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Keystone XL construction to begin next year, but indigenous activists vow to keep fighting

Construction on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline is set to rev up next year. The project received a green light from the State Department late last week — the latest salvo in a contentious decade-long battle between indigenous communities and TransCanada, the pipeline’s developer.

On Friday, the State Department issued a 338-page supplemental environmental impact statement for an alternate route through Nebraska. The agency has determined that major environmental damage stemming from the $8 billion, 1,180-mile project would be “negligible to moderate.” According to the report, there will be safeguards in place that would prevent a leak from contaminating ground or surface water.

“Keystone XL has undergone years of extensive environmental review by federal and state regulators,” TransCanada spokesperson Matthew John said. “All of these evaluations show that Keystone XL can be built safely and with minimal impact to the environment.”

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The review comes a little more than a month after a Montana court required the State Department to conduct a separate analysis — not part of the pipeline’s 2014 environmental impact study — of the updated route under the National Environmental Policy Act. The new route will be longer than TransCanada’s preferred route.

Following the release of the environmental assessment, TransCanada lawyers filed a response on Friday to address concerns by environmental and indigenous groups that are challenging the pipeline’s permit to cross into the U.S. from Canada in the Montana court.

But as TransCanada moves ahead with plans to construct the pipeline — which would carry up to 830,000 barrels of heavy crude from Canada’s oil sands in Alberta to Steele City, Nebraska — tribal communities living in its path remain steadfast in challenging the review’s conclusions.

“It’s a total disregard for the land, and the animals, and the people that reside on it and have for generations,” Faith Spotted Eagle, a member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and a vocal opponent of major oil-pipeline projects like the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline, told Grist. “I think the thing to remember is that the people who are building this pipeline — they don’t care because they don’t have to live here. But it’s not going to stop me from fighting back.”

Pipeline-opponents on the front lines like Spotted Eagle are gearing up for what comes next, pledging to fight until the pipeline project is halted for good. Earlier this month, the Fort Belknap Indian Community of Montana and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota sued the Trump administration after it granted the pipeline a permit which they claimed didn’t assess how it’s construction “would impact their water and sacred lands.”

Indigenous groups aren’t the only ones voicing their discontent — the Sierra Club called the new State Department report a “sham review.” “We’ve held off construction of this pipeline for 10 years, and regardless of this administration’s attempts to force this dirty tar sands pipeline on the American people,” said Kelly Martin, director of the group’s Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign. “That fight will continue until Keystone XL is stopped once and for all.”

Members of the public have 45 days to comment on the State Department’s review, but Spotted Eagle is skeptical that the powers that be will even bother to consult with indigenous people residing in the pipeline’s route. “There is no regard to nation-to-nation relationships with tribes,” she says.

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Keystone XL construction to begin next year, but indigenous activists vow to keep fighting

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The private intelligence firm keeping tabs on environmentalists

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The flyer shows a mob of balaclava-clad activists dressed in black, lobbing bottles at an undefined target. They could be protesting anything, but for attendees at a petroleum industry conference in Houston earlier this year, it was pretty clear what the violent demonstrators were targeting: the fossil fuel industry.

The scary image of protesters was distributed by Welund North America, a private intelligence firm that promises to help oil and gas operators mitigate the threat posed by an increasingly sophisticated activist movement. On the back of the flyer an anonymous testimonial reads, “Since subscribing to Welund we’ve dramatically increased our ability to pre-empt and better manage activist engagements and minimize reputational damage.” Logos — presumably of Welund’s clients — listed on the flyer include a who’s who of Big Oil and Gas: Royal Dutch Shell, Kinder Morgan, Duke Energy, Dominion, and Chevron. Welund has even secured contracts with the Canadian government.

In the past year, Welund has presented at several energy industry conferences and has also partnered with the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association — or TIPRO — to promote its intelligence-gathering services. The company bills itself as a leader in “understanding the activist threat” and in the past has provided intelligence on social movements and activist groups, including Greenpeace, Occupy Wall Street, and animal rights advocates.

Welund and its top North American officials ignored repeated requests for interviews and did not to respond to detailed written questions. But publicity materials and other documents reviewed by Mother Jones shed light on the company’s strategies.

