New book examines WWF's relationship with Monsanto and Big Business

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GM Watch | Sep 28, 2014 | Claire Robinson

WWF's lawsuits failed to achieve ban on book

In 2011 the German film maker Wilfried Huismann released his documentary film exposé of WWF, The Silence of the Pandas. The film highlighted the devastation caused by the expansion of GM soy in South America and WWF's collaboration with Monsanto in the Round Table on Responsible Soy, an industry-led greenwashing forum that tries to portray GM soy as "responsible".

Now Huismann has published an English language book on his investigations. It's available as an e-book or in a Kindle edition from Amazon. Paperback version available soon.
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PandaLeaks – The Dark Side of the WWF

pandaleaks.org, 24 Sept 2014
http://www.pandaleaks.org/operation-lock/

We are pleased and proud to announce the long-awaited publication of PandaLeaks – The Dark Side of the WWF: the controversial book by award-winning German journalist and filmmaker Wilfried Huismann is  finally available in an English language edition – unabridged and updated.

PandaLeaks is a journalistic tour de force unearthing the grim secrets of the world’s biggest and most powerful wildlife conservation organization. When the German edition was first published in 2012 it went straight to the bestseller list. Despite the fact that the WWF had initially managed to stop its sale for several weeks with a massive campaign of threats to the book trade. A subsequent series of lawsuits launched by the WWF also failed to achieve a book ban.

The WWF cannot refute the facts gathered by Wilfried Huismann during his two-year research expedition to all corners of the “green empire”: the WWF is in bed with the world’s biggest environmental polluters; it “greenwashes” the ecological crimes of Big Business, the corporations currently destroying the last remaining rainforests and natural habitats on earth; and it accepts their money. The WWF doesn’t stop short of cooperating with GMO giant Monsanto. The facts are clear and sobering: the business model of the famous “eco” organization does more to harm nature than to protect it.

Huismann dug deep into the history of the WWF and found several skeletons in the closet: the elite secret club known as “The 1001”, and a private military commando unit deployed in Africa against big game poachers – and against black African liberation movements. In the name of environmental protection the WWF has initiated the displacement and cultural extinction of indigenous peoples the world over. The German newspaper Die Welt wrote: “The revelations of this book shatter faith in the panda as a force for good.”

Huismann’s book is a fast-paced exposé based on boots-on-the-ground journalism. Jam-packed with startling revelations, it is a must-read for anyone who wants a glimpse behind the façade of global power structures, and anyone prepared to hear what the WWF panda isn’t saying.

PandaLeaks is now available as an ebook for 8,99 € / 9,99 $ and as a book on demand (256 pages) for 19,99 € (VAT not included) / 24,99 $. You can buy it directly on our homepage, or at Amazon, Apple, Kobo and Google play.

Please visit our website for additional information: www.pandaleaks.org

An abuse of science - concealing fracking's radioactive footprint

Some springs on Ikaria, Greece, carry high levels
of natural radioactivity - but that does not mean
the radiation is good for you!
Photo: Eleni Ikanou via Flickr.

The Ecologist | Jul 8, 2014 | Paul Mobbs

A new scientific paper presents the radiation produced by fracking as 'natural' and harmless. But it's based on sketchy data, hyperbolic statistics and questionable assumptions, writes Paul Mobbs. Is it an attempt to stifle an essential public debate? 

As the facts about unconventional gas emerge around the globe the UK Government and the on-shore oil and gas industry have been pulling-down the shutters on their grand project. Increasingly reports are "being seen to be written rather than written to be seen".

For example, last week Public Health England launched the final version of their report on shale gas and health - on the same day that the Jimmy Saville inquiry results were reported. That pretty much ensured there would be no room in the schedules for any critical analysis of it.

As Government and industry have retreated into their ideological comfort zone, avoiding public debate on these issues, their defence of unconventional oil and gas policy has become increasingly tenuous.

Criminal scientific negligence

In the face of the evidence now available, they are acting in blind ignorance of the facts we can established from other nations where unconventional oil and gas are being exploited on a large scale. In my view, that indifference to the evidence is such that it could be considered criminally negligent.

The most recent addition to the Government's Pantheon of misinformation emerged last week. With little fanfare, Durham University issued a press release to publicise a new research paper from the 'ReFINE' project - a.k.a. Researching Fracking IN Europe, a joint academic, Government and industry project to research the impacts of unconventional oil and gas.

Its title: 'Research finds fracking would increase water radioactivity but would not pose a threat to public health'.

'Within the natural range'
I was immediately suspicious since recent research has found the opposite, so I downloaded the paper. They were in such a hurry to get it into the public domain they hadn't even waited for the journal, who had just accepted it, to typeset it for publication. The PDF file was the raw copy which the journal's peer reviewers had just approved.

And what did the paper say? Nothing. Or rather, nothing which could be readily verified as accurate.
Let's begin (where else?) with their concluding remarks:

"This study shows that shale gas exploitation will result in increased flux of radioactive elements to controlled waters including to surface water bodies.

