strontium 90, cesium 137 and ruthenium 103, are generated at Oak Ridge.”

“Among the disposal methods already tried have been dumping concrete-encased barrels of waste in the ocean or burying the waste in lead-lined containers. These are considered either too dangerous or too expensive or both.”

Unfortunately, the ocean has been used as a giant trashcan not only by the nuclear industry, but municipal garbage and landfill companies and many other entities as well, without any real concern about its significant effects on the food supply and larger ecosystem of the planet.

“If this process is successful for disposal of Oak Ridge National Laboratory intermediate-level wastes, it has potential application at other atomic energy sites where suitable geological conditions exist,” the Atomic Energy Commission says.”

The slightly different version in the San Antonio Express News added these details:

“A couple of techniques used by oilmen when they have hopes of production may soon be used by the Atomic Energy Commission for – of all things – radioactive garbage disposal.”

“Final tests are now under way at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, in trying a combination of oil well cementing plus hydraulic fracturing to entomb radioactive wastes in an impermeable shale formation a thousand feet underground.”

Meanwhile, the Great Bend Tribune added information about the Halliburton executives involved in the plan in their caption for a photo which shows businessmen looking at a diagram explaining how nuclear waste like strontium 90 is mixed with cement and injected into shale formations:

“Halliburton engineer Mack Stogner, left, reviews the project with Harry P. Conroy, senior vice president and general manager of the oil field service firm, and W.D. Owsley, senior vice president.”

The process includes remote controlled operation of the hydraulic fracturing drill in order to shield workers from the “medium level” radioactive substances being dumped into the earth’s crust, as the Warren Times Mirror in Pennsylvania notes in the caption:

“Disposing of Waste – Working behind shielding and wearing film badges, Halliburton Company personnel use demounted oil field service units to dispose of radioactive waste generated at the Oak Ridge, Tenn. nuclear site.”

How often this procedure has been used at other facilities since then is not entirely clear, though we know from reports discussed below that the practice continued and there is no indication that it ever stopped.

Five years later, the October 22, 1969 edition of the San Bernardino County Sun carried a report titled, “3 Ways to Manage Radioactive Waste.”

It discussed the ongoing and growing problems with nuclear waste, naming three principle strategies for managing the toxic stuff, summed up as “(1) delay and decay, (2) concentrate and confine and (3) dilute and disperse,” discussing how materials with lower half lives can supposedly be safely sequestered and later dumped, while other materials can be simply diluted and poured into existing groundwater supplies and systems.

The UPI story originating out of Oak Ridge states, in part,

“Since the start of the atomic era in the 1940s, nuclear reactors around the nation have produced 75 million gallons of hazardous high level radioactive waste materials.”

“And scientists here and elsewhere around the nation still are wrestling with the problems of what to do with this material, which promises to become even more plentiful as more and more commercial nuclear reactors go into power production.”

Oak Ridge proclaims that it found a solution to dealing with high level nuclear wastes, which has thus far been to keep it,

“…buried a few feet underground in storage tanks – tanks which must be periodically replaced because of the natural deterioration of the steel and other materials of which they are fabricated.”

“It is in this area of confining the high level wastes, whose radioactive half life ranges up to 30 to 50 years, that the Atomic Energy Commission is pushing dramatic new concepts.”

“One disposal system, involving materials in the medium range of radioactivity, is the hydraulic fracturing procedures. This system is now being used at Oak Ridge and involves mixing the liquid radioactive waste with concrete to form a grout which is pumped into shale formations 500 to 800 feet underground.”

Note, this article cites a shallower depth, at levels as shallow as 500 feet, after the 1964 articles claimed a further removed depth of 1,000 feet to 5,000. The even “higher level wastes” were disposed of in abandoned salt mines, according to Oak Ridge.

Nuclear Waste ‘Safely Flushed Away’ into the Water Supply

The 1969 article states that “low level waste” is “material which can safely be flushed away into rivers and lakes or released into the atmosphere because the level of radioactivity is so low that is presents no hazard when diluted and flushed into man’s natural environment. The more difficult problem is involved in the high level, liquid and solid wastes which are produced in the reprocessing of used fuel elements from nuclear reactor cores.”

The idea that the waste dumped into water supplies was so “low level” as to be completely harmless is likely dubious and hopeful at best. Fluoride, a by-product of the nuclear power industry, was one of those constituents, and was transformed from being known as a rat poison to being known as a dental benefit by the original spin doctor and propagandist, Edward Bernays.

In his book “The Fluoride Deception,” author Christopher Bryson revealed how the nuclear industry also used fluoridation of the public water supply as a means of secretly dumping industrial waste after fluoride was a major by-product in the uranium enrichment process for building the atomic bomb. Bryson told Democracy Now:

The Manhattan Project needed fluoride to enrich uranium. That’s how they did it. The biggest industrial building in the world, for a time, was the fluoride gaseous diffusion plant in Tennessee the Manhattan Project and Dr. Hodge as the senior toxicologist for the Manhattan Project, were scared stiff less that workers would realize that the fluoride they were going to be breathing inside these plants was going to injury them and that the Manhattan Project, the key — the key of U.S. Strategic power in the Cold War Era, would be jeopardized because the Manhattan Project and the industrial contractors making the atomic bomb would be facing all these lawsuits from workers, all these lawsuits from farmers living around these industrial plants and so Harold Hodge assures us that fluoride is safe and good for children.

More recently, an Associated Press investigation found in 2011 that 48 of 65 nuclear sites in the United States were leaking tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, into groundwater supplies via corroded pipes and tunnels. AP found at least 37 locations were in direct violation of federal drinking water standards for tritium, in some cases hundreds of times over.

Fracking Nuclear Waste ‘Safe for Millions of Years’… Unless It Leaks

Some 30 trillion gallons of toxic waste has been kept out of sight, out of mind by U.S. industries that have injected it hundreds and thousands of feet underground into wells since the 1960s.

Scientists who work for these corporations have used computer modeling to assure the Environmental Protection Agency that this waste poses no threat to our aquifers and that layers of rock deep within the Earth would safely store this stuff like Tupperware for millenia.

Already, several incidents have proven that scientific computer models are no match for reality.

It is clear from a December 21, 1973 article that disposal of nuclear waste via fracking continued, along with promises that it would be safe for millions of years to come.

