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French Farmers Protest and Astroturfing in Alaska

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October 2, 2024

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French Farmers Protest and Astroturfing in Alaska

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The Official Project Censored Show

It’s Not What It Seems: French Farmers Protest Outside of Political Ideologies & Astroturfing in Alaska

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In the first half of the show, David Lorant, a farmer based in Rennes, France joins host Eleanor Goldfield to contextualize the widespread farmer protests that just recently saw farmers in tractors blockading major motorways across the country, calling for what media has spun as right-wing anti-ecological demands. David debunks media’s flat and flimsy reporting and highlights a wide array of issues for French farmers, and how these protests are an example of not only meeting people where they’re at to build powerful solidarity, but in not letting ideological differences stand in the way of legitimate shared demands.

In the second half of the show, filmmaker and youth forest defense activist Joshua Wright joins the show to discuss the insidious astroturfing campaign to privatize tens of thousands of acres of Alaskan nature under the guise of land back and Indigenous justice. Joshua details the corporatization of Indigenous peoples and their land in particular in Southeast Alaska where colonization and land exploitation take on the ultimate greenwashed facade in order to serve corporate interests over nature and humanity.

Video of the Interview with David Lorant

Video of the Interview with Joshua Wright

Below is a Rough Transcript of the Interview with David Lorant

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Eleanor Goldfield: Thank you everyone for joining us back at the Project Censored radio show. We’re very glad to be joined right now by David Lorant, who’s a 28 year old farmer based in Rennes, Brittany, in the west of France.

He’s also a part of the left farmer union, La Confédération Paysanne which roughly translates to the Confederation of Peasants. It’s a, also a member of the Via Campesina, the largest union in the world. He’s also a member of the ecologist movement, Les Soulevements de la Terre, which is a brief, a rough translation of the Earth’s Uprising, and also a political, member of a political group Media Autonomie de Classe. David, thank you for sitting through my awful French and thank you so much for joining us.

David Lorant: Thank you.

Eleanor Goldfield: So I want to start off by setting the scene here. There are widespread farmer protests across Europe right now, but in typical fashion, France is the most rad of the group. There’s been a particularly loud and tenacious contingent in France, which also happens to be home to Europe’s largest agricultural sector.

Now here in the US these farmers are often painted pretty flatly. They’re painted as American farmers are also often painted: right wingers who hate the environment, and hate any kind of regulation. So first of all, can you address that? Is that a true description of what’s happening in France?

David Lorant: Well, farmers, try to demonstrate , it’s important for them to show that they are from far right, because it’s a way to depoliticize the movement and to invisibilize the fact that the movement is spontaneous. It’s said that it’s led by the right unions and far right unions, but in fact, it’s a movement that just want to basically defend their incomes and just to be well treated.

Politically, I would say, and I think, the fact that we see them as right wingers is interesting because it’s made us think about the yellow vests, the mobilization we had in France like five years ago now, and well, it’s kind of the same. It’s just like spontaneous, a spontaneous movement with people who just come there with their own material problems, I would say, and they just express them with very diverse manners. In fact, it’s a movement that is just constructing its own re-indications by just being together in the roads or in the streets.

And so I think it’s dangerous because there is, it’s also a speech, a discourse that we can hear in the ecologic sphere to say that they are just like rednecks and so on. And I think we absolutely have to just talk with them and to, to see that we have the same problems in the same world, I guess. And we can talk about the ecologic crisis after, but it’s a lot part of it.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. And of course, the media does not want to paint it as just people coming together because then that suggests that people can just come together.

And I want to also highlight that this idea that it just has to do with environmental regulation is not true either. There’s a lot going on from what I understand, and I’m hoping you can explain more.

For instance, imports from other EU countries, especially Ukraine that farmers in France are protesting against as they can’t compete with these cheaper imports, but some have also voiced concerns that France has very clean food compared to some other EU countries. So they’re actually importing dirtier foods, i. e. like with more pesticides and things like that. Could you talk a little bit about the variety of issues that farmers are dealing with and therefore protesting?

David Lorant: Yeah, it’s interesting because free trade, and it’s not only in the European scale. In France, we’re talking about free trade in just an international way, and not just between European countries this free trade is a big deal. And this is typically one of the subject that government really struggled to hide. And, between the mobilization, some free trade negotiations just occurred in the EU and we just signed a treaty, I guess with Chile and, and so on.

And at the same time, the government tried to say that we will stop some of these agreements, like the negotiations with Mercosur and so on, but in fact, at the EU level, it just continues.

And, concerning free trade, I think there is an awareness on that question that this competition is not something that is good for us, but, as a left union in the Confédération Paysanne, we also say that this free trade isn’t good for anyone. And in fact, it’s because there is this free trade that poor countries has to produce with chemicals and so on because they have to be competitive and so that’s the first point.

And in the question of environmental regulation specifically, I think it’s a big point and that’s why we put a lot of parallels with the yellow vests is because in France, the movement started because of a raise on the tax on agricultural oil, I would say. And, in fact, there is a trap because the government says he wants you to take some ecological measures. But, in fact, it just put it on the shoulders of the farmers.

So again, we have a big problem with incomes and in fact, farmers today, they just can’t live from their work. I don’t know, I think it’s like, there is a farmer that commits suicide every two days in France. A third of farmers live under the poverty line, and that’s just explained by the fact that agro industry buy the products of farmers at a price that is less than the cost of production. So they just can’t live like that.

And so today, the solutions of the main unions that are more defending the industry is to get bigger and bigger farms with less and less farmers that can make money, not from food, but from other things like energy, or things like that.

And so today it’s not possible that these farmers just work like 50 or 80 hours a week sometimes, and they just earn no money. And so when they say that there is too much regulation, well, what is true is that there is a problem on regulations, like, we need regulation to protect them and not to kill them, in fact, and and today, behind the world ecology, they just see the punitive ecology, so it’s normal that all the farmers are angry.

And, maybe to talk about the last issue. The candidate at the last presidential election from the left party said on TV the other week that this crisis of agriculture is maybe the final crisis of agriculture. And I think he’s right because we are just destroying the last of the farmers that try to have a reasonable way of working, thanks to liberalism.

In fact, farmers are just disappearing in France. We had 2 million farmers in France after the World War II. And now we are just 300,000 and it’s collapsing again.

And so for instance, today I tried to create a farm to just take over a farm with a group of farmers. And it’s really complicated because all the farmers are supposed to go to retirement, to stop working because they are old and so a lot of farms are supposed to get free and we just don’t find any because it goes to the other farm that gets bigger and bigger for agro industry. So that’s the overview.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, it sounds bleak and it reminds me a little bit of why a lot of farmers in the United States don’t have organic, like they don’t have the organic label, for instance, even though their practices are so much cleaner, because the organic label costs so much money so that it’s really prohibitive for farmers to get.

And so it’s like you create all these barriers to farmers who try to do things well and try to do things ecologically. And yet they’re supposed to shoulder this burden. It’s absolutely absurd.

And so I’m also curious, you talked about just these people coming together. And I wanted to get into a little bit of the diversity of perspectives and the diversity of tactics.

Could you share some about how people have been organizing to create these really powerful shows of farmers when they come from very different perspectives, like some coming from the right wing, you yourself are coming from the left wing, and centrist, like, how do you all organize based on that?

David Lorant: Yeah, so the organization of the demonstration in itself well, I said that there was a lot of parallel with the Yellow Vests and there is just a big difference in that it’s that the Yellow Vests, there was no union at all. Here they are, and there are especially two unions that are at the initiative of this movement, which is the biggest one, the FNSEA, which is, I would translate it as like the National Federation of Farm Operators, because for them, we are not farmers, we are farm operators, in fact. And the other union is the rural coordination.