"However, it is clear that fluxes are within range of those that might be experienced elsewhere in the world from use of natural groundwaters; lower than other discharges even from the non-nuclear sector; and lower than those from other energy production including both conventional offshore oil and gas production."

'Natural' does not mean 'healthy'

Now what do the mean by "natural groundwaters"?

They don't mean the local groundwater springs of Lancashire. They're quoting levels of radioactivity found in a very few 'radioactive springs'. For example: the spas of Andalusia in Spain; or the historic hot springs on the Greek island of Ikaria, where workers in the spas can receive radiation exposures which wouldn't be allowed in the nuclear industry.

Such 'naturally' toxic environments are rare; and highly radioactive springs are also the rare exception, not the rule. They occur in a few locations, mostly in geological subduction zones - such as in the Southern Mediterranean.

That's the problem with the word 'natural'. From naturally toxic soils, to volcanic caves with acidic atmospheres which dissolve your lungs, the world contains many 'natural' wonders which are quite harmful to humans.

There's even a geological strata in Gabon which is so rich in uranium that when, millions of years ago, groundwater flowed through the rock it underwent natural nuclear fission. A fact which the nuclear industry played upon during the 1980s to try and greenwash nuclear power as a 'natural' technology.

The Durham paper uses these exceptions to justify the rule. In reality, most of the groundwater springs around the world produce perfectly drinkable water, low in radioactivity and harmful dissolved minerals. This fact, and the impact of the produced water from fracked wells, was alluded to in the Durham paper:

"The total activity for Bowland flowback fluid is ~2.5 MBq/yr, this compared to ~0.021 MBq/yr in surface waters, a difference of 2 orders of magnitude [or 100 times greater]. This highlights a potentially large risk if surface waters were to become contaminated with flowback fluid."

Too many statistics, too few data

We must also question the data they used as the basis of their calculations for the Bowland shale - and the method used to calculate radiation doses.

Their figures are based on just one site which the Environment Agency monitored - at Preese Hall in Lancashire. That's a questionable use of data since it assumes this one site is representative of the entire Bowland shale - and hence the whole of Britain.

It is a highly unlikely scenario given the innate geological variability of shale, and given the potential impacts upon the environment and human health it is a highly irresponsible approach.

In any case the Environment Agency's sampling of the well was pretty poor. The monitoring data shows eight sample results spread over a period of three months - which qualitatively tells us little about the statistical distribution of pollutants produced by Bowland shale wells over their gas-producing lifetime.

To be statistically rigorous in characterising a 'Bowland shale radioactive fingerprint' we'd need a few thousand samples from a few hundred wells, with a wide geographical spread - and a similar exercise in every other gas producing area to characterise their footprints too.

Therefore when this paper assumes a statistical distribution of pollution in order to carry out it's calculations, it's doing so on a highly tenuous set of assumption about the nature of the Bowland shale.

A leap of faith

It is from this poor statistical base they make a gigantic leap - to calculate the radiation exposure of the public from flowback water. And what did they deduce?

"In no scenario was the 1% exceedence exposure greater than 1mSv - the allowable annual exposure allowed for in the UK."

The exposure limit in the UK is not 1 milli-Sievert (mSv) per year. That's the whole body annual dose from ALL man-made sources. For regulatory purposes the maximum dose permitted from a SINGLE source is 0.5mSv per year.

More importantly, any source which gives a dose greater than 0.02mSv per year (which gives greater than a 1 in a million chance of cancer) has to be investigated; and, if required by law, issued with a permit which will require certain actions to minimise its impacts upon health and the environment.

That's the big backroom debate in Whitehall and in the Environment Agency's HQ at the moment. And it's a debate which is arguably one sided given that their departing Chairman, Lord Smith, thinks that fracking is safe, even in national parks.

Deregulating nuclear safety?

The Government wants to deregulate - but international agreements on radiological protection require the opposite. Given the level of radioactivity in the discharges, the Environment Agency must regulate every fracking pad as a single radioactive discharge. That creates a lot of form-filling and monitoring problems for the shale gas industry.

As a result, bit by bit, the Government are trying to dismantle our environmental laws in order to allow unconventional oil and gas to go ahead.

Trouble is they can't be discriminatory. If they were to relax the law for on-shore oil and gas, then the nuclear industry could argue that they too should be released from these regulatory burdens.

Given the current regulatory restrictions, the Durham paper makes a startling proposition:

"For this calculation it was assumed that the volume of water being used by a person on a daily basis was from flowback fluid and then the radioactive flux to that person that would be the case from each of the scenarios considered."

But don't people drink water?

Now, what is it that you do with water? Before writing this article I asked a few people what they did with water and the first thing they said was, "drink it".

That's not the case in the Durham paper.

The paper sets out a method for calculating radiation doses which doesn't properly evaluate the radiation dose to an affected group, nor the most exposed individual - which is the regulatory approach taken in Europe and much of the developed world.