The Dixon Evening Telegraph wrote in “Geologists look at energy crunch”:

“The U.S. Government is disposing of approximately 250,000 gallons of intermediate-level wastes each year using a technique called hydraulic fracturing. Liquids are pumped into impervious shales 1,000 to 5,000 feet below the surface. High pressure is applied causing the rocks to fracture and the liquid moves out laterally. Because the rock and radioactive wastes it contains will not be exposed to the biosphere for millions of years, this method should be safe unless leakage into an overlying aquifer occurs.”

That is, as the article points out, unless there are leaks.

As we found in research, leakage is exactly what has happened time and again throughout the years, including at disposal sites for Oak Ridge National Laboratories, according to reports in the following cases.

Via ProPublica:

In April, 1967 pesticide waste injected by a chemical plant at Denver’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal destabilized a seismic fault, causing a magnitude 5.0 earthquake — strong enough to shatter windows and close schools — and jolting scientists with newfound risks of injection, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

A year later, a corroded hazardous waste well for pulping liquor at the Hammermill Paper Co., in Erie, Pa., ruptured. Five miles away, according to an EPA report, “a noxious black liquid seeped from an abandoned gas well” in Presque Isle State Park.

In 1975 in Beaumont, Texas, dioxin and a highly acidic herbicide injected underground by the Velsicol Chemical Corp. burned a hole through its well casing, sending as much as five million gallons of the waste into a nearby drinking water aquifer.

And these are hardly the only examples… in fact, it is just scratching the surface of an issue that is almost as incomprehensible as it is unfathomable.

Then in August 1984 in Oak Ridge, Tenn., radioactive waste was turned up by water monitoring near a deep injection well at a government nuclear facility.

Bingo…

There it is. The infallible, permanent, and “impermeable” deep injection wells that Halliburton and the Atomic Energy Commission considered as a solution to nuclear waste for eons to come were found turning up radioactive nuclear waste at the very Oak Ridge site where these 1960s disposal projects were taking place.

Subterranean Waste Disposal a ‘Cornerstone of the Nation’s Economy’

Those cemented wells, filled with injected disposal substances may be safely secured for a few years or even decades, but that is no guarantee for the years down the road and its certainly not the millenia as promised by Halliburton and others in the industry. In fact, many of the wells have been forgotten, abandoned, and are lost to the record books.
As ProPublica reports:

There are upwards of 2 million abandoned and plugged oil and gas wells in the U.S., more than 100,000 of which may not appear in regulators’ records. Sometimes they are just broken off tubes of steel, buried or sticking out of the ground. Many are supposed to be sealed shut with cement, but studies show that cement breaks down over time, allowing seepage up the well structure.

And many of these are injection wells, where all kinds of unwanted, toxic substances are dumped in order to be forgotten… though not necessarily gone.

Not only are these practices taking place, they are widespread… and widely defended, even with the known failures and safety issues.

Many scientists and regulators say the alternatives to the injection process — burning waste, treating wastewater, recycling, or disposing of waste on the surface — are far more expensive or bring additional environmental risks.

Subterranean waste disposal, they point out, is a cornerstone of the nation’s economy, relied on by the pharmaceutical, agricultural and chemical industries. It’s also critical to a future less dependent on foreign oil: Hydraulic fracturing, “clean coal” technologies, nuclear fuel production and carbon storage (the keystone of the strategy to address climate change) all count on pushing waste into rock formations below the earth’s surface. (source)

Sure, maybe it’s better than dumping it directly into the waterways, but still. This isn’t just playing with fire, this is playing with the lives of everyone in the nation for generations to come.

Please read ProPublica’s full series of reports on this, starting here. Things have to change.

These people should not have started messing with something they did not know how to fully and safely manage.

How long can this madness continue until it winds up tainting every drinking glass in America?

Engineer Mario Salazar, who worked as a technical expert for 25 years with the EPA’s underground injection program in Washington, told ProPublica’s Abrahm Lustgarten something that should give us all pause about how radioactive nuclear waste and industrial pollutants in general are being handled, and where they may ultimately end up:

“In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted. A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die.”

Busted! Fukushima Operator Concealed Radioactive Leak for Nearly a Year

© AP Photo/ Toshiaki Shimizu

Sputnik | Feb 26, 2015

Tokyo Electric Power Co., TEPCO, has been slammed by fishermen, for knowingly allowing radioactive substances to flow freely into the sea for ten months.

Operators of the tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant admitted that a drainage ditch allowed highly-contaminated water to flow into the sea, and that the leak was first detected back in May 2014.
Fishermen were shocked to hear such confession, voicing disappointment in the company that has been criticized for the cleanup of the Fukushima disaster that happened four years ago.

"I don't understand why you (TEPCO) kept silent about the leakage even though you knew about it. Fishery operators are absolutely shocked," Masakazu Yabuki, chief of the Iwaki fisheries cooperative said.

© AP Photo/ Tokyo Electric Power Co.

Underground water is being released into the ocean through a piping at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in Okuma, Fukushima prefecture, northern Japan Wednesday, May 21, 2014. Japan’s crippled nuclear power plant has begun releasing groundwater from the least contaminated areas of the facility into the ocean so it does not run into contaminated areas and create more toxic water amid storage space limitations.

A TEPCO officials justified the cover-up saying the company found out during an investigation.

"This was part of an ongoing investigation in which we discovered a water puddle with high levels of radiation on top of the Reactor No. 2 building, and because this also happens to be one of the sources for this drainage system, we decided to report everything all at once."

A company spokesperson added that it did not disclosed the leak because samples from ocean water surrounding the area showed no substantial spikes of hazardous material.

TEPCO had to get permission from the fishermen to dispose of groundwater in the surrounding ocean.

In Sept. 2013, when Tokyo was announced to be the host country for 2020 Summer Olympics, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe promised the International Olympic Committee that all radiation leaks at the tsunami-ravaged plant were “under control.”

The Japanese government also announced that TEPCO would be the main sponsor of the 2020 Olympics.

Meanwhile, TEPCO maintains that the contaminated water that has been freely leaking into the Pacific Ocean does not violate regulations and the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) has not detected a spike in the level of toxins.

In March 2011, the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant in Japan was hit by a massive earthquake-triggered tsunami that led to meltdown of three of the plant’s six nuclear reactions. Four people were killed, 37 had physical injuries and two were taken to the hospital for radiation burns. The entire death toll from the earthquake and tsunami is estimated to be around 20,000.

Citizens worldwide mobilize against corporate water grabs

Water is Life! - Milwaukee in solidarity with
those fighting water shutoffs in Detroit.
Photo: OccupyRiverWest.com.