Welund is part of a deeply controversial cottage industry of private intelligence firms that has flourished in recent years. According to one estimate, the global industry is now worth about $20 billion, and the agencies — sometimes with just a handful of employees — are popping up everywhere from Israel to Africa to the United States. Recent revelations have shown that Black Cube, an Israeli firm, gathered intelligence on Obama administration officials in an effort to undermine the Iran nuclear deal. Christopher Steele, the co-founder of Orbis Business Intelligence, another private firm, was responsible for the famous Trump-Russia dossier.

Welund, a U.K.-based company founded by a former MI6 special agent in 2007, has traditionally kept a low profile. Even its name, which is derived from Norse mythology, is little known beyond a small subset of industry and government contractors. Welund, which established a North America office in 2016, seems to rely heavily on its ties to industry and law enforcement. The firm’s vice president of operations, Travis Moran, is a former U.S. Justice Department special agent who previously worked as a senior counterterrorism investigator at Dominion Energy, one of the largest suppliers of electricity and natural gas in the United States.

The company depicts the environmental movement as one of the energy industry’s most dangerous adversaries — comparable to the challenges posed by international industrial espionage. “What we’re talking about here is an existential threat,” Moran told the audience of oil and gas executives in Houston.

The industry seems to agree. In November 2017, when Welund partnered with TIPRO to provide free access to its intelligence platform, the petroleum group’s president described activism as “one of the most disruptive and costly threats to the energy industry — in lost productivity, damage, legal and reputational risk.”


Welund’s effort to court the oil and gas industry comes at a time when battles over energy development have reached a fever pitch. Beginning in 2008 with the campaign to block approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which was designed to carry tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf Coast, activists have focused on fossil fuel infrastructure as a target of both legal action and political protest. The movement claimed a major victory in 2015 when President Barack Obama rejected the Keystone project. (That decision was promptly reversed by President Donald Trump during his first few days in office.)

“The anti-fossil fuel movement is the No. 1 challenge threatening our industry, especially when they have sympathizers in the White House, Ottawa, and elsewhere in public office,” wrote the editor of the Pipeline and Gas Journal, an industry trade publication, shortly before the 2016 election.

Welund specializes in profiling these activist threats and maintains a “live archive” of original content that, it says, is used by dozens of international corporations, law enforcement agencies, and government bodies. Its subscriber-only intelligence platform appears to be largely composed of open source data — that is, news reports, online information, and strategic analysis — according to the firm’s contracts with the Canadian government. At industry gatherings, the company has emphasized the importance of continuously following social media to develop effective counter campaigns. The firm promises to closely monitor activists, and one of its Canadian contracts referred to the use of open and “other sources.” Canadian officials declined to say what those “other sources” included.

At the Houston conference, Moran described activists as traveling “professionals” who have more experience than the companies they are protesting. “We keep track of them,” Moran said. “You’ll see them at the Marcellus. You’ll see them at Bayou Bridge. That’s what they do.” The Bayou Bridge Pipeline is a controversial project in Texas and Louisiana; the Marcellus shale formation is the epicenter of fracking in the eastern United States.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

The firm has also presented alongside Gryphon Sensors, a subsidiary of defense contractor SRC, which is a pioneer in the field of commercial drones. Moran, whose Twitter handle is “dronin_on,” is a strategic partner at Gryphon and an advisory board member of the Texas-based Energy Drone Coalition, which focuses on the use of drone technology by the energy industry. According to Gryphon, its mobile drone security system, which can track hundreds of targets simultaneously, is “perfect for … law enforcement and critical infrastructure protection.”

In recent years, anti-pipeline advocates have been targeted by law enforcement agencies and private security contractors employed by the industry. In late 2012, the FBI opened an investigation into anti-Keystone activists. More recently, according to the Intercept, private security contractors and FBI informants infiltrated the activist camp at the heart of the Native-American-led protest movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota.

None of those controversies involved Welund, which cautions energy firms against using covert or illegal methods to obtain intelligence, arguing that such tactics are likely to do more harm than good. In Houston, Moran referred to the PR mess Energy Transfer Partners found itself in after contracting with private security firms that used aggressive tactics in encounters with protesters campaigning against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Moran advised companies enlisting the services of private security contractors to “make sure you have a policy that they understand.”