They should have considered both the external dose from daily water use, but also the more significant issue of water consumption. This produces a far greater impact upon health due to the action of 'internal emitters'.

From their method, it would appear that only the lesser 'external dose' has been considered, giving a false result for the impact of these discharges upon health.

Another statistical slight of hand

Nor does the paper state the source of one of the critical values (called 'k') which converts the level of radioactivity consumed into a whole body radiation dose. Therefore we can't independently verify the results presented in the paper.

Finally, they perform a statistical slight of hand which reduces the impacts upon dose even further - calculating the total flowback water production from a certain number of wells based upon their tenuously assumed distribution of pollutants. A randomly generated sample of these 'probabilistic' figures then forms the input to their dose calculations.

To calculate the impact of contaminated water ingestion is straightforward, using the standard assessment procedure set by the International Committee for Radiological Protection (ICRP):

• Take the annual amount of water consumed per year (around 730 litres/year, although you would adjust this figure to examine the impact upon more sensitive groups - such as children).
• Multiply the consumption figure by the levels of the different radioactive elements in the water (for example, by averaging the four samples from the Environment Agency's monitoring of Preese Hall).
• Then for each radioactive element, multiply each figure by the relevant 'Ingestion dose coefficient for members of the public' set in Council Directive 96/29/EURATOM (which is also dependant upon the age of those exposed - the figures for which are published in the Official Journal of the European Community).
• Finally, add those numbers together to produce the total annual dose.

Doing that calculation for the Preese Hall flowback water, the result isn't anywhere near the 0.02mSv per year stated in the paper. It's over 7mSv per year, most of which is due to the high levels of radium-226.

An attempt to stifle a very necessary debate

The difference between these figures is not unexpected. This issue of contention is that the calculations behind the Durham figure neglect the impacts of ingesting radiation.

As a result the public can't independently know that these results are accurate; but perhaps that's the point? Looking with a sceptical eye, what I see in this paper is an attempt to nullify the debate over the radiological footprint of shale gas.

We know from recent US research that, on river beds downstream of the discharge from flowback water treatment plants, "the level of radioactivity found in sediments at one brine-treatment discharge site exceeded the management regulations in the US for a licensed radioactive waste disposal facility."

Another recent research paper, which examined the pit lagoons associated with well drilling and flowback, found that, "total beta radiation ... found in this study exceeded regulatory guideline values by more than 800 percent".

Given what we know of the impacts of the industry elsewhere, the assumptions in this paper do not correlate to the reality of how unconventional oil and gas is likely to be extracted in Britain.

Nor does it properly assess the radiological impact in accordance with the process which would be applied by the Environment Agency as part permitting. Nor by the Drinking Water Inspectorate if flowback water should ever end up in public water supplies.

Playing down serious impacts

That this paper passed the peer review process should also raise concerns about the level of scrutiny to which such studies are subjected.

The results of this paper present an idealised view which doesn't inform the public debate over unconventional oil and gas.

Instead it misdirects the public's attention, away from the quite serious impacts which have been demonstrated in other research, and seeks to down-play the radiological impacts of fracking's discharges to the environment and human health.

---

Paul Mobbs is an independent environmental consultant, investigator, author and lecturer. He runs the Free Range Activism website.

A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.fraw.org.uk/mei/musings/2014/20140626-frackings_radioactive_footprint.html.

Monsanto Indoctrinating Kids At the Zoo

© TruthStream Media

TruthStream Media | Jun 18, 2014 |Melissa Melton / Aaron Dykes

Melissa and I visited the St. Louis Zoo, in Monsanto’s hometown, and found that they and other leading corporate donors were actively “educating” children, families and groups about the natural world, including the causes of bee colony collapse and the rapid mass disappearances of Monarch butterfly populations.



We passed by the Monsanto Lecture Hall, Monsanto Education Center and went inside the Monsanto Insectarium… I guess the conquerors always celebrate the things they dominate and destroy, putting their fleeting beauty and grace on full display.

The saturated propaganda and overt corporatism could not be missed… Melissa kept wondering if there was anything in this town Monsanto hadn’t bought.

Agenda 21 “Plan Bay Area” & “Wildlife Corridors” Explained

© Steve Kemp Channel

Cross-posted from FindResolution.info under Austerity as Neuro-linguistic Programming

Agenda 21 “Plan Bay Area” & “Wildlife Corridors” Explained
Nov 21, 2013 | Farm Wars | Heather Gass

Editor's note: Heather Gass outlines how our UN and aristocracy have taken words such as "sustainability," and are using this deceptive language to hide both austerity and the manner of bailouts that are actually in process. This attributes the movement of wealth from that of the people, into the hands of those who have no conscience or humanitarian values. This is a form of psychological warfare and awareness is beyond critical, as partnerships are already being employed world wide with the monolithic powerful.