The Ecologist | Feb 15, 2015 | Victoria Collier

The US and other governments are pushing a failed model of water privatization, writes Victoria Collier - but water is a human right, not just a commodity to be traded for profit or monopolized by corporations, and citizens and communities worldwide are fighting back, from Detroit to Cochabamba, from Berlin to Malaysia, to reclaim their water commons. 

"The last 15 years have seen at least 180 cases of water 'remunicipalization' in 35 countries, according to the Transnational Institute, and the trend is growing."

Earlier this month on 5th February, New Jersey became the latest state to subvert democracy by authorizing the fast-track sale or lease of water utilities without public notice, comment, or approval.

The controversial decision highlights the intensifying struggle over who owns, controls, and profits from the most precious - and threatened - resource on Earth.

We tend to associate corrupt water privatization schemes with the developing world, where according to the World Health Organization, nearly 2.6 billion people still lack a latrine and 1.1 billion people have no access to any type of improved drinking source of water.

In this crisis environment, the World Bank and IMF have spent decades imposing water privatization as a condition of their exploitative loans, profiting a handful of transnational water corporations. But according to renowned food and water rights advocate Maude Barlow,

"The performance of these companies in Europe and the developing world has been well documented: huge profits, higher prices for water, cut-offs to customers who cannot pay, little transparency in their dealings, reduced water quality, bribery, and corruption."

Double diasaster for impacted communities

Water privatization has also followed on the heels of war and natural disaster in devastated regions where massive reconstruction projects are needed. These are the largely unregulated profit-centers of what journalist Naomi Klein coined the "disaster capitalism complex".

But now, disaster capitalism has come home to the United States. Private corporations are taking advantage of lucrative opportunities created by the intentionally crippled tax base of American states.

Decades of neo-liberal policies have bled the public sector to the point of collapse: deregulation, outsourcing, tax cuts for the one percent, and trillions lost annually to war spending, corporate welfare and off-shore tax-havens.

Cash-strapped governments can finally no longer repair crumbling infrastructure or meet future development needs. Offering to "fill the budget gap", the private sector is grabbing public assets and resources, particularly water, blinding public officials to the consequences of long-term contracts with substantial up-front payments.

The fast-growing 'public-private-partnership' or PPP model is a friendly marketing euphemism for privatization. PPPs facilitate the transfer of public utilities, like water, to profit-driven private corporations. This is proving a slippery slope as laws are constantly changing, always further acceding to corporate demands.

In June 2014, water investment advisors Bluefield Research praised the "revised regulatory landscape" and cheered a "major step forward for the market" when President Obama signed the Water Resources Reform and Development Act (WRRDA) into federal law, which among many other provisions seeks to expand private financing for water projects.

Private sector groups like the American Water Works Company (AWWC), Water Environment Federation (WEF), and the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA) began lobbying to further weaken WRRDA's public protections and to force tax-free Private Activity Bonds (PABs) so private investors can pocket more money at the expense of public coffers.

Meanwhile, investment banks including JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, the Carlyle Group, Allianz and many others are aggressively buying up the world's declining fresh water supply and infrastructure in what is being called a "liquid gold rush".

The global water fightback

But water is not a commodity; it is a human right. As climate change, population growth, industry use and pollution threatens the world's dwindling fresh water supplies, the onslaught of privatization is being countered by a powerful backlash to reclaim that precious resource for the public sphere.

The last 15 years have seen at least 180 cases of water 'remunicipalization' in 35 countries, according to the Transnational Institute, and the trend is growing.

In France, which had the longest history of water privatization, numerous cities have recently reclaimed their water, including Paris in 2010. From Spain to Buenos Aires, Cochabamba to Kazakhstan, Berlin to Malaysia, water privatization is being aggressively rejected.

Yet, because water privatization is notoriously at odds with democracy, citizens often find they must take to the streets in nonviolent marches and civil disobedience in order to defend their rights and reclaim control of this vital resource.

In Bolivia, a historic public uprising literally drove Bechtel from Cochabamba in 2000. In Ireland, nearly 100,000 people took to the streets in December 2014, to protest the right-wing government's plans to privatize water services. India and Nigeria are also launching campaigns against dangerous and undemocratic privatization schemes.

In the Unites States, residents of Detroit, Michigan spent the summer of 2014 fighting mass water shut-offs to tens of thousands of low-income, mostly African American residents. More than 3,000 protesters marched and citizens - including the elderly and disabled - engaged in direct action to block the trucks sent to disconnect water without notice. Detroiters will now have to mobilize against the water privatization expected through their new regional authority.

In Portland, Oregon, residents are mobilizing now to oppose the costly and unnecessary water system to be built by CH2M Hill, the notoriously corrupt mega-developer and privatization pioneer. CH2M Hill has also planned a mass-privatization scheme for California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, called the West Coast Infrastructure Exchange.

Public-Public Partnerships (PUPs) are emerging frameworks for preventing corporate takeovers of natural resources and developing non-profit, public-driven solutions for water infrastructure needs.

PUPs are partnerships between "two or more public authorities or organizations based on solidarity, to improve the capacity and effectiveness of one partner in providing public water or sanitation services", according to the Public Services International Research Unit.

Such solidarity partnerships are underway in Japan, the Netherlands, India, Costa Rica, Brazil, and many other countries.

We must continue to organize in the United States around similar, pro-active democratic solutions, to prepare for a future increasingly defined by resource scarcity, and fundamentally threatened by the corporate imperative of profits over people and democracy.

---

Victoria Collier is the Education Director of the National Election Integrity Coalition, the co-founder of Girasol, a center for sustainable ecology and economy in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

Japan orders Fukushima waste to be released into ocean after worker falls into tank of radioactive water and dies

© Natural News

Natural News | Feb 15, 2015 | Ethan A. Huff

With nowhere else to put it and workers constantly being exposed to it, radiation from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility in Japan has been ordered to be dumped into the ocean by Japanese regulators, according to new reports. This was just two days after a plant employee accidentally fell into one of the onsite storage tanks filled with radioactive water, resulting in his death.

According to the Star Tribune, the 55-year-old man died of multiple injuries after falling through an opening at the top of the 10-meter (33-foot) high tank. He was one of three men who was inspecting the tank at the time of the fall.