Industry now has a staunch ally in the White House, but activists have continued to engage in high-profile civil disobedience campaigns and legal challenges designed to thwart or delay pipeline development, often at great cost to the oil and gas firms.

Environmentalists have also made life difficult for energy companies in Canada — as well as for the government agencies those firms often work with. In 2016, protesters disrupted a National Energy Board hearing in Montreal, resulting in several arrests and forcing the regulatory body to cancel two days of hearings on TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline, which was slated to run from Alberta to refineries and shipping terminals in New Brunswick and Quebec. TransCanada eventually terminated the project.

And that’s exactly what Welund is seeking to prevent. The company appears to have worked on behalf of clients involved in some of the most controversial projects currently moving forward: Dominion’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline, designed to carry fracked gas from the Marcellus Shale in West Virginia to processing facilities in Virginia and North Carolina; and the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which would greatly expand the capacity for shipping tar sands oil from Western Canada.

Dominion, Moran’s former employer, is facing strong headwinds as it seeks to complete its pipeline. Activists have already set up an encampment in an old growth forest known as Miracle Ridge that is in the project’s pathway and is scheduled to be cleared this year. This follows weeks of tree sits — including one by a 61-year-old-woman that garnered national attention — protesting the nearby Mountain Valley Pipeline.

Kinder Morgan, apparently also a Welund client, was facing similar opposition when it decided to abandon its Trans Mountain project. In March, the company’s CEO described the anti-pipeline movement as “much more intense” and “more organized” than ever before. Two months later, in an unprecedented move, the Canadian government agreed to intervene and purchase the pipeline for $3.4 billion. The sale closed this summer, and construction has been underway on about 600 miles of pipeline connecting Alberta’s tar sands with export terminals near Vancouver.

Opposition to the project has persisted, including from British Columbia Premier John Horgan, whose government has joined a First Nations lawsuit challenging the decision to approve the pipeline. The conflict has sometimes been described as Canada’s Standing Rock.

“People can just expect resistance to this project to grow,” Greenpeace activist Mike Hudema told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “Already we’ve seen over 200 people risking arrest and getting arrested to try and oppose this project, and those numbers are going to continue to increase as it moves forward.” In late August, a Canadian court ruled that the NEB had not properly consulted with First Nations groups and temporarily halted the project.

Welund did not respond to questions about its apparent work for Dominion and Kinder Morgan and whether that work related to the Atlantic Coast or Trans Mountain pipelines. Dominion declined to comment for this story. Kinder Morgan said it does not comment on security-related issues.

Last year, as Canada’s National Energy Board was evaluating Kinder Morgan’s application to build the Trans Mountain Pipeline, the agency signed a contract with Welund to monitor social media activity and provide the government with weekly updates on activist threats, according to documents obtained through a public records request.

The contract, which came just months after protesters shut down the NEB hearings on the Energy East pipeline, focused on helping the agency manage threats to “personnel, critical assets, information and services” as it prepared for upcoming public events, many of them related to the Trans Mountain project. The contract included access to Welund’s intelligence platform, email advice and warnings from Welund researchers, the Welund weekly banking digest, something called the “Welund Weekly Activist Overview,” and up to 50 hours of “bespoke services,” which focused on information specific to the safety and security of the agency’s staff and activities, according to the NEB. (Welund had already been providing the NEB with some form of intelligence and analysis for some time.)

Within the Canadian government, Welund’s services were touted by Lee Williams, who at the time was the head of security at the NEB. In a June 2016 email, Williams introduced his counterpart at the National Research Council — a Canadian government body that oversees research and development and often works closely with the private sector — to a Welund representative.

“We’ve been using their services for almost a year,” Williams wrote, “and find both their web content and bespoke services very beneficial.” A few months later, the NRC’s security branch entered into a $28,250 contract with Welund. In one document related to the contract, an NRC employee highlighted the firm’s “domestic and international military and counter-terrorism experience” and targeted data collection “through open and other sources.”