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Long Green: Squandering taxpayers' money on the Green Climate Fund

Long Green: Squandering taxpayers' money on the Green Climate Fund
Oct 27, 2013 | Willis Eschenbach / Watts Up With That

The US has some of the world's most boring looking money - it's all green. So we have terms like "greenbacks" for dollars, and "long green", meaning lots of money.

I offer this as context for what I found when I got to wondering what had happened to the United Nations "Green Climate Fund". You may recall that the Green Climate Fund was set up by the UN as the only result of the recent Rio de Janeiro Cancun conference on climate idiocy. When the Fund is going full throttle, it is supposed to disburse no less than $200 billion ($200,000,000,000) dollars each and every year to the developing countries.

It turns out that, unlike those of us skeptics who are falsely accused of receiving big bucks from big oil, the "Green Climate Fund" has already raked in millions of dollars to spend on fighting the evil forces of carbon. They have a catchy slogan, viz: "The urgency and seriousness of climate change call for ambition in financing adaptation and mitigation". Ambition in financing? What's not to like?

Now, I've worked for development organizations before. The rule of thumb is that no more than 15% of the funds should go for administration, the rest needs to go to the eventual intended recipients of the largesse.

© WattsUpWithThat

So ... how many of the millions of dollars that have been "donated" by taxpayers in a variety of countries have gone to the actual poor, to aid them in their battle against the dread CO2?

Let's start how much money we're talking about.

Here's a list of the countries who are both rich and improvident enough to squander their taxpayers' money on the Green Climate Fund. It's the usual suspects, my condolences to their citizens who are paying for this:

Australia, $513,000
Denmark, $608,000
Finland, $648,000
France, $326,000
Japan, $500,000
Germany, $1,053,000
South Korea, $2,099,000
Netherlands, $286,000
Sweden, $752,000
UK, $770,000
TOTAL, $7,555,000

The Koreans put in two megabucks ... but then, they also negotiated a deal where the Green Climate Fund is headquartered in Seoul. So no tears for them, they'll make out like bandits. Landing a UN drone hive is like landing a money machine, the local landlords will be overjoyed.

Now, of course, $7.5 million, that's a long ways from their goal of dispersing $200 billion per year. In fact, it's about this far from their goal:

© WattsUpWithThat

I see this as very good news - perhaps the countries of the world have figured out that they have better things to do with their money.

Anyhow, I started all of this out with a simple question. How much of the $7.5 million went to help the people it's supposed to help?

Here's the not-so-simple answer. When you do this kind of thing, first you have to hand out the plum jobs. Among those are the Members of the Board. Of course, then you have to pay for their travel, and a place for them to meet, for their meetings. And it turns out that three Board Meetings cost just under a million dollars. Expensive meetings. Very expensive meetings.

Oh, can't forget the Board Committees, Panels, and Working groups. They cost just under four hundred thousand. Total, a million three ...

The next round of plum jobs are the people who make up the "Interim Secretariat". From the name, I take it that these folks are just placeholders until we get more parasites for the real Secretariat ...in any case, there's two million in the budget to hire fifteen people. My mathematics makes that $133,000 per person per year.

So one thing is clear. The UN Personnel came to do good for the poor ... and they're doing very well indeed. A hundred and thirty grand per person? You can see why the South Koreans will be the big winners in the deal.

It gets worse. They actually hire themselves to do the work, at incredible rates. For example, from the UN FCCC they are hiring one full-time and one part-time person, plus some administrative support ... for a cool half million dollars. One and a half people. Half a megabuck.

And from the UN GEF, same deal, one full-time and one 60% time person, cost, another half million.

Now, you and I might be satisfied by that. But the UN folks are realists. They know that even if all those fifteen UN drones could somehow work together, they still couldn't organize a booze-up in a frat house. For that, they always hire consultants. You know, people who can actually do the stuff the UN employees can only talk about.

So the Green Climate Fund has three-quarters of a million bucks in the budget for consultants, to make sure something gets done.

Oh, and did I mention $200,000 per year for the Executive Director?

Now, you gotta know that you can't have fifteen pluted bloatocrats, plus 3.1 loan-drones from other UN agencies, and three-quarters of a million dollars worth of consultants, without renting some executive-type hive to house the worker bees. Plus phones and faxes and the like, that's a million two ...

Of course, you can't do business by email, phone, and Skype. Gotta have a travel budget ... three hundred grand.

Add all that up, and the "Interim Secretariat" costs $5.3 million ...

Lastly, a Trust Fund needs an Interim Trustee. The Green Climate Fund hires that service from the World Bank for just under three-quarters of a million dollars per year ... one trustee ...IT costs ... I can hardly believe it myself, but by a strange coincidence, what it costs them to run the Green Climate Fund adds up to ... well ... about seven and a half million dollars.

And that means that of the $7.5 million dollars donated by taxpayers all over the world, the people in the developing countries will get ...

None.

Like I said, while I bemoan the waste of resources, I see all this as good news. Any country that takes a serious look at what's happened to the first seven plus million that was donated to the Green Climate Fund will certainly have second thoughts about giving them money.