Following the incident, Japan's Nuclear Regulatory Authority met to discuss options for disposing of the radioactive waste, which continues to pose health threats at the facility. The Wall Street Journal reports that the regulatory body's chairman isn't pleased with the way the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has handled the disaster, which continues to wreak havoc.

"Tokyo Electric Power must consider whether it (storing the water) is really necessary," stated Shunichi Tanaka during a recent board meeting. "It is surely harmful if it leads to the death of workers."

Japanese regulators suggest that TEPCO start disposing of radioactive water in 2017 

A draft recommendation was made at the meeting that proposes a 2017 start date for discharging the water. That proposal is expected to receive approval within the next week. More than one year ago, the International Atomic Energy Agency made the recommendation to TEPCO that it begin releasing small amounts of low-level tritium-contaminated water in a controlled manner so that it could focus on other problems at the plant.

But the power operator has yet to take action, which has resulted in massive contamination of local groundwater. Reports indicate that up to 400 tons of highly contaminated water is added to the site every day, an insurmountable level that will only make it that much worse to clean up in the future.

TEPCO's water purification process can't remove tritium; operator running out of room for storage tanks 

TEPCO is currently trying to remove radioactive material from the tainted water before dumping it into the ocean. But the system it currently has in place to do this is unable to remove radioactive tritium, which is why the power operator has begun moving the water into large storage tanks onsite.

There are currently about 1,000-and-counting storage tanks at the facility, but TEPCO is quickly running out of space to add more. Besides this, TEPCO is having to continue working towards removing spent fuel rods and replacing cooling equipment to prevent further problems at the plant, which show no signs of relent.

Worker injuries increasing at Fukushima, suggesting sloppier safety measures 

The plant's decommissioning process, which is expected to take several decades, currently involves some 7,000 workers laboring day and night to get things under control. Between April and November of 2014, however, there were 40 injuries at the plant compared to 12 the year prior, suggesting that safety measures are degrading.

"He was wearing a harness, but the hook was found tucked inside the harness," explained a TEPCO spokesman to reporters about the tank fall incident. "This means the harness was not being used. We are investigating whether safety measures were appropriately observed."

Earlier in 2014, another Fukushima worker died after being buried in earth and rubble while trying to dig a hole at the site.

Sources:

http://blogs.wsj.com

http://www.startribune.com

http://www.channelnewsasia.com

Methane deceptions

Ice Age Now | Jan 31, 2015 | Paul Driessen

Deception, agenda and folly drive latest Obama EPA anti-hydrocarbon rules. Are farmers next?

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No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change, President Obama insisted in his 2015 State of the Union address. So now he wants his Environmental Protection Agency to compel drilling companies to slash methane emissions, which he says contribute to “dangerous manmade climate change.”

His goal is steadily greater control over our lives, livelihoods, living standards and liberties, with little or no transparency or accountability for regulators, pseudo-scientists or activists.

However, companies already control their methane emissions, and the supposed warming effect of this gas is wildly inflated, by as much as 100 times. Moreover, there is no evidence that we face dangerous manmade warming or climate change, now or in the near future. What we are really dealing with is a catechism of climate cataclysm: near-religious zealotry by an alarmist scientific-industrial-government-activist alliance – and EPA’s determination to use methane’s alleged impacts on Earth’s climate to control a highly successful fracking industry that has thus far been largely free of federal interference, because it operates mostly on state and private lands that are governed effectively by state and local regulators.

---

Methane deceptions

Deception, agenda and folly drive latest Obama EPA anti-hydrocarbon rules. Are farmers next?

Paul Driessen

---

First they came for the coal mining and power plant industry, and most people did not speak out because they didn’t rely on coal, accepted Environmental Protection Agency justifications at face value, or thought EPA’s war on coal would benefit them.

In fact, Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon gave the Sierra Club $26 million, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave the Club $50 million, to help it wage a Beyond Coal campaign. The Sierra Club later claimed its efforts forced 142 U.S. coal-fired power plants to close, raising electricity rates, threatening grid reliability, and costing thousands of jobs in dozens of states.

Mr. McClendon apparently figured eliminating coal from America’s energy mix would improve his natural gas business. The mayor likes renewable energy and detests fossil fuels, which he blames for climate change that he tried to finger for the damages ‘Superstorm’ Sandy inflicted on his city.

Now the Obama EPA is coming after the natural gas industry. Hopefully many will speak out this time, before more costly rules kill more jobs and damage the health and welfare of more middle class Americans. The war on coal, after all, is really a war on fossil fuels and affordable energy, and an integral component of President Obama’s determination to “fundamentally transform” the United States.

Proposed EPA regulations would compel drilling and fracking companies to reduce methane (natural gas or CH₄) emissions by 40-45% by 2025, compared to 2012. Companies would have to install technologies that monitor operations and prevent inadvertent leaks. The rules would apply only to new or modified sites, not existing operations. However, Big Green activist groups are already campaigning to have EPA expand the rule to cover existing gas wells, fracking operations, gas processing facilities and pipelines.

But companies already control their emissions, to avoid polluting the air, and because natural gas is a valuable resource that they would much rather sell than waste. That’s why EPA data show methane emissions falling 17% even as gas production increased by 37% between 1990 and 2014, and why natural gas operations employing hydraulic fracturing reduced their methane emissions by 73% from 2011 to 2013. The rules are costly and unnecessary, and would bring few benefits.

The Obama Administration thus justifies them by claiming they will help prevent “dangerous manmade climate change.” Methane, EPA says, has a warming effect 50 times greater than carbon dioxide. This assertion is wildly inflated, by as much as a factor of 100, Dr. Fred Singer says. Atmospheric water vapor already absorbs nearly all the infrared radiation (heat) that methane could, and the same radiation cannot be absorbed twice. The physics of Earth’s surface infrared emission spectrum are also important.

More importantly, to borrow a favorite Obama phrase, let me make one thing perfectly clear. There is no dangerous manmade climate change, now or on the horizon. There is no evidence that methane or carbon dioxide emissions have replaced the complex, powerful, interconnected natural forces that have driven warming, cooling, climate and weather fluctuations throughout Earth and human history. There is no evidence that recent extreme weather events are more frequent or severe than over the previous 100 years.

Indeed, planetary temperatures have not budged for more than 18 years, and we are amid the longest stretch since at least 1900 (more than nine years) without a Category 3-5 hurricane hitting the United States. If CO₂ and CH₄ are to be blamed for every temperature change or extreme weather event, then shouldn’t they also be credited for this lack of warming and deadly storms? But climate hype continues.