So to also answer your first question, the rural coordination is depicted as a far right union. But I think it’s like a big issue here it’s that this union it’s far right. I think we have to say that it’s far right, but it’s not like an ideological far right like the National Front in France . It’s more like due to the traditional way of life of these farmers and so on. And so at the end, in this period of crisis, they have the same conclusion, that in fact, we can talk to them. It’s way, way easier.

And so to answer your first question to what we saw in these demonstrations is the political exploitation of these movements by really dangerous far right movements in each city, like some fascist groups that just say they support the movement .

We just made our first demonstration, side by side with them, and we were like, oh, there is a problem, but in fact, we don’t have to quit this demonstration because they are here. We have to stay because there is this fascists, but the rural coordination, for instance, one of its leaders said that she was not happy that the movement was exploited by the far right. So even from the leader, they say that they don’t want to be like that. So it becomes clear.

And to come back to the organization of this movement, well, I would say that it’s like classical methods, but with big instruments because we have big tractors and so on. And when I say we, it’s more the FNSEA and the rural coordination because they have just bigger tractors because they have bigger farms. So it’s impressive.

And another point is that because they are farmers I, I don’t really know entirely why, but police and the government just don’t repress them. So, they can just block all the highways of the country. The only limit the government put is when they say, we’re going to Paris and we will invade Paris. And at that time they just take like, I don’t know the word, but like the big trucks from army to just protect Paris, but they didn’t fight at any time.

So that makes it easier for farmers to do all they did. And it’s kind of crazy when you’re an ecologist or something to see that they can do everything they want. And when we just throw a stone or something, we’re like eco terrorists. I don’t know if you have this term in the US, but it’s something that is really scary in France too, the criminalization of the ecologists. So we can be shocked by this difference of treatment that I think that we should see it as an opportunity too, because we have alliance. So, yeah.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah. Absolutely. And yeah, we definitely have the term eco terrorist here. There are people facing terrorism charges right now for defending trees.

So yeah, and I think, just from what I’ve seen, we’re recording this on Monday, February 5th, for those listening. And as of February 1st, I saw that farmers were blocking roads leading into Paris and other major road motorways across the country, like from Lyon to Paris, Toulouse to Rennes.

Could you talk a little bit about some of those tactics and also what the status is right now? I mean, you mentioned that they placed tanks so people couldn’t like invade Paris, but what is the status right now?

David Lorant: So, right now the movement has kind of finished or not finished, but it’s, it’s getting really calm for now because, well, the the main unions just get what they wanted from the government.

And so as they are the ones who pay for the demonstration, because it’s kind of really costly to just move tractors in such big distances, well the unions just say, okay, we go back to the farm.

And, it’s hard because when the fact that all the pesticides that were going to be forbidden will not be, and so that’s a pity, but that’s like that.

And so the situation is that a lot of farmers just went back to the farms, but they have like a bitter taste about all of that because on the incomes, nothing really happened, on the system change, nothing happened.

And I think that they know, well, the discourse is that they waited and see but they know that nothing is going to really happen. And so the situation is that after the announcements of the government, only the Confédération Paysanne stayed outside on the blockages and so on.

And at that point, police came because it was not the FNSEA. And so there is no more blockages in France, but the Confédération Paysanne, we stay mobilized because we make the gamble that the movement is not over. And this is something that has to be constructed on the long term.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

So you mentioned that the government basically said, okay, we’re not going to outlaw these pesticides. Were there other things that they said were going to happen that caused the farmers to leave? Or was it really just that main thing?

David Lorant: It was that main thing and also the tax on the agricultural oil, but that’s it. And yeah, nothing else. And I think that they’re really good in just saying that they heard that farmers don’t want to make ecology, and so they responded to that. In fact, that was just not the demand, but…

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, well, that’s when it gets painted that way. So I’m curious what you feel, like the organization that you’re, the Confédération Paysanne, what your demands are. What would you like to see with regards to how you feel that French farmers are being treated or how would you like this to go?

David Lorant: Yeah. So on that mobilization, our first demand was, , some floor prices. As I told you, we just don’t have the money to work. So we need some floor prices because of the inflation that is strong in Europe and that is structural. I could talk about how ecological crisis just make the inflation and the oil problem is really something that won’t be solved by a tax.

And so, we have the problem in France that the agro industry and the supermarket at the same time, they buy the products at the farmers, cheaper and cheaper, and they sell it to consumers costlier and costlier. And, that’s the main point.

It’s like, we just need another agricultural system and another alimentation system because like 10 percent of French needs the alimentation care, maybe. 10 percent of French people can’t eat without distribution. So that’s huge for like the seventh wealthiest country in the world.

And, in the environmental issue, we just say that the problem is not regulation, but money. We just need money. And the ACP, which is like the agriculture common policy of Europe just cut the agroenvironmental funds to help farmers to change their model.

And so that’s a big point for us. And we just need lots of people to become farmers. And for that, we need a lot more formations, we need some help because we calculated that, if we want a reasonable agriculture for tomorrow with less oil and so on, we need not less than a million peasants in France, which is normal because production of food is important and, and so this is our biggest claims.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, especially if, like you said, after World War II, there were 2 million and now, I mean, that’s a significant drop.

So kind of wrapping up here, I’m curious how you see, I know you mentioned that the big union kind of left and went back, but they have a bad, a bitter taste left.

So I’m wondering what you feel the potential is of building solidarity across that political spectrum or working with people that aren’t necessarily part of your union and understanding that, okay, the government doesn’t care about us. And we have to do this ourselves. We have to be the ones to push this.

What do you think the potential is for that?

David Lorant: Well, when I was talking about the yellow vests, maybe the biggest thing I didn’t, I haven’t talked about yet is the fact that this mobilization is also a mobilization against the FNSEA.

So this biggest union that is historically in a kind of co-management with the Ministry of Agriculture. So it’s half a union, half a member of state, maybe. And so politically, it’s really censored, the agriculture world.

And, that’s the biggest point is that people don’t want to be represented by these organizations. And so, we just have to make people just discuss together, because we’re just in a period of political polarization. I think that’s an important concept because in this crisis , we have to choose maybe between fascism and anti capitalism and there is no middle way.

The middle way, even in the government is just , taking position in this divide, and it’s scary to see that Emmanuel Macron, which is center is really authoritarian. And he’s like, he starts to govern with the far right, in fact. So we have to just talk to avoid that the majority just go that way.

And I think that, so I already said that but I think that the ecology could be a great entry to talk. But, I think one of the opportunity of the farmers mobilization is that farmers are not, they’re not talking with ideologies or so on.

They’re talking with very material problems and you can talk with them and I’m sure that one day we’ll succeed to understand together that we have a problem on ecology and maybe it will not be by biodiversity, but by oil issues and just to say, okay, now you are crying because the oil is like two euros a liter, but how do you make your farm turning with the oil at four euros and that’s not a long time away, yeah.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah. And I love that idea because I think oftentimes when people come to the table with just their ideologies too present, then you just get into fights. So I think coming to the table with just your material realities can be far more generative.

So David, thank you so much for taking the time and sitting down with us. Is there anything else that you’d like to just throw out there right before we wrap up?

David Lorant: Well, maybe just that question of ecologists, they really need to stop to be like a bit snobbish and we need to make some popular ecology.

One thing I would love to talk about is maybe a decolonial approach of ecology, which make that agriculture and immigration and colonialism just joined together because it’s just a question of the way we colonized the lands. And the land is like one of the most powerful subject that can just make us fight together.

I’m sure of it.

Eleanor Goldfield: That’s beautifully put. And I absolutely agree. So thank you so much, David. It’s a powerful way to end it.

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Below is a Rough Transcript of the Interview with Joshua Wright

Please consider supporting our work at patreon.com/ProjectCensored

Eleanor Goldfield: Thanks, everyone, for joining us back at the Project Censored radio show. We’re very glad right now to be joined by Joshua Wright, who’s an award winning filmmaker of the documentary Eden’s Last Chance and a youth forest defense activist.