Williams has since left the NEB, according to government records. In recent promotional materials, Welund has listed a person named Lee Williams as a company contact. A Welund employee confirmed that a Lee Williams currently serves as an executive with the company but didn’t know whether he is the same Williams who worked for the NEB. Company spokespeople did not respond to written questions about Williams. Welund’s Williams did not return repeated phone calls and text messages. The NEB said it does not comment on HR-related employee matters.

The National Research Council declined to be interviewed for this story but said that Welund had a one-year service contract with the agency to provide country-specific risk assessments and alerts. This information, according to an emailed statement from the NRC, was used to assess the safety of travel and to brief employees in advance of international trips.

In response to a public records request for specific Welund materials — including copies of the weekly activist overview — provided to the NEB as outlined in the contract, the agency said it had no additional records in its possession.

Karen Ryhorchuk, an NEB spokesperson, said the agency sometimes conducts security assessments in advance of public events in order to safeguard personnel, assets, information, and services. Welund, she said, assisted the NEB in managing security threats and risks. “Information provided to the NEB by Welund was from [publicly] available, open source data from conventional media and social media outlets,” Ryhorchuk wrote in an email.

The NEB’s contract with Welund expired at the end of 2017 and has not been renewed. But early this year, the agency awarded a similar contract to Falling Apple Solutions, which was founded by Eppo van Weelderen, a retired Lieutenant-Colonel in the Canadian army. Falling Apple has the same Alberta address as Welund, and van Weelderen is listed as one of Welund’s directors. According to the NEB, the contract with Falling Apple, a self-described engineering and project management firm, was terminated after only three months. When I reached van Weelderen by phone and told him what I was writing about, he hung up.

Meanwhile, privacy advocates are growing increasingly alarmed about the Canadian government’s use of intelligence firms — especially after a recent request by the NEB for contractors who could evaluate security threats by monitoring social media on an even broader scale. In June, Ron Deibert, a political science professor at the University of Toronto and director of the Citizen Lab, which studies the intersection of technology and human rights, wrote an open letter warning that the hoovering up of massive amounts of data in the name of protecting critical infrastructure could have a chilling effect on free speech.

“The system proposed … is inherently oriented toward mass data collection and analysis, and will, by definition, have significant collateral impacts on the rights and interests of individuals who pose no security threat,” he wrote. The NEB ultimately withdrew the proposal.

For its part, Welund may disagree with the heavy-handed methods employed against the Dakota Access protesters, but it still holds a rather ominous view of environmental activism. “It’s threatening your operations, it’s threatening your finances, it’s threatening your reputation, and it’s threatening your viability,” Moran said in Houston.

The Houston conference was mostly celebratory, with discussions of greatly expanding oil production and pipeline capacity. There were presentations refuting the science of global warming and information sessions with representatives of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Bureau of Land Management. David Blackmon, editor of Shale Magazine, gave a talk titled, “The Trump-Driven Sea Change in Federal Energy Policy.” Chris Wallace of Fox News delivered the keynote address.

But, when Moran took the stage, the tone was decidedly darker. Showing the audience an image of a masked tree-sitter protesting a pipeline project, he warned them about the financial impact of activism. “If you’re not aware of this, if you’re not aware of how effective they can be … if you’re not ahead of the game,” he said, “this can be your fate.”

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, with support from the H.D. Lloyd Fund for Investigative Journalism.

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The private intelligence firm keeping tabs on environmentalists

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No Immediate Danger – William T. Vollmann

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

No Immediate Danger
Volume One of Carbon Ideologies
William T. Vollmann

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $16.99

Publish Date: April 10, 2018

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Seller: PENGUIN GROUP USA, INC.