And that's a good thing, because if they are this profligate with the first seven and a half million ... can you imagine these same pack of over-fed fools in charge the dispensing of two hundred billion dollars to the developing world? I shudder to think of the waste, corruption, bribery, blackmail, and tribalism that would be involved in that kind of an industrial-scale goat-rope. The only people who'd be happy if that happened would be corrupt developing world leaders ... and of course, Swiss bankers ...

w.

DATA: I do give the GCF high marks for one thing: transparency. All relevant documents are here.

Nestle: Global Water Predator

Nestle: Global Water Predator
Oct 16, 2013 | Life Wise / Stephen Lendman

Nestle is a global predator. It lies calling itself “the world’s leading nutrition, health and wellness company.”

“Our mission of ‘Good Food, Good Life’ is to provide consumers with the best tasting, most nutritious choices in a wide range of food and beverage categories and eating occasions, from morning to night.”

Acquiring competitors secured it numerous water brands. They’re listed under the heading “Nestle Waters: The Healthy Hydration Company.”

They include Aqua Spring, Deep Spring, Glaciar, Ice Mountain, Perrier, Poland Spring, and Pure Life among others. They’re sold in dozens of countries worldwide.

It does so by stealing community water resources. It claims what’s “good for business can also be beneficial to society. This is what we call Creating Shared Value,” it claims.

It calls nutrition the only Nestle “raison d’etre.” Its concern for public health rings hollow. Profits alone matter.

“Rational water management is an absolute priority,” Nestle claims. It drains public aquifers and other water sources. It leaves communities high and dry when they’re exhausted.

It’s costly bottled water is no different from what most people in developed countries can get through their taps.

For sure it’s no better. At times it’s worse. In July 2013, the Natural Resources Defense Council(NRDC) headlined “Bottled Water: Pure Drink or Pure Hype?”

Its report discussed earlier findings. They show “bottled water is not necessarily safer than tap water.” Facts and figures don’t lie.

They expose water predators like Nestle. They rip off consumers. They make false claims to do so.

NRDC found “major gaps in bottled water regulation and conclude(d) that bottled water is not necessarily safer than tap water.”

Independent labs were used. They tested over 1,000 bottles of 103 brands.

One-third contained “significant contamination (i.e. levels of chemical or bacterial contaminants exceeding those allowed under a state or industry standard or guideline).”

Contaminants found in some samples included excessive coliform bacteria, and synthetic organic compounds. Ones named were toluene, xylene, styrene and others.

Flouride, phthalate, arsenic, nitrates, and other inorganic contaminants were found. Labeling stresses purity.

A January 2009 Food and Water Watch report was titled “All Bottled Up: Nestle’s Pursuit of Community Water,” saying:

“Nestle takes water from US communities” on the cheap. It “bottles and sells it. (It does so) for billions of dollars in profit. (It) dumps the environmental and other costs onto society.”

It ignores community and citizen rights. It plunders for bottom line priorities. It bottles what’s no different from tap water. It sells it “for thousands of times more cost” than what most people in developed countries can get cheap or free.

It contributes to pollution doing so. It from its plastic bottle production, as well as processing and distributing water.

It “greenwashe(s)” harmful environmental fallout. “Of the billions of empty plastic bottles that end up in landfills every year, Nestle’s brands” contribute hundreds of millions.

It’s a global predator writ large. It’s all take and no give. Weak regulatory oversight permits ripping off communities for profit.

Vandana Shiva calls privatized water “ecological terrorism.” It contributes to global water crisis conditions. It causes overuse, waste and pollution.

It results in “the most pervasive, most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth.”

It’s a road to “ecological crisis with commercial causes but no market solutions.”

It “destroy(s) the earth and aggravate(s) inequality. Solving “an ecological crisis is ecological,” she says. Solving “injustice is democracy.”

Water is a fundamental human right. Nestle claims it a food for sale. Shiva says water rights are natural and “usufructuary.”

It can be “used.” It can’t be “owned.” It belongs to everyone. It’s part of the commons.

It’s essential for life “under customary laws. (T)he right to water has been accepted as a natural, social fact.”

It’s “nature’s gift.” There’s no substitute. It’s vital “for sustenance needs.” Life is “interconnected through water.”

It’s limited and exhaustible. Conserving it is essential.

“No one has a right to overuse, abuse, waste, pollute,” or own it.

It’s not a commodity. It belongs to everyone. Water predators like Nestle exploit it for profit.

Stop Nestle Waters.org calls itself “a gathering point for rural citizens fighting to preserve control of their water supplies and local economies from Nestle.”

“Why are we targeting Nestle Waters,” it asked? “Because Nestle’s predatory tactics in rural communities divide small towns and pit residents against each other.”

“Because Nestle reaps huge profits from the water they extract from rural communities – which are left to deal with the damage to watersheds, increases in pollution and the loss of their quiet rural lifestyle.”