He was a part of the Ferry Creek blockade, which facilitated the largest active civil disobedience in Canadian history, and currently works with the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition in Washington State. Joshua, thanks so much for joining us.

Joshua Wright: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Eleanor Goldfield: So Joshua, I’d like to start because this is something that I feel like doesn’t pop up, at least not in my experience, with the discussion of either land back or the designation of lands and things like this is the quote unquote landless aspect, which came up onthe website in discussion of this issue.

So just starting with a little bit of backstory here, could you talk about who the Landless Five are and what that really means in terms of being landless and how that relates to the legislation that you’re currently fighting?

Joshua Wright: So in 1971, the Congress passed a bill called the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which was supposed to settle native claims on the newly acquired territory of Alaska.

And that act did not give land to communities, it gave them to corporations, it corporatized the existence of indigenous peoples in Southeast Alaska. So, instead of being part of a tribe which then had lands that the tribe could use for subsistence, for, you know, economic development, for whatever they would want to use them for, tribal members in Southeast Alaska and across Alaska were given shares in regional and local corporations.

So, these were called village corporations and then you had regional corporations. So, for the South, Southeast Alaska on the Tongass, you had the Sealaska Corporation. And, these corporations board of directors were predominantly white at the beginning, and they started out having absolutely no money on hand, but they were given, in the case of Sealaska, around 200 or 300,000 acres of old growth forests.

So, as you can imagine, those were brutally clearcut. Through the 80s and 90s, some of the biggest clearcuts on earth were in Southeast Alaska. And even until today,these corporations have still been logging out these lands. And to put this into perspective, these clearcuts are some of the biggest in North America. They, some of them are over 5,000 acres.

There are not stream buffers on many streams. On salmon bearing streams, there are tiny buffers, but some of them are logged straight through, and there’s no maximum cut block size, and these logs are exported in the round, they’re not milled in Southeast Alaska, and I’ve been to one of these clear cuts, and it was one of the most horrible things I’ve seen in my entire life.

So, as part of this Native Claims Settlement Act, if a community was considered urban in nature, then it would have local quote, unquote, village or urban corporations. And those corporations would have their own land entitlements. So folks living there would be a shareholder of that local corporation and the regional one.

Some communities that were considered not to be urban in nature, and think of communities like Tenekee Springs, which is one of the quote unquote landless communities in this bill. Tenekee Springs has a hundred people in it. It’s predominantly a white town. And it has no roads, you have to take a day’s boat ride from Juneau to get there.

So these communities that had very few people and were not traditional village sites, those communities, the Alaskan Natives living in those communities received larger dividends from the regional corporations, but they did not receive their own local corporations.

So, for the past ten years or so, Lisa Murkowski, who is the Republican senator who represents Southeast Alaska, has been introducing this legislation called the Landless Legislation. And the sensible purpose is to fix an injustice where five of these communities were overlooked in land claims in Southeast Alaska.

And the idea is to address this by giving each of them A township which consists of 23,500 acres of cherry picked lands, and these lands would then be used for economic development. Under a best case scenario, which would still be bad, these lands would be used as carbon credits to justify drilling in Alaska and in a worst case scenario, they would just be clear cut. And the most likely outcome is some combination of the two.

You might have heard about the 2001 roadless rule, which is the rule that protects many millions of acres of old growth forests on the Tongass.

52 percent of these land selections are areas currently protected by the roadless rule. So, overall we’re talking about 80,000 acres of productive old growth forests that are at imminent risk of being privatized, and once they’re privatized, they’re going to be logged.

And what you’re seeing now is an astroturfed campaign supported by the regional corporation, Sealaska, and by a number of major environmental groups, including the Nature Conservancy to privatize these lands in the name of land back, but I guess what people aren’t realizing is that this is a Trojan horse supported by the Republican delegation from Southeast Alaska, and it could be the biggest potential logging project in, in the Pacific temperate rainforest this century, so the stakes are really high.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, and I want to circle back to a word that you used because I think it’s a word that not a lot of people are familiar with: astroturfing. And actually it’s shared on your website, notongassprivatization. org, and you have a definition of it: “organized activity that is intended to create a false impression of a widespread spontaneously arising grassroots movement in support of or in opposition to something, such as a political policy, but that is in reality initiated and controlled by a concealed group or organization, like a corporation.”

So with that, I mean, how is this an astroturfed legislation in terms of control of that land or native claims to ancestral lands? Can you explain that and why you’re fighting that specific legislation?

Joshua Wright: This legislation is being supported by the regional native corporation, Sealaska, which is deeply invested into resource extraction in southeast Alaska and would potentially stand to gain the subsurface rights to these lands if they were privatized. At least that’s my understanding.

So they’ve donated in a altruistic sense, from their perspective, $500,000 to try to see this legislation through because they see it as correcting an injustice. And I’m not, you know, I think it’s mixed with financial interests, but also they genuinely believe that this is the right thing to do to, you know, in terms of correcting the injustices of colonization.

And the reason that I’m opposing this legislation is not because I’m by any means against land back. Those of us who are opposing this aren’t, we don’t not support land back, but we don’t support corporatization and destruction of old growth forests. Wanda Culp, who was hoping to be here today,she ‘s an elder, a Tlingit elder who lives in Huna, which is one of the villages that had the regional corporation land selections around the village.

And those land selections, which were selected in the 1970s, those were brutally clear cut. 25,000 acres, and those were lands that her village used for subsistence living, for wild salmon, for gathering. And the fact is that the roadless acres of the Tongass National Forest in a roadless, wild state provide more services for all residents of Southeast Alaska than these lands would to the Alaska natives of these particular communities who would be receiving shareholder dividends from them.

And, you know, this, I, I think one of the things that we as environmentalists are known to do, especially lately, is see something that says it’s land back, that says it’s good, and immediately take it at its word. And that, those good intentions of the environmental movement to incorporate land back are, they’re important, they are critical, but they are also being exploited by cynical interests who, in the case of this bill, you know, they have a petition that has 3,000 signatures.

People I know have signed their petition unknowingly because they see it as, it’s being framed as a land back proposal. But you will also hear the advocates of this bill say, we cannot take logging off the table. And the only reason they would say that is if they didn’t want to take logging off the table.

And another thing that I would say in terms of this bill, is if it was land back, wouldn’t you want land around the village sites? Wouldn’t you want land that the people could access? I think that that’s a given. The land selections in this map can be overlaid with maps of planned timber sales and high timber volumes on the Tongass National Forest.

Under the Trump administration, they did away with the roadless rule, and the Forest Service made maps of where they would want to do the sale called the Prince of Wales Landscape Level Analysis and the Central Tongass, and both of these were mega timber sales that would be logging around, I think it was 60 and 20 thousand acres each.

If you overlay the location of the cut blocks with these land selections, it’s almost a perfect match.

So there’s only one reason that you would be selecting lands. In the case of Ketchikan, the house version of this legislation is selecting lands that are 92 miles north of the actual city of Ketch.

So the only reason you would do that, it’s in an area called Red Bay, the Northern Prince of Wales Island, which is known for having the best timber on the Tongass. The only reason you’d do that is if you wanted to log it, and that’s just the plain and simple truth of it.

People need to realize that colonization and land exploitation can come in many, many forms. And some of them are awfully convincing. And I think that that’s the case here, and every, not every, but many major environmental groups have shut up about this because they are afraid, I guess you’d say. They’re afraid of being called racist, they’re afraid of the backlash. But ultimately this, we are talking about an industrial mega project that would be disastrous for biodiversity and for the people that live there, you know, Indigenous and settler, you know, people rely on these lands. These are lands that foster wild salmon. They’re lands that people hunt on, lands that people live in.

Yeah,

Eleanor Goldfield: absolutely. It brings me back to something I’ve talked about before, which is the malleability of the system in terms of co opting phrases like Black Lives Matter or Land Back and using it for its own means.