We are repeatedly told, “Climate change is real, and humans are partly to blame.” The statement is utterly meaningless. Earth’s climate fluctuates frequently, and human activities undoubtedly have some influences, at least on local (especially urban) temperatures. The question is, How much of an effect?  Are the temperature and other effects harmful or beneficial, especially when carbon dioxide’s enormous role in improved plant growth is factored in? Would slashing U.S. CO₂ and CH₄ emissions mean one iota of difference, when China, India and other countries are doing nothing to reduce their emissions?

Nevertheless, the latest NASA press release asserts that 2014 was “the hottest since the modern instrumental record began,” and again blames mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions. This deliberately deceptive, fear-inducing claim was quickly retracted, but not before it got extensive front-page coverage.

Let me make another fact perfectly clear. The alleged global temperature increase was 0.02 degrees C (0.04 degrees F). It is not even measurable by our most sensitive instruments. It is one-fifth the margin of error in these measurements. It ignores satellite data and is based on ground-level instruments that are contaminated by urban heat and cover less than 15% of Earth’s surface. Even NASA admitted it was only 38% confident of being correct – and 62% certain that it was wrong. Analyses by Dr. Tim Ball, Marc Morano, Anthony Watts and other experts provide more details eviscerating this bogus claim.

In the end, though, all these real-world facts are irrelevant. We are dealing with a catechism of climate cataclysm: near-religious zealotry by a scientific-industrial-government-activist alliance that has built a financial, political and regulatory empire. They are not about to renounce any claims of climate catastrophe, no matter how much actual evidence debunks their far-fetched computer model scenarios.

Their EPA-IPCC “science” is actively supported by most of the “mainstream media” and by the World Bank, universities, renewable energy companies and even some churches. They will never willingly surrender the political influence and billions of dollars that CAGW claims bring them. They won’t even admit that wind and solar facilities butcher birds and bats by the millions, scar landscapes, impair human health, cannot exist without coal and natural gas, and are probably our least sustainable energy option. They want gas prices to rise again, so that heavily subsidized renewable energy is competitive once more.

Meanwhile, polls reveal that regular, hard-working, middle-income Americans care most about terrorism, the economy, jobs, healthcare costs, education and job opportunities after graduation; climate change is always dead last on any list. Regular Europeans want to end the “energy poverty” that has killed countless jobs, and each winter kills thousands of elderly people who can no longer afford to heat their homes properly. The world’s poorest citizens want affordable electricity, higher living standards, and an end to the lung infections, severe diarrhea, malaria and other diseases of poverty that kill millions of children and parents year after year – largely because alarmists oppose nuclear, coal and gas-fired power plants.

But federal regulators, climate chaos “ethicists” and “progressives” who loudly profess they care deeply about the poor and middle classes – all ignore these realities. They focus on methane, because they view it as a clever way to inject federal oversight and control into an energy sector that had been largely free of such interference, because the fracking revolution has thus far taken place mostly on state and private lands governed effectively by state and local regulators. (Federal lands are mostly off limits.)

The proposed methane rules would generate more delays, paperwork, costs and job losses, to comply with more federal regulations that will bring no detectable benefits – and much harm, at a time when plunging oil and gas prices are forcing drillers to reduce operations and lay people off.

President Obama devoted 15 lines of his 2015 State of the Union speech to climate fables and propaganda. His goal is steadily greater control over our lives, livelihoods, living standards and liberties, with little or no transparency or accountability for regulators, pseudo-scientists or activists.

It won’t be long before EPA and Big Green come for farmers and ranchers – to curtail “climate-wrecking” methane emissions from cattle, pig and sheep flatulence and dung, and exert greater control over agricultural water, dust and carbon dioxide. By then, there may be no one left to speak out.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: To save the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine.

Lord Christopher Monckton-Climate Change is Really a Basis for Elite Control

Greg Hunter | Jan 27, 2015

Lord Christopher Monckton believes there is climate change, but he does not believe man has anything to do with it. Lord Monckton says science will ultimately back up that claim. Why the recent push to do something about climate change that is also called global warming? Lord Monckton says, “I think they are panicking because they know that this process . . . cannot be kept going for very much longer because . . . it’s been 25 years since the UN produces a report saying we were all doomed, and since then, the rate of warming has been half of what they predicted and well below their entire range of estimates.” Also, former Vice President Al Gore predicted the polar ice caps would be melted by now. Just the opposite has happened, as Lord Monckton points out, “If you took the Arctic and the Antarctic together, global sea ice was the greatest it’s been throughout the 35 years of the satellite era. It is greater than it has ever been before.”

Lord Monckton, former award winning journalist and Margaret Thatcher advisor, also says, “Let’s not forget, it was Hitler who first founded the green movement and first used the environmental movement, not for the basis for genuine concern about the environment, but as a basis for getting control over every detail over people lives so they couldn’t argue back. That’s what this is really all about. . . . I get criticized all the time as to why I don’t just stick to the science. I say somebody has to tell the truth, not only about the science, but also about the politics.”

Join Greg Hunter for an in-depth interview with Lord Christopher Monckton, who calls himself a “seeker after truth” on climate change.
http://usawatchdog.com/climate-change...

2015: Al Gore Ends Global Warming - Following the Trail of Propaganda Hypocrites

Next News Network | Jan 25, 2015

Fracking caused earthquake boom in Ohio town – study

Anti-fracking demonstrators protest on 51st
Street and 7th Avenue.(AFP Photo / Bryan Thomas)

RT | Jan 6, 2015

In March 2014, hydraulic fracturing – or fracking – caused 77 earthquakes in a small Ohio town that had no previous experience with seismic activity, according to a new study. One quake was large enough to be felt in neighboring areas.

Fracking in Poland Township, Ohio was halted two days after the area was hit with a magnitude-3 earthquake along a hidden fault in rock which was deep beneath a natural gas well in the Utica Shale, according to research published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

The study's authors said the magnitude-3 quake was "one the largest earthquakes ever induced by hydraulic fracturing in the United States."

All 77 quakes occurred between March 4-12, the study found.

Besides the magnitude-3 quake, the study reported that most of the seismic activity was not felt by Poland Township's population, which numbered 14,960 in the 2010 census.

No previous seismic activity had occurred in Poland Township, which sits near the Pennsylvania border, and the quakes stopped once fracking operations were put on hold, according to lead study author Robert Skoumal, a graduate student in seismology at Miami University in Ohio.