“Because Nestle has a pattern of bludgeoning small communities and opponents with lawsuits and interfering in local elections to gain control of local water supplies.”

“Because the environmental consequences of bottled water on our atmosphere, watersheds and landfills are simply too big to ignore.”

Since 1993, McCloud, CA residents contested Nestle’s plan to build America’s largest bottling plant. They intended a huge one million square foot facility.

McCloud’s Services District contractually agreed. It did so secretly. No public input was allowed. Completion would have given Nestle control of McCloud’s water for 100 years.

It would have gotten it for virtually nothing. It operates the same way everywhere. It’s no good neighbor. Plunder is its bottom line priority.

It interfered in local McCould elections. It funded campaigns of pro-company candidates. It bought their support. It intimidated opponents. It harassed them.

It “had their legal hit squad subpoena (their) private financial records.”

It failed. Justice prevailed. In 2009, it abandoned plans to build in McCloud. It chose Sacramento instead.

Nestle sued Fryeburg, ME five times. Doing so tried to litigate it into insolvency. It sought the right to steal its aquifer water. It wanted it by default.

Corporate predators operate this way. Nestle’s size and financial clout make it formidable.

Fryeburg’s planning commission and citizens contested courageously. They opposed Nestle’s proposed 24/7 water pumping station. They faced long odds.

In return for intrusiveness, bullying, litigiousness, congestion, noise and pollution, Nestle offered townspeople virtually nothing. It contested them up to Maine’s Supreme Court.

In March 2010, it prevailed. It won the right to build a water pumping station. It did so despite overwhelming public opposition. It’s empowered to steal Fryeburg’s water.

Western Maine Residents for Rural Living attorney Scott Anderson fought a losing battle. Nestle gets water from around two dozen wells. They’re located in eight Maine communities.

It’s bottling plants operate in Hollis, Poland Spring and Kingfield. It bears repeating. Nestle’s no good neighbor. It’s a corporate predator writ large.

According to Stop Nestle Waters.org, its “transgressions against rural communities and watersheds include communities from the Northwest, Michigan, Maine, Florida and Canada.”

It profits by stealing their water. It usually gets what it wants. It does so by bribing and/or bullying local politicians. Other times, it prevails litigiously.

Not always. It failed in McCloud. Enumclaw, WA and Kennebunk, ME “summarily kicked (it) out of” their communities. It’s not going quietly into the night.

Stealing water for virtually nothing is too profitable to abandon. Nestle pursues every way possible to do it.

Stop Nestle Waters.org uses “community-building powers of the Internet to counter Nestle’s big-dollar PR/legal/marketing legions.”

It wants communities across America in control of their own water. It wants Nestle and other water predators kept out.

In March 2012, Marseille, France hosted two international forums on water issues.

On March 16, 2012, Public Services International headlined “The resounding message from people’s world water forum: Reclaim public water!”

The World Water Council promotes privatization. An Alternative World Water Forum opposes its agenda.
It focuses on water as a human right. It’s a common good. It belongs to everyone. It’s not a commodity for sale.

It supports establishing universal legal standards. It wants them in place to prevent corporate water predators from stealing public water.

It wants water free from corporate exploitation. It’s an essential to life resource.

The Transnational Institute (TNI) promotes water justice. It says “(t)he 1990s witnessed an ideologically-driven global push for water privatisation that failed to deliver promised investments and pushed prices beyond the reach of the poorest.”

“Water Justice believes it is critical to refocus the global water debate on the key (issue): how to improve and expand public water delivery around the world.”

It facilitates reclaiming water as a public resource. It does so by working with “an international network of civil society activists, trade unionists, academics, as well as water utility managers and engineers.”

Together they promote people-centred democratic public water servicesAdvocates and facilitate public-public partnerships (PUPs).”

They represent “civil society’s voice in the UN’s Global Water Operators Partnerships Alliance (GWOPA).”

The struggle to control world water pits communities and ordinary people against giant corporate predators.

At stake is what’s essential to human life. It bears repeating. Water belongs to everyone. It’s a universal right.

It’s not the private domain of predators to exploit. Doing so is “ecological terrorism.”

The struggle for water continues. It’s a life sustaining resource too important to lose.

By Stephen Lendman – author of  ’How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War’. Visit his blog site atsjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/

Source

The IPCC Exposed

The IPCC Exposed
Sept 27, 2013 | corbettreport


SHOW NOTES AND MP3: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=8066

The IPCC has released its latest assessment of the state of climate science, and this time it's even more dire than their 2007 assessment. Global warming is "unequivocal" and humans are the "dominant cause" to a certainty of 95%. But how are these uncertainties calculated? And how does the IPCC process work anyway? Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we dissect the latest IPCC hype and examine the organizations processes and conclusions.

Climate expert warns of impending global cooling crisis

SOTT: Climate expert warns of impending global cooling crisis
Sept 26, 2013 | Washington Free Beacon

A prominent climate scientist says the earth actually faces a global cooling crisis on the eve of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) release of its latest climate change report.