And I’m reminded of Klee Benally’s book, No Spiritual Surrender. And he points out that actually the Marshall doctrine which established Indigenous people’s lands, are held in a federal trust. So under the actual doctrine, tribal sovereignty is non existent as indigenous nations are, quote, domestic dependent nations.

So any land that is negotiated back by tribal entities remains a state resource managed by its wards. And I’m quoting from his book right there. So even when we talk about land back, if it’s still under the context of this colonial structure, even that is, is problematic. And so I’m curious, what are the alternatives that No Tongass Privatization is pushing for?

Like, what would y’all really like to see? What would these Indigenous communities like to see as opposed to the corporatization of these lands?

Joshua Wright: So, I’ll give you two answers, and one answer is a answer based on the system that was set up by the government, and based on the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which is a colonial act for sure, you know, no arguments there. Based on that act, these quote unquote landless groups, which there are five represented here, but there are dozens of other claims across Alaska, so you could be talking, if these communities were recognized with ANCSA claims, you could be talking about two million acres privatized across Alaska.

So, under the actual legislation passed by Congress, these communities have already been compensated in the sense that they’ve received much greater shareholder dividends from those regional corporations than those who are also members of tribal corporations. And that, you know, that is an answer that is based in colonial law, I guess.

What I would say on a more, on a broader scale is, if there are outstanding land claims, and if what the aim of these land claims is to have money, get revenue from these lands, then why on earth doesn’t the government just give them a pot of money? Why do you need to have the land get destroyed for that to happen?

You know, 23,000 acres, you might be talking about a hundred million dollars. Okay, I don’t think anybody’s gonna cry about that. That’s, that’s alright with us. And on a broader scale, these lands that are currently managed for exploitation, 44 million acres across Alaska in these ANCSA corporations, those lands should be, those corporations should be dissolved and incorporated into actual tribal governments so that these lands are managed on behalf of the people for all of their benefits, not just their financial benefits.

And, you know, I think that there’s absolutely a greater role for Indigenous peoples, tribal rights, for instance, like fishing and hunting without needing to go through the bureaucracy of the colonial state in Southeast Alaska.

I think that there’s a lot of room for co management, not in a, we’re going to manage it sense, which always is covert for logging, but in the actual, you know, Indigenous peoples of the land have the right to be involved in the land. I think that that’s really important, but I think, ironically enough, part of colonialism has been removing Indigenous peoples from their lands for protected areas and for conservation.

But ironically enough, the very lands that have Indigenous people removed from them, not because of that, but because of the aims of the colonial system, those are the lands which have the potential to be the most important lands to Indigenous peoples because they’re still protected, because they’re still functioning systems.

So what you want to do is return Indigenous people to the land and return everybody to that land, but not in a way that you’re going to destroy that land, in a way that you’re going to protect that land. So as far as we’re talking about that, I think that that’d be fantastic, but right now, this entire bill is ultimately a corporate bill, it’s a corporate scheme.

Senator Lisa Murkowski’s had a bone to pick with the forest. She’s been wanting to privatize, like in 2014, she privatized 70,000 acres on the Tongass National Forest to the Southeast Alaska Native Corporation, Sealaska. And funnily enough, those lands were logged and then they were put into a carbon project.

So, she has a goal of creating a 2 million acre state forest in southeast Alaska to maintain a timber industry that employs, and I kid you not, 100 people in the region. That’s her goal. And this is her backdoor way of completing that.

If she gets this bill through, she will then be able to say, Well, there are other landless groups across Alaska. And as we’ve already established, the lands that they select do not need to be anywhere near them. They could be in southeast Alaska, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with the most oil. And that will be her backdoor way of creating the state forest to continue the exploitation of the Tongass in a way that goes around the roadless rule and makes every environmental group too afraid to say anything that this legislation slips through without anybody saying a thing.

And that’s the position that we find ourselves in is I originally learned about this when I was filming for my documentary Eden’s Last Chance. And in December, this bill, for the first time in the years that it’s been introduced, had passed out of committee in the Senate and could be voted on in the floor any day.

And I found myself looking around and saying, well, literally nobody else except a few people in Southeast Alaska are saying a thing. And we need to start speaking up about this.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. Again, the malleability of the system and its ability to find these back doors. So, I mean, you said like any day now, so what is the status of this bill?

And, are there plans to fight it if it passes through more doors of the legislative process, so to speak?

Joshua Wright: Well, right now, I think the biggest thing that people, and you know, I’ve been a direct action activist. I’m not a person for calling your representatives and signing petitions, but that’s not even happened yet.

Right now legislators don’t even know that this is bad. They just hear about it. So it passed out of committee. Joe Manchin let it out of the Senate Natural Resources Committee. Last time there was a bill like this, Lisa Murkowski attached it to a National Defense Authorization Act, a must pass legislation, and it was signed into law by Obama.

And right now in March, at the end of March, there’s gonna be a government funding bill. So that is an opportunity where she could sneak it through the Senate, and potentially then it could go through the House. It still has to advance out of committee in the House, but, you know, that could happen any day.

So what I would suggest folks do is go to Notongassprivatization.Org. There’s a bunch of action items you can take. Really, call all of your representatives. The bill is S-1889, Senate Bill 1889, and spread the word about this. There’s a petition. Call your representatives, make your voice heard as much as possible, because, there’s been so little dissent on this issue, no major media has actually covered it yet, and it’s gonna be stopped through the grassroots, or it’s going to sail through, and we’ll be regretting it.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you mentioned corporate media. Obviously, at Project Censored, one of the things that we do is combat corporate media, both in terms of propagandization and uplifting the stories they’ll never touch. And I think that it’s very telling that this is the kind of story that has that nuance that they wouldn’t want to touch regardless, because they don’t want to come out and make it look like they’re against Native people getting land back, but they also don’t want to anger the powers that be by going against legislation that they’re pushing through.

So, yeah, this is absolutely the kind of thing that alternative media and folks on the ground should really be paying attention to. So Joshua, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us.

Is there anything else that you’d like to highlight or throw out there before we wrap up here?

Joshua Wright: I think it’s just important for people to think about, you know, in this bill, we can get lost in abstractions, and we need to realize that these lands, these 80,000 acres, these 115,000 acres total, you know, these lands are lived in by the Alexander Archipelago wolf, which is an endangered species. They are lived in by millions of trees, hemlock and cedar and yellow cedar that have been there for over a thousand years in many cases, and I guess I would say that their lives matters just as much as ours do, and we can’t be silenced just because it’s scary, you know.

We can’t allow ourselves to be silenced just because the advocates of this bill have framed it in a way that makes dissent seem like it’s anti indigenous. You know, I think, ultimately, if you know what you’re doing is right, if you know that it is right to save a forest from being clearcut, then take that conviction and let’s stop this bill, let’s fight.

Eleanor Goldfield: Amen. Thank you, Joshua, so much for framing this all for us and putting it into context and folks can check out Notongassprivatization.org. Thanks again, Joshua.

Joshua Wright: Thank you so much for having me.

Please consider becoming a patron of our work at patreon.com/ProjectCensored

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Business

Top shale boss says US ‘unusually vulnerable’ to Middle East oil shock

Published

6 mins ago

October 2, 2024

NewsAdmin

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US shale magnate Harold Hamm has accused the Biden administration of leaving the nation “unusually vulnerable” to a Middle East oil price shock by draining its strategic petroleum reserve, damaging domestic production and bungling foreign policy.

The Continental Resources founder told the Financial Times he was “very concerned” that Middle East conflict could disrupt global oil supplies while the US shale patch had been put in a “weakened condition”, unable to rapidly lift output.

“They have drained the SPR, and refinery inventories are at their lowest in America [in years]. And you just never know when you need it. It’s kind of like having gas in your car,” said the billionaire shale boss.

“We are in an unusually vulnerable position . . . everybody is looking in the direction [of the Middle East] right now — and has been for the last four years — but we had a president that frankly wasn’t at home.”