To unleash oil or natural gas, fracking requires blasting large volumes of highly pressurized water, sand, and other chemicals into layers of rock. The contents of fracking fluid include chemicals that the energy industry and many government officials will not name, yet they insist the chemicals do not endanger human health, contradicting findings by scientists and environmentalists. Once used, toxic fracking wastewater is then either stored in deep underground wells, disposed of in open pits for evaporation, sprayed into waste fields or used over again.

Fracking has been linked to groundwater contamination, an uptick in earthquakes in other states, exacerbation of drought conditions and a host of health concerns for humans and the local environment.

Ohio and many other US states, including Oklahoma and Texas, have been subject to intense amounts of fracking in recent years, as the effects of the process have caused controversy from coast to coast.

For instance, a separate study released in October found that fracking had a direct connection to some 400 micro-earthquakes in the eastern Ohio town of Canton.

Last month, New York became the first US state to ban fracking.

“I cannot support high volume hydraulic fracturing in the great state of New York,” said Howard Zucker, acting New York State Health Commissioner. He equated fracking to second-hand smoke, the health risks of which were not fully understood until many years of scientific studies were conducted.

A fracking ban was recently instituted in Denton, Texas, a town of 123,000 located on top of the natural gas goldmine that is the Barnett Shale formation, the birthplace of the much-maligned oil and gas extraction method.

Meanwhile, dozens of other US cities, towns, villages, and counties have passed measures against the practice, according to Food and Water Watch.

In November, cities in Ohio voted on fracking ban measures, with mixed results. The cities of Gates Mills, Kent, and Youngstown – all located in northeast Ohio, near Poland Township – voted down bans, while the town of Athens approved one.

Yet city bans are not always sure to remain in place, as local ordinances against fracking can run afoul of state laws that allow the process, as is the case in Ohio.

In Colorado, for instance, state officials have worked to supersede local, voter-approved bans through the legal system.

How The Elite Stay In Power

We Are Change | Dec 30, 2014

In this video we break down in simple terms a very complex game that is happening behind the scenes that many do not notice. A complex game played by the very few against everyone else.

Who Owns the Earth? People versus Power

Global Research | Dec 12, 2014 | Lesley Docksey

“We are now living outside of the laws of nature where nature is now turning against man and becoming the enemy.”  The Kogi Mamas

Last week the latest efforts to head off climate change started in Lima, Peru.  The aim of this latest conference (the twentieth, would you believe) is to produce a draft agreement on action, to be finalised in Paris next year.  With time running out it doesn’t look hopeful.  The world is silent.

In 1990 Alan Ereira made a film for the BBC, The Heart of the World: Elder Brother’s Warning.  In it the Kogi people of Columbia, having seen serious signs of climate change in their territory, issued a plea to the rest of us: stop living in our thoughtless, selfish way and wake up to what we were doing to the Earth.  (After so many years of it being available online, in the last week this film has become unavailable due to “copyright issues”.  Had it suddenly been resurrected by climate campaigners, and has been taken off by the powers that be because of the Lima Climate Conference?)

Apart from a procession of New Age eco-tourists flying out to Columbia thinking, wrongly, that the Kogi would welcome them, few took any real notice and they were soon forgotten.  Some years later Alan visited Glastonbury with an updated film.  The Assembly Rooms were full; almost all were young people asking questions about the Kogi’s sex lives.  What?  The Earth is being ruined and they wanted to know how the Kogi people screwed?  I despaired.

I still despair at times, because the indigenous people of Central and South America are showing us the way ahead, if only we’d listen.  Many of their countries have been paupered because of corporate-friendly interventions by the IMF and the World Bank.  The result, to the annoyance of the US, is an increasing number of left-wing, socialist governments.

Indigenous people have died in their hundreds trying to protect rain forests from ranching, illegal logging, and mining, oil and gas companies, the latest death just days before a planned protest at the Lima talks.  How convenient.

In 1994, in the Chiapas region of southern Mexico, the Zapatista revolution took place.  These indigenous people objected to powerful outsiders taking control of their land via the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) – ‘free trade’ standing for corporate profit.  They haven’t yet won their battle.  On the other hand the Mexican government has failed to control them.  The Zapatistas govern by consultation.  The decision to take up arms was a collective decision.  They do not elect leaders; they select those who will best voice community views, something the government could not understand, as the film A Place Called Chiapas showed.

The US has tried to extend NAFTA into the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).  There were massive demonstrations.  Over 10 million Brazilians voted to withdraw from the negotiations.  While governments negotiate, the people know that such deals will damage their lives and their beloved Earth.  There are current trade agreements and almost all of them sideline the US and its corporate plans.

The Campesinos have created a worldwide movement of peasant farmers, indigenous peoples and fishermen from small beginnings in Paraguay, where they ‘illegally’ took over land in order to grow their food.  Workers in Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere took over factories closed by absentee owners.

Many ‘peoples movements’ started in the Americas and right now members from across the world are attending the Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change, running parallel to the UN climate talks in Lima, parallel because their voices won’t be heard at the ‘big table’.   Neither will young people be heard even though they will suffer more from climate change than those producing all the hot air.  Other activists were prevented from attending but then, even the UK climate change Minister, Amber Rudd, has been barred from going.

And the talks themselves are almost invisible in the mainstream media.  Apart from the environment-friendly Guardian, only the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times featured articles about it in the first week.  Obviously the ‘economics’ of climate change are more important than the future of the planet.

The LA Times limped in with a story about clashes between rich and poor nations slowing down the talks.  But that was basically it.  The UN News site had several items, it being a UN Conference.  All other news came from activists’ websites.  The message?  People care; power and politics don’t.  They will simply go on making money as long as they are able

To see how determined indigenous people can be in trying to protect their resources and the Earth, one should look at Bolivia.

In 2000 many Bolivians fought against a private water company taking control of their water.  The Water War lasted for four months, at the end of which the company fled and later presented a large bill (compensation for lost profits) which remains unpaid.  This was followed in 2003 by a Gas War, when the Bolivians resisted the corporate interests that wanted their vast natural gas resources.

This conflict rumbled on until 2005, when the millionaire President, known for speaking Spanish with an American accent, resigned.  An indigenous left-wing politician, active in the Water and Gas Wars, was becoming prominent – Evo Morales.  He was elected President and a whole new agenda appeared.  Suddenly people were demanding rights for Mother Earth.