David Archibald, an Australian scientist and visiting fellow at the The Institute of World Politics (IWP) in Washington, D.C., said during an IWP presentation Wednesday that contrary to a perceived consensus among the scientific community, the planet's climate is not warming. Global temperatures have essentially remained flat in the last thirty years, he said.

While temperatures have increased by a modest 0.8 degrees Celsius in the last 150 years, that rise is unremarkable compared to previous increases in earth's history, he said. Temperature spikes have occurred for hundreds of thousands of years and were slightly higher in the Roman Empire and Medieval periods, he added, according to a Swedish study and data from ice cores in Vostok, Antarctica.

Additionally, about 80 percent of the warming that has occurred can be attributed to water vapor compared to about 10 percent for carbon dioxide, said Archibald. The IPCC's report, scheduled for release Friday, is expected to state with 95 percent certainty that greenhouse-gas emissions generated by humans are responsible for 20th century warming.

"The IPCC models have failed," Archibald said, adding that meetings like the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark are "hilarious."

Archibald, credited as the first scientist to develop a method for using solar sunspot cycles to predict temperatures, instead said solar activity suggests global temperatures will cancel out previous warming and fall 2 to 3 degrees Celsius by 2040.

That could wreak havoc on the world's food supply by potentially reducing global grain production by 400 million tonnes - mirroring the skyrocketing crop costs and 200,000 European deaths sparked by the 1816 eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia.

"There will be at least one consolation. Phil Jones, Michael Mann, James Hansen and Al Gore will all, most likely, still be around to see their entire religious belief system collapsing around their ears," wrote James Delingpole, a writer for the Telegraph, in a post last year on Archibald's work.

See slides from Archibald's presentation here.

Orwell’s Dystopic Nightmare Comes True: Agenda 21 Smart Cities Are Here!

© TruthStream Media

Orwell’s Dystopic Nightmare Comes True: Agenda 21 Smart Cities Are Here!
Aug 24, 2013 | TruthStream Media | Aaron Dykes / Melissa Melton

Our brave new world starts with these brave new cities. 

So-called smart cities aren’t just some far off futuristic abstract twinkle in the New World Order’s eye…these are being built right now.

Think privacy and freedom are limited commodities now? Try having either of those things living in a smart city control grid where everything you do is tracked, traced, chipped and monitored 24 hours a day.

Masdar City: ‘City of the Future’

Currently being built in Abu Dhabi at a price tag of $22 billion, Masdar (which means “the source”) is a six-kilometer walled smart city shaped like two squares that resemble The Borg’s Unicomplex from the sci-fi TV show Star Trek. Set for a target population of 50,000 people, the city promises to be carbon emission-free with 100% renewable energy. Traditional cars are completely out; while walking, biking and mass transit are encouraged. Futuristic driverless ‘personal rapid transit’ (PRT) pod cars are being considered, but are apparently quite costly. The tiny cars look like a smaller version of the little electronic cars featured in the 1980s film Total Recall.




As a research and testing ground for smart technologies, The National reported, “The officials running Masdar’s power grid will have access to detailed data on how energy is being used at any given moment and will have the means to directly moderate high rates of consumption to balance supply with demand.” [emphasis added]

Sensometrix SA – a Geneva-based company and leader in next generation biometric technology with products including “SensoBrain” and the eerie biometric slogan “Your hand is the future” – will work with Masdar to continue developing the company’s security technologies such as identity access management.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) headquarters is set to reside in Masdar as well. After the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) signed on to the project in 2010, Hillary Clinton spoke at The Masdar Institute, remarking, “the partnership that we have established between the United States and Abu Dhabi around renewable energy and climate change and sustainable development that takes advantage of human capital is one of the most important partnerships for the future that we could be pursuing.” Clinton also noted the work in Masdar is “in the interest of global progress”.

While truly sustainable, renewable green energy sources are a positive thing on the surface, the flip side to this community is that everything will be wired into a top-to-bottom, completely controlled smart grid. As experimental technologies are tested out over there, the U.S. deal through the DOE ensures these technologies will be “shared” (or someday imposed?) over here.

Considering the rise of these smart cities, NY Times Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote,“What Masdar really represents, in fact, is the crystallization of another global phenomenon: the growing division of the world into refined, high-end enclaves and vast formless ghettos where issues like sustainability have little immediate relevance.”

The city was set for 2016 completion, but several delays, including dust storms that incapacitated the solar panels, have set Masdar back to a potential 2020 end date.

Songdo International Business District: A ‘City in a Box’ 

The 100 million square foot Songdo, a $40 billion project by Gale International and Morgan Stanley Real Estate, has been dubbed the “City in a Box,” and is set for completion by 2015. Smart Data Collective.com reports that Songdo will be completely wired, with microchips and/or wireless sensors in practically everything from houses to cars to children who will wear tracking bracelets just in case they get lost. TelePresence screens will adorn all businesses and shops. Even the garbage will offer the city’s central monitoring unit real-time data for instant analysis via microchip cards. As if the ubiquitous sensors and microchips weren’t enough, everything in Songdo will also be monitored via CCTV cameras as well.