While strategic reserves have been drawn down, commercial inventories of crude and petroleum have surged 25 per cent over the past decade. Officials have been replenishing SPR reserves since June 2023, which now stand 10 per cent higher since then, at 382mn barrels.

US oil and gas production has hit record highs under President Joe Biden, while crude and LNG exports have soared.

Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, said the US was in a better position now to weather supply disruptions than in the 1970s, when some Arab Opec members imposed an embargo on shipping crude to western countries that triggered a sudden price spike.

“We’ve battened down a lot of hatches,” he said, giving the US “limited industrial exposure to high crude prices”.

The comments from Hamm, a prominent donor to Republican candidate Donald Trump’s election drive, echo campaign trail comments from the former president, who has accused the Biden administration of a “war on American energy” and taking the US to the “brink of world war three”.

Hamm, a pioneer of the shale revolution, spoke to the FT shortly before Iran fired a barrage of missiles at Israel, a response to Israel Defense Forces’ ground offensive against Hizbollah in southern Lebanon.

The Iranian attack sent oil prices up 5 per cent to $75.40 on Tuesday, amid fears of a wider conflict in a region accounting for about a third of global oil production capacity.

Geopolitical analysts have warned any conflict involving Tehran could threaten Gulf oil and gas exports through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow chokepoint bordering Iran through which 20 per cent of the world’s crude supplies pass.

Further fuel price rises would be uncomfortable for the Biden administration and vice-president Kamala Harris, who is running for the White House with a pledge to drive down the cost of everyday goods.

US petrol prices average about $3.40 a gallon, down about a third from their price in mid-2022, when a surge in crude markets after Russia invaded Ukraine pushed up fuel costs.

The White House began releasing oil from the SPR in 2021 — created in the wake of the Arab oil embargo in the early 1970s — ahead of the invasion in an attempt to keep down domestic petrol prices.

It released another 180mn barrels of oil from the reserve in 2022 after sanctions on Russia brought fears of supply disruptions.

The US has been buying back some of the oil but has 382mn barrels — about half of capacity — left in the SPR, enough to meet about 19 days of consumption, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Line chart of Weekly stocks of crude oil in Strategic Petroleum Reserve, millions of barrels showing US emergency crude stockpiles are half full

Hamm also accused the Biden administration of trying to restrict US oil and gas investment by pursuing “short-sighted” policies including curbs on some drilling and a pause on new liquefied natural gas plants, compromising energy security at a time of mounting geopolitical risk.

“It’s very important that we don’t crash this industry any further than the administration has crashed it already,” said Hamm, adding that he expected Harris to maintain curbs on the industry if she won the election in November.

A US official rejected Hamm’s criticisms of the Biden administration, saying the Washington played an active role in ensuring conflicts overseas had not damaged Americans.

“We’ve done this by accelerating the energy transition, on the one hand reducing fossil fuels demand in the process, and making strategic releases from the SPR,” the official said.

“People said this would break the market, but it didn’t. People then said we would have $100 oil this year, but we haven’t. People said we wouldn’t be able to fill up the SPR. But we are filling the SPR. We put a plan together in January of 2022 and we have stuck to it without deviation, despite all the dire predictions.”

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News

AI data centers are draining water from this drought-stricken Mexican town

Published

15 mins ago

October 2, 2024

NewsAdmin

AI data centers are draining water from this drought-stricken Mexican town

As the climate crisis intensifies, billions of poor and working people around the world are suffering from lack of regular (or any) access to clean water, but the dawn of “AI” is about to make the problem much worse. In their recent report for Context, “Forget jobs—AI is coming for your water,” Diana Baptista and Fintan McDonnell write, “Artificial intelligence lives on power and water, fed to it in vast quantities by data centres around the world. And those centres are increasingly located in the global south.” In Colón, a municipality in Central Mexico that is home to Microsoft’s first hyperscale data center campus in the country, working people are already bearing the environmental costs of man-made climate change, and they will be the ones to bear the costs of AI and Big Tech. “The town of 67,000 is suffering extreme drought. Its two dams have nearly dried up, farmers are struggling with dead crops, and families are relying on trucked and bottled water to fulfill their daily needs.”

In the latest installment of our ongoing series, Sacrificed, Max speaks with Diana Baptista, a data journalist at the Thomson Reuters Foundation based in Mexico City, about Mexico’s ongoing water crisis and about the human and environmental costs of AI and cloud computing.

Additional links/info below…

Diana’s Context author page and X page
Fintan McDonnell & Diana Baptista, Context, “Forget jobs. AI is coming for your water (Video Report)”
Fintan McDonnell & Diana Baptista, Context, “Thirsty data centres spring up in water-poor Mexican town (Text Report)”
David Berreby, Yale Environment 360, “As use of A.I. soars, so does the energy and water it requires”
Tamara Pearson, The Real News Network, “Indigenous Mexicans risk their lives to defend the environment from organized crime and ‘insatiable, predatory’ transnational corporations”
Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “In Brazil, the climate crisis is already turning working people into climate refugees”
Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “East Palestine residents have been left behind—and they’re running out of water”

Permanent links below…

Featured Music…
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Diana Baptista:

Hello, I’m Diana Baptista. I’m a data journalist for the Thomson Reuters Foundation context, and I’m based in Mexico City.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out all the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to or subjects you’d like us to investigate and please support the work we do at The Real News Network by going to therealnews.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we’ve got another critical installment of our ongoing sacrificed series where we are speaking with people, working and living in industrial government run and climate sacrifice zones around the US and beyond where we investigate the root causes and the connections between sacrifice communities and where we talk seriously about what we can do about it. In the description of a recent video report titled, Forget Jobs. AI is Coming for Your Water, Diana Baptista and Fenton McDonald write: “Artificial intelligence lives on power and water fed to it in vast quantities by data centers around the world, and these centers are increasingly located in the global south.” One estimate from the University of California, Riverside says AI’s total water demand by 2027 could be more than half the total annual water withdrawal of the United Kingdom, but all we really have are estimates.

Big tech firms have been secretive about the amount of public water used by individual data centers, and up to half of all data centers don’t even measure how much water they use. According to one survey, a municipality of Mexico City and Central Mexico is home to Microsoft’s first hyperscale data center campus in the country. The town of 67,000 is suffering extreme drought. Its two dams have nearly dried up. Farmers are struggling with dead crops, and families are relying on trucked and bottled water to fulfill their daily needs. Mexico leveraging its proximity to the US is hoping to convince big tech to nearshore their facilities. Here, the state of Quero is offering favorable land loans, cheap electricity in a pool of local talent. Similar stories are playing out around the world. In Uruguay, Google admitted that a planned data center in Montevideo would require 7.6 million liters of drinking water per day.

While the country was suffering a historic three year drought in the United States, a bill has been introduced in the Senate to compel big tech to reveal the environmental impacts of AI after reports of conflict over water between farmers and big tech in the desert of Arizona. So that’s what we’re going to be discussing today, and I could not be more honored to have Diana Baptista on the show with us. Diana is, as you heard, a data journalist at the Thomason Reuters Foundation. She’s based in Mexico City, and you can find a link to the vital video report that she produced with Fenton McDonald for context, a media platform created by the Thomason Reuters Foundation in the show notes for this episode. And if you haven’t already, I highly recommend that you watch the report and follow all the important work that Diana and her colleagues are doing over at context, but we’re going to have a conversation here that hopefully will encourage you to go watch the report if you haven’t already, because you really, really should.