“ The Infinite Jest of climate books.” — The Baffler “Incontestably important.” — The San Francisco Chronicle A timely, eye-opening book about climate change and energy generation that focuses on the consequences of nuclear power production, from award-winning author William T. Vollmann In his nonfiction, William T. Vollmann has won acclaim as a singular voice tackling some of the most important issues of our age, from poverty to violence to the dark soul of American imperialism as it has played out on the U.S./Mexico border. Now, Vollmann turns to a topic that will define the generations to come–the factors and human actions that have led to global warming. Vollmann begins No Immediate Danger , the first volume of Carbon Ideologies , by examining and quantifying the many causes of climate change, from industrial manufacturing and agricultural practices to fossil fuel extraction, economic demand for electric power, and the justifiable yearning of people all over the world to live in comfort. Turning to nuclear power first, Vollmann then recounts multiple visits that he made at significant personal risk over the course of seven years to the contaminated no-go zones and sad ghost towns of Fukushima, Japan, beginning shortly after the tsunami and reactor meltdowns of 2011. Equipped first only with a dosimeter and then with a scintillation counter, he measured radiation and interviewed tsunami victims, nuclear evacuees, anti-nuclear organizers and pro-nuclear utility workers. Featuring Vollmann’s signature wide learning, sardonic wit, and encyclopedic research, No Immediate Danger , whose title co-opts the reassuring mantra of official Japanese energy experts, builds up a powerful, sobering picture of the ongoing nightmare of Fukushima.

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No Immediate Danger – William T. Vollmann

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Rainforests: The good, the bad, and the Trump trade war

In the time it takes you to read this story, a forest the size of nearly 100 football fields will be cleared. Farmers have been burning forests for decades — in part to grow soybeans for hungry animals. In fact, soy cultivation is one of the major drivers of deforestation, especially in South America.

In an effort to stop the burning, the Louis Dreyfus Company, one of the world’s largest food corporations, recently announced plans to start policing its soy suppliers. It’s the latest in a series of corporate commitments aimed at stopping deforestation. As Trump’s trade war pushes soy cultivation from the United States into South America, these corporate pledges may be the last barrier against a massive rise in deforestation.

“This is a breakthrough from one of the world’s largest traders with huge significance to the global meat industry,” said Glenn Hurowitz, CEO of Mighty Earth, an environmental activist group chaired by the former Democratic Representative from California, Henry Waxman.

Dreyfus is one of four behemoths running the international grain trade. These so-called“ABCDs” — Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Dreyfus — dominate 70 percent of the industry. Some activists see their clout as an opportunity. How do you get billions of consumers to change their eating habits or convince millions of farmers to change their techniques? You don’t. But if you get those four middlemen to demand an end to deforestation, it might actually happen.

The ABCDs have all pledged to stop their supply chains from causing deforestation. Yet fires continue to consume rainforests. The problem is that corporate commitments and other efforts amount to a “feather on the brake,” according to Frances Seymour, a distinguished senior fellow at the World Resources Institute. And the global hunger for grain and meat is like a brick on the gas pedal.

World Resources Institute

Trump’s trade war with China could swap out that brick for a boulder. China, the world’s largest buyer of soy, has already cancelled several shiploads of beans from the United States in response to Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium. Now they’ll likely turn to South America for soybeans, raising the incentive for farmers there to expand their fields into forest land.

Faced with this challenge, activists have pushed the companies harder — lavishing praise on companies like Dreyfus that make the strongest commitments, while attacking those they consider laggards. Though all four big companies have committed to stop deforestation, some go farther than others. Cargill, for instance, initially aimed to eliminate deforestation from it’s supply chain by 2020, then pushed that goal back t0 2030.

ADM and Dreyfus have strong commitments in place, according to Hurowitz, so he’s putting more pressure on the other two. “There’s now no reason for McDonald’s and other companies to continue doing business with deforesters like Cargill and Bunge,” Hurowitz said.

Both Cargill and Bunge say they are keeping pace. Cargill said it remains committed to the goal of zero deforestation “while balancing forest protection with inclusive growth and sustainable development,” April Nelson, a Cargill representative, wrote in an email.

Similarly, a representative from Bunge told Grist that it’s developing a monitoring program to halt deforestation, and also welcomed Dreyfus’s announcement.

It’s a monumental challenge for a sprawling multinational corporation to figure out how to avoid buying soybeans grown a recently burned rainforest. Companies say they’re making strides. But it’s hard to tell from the outside how significant those strides really are.

Cargill’s CEO, David MacLennan, underscored the difficulty of getting a large and complex organization to change course in an interview with the New York Times last year.