“The data will provide valuable insights in how people work, live and think within the smart city,” wrote Mark van Rijmenam of Smart Data Collective. [emphasis added]

Smart Grid, Stupid Implications

At first, giving real-time data on everything you do from the utilities you use to the garbage you throw away to a giant computer to help regulate resources and waste might sound helpful. Leave your water running? No worries, a computer can send a signal to the main control hub to shut it off for you. But as David Sasaki points out, smart cities could lead to dumb citizens: “There is a real risk that as our lives become more automated we become more like automatons. We will follow the guidance of our smart phones without reflecting on how we live our lives, and how we engage in our communities.” [emphasis added]

Sasaki’s comment recalls the instance of Japanese tourists driving their car into an Australian bay because they followed orders from their GPS over their own eyeballs.

Beyond that, while Sasaki notes that citizens could be given tax breaks, for example, if they reduce their water consumption, the same hand that can give can also take away by penalizing those in smart cities who use what might be considered too much of any resource – a determination that could easily adjust over time to become even more restrictive.

Ever since 9/11 in America, we’ve seen a government that has completely abandoned the Constitution with undeclared drone wars that lack any form of due process; the declaration of the homeland as a battlefield and the ability to detain and disappear citizens with the National Defense Authorization Act; unprecedented expansion of the National Security Administration big brother surveillance state; the continual militarization of our police and further expansion of the Transportation Security Administration; and unfair targeting practices of certain political groups considered oppositional to the president’s agenda by the Internal Revenue Service just to name a few.

Smart grid cities have the potential to bring some really wonderful alternative energy sources to the table, but with the power balance shifted into all the wrong hands, these cities amount to little more than glorified electronic concentration camps with trendy façades that play on “green guilt”.

To put tyrannical governments in control of a network of these electronic concentration camps makes George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 look like a Sunday afternoon at a preschool playground.

Groups Slam Environmental Defense Fund for Fracking "Greenwash"

More than 70 environmental groups and
activists sent a letter to EDF President Fred
Krupp accusing him of "greenwashing" a
pro-fracking group. (Photo: fotdmike/ Flickr)

Groups Slam Environmental Defense Fund for Fracking "Greenwash"
May 24, 2013 | Common Dream | Lauren McCauley

Criticism follows news that EDF president has partnered with gas companies in pro-fracking coalition

Environmental groups and activists slammed the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) this week for partnering with a coalition of Big Energy companies and pro-fracking groups, saying there is "nothing sustainable about shale oil or shale gas."

 "Greenwashing" is what the groups called the move, following the disclosure that the Executive Director of EDF, Fred Krupp, had joined the board of directors of the Center for Sustainable Shale Development (CSSD).

"The very use of the word sustainable in the name is misleading, because there is nothing sustainable about shale oil or shale gas," they wrote in a letter addressed to Krupp (pdf) and signed by more than 70 environmental groups and activists including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Beyond Nuclear, numerous local anti-fracking organizations, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mark Ruffalo, and Gasland director Josh Fox.

Based in Pittsburgh, Penn., CSSD claims to provide a forum "for a diverse group of stakeholders" to discuss "innovative practices" and "share expertise" for shale oil and gas development. Other partners include the presidents of CONSOL Energy and Chevron Appalachia as well as the president of The Heinz Endowments, of which Secretary of State John Kerry's wife, Teresa, is chairman.

"[O]ur goals as a nation are not, and cannot, be the same as those of Chevron, CONSOL Energy, EQT Corporation, and Shell, all partners in CSSD," writes the group.

The letter continues:

These are fossil fuels, and their extraction and consumption will inevitably degrade our environment and contribute to climate change. Hydraulic fracturing, the method used to extract them, will permanently remove huge quantities of water from the hydrological cycle, pollute the air, contaminate drinking water, and release high levels of methane into the atmosphere. It should be eminently clear to everyone that an economy based on fossil fuels is unsustainable. [...]

These corporations are interested in extracting as much shale gas and oil as possible, and at a low cost. We are interested in minimizing the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels and in facilitating a rapid transition to the real sustainable energy sources—the sun, the wind, and hydropower.

The group cites the "glaring faults" of the CSSD's alleged "performance standards" for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and says the "whole notion of expanding oil and gas drilling" is problematic when one considers the destruction caused by the practice.

"It is doubtful that the tens of millions of Americans who live 'on the shale' would approve of open waste pits or the underground injection of undisclosed toxic chemicals in the vicinity of their water wells," they add.
"While EDF is free to partner with the gas industry in CSSD, we feel it is important that the press and the public clearly understand that neither EDF nor CSSD represents the environmental and public health communities on the subject of shale oil and gas extraction," the group concludes.