And Diana, thank you so much for joining me today, and thank you so much for doing this important work. I was really excited to learn about it, although I was horrified to learn what you found in reporting this stuff. And so I want to dig into all of this, but I guess before we really dig into the meat of this particular story, I wanted to ask if we could start with a sort of zoomed out context here for the water crisis that is going on in Mexico and has been going on for some time. I mean, I remember as a grad student in Mexico City, like everybody else, I was getting my water and those big jugs people in our buildings were getting them delivered twice a week or you’d walk to the corner shop and carry back these heavy, expensive bottles of purified water while the stuff coming out of your taps was not fit to drink. So for folks who are listening to this who maybe don’t know about how bad the water crisis in Mexico is, I was wondering if you could just sort of give us some context there. How bad is it?

Diana Baptista:

First of all, thank you, Maximilian. It’s such a pleasure to be in this podcast. Thank you so much for the invitation. So yeah, let’s talk about Mexico. So we have drinking water. We have taps in 99% of the country. However, this is not drinking water. We don’t put a glass of water and drink from it. It all comes from bottles and the water we collect to drink afterwards. And this is because of several issues with infrastructure that have been going on for decades now. And one of the main issues we’re having right now in Mexico is drought. We have had several rain seasons that have been irregular. Our dams are not filling up, and this is all around the country except the southern part of the country, but most of it is just drying up. And the truth is that we’ve come completely dependent to water bottle companies and all these big soda companies.

So what we are drinking as a population, everything comes from plastic and everything comes from soda. It’s a very sad reality that we have been facing for decades now here in Mexico. And because of the drought. For example, in Mexico City this year, we were very close of reaching day zero, which is the day that the dams have been completely empty and there is no more left for consumption. This has happened in other parts of the world like South Africa. They’ve overcome it and we really didn’t have any plan to overcome it. There were several plans of infrastructure and stuff, but the only way we survived that was thanks to the rain, it rained finally. It has been raining quite intensely, and it was just luck. We got lucky this rain season and it has been raining otherwise, perhaps we would’ve reached day zero for Mexico City, and that means around 20 million people without access to water.

So very serious stuff. And we focused on our investigation on a place that is north of Mexico City. It’s around three hours away. That is called Quero. And for many years this has been a semi deserter and it has been struggling with tremendous drought. This means that at least for three years, rain seasons have been irregular. Dams are almost completely empty. If you go there, everything is yellow, everything feels dry. And the sun with the heat waves, we have been getting, it has been horrible up there. And while people are dependent more than ever on water bottle companies at the moment, so one of the main issues we have in Mexico as well is unequal water distribution. So this means that this big and bottled water companies are located in these places with extreme drought and most of the water is being allocated to them. So our public water, our public resources are going to these companies so they can sell water to us in the form of plastic. And activists for many years now have been fighting this around the country because this is for soda, for bottled water and for beer and a lot of beer that’s getting exported to the United States, for example. So activists have been very angry for many years denouncing that this water inequality is just very hard on the population.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to circle back to that in the end when we sort of connect this story in Mexico that you’ve reported on to the other stories that we’ve been reporting on in this sacrificed series and kind of how what you’re describing is really the future that lies in store for so many of us. And that future is already here for towns like East Palestine, Ohio, where people are still living off of bottled water. So I want to end up there, but let’s kind of stay in Colon for a minute and talk about what it was like for you to really start digging into this story and what you were learning about Microsoft’s plans for this massive campus in Cologne, a municipality that’s already experiencing extreme drought.

Diana Baptista:

Of course. So this was all burned. This all came from the fact that Thom from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, we had been investigating the expansion of data centers in the global south. And we had been reading that a lot of them were coming to Mexico, and suddenly Microsoft made this big announcement saying, we have invested billions in the state of Carrero and we’re opening up this hyperscale cloud region, which we’re not very sure yet what it means, but it came with billions of dollars of investment and it was a huge announcement. It even reached the president. The president was very happy about this investment. So we looked at Rero and wondered, oh, we know data center stick water. We know there’s not enough data on how much water they take, but there have been a lot of battles around the global south when these data centers come to town.

And we were very interested in the fact that from Carrero, we heard nothing but silence. We weren’t hearing the activists, we weren’t hearing the protests. So we wondered, is nobody looking at Carrero? What’s happening there? So we decided to make the trip up there to Cologne. The colon is this very large municipality. So you have a lot of in cologne, you have car manufacturers and you have agriculture and you have chickens and meat and protein industry. And then you have these very small towns hidden in the mountains that are the ones who small farmers and people living off tourism actually live. And they’re among the most vulnerable population in our country. So we went up there and Quero has always had a problem because of all the water that goes to the industry, you have these huge industrial parks among these yellowed hills where everything you see is dry and a lot of water is being taken by the industry.

And it’s such a stark contrast from where you’d expect big industry to grow. And then we went to this little towns in the municipality of cologne. There must be around 50 minutes away from where all the industrial parks with the data centers are located. And over there we saw people really struggling. We went to a community that is called Lare, and this is an indigenous community. Most people are very small farmers. They have very small restaurants that has no electricity, they have no tap water there. They bring their own water and water jugs, and they live of tourism from every weekend. People would go from Mexico City or from Carrero capital to that little town and just spend a couple days next to the dam in the water, eat and go back home. So that’s what the people live off. But when we went there, the dams were almost completely empty. There was nobody there. We went there on Father’s Day, which is supposed to be one of the most active days, and there was a lot of music. There were people, but after a couple of hours, everybody left and the businesses were all empty. So we saw people had nobody to sell their fish to or their produce. Nobody was doing water sports, they weren’t eating at the restaurants. It just felt very lonely. Where this town’s life is around water. When there’s no water, everything just dies around it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

As the water protectors have famously burned onto our memories, water is life and without water, there’s no life. And that’s really the direction that we’re heading in. I mean, how more basically can we put it here? And I want to kind of drill down on this point because I know as you guys say in the report, and as I mentioned in the introduction, it’s actually hard to determine how much water these data centers and big tech in general are using. But we know that that usage has spiked since the introduction of AI products like Chat, GPT. And there’s an article by Yale’s E 360 that I’ll include in the show notes for this episode that reads, according to a recent study by Ren, Google’s data centers used 20% more water in 2022 than they did in 2021. And Microsoft’s water use rose by 34% in the same period. Google data centers host its Barred chatbot and other generative ais. Microsoft Servers host chat GPT as well as its bigger siblings, GPT-3 and GPT-4. All three are produced by open AI in which Microsoft is a large investor. So Diana, could you just flesh this out a little more for folks, how the introduction of so-called AI has played into this story and how much water usage we’re really talking about here?

Diana Baptista:

I mean, this has been quite an adventure to try to figure out how much water is being used. So when we first heard that data centers were coming to Queretaro and we’re talking about the three big companies, so we had announcements by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon for billions of dollars coming to this little town without water. So the first thing we did was ask. We asked the companies, can you tell us how much water, how many data center units you have first in the state and how many you’re planning to build and how much water they will take? Microsoft kept telling us they had no spokesperson that could give us information. Amazon gave us some explanation that the tech they’re going to use is very new, doesn’t take water, but they wouldn’t go into detail because of industrial secrecy and all that. And Google just said they’re bringing down the water usage.

So we didn’t get answers. From there, we decided to ask the government, the local government who has been doing a major push to bring these data centers to town. So we have Governor Mauricio Kuri from the first day he was appointed as governor, he traveled to Washington DC to meet with Amazon people to try to convince them to bring their data centers to Carrero. So from day one, it has been a priority of the local government to bring them. And when I spoke to the Secretary of Sustainable Development, Marco Elte, who is one of the main figures bringing the data centers to town, he said he didn’t have the figures because he’s not the water commission, so he doesn’t allocate the water. But he also gave me some very weird numbers saying that the data centers in Quero take the same amount of water as a hotel room with 55 rooms or the same as a restaurant in 30 days.