“I don’t think I or others appreciated the vast complexity of the task,” he said. “Let’s say that we are trading or buying and selling soybean meal. Where did the soybeans come from? And did they come from deforested land? Maybe we weren’t buying the soybeans directly. I don’t know.”

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Rainforests: The good, the bad, and the Trump trade war

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Trans Mountain pipeline opponents vow to keep fighting

Canada is coughing up $3.5 billion to buy the floundering Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project from Kinder Morgan. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had vowed “to get that pipeline built,” but pipeline resistance groups aren’t backing down, either.

“This is a declaration of war against indigenous people because they’re not recognizing our own sovereignty,” says Kanahus Manuel, a Secwepemc midwife and mother of four. “So we are putting on our war paint and we are putting on our battle gear and we’re going to fight.”

The Houston-based company had stopped all non-essential spending on the project last month after facing broad opposition from environmental groups, indigenous communities, and the province of British Columbia. Canada says it plans to fund construction of the project until it can find another buyer to take over. If completed, it would nearly triple the pipeline’s capacity to transport crude and refined oil from Alberta to B.C.

Manuel’s group, Tiny House Warriors, plans on physically blocking construction of the pipeline. The group has constructed 10 tiny houses on wheels that they’ll use to deter construction of the pipeline on Secwepemc land. “We’re going to stand with our bodies as our weapons to defend the last of our sacred lands from any type of further encroachment or invasion,” Manuel says.

Will George is a leader with the Tsleil-Waututh, which built a Watch House — traditionally used to monitor an enemy — atop Burnaby Mountain as part of their opposition to the pipeline. “If anything, we’re going to ramp up our demonstration and our movement,” George says. “We’ll do whatever it takes to stop this pipeline.”

Greenpeace, the Coast Salish Watch House, and other grassroots indigenous and environmental groups have already planned an emergency rally in Vancouver this evening.

Over the weekend, an oil spill at a pump station near Barriere, B.C., forced Kinder Morgan to temporarily shut down the existing Trans Mountain pipeline. Pipeline opponents are also calling out Trudeau for abandoning federal commitments to take action on climate change and respect the rights of indigenous nations.

“It’s an outrageous and reckless decision by the Canadian government. This was a government that stood up in Paris and promised climate action. It’s a government that committed to the U.N. declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples,” says Mike Hudema, climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Canada. “Today it is breaking both of those promises by not just supporting a pipeline but buying a new massive tar sands pipeline project.”

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Trans Mountain pipeline opponents vow to keep fighting

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Scott Pruitt’s got 99 problems but Trump ain’t one.

Rick Scott, who has served as Florida’s governor since 2011, hasn’t done much to protect his state against the effects of climate change — even though it’s being threatened by sea-level rise.

On Monday, eight youth filed a lawsuit against Scott, a slew of state agencies, and the state of Florida itself. The kids, ages 10 to 19, are trying to get their elected officials to recognize the threat climate change poses to their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

18-year-old Delaney Reynolds, a member of this year’s Grist 50 list, helped launch the lawsuit. She’s been a climate activist since the age of 14, when she started a youth-oriented activism nonprofit called The Sink or Swim Project. “No matter how young you are, even if you don’t have a vote, you have a voice in your government,” she says.

Reynolds and the other seven plaintiffs are asking for a “court-ordered, science-based Climate Recovery Plan” — one that transitions Florida away from a fossil fuel energy system.

This lawsuit is the latest in a wave of youth-led legal actions across the United States. Juliana v. United States, which was filed by 21 young plaintiffs in Oregon in 2015, just got confirmed for a trial date in October this year.

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Scott Pruitt’s got 99 problems but Trump ain’t one.

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The Northeast is chugging right along on climate change action.

Rick Scott, who has served as Florida’s governor since 2011, hasn’t done much to protect his state against the effects of climate change — even though it’s being threatened by sea-level rise.

On Monday, eight youth filed a lawsuit against Scott, a slew of state agencies, and the state of Florida itself. The kids, ages 10 to 19, are trying to get their elected officials to recognize the threat climate change poses to their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

18-year-old Delaney Reynolds, a member of this year’s Grist 50 list, helped launch the lawsuit. She’s been a climate activist since the age of 14, when she started a youth-oriented activism nonprofit called The Sink or Swim Project. “No matter how young you are, even if you don’t have a vote, you have a voice in your government,” she says.