In 2009 Morales, backed by other nations, addressed the UN General Assembly in a heartfelt speech, pointing out that it is no use discussing the effects of the financial, energy, food or climate change crises, without ever looking at the cause:

“The origin of this crisis is the exaggerated accumulation of capital in far too few hands.  It is the permanent removal of natural resources and the commercialization of Mother Earth…  Mother Earth gives life, water, natural resources, oxygen and everything that supports the well being of our people.  If we talk, work and fight for the well being of our people we first have to guarantee the well being of Mother Earth; otherwise it will be impossible to guarantee the well being of our citizens.  Mother Earth, Planet Earth, will exist without human life, but human life cannot exist without Mother Earth.”

He sought a UN treaty that gave legal rights to Mother Earth.  He asked for three things: that developed countries pay the climate debt they owe; that there should be a Court of Climate Justice; and that nations must declare and expand the rights of Mother Earth’s natural regeneration.  We’re still waiting on all that, but the UN did designate 22 April as International Mother Earth Day.  So that’s okay then.

In April 2010 Bolivia hosted a World Peoples Conference in Cochabamba.  35,000 people came from all over the world.  It produced a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.  This was followed by an international gathering in Ecuador at which the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature was formed.

In 2011 Bolivia passed into law an act protecting the rights of Mother Earth.  It then took a draft treaty to the UN, prompting outrage among all the right-wing corporate interests.  Last year, during a dialogue on harmony with nature , the General Assembly called yet again for real and rapid action that would protect the Earth and the future existence of humanity.

Also last year, a UN meeting on the rights of the indigenous peoples produced a document simply ‘inviting’, ‘requesting’  or ‘encouraging’ governments and corporations to listen to, engage with and recognise the knowledge that indigenous people have to offer.  More hot air and no action.  In June this year Morales hosted a G77 Summit which produced a Declaration titled “For a New World Order for Living Well”.

Unknown to the average person there have many attempts, some successful, to bring our treatment of the Earth within the law.  What Morales and his fellows have done is to keep pushing the Earth’s rights into the debates.  But debates alone will not heal the Earth or guarantee our future.

And all this is looked upon with scorn by our governments and their corporate allies.  Who cares about peoples’ movements or Bolivia?  And Morales himself is the first full-blood indigenous leader, for God’s Sake!  What does he know about running the world?  Come to that, what does man’s world have to do with Mother Earth?

But indigenous people know how the Earth runs.  Slowly we others are realising that we can’t own the Earth, or the water, the air, the forests and plains, or the fish in the sea.  The Earth doesn’t belong to us.  If anything, the reverse is true; we belong to it, a position the developed world spurns at its peril.

Will Lima produce anything other than another fudge?  I doubt it.  Corporate interests still dictate our future and we are deaf to the indigenous voices.  And as Jared Diamond showed inCollapse, civilisations have died out because of trashing their environments.  We are now trashing the whole Earth.

Man’s drive to ‘develop’, his inventions that require yet more resources, his desire to own everything in sight, to put his interests before those of any other life forms – all this has led to an Earth stripped of its flora and fauna, and its mineral riches without which we cannot sustain our current way of life.  Rivers run dry while the seas rise.

We will not kill life on the Earth; life is here and will evolve in strange and wonderful ways.  But we are destroying everything that we have come to know and love.  And while the Earth weeps and begs for our attention the world of men is silent in its selfishness.

Kenya: a forest people illegally evicted, beaten, imprisoned - paid for by the World Bank

The Ecologist | Dec 7, 2014 | Dean Puckett / REDD Monitor

Torched Senger homes. Photo: Dean Puckett.

Financed by the World Bank, the Kenya Forest Service has intensified its illegal campaign of evictions, arson, beatings and arrests of the Sengwer forest people of the Embobut forest, Dean Puckett reports from the Cherangani Hills. And behind the violence lies the lure of hard cash - from the prospect of selling the forest's carbon to international financiers.

When Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, visited Kenya earlier this month, he reportedly urged the Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta to sort out Kenya's historical land injustices once and for all, specifically mentioning the plight of the "Sengwer of Cherangani Hills."

But despite the World Bank having 'a word' with its 'client', the plight of the Sengwer of Embobut forest has worsened dramatically. An indigenous community is being evicted from their ancestral land in the name of conservation.

I am currently filming a documentary about the Sengwer. As I write this I am sitting in a small town on the edge of Embobut forest. On Sunday 23rd November, I was heading up into Embobut from a settlement called Tangul which sits on the edge of the contested forest area.

Following my camera assistant and translator Elias Kibiwot, we had planned to film a young Sengwer woman called Ellen visiting her friend who, after her home was repeatedly burnt by the government's Kenyan Forest Service (KFS), is living in a tree trunk.

Kenya Forest Service brutality and extortion

As we walk through Tangul we notice that a crowd of Sengwer has assembled outside a few huts and tiny kiosks. Directly above them, on a hill overlooking Tangul, is the ominous KFS encampment - a constant reminder for the community that they are being watched.

A distraught teenage girl stopped us, and said: "Eight people where arrested in the forest yesterday, two school children and six elderly including my mother."

Elias spoke to them in Sengwer, and then informed me that four were released including the children after paying the KFS bribes of 500 Ksh each for the children and 2,000 Ksh for each elderly person.

I have been back in Embobut for 12 days so far and approximately 20 people have been arrested, fewer than half of whom have gone to court, while the rest paid bribes to the KFS to be released. It's hard to see how these policies conserve the forest.

The teenage girl continued to tell her harrowing story: "The KFS came yesterday morning, and kicked open the door. My mother woke up suddenly. She was told to lay down on the floor. My father wrestled with a guard until a magazine fell from his gun then he ran away.

"Some of the KFS guards were shouting 'Shoot, Shoot!' Then the other ones blocked the door and they beat on my mother. They rained punches and kicks on her."

The woman who was beaten is called Margeret Suter. We learned that she and three others were being held at Kapsowar Police Station on the South Eastern Side of the forest. Elias and I jumped on motorbikes for a buttock clenching journey and I tried in vain to protect my seriously sunburnt nose.

We stopped at least five times for the driver of my motorbike to pump up the slow puncture on his completely bald front tire. People passing paused to take photos of the Pink 'Mzungu' standing on the side of the road. "This is African life", Elias told me, laughing.

Beaten by KFS, then arrested by police

We arrived at Kapsowar and I followed Elias into the police station, filming with my small and discreet Go Pro camera, as the three Sengwer men and one woman were brought out from a large metal door.