But he wouldn’t say where these estimations came from. Very weird estimations to begin with, which meant he must have known how many gallons, at least one unit is taken. But then he said he didn’t know. So we felt we kept being played around. There was such huge capacity in the public and in the private sector, we asked the National Water Commission, and they only told us that they haven’t allocated any new concessions to any new companies in Carrera. But one thing about Mexico that is one of the roots of our water crisis is that at some point in our history, the National Water Commission gave away a lot of concessions to a lot of private people and a lot of private companies. And the way our law works is that they can sell that concession. So Maximilian, you may have owned an entire aquifer, for example, and you decide to sell it to Microsoft and you don’t have to ask anybody about this, you just tell the water commission.

You did that and that’s it. So people who owned these concessions have been selling to the industry in a way that then the public has no say in it. You have no voice in it because it’s a private thing between particulars and then the public is left without water and you don’t even know who sold it to whom. So it’s been, I don’t know, it’s very bureaucratic, but also a lot of opacity on how these concessions are being sold. And the National Water Commission told us that that’s how Microsoft got one of its commissions. It got sold to them by somebody who already owned one, which is very grave, right? Because then it allows for absolutely zero accountability. So once we had this information, we tried to figure out on our own how much water these data centers were taken. We went to public databases for the National Water Commission, and we couldn’t find anything because this information is no longer public once it belongs to a private company or you don’t know who is selling to whom.

So we were left in the dark. Companies refuse to tell this information. Local government said they didn’t have the information, which we found was ridiculous. And then you have local activists that for many, many years have been fighting for equal distribution of water in Quero, but they were also left in the dark. There are very small group to begin with who have been asking in the last month, in recent months have been asking the secretary like, Hey, can you tell us how much water these data centers are going to take? And he always says that, don’t worry about this. These data centers do not take a lot of water. They cannot come to Carrera because there’s no water to begin with, so we cannot give them more water. They’re super efficient data centers, but then we’re already left in the dark about how this technology operates, this super, supposedly super efficient new data centers that do not require water.

We don’t know how they work. We have no way to prove that they are actually water efficient, that they require zero water. We just have to take everything at face value, everything that the local government and the companies tell you. And activists actually found out from context about the concession bought by Microsoft. So it has been very difficult to figure this out. And when Finon reached out to some international experts that have been doing this estimations of how much water this data centers take around the world, they told us the same thing. There’s no data on data centers. They have to rely on certain estimations and certain methodologies they have developed by themselves, but there is nothing certain. And it has been very frustrating trying to figure it out and trying to do the estimations by yourselves when nobody is cooperating, nobody’s giving you any numbers to start up from. So it makes a journalist job very difficult. But we also see it makes the activist jobs very difficult because then we have no certainty and no possibility for accountability.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that’s really beautifully and powerfully put. And again, I want to encourage everyone listening to this to go watch the report itself because Diana and Fenton dig into this a lot more there. And Diana, I just wanted to ask just to make sure that folks are keeping up with us. You guys talk a bit about what the hell they’re using the water for, but can you just give us the basics there? Why do these data centers need so much water and why does AI demand so much water?

Diana Baptista:

Of course, it comes down to cooling. These data centers get very, very hot from all the computing, from all the computing processing it requires. It gets very hot inside a data center unit. So they can use two things, either electricity or water to cool off a data center. So you will hear information sometimes from a company saying that they have become super water efficient and they do not require fresh drinking water, which is the kind of water they need. They don’t need recycled water. They need fresh drinking water to cool down their huge computers, so using electricity. But the experts we have spoken to have also estimated how much water a country needs to power. Its electricity that powers the data centers. So no process for a data center is water free to begin with. Everything requires water. So of course they may come to Reta and say, all we’re going to need is electricity, but in the end, the power plants are also running on water.

So Queretaro needs water to run these power plants to run data centers. So in the end, everything needs water. So that becomes kind of tricky to understand. What does AI have to do with this? First of all, most of the data centers that are coming to Mexico are for the cloud for storing our images and our memes, our thousand on red emails and everything like this. The secretary, when I spoke to him, he said this was the industry of the future that everything we would need as humans would be cloud storage. And that quero would be so much stronger by become a data center valley because the world wouldn’t need our services. Which tells us a lot about balancing the creation of jobs with the depletion of our natural resources and ai. Yes, as these AI systems grow, these companies are also looking to the global south to locate their data centers.

And experts told us this is for different reasons. First of all, because local governments are giving them incentives. So water is cheap, electricity is cheap. In Creta, we found out they’re even giving some of them free land. We found a contract that the Congress approved this huge land to be giving to cloud HQ for a data center. There’s a pool of local talent that as we know in the global south, you pay less than you would in the north. And then you have all these local governments that are not asking questions. So we were very skeptical when the secretary told us he wouldn’t know how much water would be allocated to the data centers because we imagine when they traveled to Washington DC to talk to these companies, they must have discussed this, it must have come up. How much water are you going to use? What are your estimates? What is the technology you’re using? So I don’t want to think they’re not even discussing this or they’re not even thinking about these questions. They’re just telling them, come and bring your money. So these are the two technologies that are using these data centers, AI and cloud storage.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I have so many thoughts and questions about this, but I know how busy you are and I can’t keep you for two hours. But I mean it’s so wild to think that it was less than a hundred years ago in 1938 when La Ena nationalized famously the oil industry in Mexico, thus really representing a sort of different governmental mentality and how Mexico was approaching its collective ownership over its own resources. And we’ve had a long kind of windy up and down sort of road from there to here. The government doesn’t even know, is not tracking all this water that’s being promised to these private companies from Silicon Valley. And the sales that are being made are sort of passing through private hands in a way that just sort of really shows you, I think the trajectory of the past century in a state like Mexico and what the kind of privatization, neoliberal and all those big historical forces, what they translate to 80, 90 years later in everything that you and I are talking about here.

But you and I will have to have a follow-up discussion, breaking all that down because there’s a whole lot to dig into there that we don’t have time to now. But I wanted to kind of bring it back to the working people living and working in this area because normally whether it’s the Quila, Dores on the border or these other sort of incentives that states and local governments give to industries to try to bring them them to Mexico, big promises like, oh, it’s going to mean jobs. It’s going to mean economic prosperity for the people here and the people here can provide their labor and expertise in cheaper quantities than you could get north of the border. All that stuff. I wanted to ask, is that even a thing? It feels like, and you guys touch on this in your reporting, the average working person A doesn’t even know that this is happening, let alone how it’s going to impact them, and B, they’re sure shit not going to benefit from it. So could you talk a bit about that, what this all looks like or doesn’t look like through the eyes of local working people in colon. Colon?

Diana Baptista:

One thing, colon is going to be a victim of its own success because you had this deserted area that suddenly it’s becoming the data center valley and you had all these other industries. So you’re attracting a lot of people that are not even from colon. So we’re talking people with master’s or PhD degrees, highly educated people that are not living in small towns of fishermen and people relying on tourism. They’re living in the cities, so they’re bringing these data centers and they’re not even promising that many jobs to begin with. The secretary recognized like 2000 direct jobs, which is very little, to be honest, for such a huge 20 billion investment, 2000 jobs are not a lot. He was mainly excited about indirect jobs and suppliers and stuff like that. So you’re attracting all these people from the cities. So it’s three hours away from Mexico City.

You have these highly educated people traveling from Mexico City or from Queretaro Capital a couple of hours into colon for these data centers and then traveling back. So these are not people from colon to begin with because colon is a series of small towns of fishermen and small farmers and restauranters people with limited educational background, the most vulnerable inner country, the ones that are always left behind because you have to travel, I don’t know, five hours by car to reach LASA community. And you only go there to see the dam and take a little ride on a boat and then travel back to Mexico City. So these are abandoned people to begin with. So we were very interested to see what they thought about this. And I mean, it was funny because you ask them, do you know what an AI is to begin with? Do you know what the cloud is? And for example, 70-year-old Mr. Gu Hernandez who has this blackberry patch of land, he would be like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what AI is.