Reynolds and the other seven plaintiffs are asking for a “court-ordered, science-based Climate Recovery Plan” — one that transitions Florida away from a fossil fuel energy system.

This lawsuit is the latest in a wave of youth-led legal actions across the United States. Juliana v. United States, which was filed by 21 young plaintiffs in Oregon in 2015, just got confirmed for a trial date in October this year.

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The Northeast is chugging right along on climate change action.

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The whole island of Puerto Rico went dark for the first time since Hurricane Maria.

Rick Scott, who has served as Florida’s governor since 2011, hasn’t done much to protect his state against the effects of climate change — even though it’s being threatened by sea-level rise.

On Monday, eight youth filed a lawsuit against Scott, a slew of state agencies, and the state of Florida itself. The kids, ages 10 to 19, are trying to get their elected officials to recognize the threat climate change poses to their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

18-year-old Delaney Reynolds, a member of this year’s Grist 50 list, helped launch the lawsuit. She’s been a climate activist since the age of 14, when she started a youth-oriented activism nonprofit called The Sink or Swim Project. “No matter how young you are, even if you don’t have a vote, you have a voice in your government,” she says.

Reynolds and the other seven plaintiffs are asking for a “court-ordered, science-based Climate Recovery Plan” — one that transitions Florida away from a fossil fuel energy system.

This lawsuit is the latest in a wave of youth-led legal actions across the United States. Juliana v. United States, which was filed by 21 young plaintiffs in Oregon in 2015, just got confirmed for a trial date in October this year.

View post – 

The whole island of Puerto Rico went dark for the first time since Hurricane Maria.

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Boulder, Colorado, is the latest city to sue Big Oil over climate change.

Rick Scott, who has served as Florida’s governor since 2011, hasn’t done much to protect his state against the effects of climate change — even though it’s being threatened by sea-level rise.

On Monday, eight youth filed a lawsuit against Scott, a slew of state agencies, and the state of Florida itself. The kids, ages 10 to 19, are trying to get their elected officials to recognize the threat climate change poses to their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

18-year-old Delaney Reynolds, a member of this year’s Grist 50 list, helped launch the lawsuit. She’s been a climate activist since the age of 14, when she started a youth-oriented activism nonprofit called The Sink or Swim Project. “No matter how young you are, even if you don’t have a vote, you have a voice in your government,” she says.

Reynolds and the other seven plaintiffs are asking for a “court-ordered, science-based Climate Recovery Plan” — one that transitions Florida away from a fossil fuel energy system.

This lawsuit is the latest in a wave of youth-led legal actions across the United States. Juliana v. United States, which was filed by 21 young plaintiffs in Oregon in 2015, just got confirmed for a trial date in October this year.

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Boulder, Colorado, is the latest city to sue Big Oil over climate change.

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Tensions rise in battle over Canadian pipeline.

Rick Scott, who has served as Florida’s governor since 2011, hasn’t done much to protect his state against the effects of climate change — even though it’s being threatened by sea-level rise.

On Monday, eight youth filed a lawsuit against Scott, a slew of state agencies, and the state of Florida itself. The kids, ages 10 to 19, are trying to get their elected officials to recognize the threat climate change poses to their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

18-year-old Delaney Reynolds, a member of this year’s Grist 50 list, helped launch the lawsuit. She’s been a climate activist since the age of 14, when she started a youth-oriented activism nonprofit called The Sink or Swim Project. “No matter how young you are, even if you don’t have a vote, you have a voice in your government,” she says.

Reynolds and the other seven plaintiffs are asking for a “court-ordered, science-based Climate Recovery Plan” — one that transitions Florida away from a fossil fuel energy system.

This lawsuit is the latest in a wave of youth-led legal actions across the United States. Juliana v. United States, which was filed by 21 young plaintiffs in Oregon in 2015, just got confirmed for a trial date in October this year.

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Tensions rise in battle over Canadian pipeline.

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