As Margeret was led out of the cell, I realized I had filmed her on my previous visit to the forest. The left side of her face was visibly swollen. It was clear to me that she has been punched in the face, a face that I have looked at on my computer since August.

She looked scared and on the verge of tears. Elias asked the police officer, "Why are you confining a beaten woman without her seeing a doctor or letting her make a statement?"

The policeman, who smelled of alcohol, said, "They didn't complain when they were arrested."

Elias directly addressed Margeret Suter, asking, "Didn't you tell them the KFS beat you?"

"I told them but they didn't listen", she said.

At this point, I chimed in and explained that she could have concussion and should therefore see a doctor before spending another night in a police cell. My concerns fell on deaf ears as we were asked to leave the police station.

Criminals - for being on their own land

The next morning we took another buttock bashing ride in a 'Matatu' to the town of Iten, home of Kenyan champion marathon runners and the Elgeiyo Marakwet County Court. We watched the four Sengwer being led from the back of a police van and into the courtroom. It was another six hours until the case was actually heard.

The Sengwer were called one by one into the dock and asked how they plead. The prosecutor explained that they are "charged with illegally being in Embobut Forest which is state property." The judge asked each one of them how they plead. The Sengwer lawyer tried to speak, but was silenced by the judge, who told him to let the defendants speak for themselves.



Three of the Sengwer pleaded guilty, including Margeret, who begged for mercy to be released so she could return to take care of her children.

A fourth man, Kereoi Lobela, defiantly pleaded not guilty: "I'm a Sengwer and I was in my ancestral land." Kereoi was released on cash bail of 3,000 Ksh and must return to court to hear his case on 8th December. The other three were sentenced to community service. As I write this Margeret is probably scrubbing the floors of an Iten courtroom.

Outside the courtroom, I asked James Gachoka, lawyer for the Sengwer, why three of them pleaded guilty. "They are ignorant of the law and don't speak Kiswaili [the national language] so they were using an interpreter, and they are scared", he said.

"There is a high court order which was issued in 2013 forbidding the KFS from burning homes and evicting Sengwers from the forest. They have been ignoring this order. So you have one arm of the Government saying they are protected and another arm oppressing them. We have a contempt of court case against the KFS being heard in Eldoret on the 4th of December."

KFS divide and rule

But the KFS is doing more than just burning homes and arresting people. They are also dividing the community. They have been recruiting and paying 'forest scouts', local Sengwers who have been named 'sell-outs' by the local community.

They are using these forest scouts to find displaced Sengwers living in tree trunks and hideaways that the KFS have trouble locating.

A few days ago I tracked down a forest scout named Patrick and asked him if he is conflicted about what he is doing. "I used to be a teacher in the forest school, teaching baby class, middle class and top class", he told me.

"But the KFS burnt the school and now I am scouting for them on a three month contract because I have five children that I want to send to school."

I asked how the rest of the community acts towards him. He said, "The thing that people need most is company. Right now its a lonely life."

World Bank complicity?

In March 2007, the World Bank funded a programme called the Natural Resource Management Programme (NRMP) overseen by the KFS - designed to enhance "institutional capacity to manage water and forest resources, reduce the incidence and severity of water shocks such as drought, floods and water shortage in river catchments and improve the livelihoods of communities participating in the co-management of water and forest resources."

But on 10th June 2011, the project was restructured and the development objective was redefined to "improve the management of water and forest resources in selected districts."

Approved by the World Bank, this amendment completely removed the modest protection afforded to the Sengwers under the project. The programme led to forcible evictions of the Sengwer as over 1,000 homes were torched and they were forced to flee their homes, driven out by the KFS.

In 2013 a request for an investigation was made by representatives of the Sengwer to the World Bank's Inspection Panel - the body responsible for overseeing grievances filed against the Bank.

In October they issued a report stating that although the World Bank had not followed some of its safeguards, it was not responsible for the evictions of the Sengwer - despite the Bank funding the KFS to the tune of around US$64 million between 2007 and 2013, a period in which evictions took place every year except 2012.

REDD is the new Green

The situation the Sengwer find themselves in is also linked to a UN initiative called REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), which "is an effort to create a financial value for the carbon stored in forests, offering incentives for developing countries to reduce emissions from forested lands and invest in low-carbon paths to sustainable development."

However Friends of the Earth is concerned that REDD could "foster an 'armed protection' mentality that could lead to the displacement of millions of forest-dependent people." This seems well-founded in the case of the Sengwer.

The No REDD in Africa Network has similar concerns: "A false solution to climate change, REDD+ is emerging as a new form of colonialism and economic subjugation, and is a driver of land grabs so massive that they may constitute a continent grab. We must defend the continent from carbon colonialism."

My attempts to get an interview or a response from the KFS have so far failed, and it's not looking too likely that they will agree to talk to me. I will hopefully get a chance to interview a representative of the World Bank, and I will ask them how they feel about the current actions of their former client.

I can't help but wonder if the boots that kicked Margeret Suter in the back on Saturday morning were bought with World Bank money that only finished flowing at the end of last year.

It seems like a shame that the World Bank funding was not used to educate, involve and engage the Sengwer in a community-led conservation initiative instead of being used to evict them and buy new weapons.

Defiance

Tomorrow morning, I will meet Margeret Suter in Tangul and follow her back up into the forest as she returns to her home on the glades at the top of the Cherangani Hills.

Looking through footage that I shot in August, I come across a clip of Margeret talking to gathered crowd of Sengwers. She said:

"I'm very happy to see the Sengwer from the different areas gathered from so far so that we can join together today. We don't have anywhere to go. We will never leave Embobut. We will keep practicing our culture, the way we always have."

---

Dean Puckett @Deanpuckettfilm is a British documentary filmmaker known for The Crisis of Civilization (2010) and Grasp the Nettle (2013). He is currently in Kenya working on a film about the evictions of the Sengwer indigenous people from their homes in the Cherangani Hills.

Support the making of the film via Kickstarter. Dean writes: "We have already reached our minimum target! I asked for the bare minimum I needed to get back to Kenya and film for one more month. Any additional money will be used to edit the film, sound mix, create music and all of the other things that a documentary needs. So please continue to contribute if you can and share if you feel like it."

This article was originally published on REDD Monitor. Read more about the evictions of the Sengwer, in previous posts on REDD-Monitor here, and more about Puckett's work in the Embobut Forest here.

Other articles about the Sengwer on The Ecologist.