And what’s interesting is he was very knowledgeable about water inequality. He was very angry telling me he hates that industry comes and that he does not have enough water for his blackberries and that he has to see them die. Meanwhile, he can see these big industries coming to town. So he is aware of what’s happening. He’s just not aware of what AI is. He doesn’t have a phone, he has no idea about cloud storage or anything like that. So it felt like things were happening around him that he was completely unaware of, but also that he was feeling the effect of, so he knew there is new tech, he knew they were coming to town and they would take a lot of water. And the only way he could relate to that was because his blackberries were dying and because it hadn’t rained in two years.

And he showed me how the heat waves burned to them and they were all yellowed and they couldn’t grow because there wasn’t enough water for his crops. We went to this small restaurant next to the dam that received all the stories from year to year. And again, the same story. These are very old people who have no idea about technology, but that will tell you about how water inequality is affecting them and how they find it unfair that the priority is given to the industry instead of them and that they have to have water once a week. So for example, we spoke to this woman who owns a small restaurant next to a dam. The restaurant has no electricity, it has no tap water, so she has to bring everything from her house. So she gets water in her house every eight days. She fills all these water jugs and she carries them on her back all the way to her restaurant. And that’s how she kind of survives the entire week in her restaurant. And yeah, she will tell you she has no idea what AI is, but she knows that she’s struggling and that her business will not survive because there is drought and she doesn’t know the drought is related to the industry. She doesn’t know if these companies are taking the water from her. She does know that new industry coming means she will get less water because of water inequality. That’s a stamp that we have in Mexico because that is how the country operates.

Maximillian Alvarez:

This sadly and morbidly kind of is where your path and mind connected, right on the kind of journalistic quests that we are on to investigate these stories that over here through our podcast we’ve been investigating by talking to working folks, living in sacrifice zones, which is exactly what you were just doing and describing, right? I mean, we may not call it that, but that is what is happening, where the lives and livelihood and the conditions for life itself are being sacrificed at the altar of corporate greed and corporate profits and technological progress that is defined by big tech companies and their supporters in government. And those things become the priorities for government policy. They become the priorities in terms of where our collective resources are being allocated, like water that we all need to live. But that’s where it really does feel to be just intimately connected to what we’ve been investigating here, talking to folks living 20 minutes from where I’m sitting in South Baltimore, black and brown and white working class communities that have been poisoned for generations by rail cars that are blowing coal dust everywhere, trash incinerator, medical incinerator that are just burning up all this stuff and spewing it into the air.

The folks living in east Palestinian, Ohio where that train derailed two years ago or almost two years ago, and they were exposed to all those chemicals and they didn’t know what was on those trains either. They didn’t know the sort of inner workings of the rail industry, but they sure as shit paid the price for all of that when one of those bomb trains derailed in their own backyard. And so I guess I wanted to just sort of take everything that we’ve been discussing here and sort of bring Mexico and places like colon Colon into this discussion of sacrifice zones and what it means to have our societies sacrificing whole communities for the sake of private corporations and serving their needs above ours and what that looks like, right? I mentioned earlier that I wanted us to end up here because when we were talking about the fact that people living in Mexico, everyone gets their water through bottles and these water bottling companies have such a stranglehold on this vital natural resource.

And I think you see something in Mexico that still seems very foreign to a lot of people here in the us, but it’s becoming increasingly less foreign, which is like, what does it look like when I can no longer trust the water coming out of my tap and I have to live on bottled water? If you’ve never done that, trust me when I say it’s a real pain in the ass, it’s a real sort of dystopian reality that folks in East Palestine have talked to us about on this very show. And that’s not something to strive for, but it feels like a reality that we’re just accepting both in areas of the global south that have been experiencing this for years, but also the global working class population. This just feels like the direction that we’re all heading in. So I guess I just wanted to sort of ask, doing this research and this reporting on these data centers, and I guess what do you think this necessarily adds to what our listeners here are hearing when we’re talking to sacrifice communities here in the United States?

Because it’s really important that folks see that it’s not just happening here. In fact, it’s been happening in the global south for a long time and what’s been happening there is coming back home or it’s been happening at home in the global south sides of our population, the poor, black, brown indigenous communities that have been living under these circumstances as well. So I just kind of wanted to give you sort of a last word there, what this has all taught you about that and how the kind of sacrifice zone question, what that looks like when we look at it through the lens of Mexico and stories like the one that you’ve been reporting on.

Diana Baptista:

Thank you. That’s a great question. I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is balance. So this government is making a push to bring Nearshoring to push for Nearshoring in Mexico. They want to tech companies to come to the country because we need more jobs because we have all this pool of highly educated people who need a job and we need all these communities outside of Mexico City to grow. We need more investment. We need to grow economically as a country, but at what cost is that cost, the natural resources, the dwindling natural resources of the country? And where’s the accountability? I mean, for me, the most frustrating part was this opacity from government and companies because maybe it could be the data centers will not take one ounce of water. That could be the truth. But if it’s so, why won’t they tell us?

Why won’t they respond to requests of information? Why will they not give interviews when they’re being requested? Why activists had no idea that there had been a purchase from Microsoft, from somebody who already had a concession. They were in the dark about this. And it’s very frustrating for us to be kept in the dark because then maybe the local government does have good intentions and maybe companies will do some good in the country, but we cannot know that for sure because they’re running on opacity. And that is incredibly frustrating because it also tells us that there’s a lack of regulation in the country for this kind of tech to grow. So we know AI systems will need more data centers, we’ll need more computing power, and they are looking at the global south, especially Latin America for this. But when they come to our countries, why do they come with so much secretiveness?

Why won’t they release the information? Why won’t they be open about their data? So we’ve been told this is because of industry secrecy and stuff, but that’s not enough. That’s not enough for a population who’s already running out of water. There has to be a better effort from companies government to let us know what is being done with our resources. So for me, that was the main lesson that it’s going to be very hard for these tech companies to progress in the global south if they do it with opacity and they do it without releasing the data. We saw it in your way, for example, in Montevideo activists pushed until they got the information and then they refused the data center by Google. And Google has had to change its plans in Montevideo. We saw it in Chile as well with this wonderful story by Rust World.

And we’re seeing it in several parts. Brazil is one of the main markets for data centers in Latin America, for example, where we saw this data, and this has been very frustrating. This has been my main frustration while conducting this investigation. And the second part of it is that we didn’t see that the arrival of new technology to Quero was going to mean any change for the most vulnerable workers in the country. So yes, maybe we attract more highly educated people to this data centers, but in the end, the small farmers and the fishermen and the lady who has no electricity and cooks once in a while for a tourist or two that come into town, they will be just as vulnerable as before. Their income will not change, their opportunities will not change. And all they’re seeing is their environment changing against ’em, which is very sad because one would hope that the arrival of this new companies and all this investment would mean change for the better, for the country’s most vulnerable. But we have not seen that happen yet. So it does leaves us wondering again, where’s the balance? Where’s the balance between economic growth and equality and the protection of our environment? We were very sad to see that there was no data, no answers, and no real change for people who are most vulnerable.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our amazing guest, Diana Baptista for talking with me today. And I want to thank her for all the important work that she is doing. Be sure to follow Diana’s work and follow the link in the show notes to watch Diana’s video report. Forget Jobs AI is Coming for Your Water, which she and Fenton McDonald produced for context, a media platform created by the Thomason Reuters Foundation. And you can read the full text report as well, which we’ve also linked in the show notes for this episode. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes that we’ve published there for our patrons over the years and go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle.

Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

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Travel

Rarely-visited country named top holiday spot for 2025 – it’s the ‘new Croatia’ and has some of Europe’s cheapest beer

Published

22 mins ago

October 2, 2024

NewsAdmin

Bosnia and Herzegovina has been billed as a top holiday destination for 2025

BOSNIA and Herzegovina has been named as a top trending travel destination for 2025.

Described as a “less crowded alternative to Dubrovnik” by a team of travel experts at Wild Frontiers, Bosnia and Herzegovina harks back to when Brits enjoyed cheap travel to countries like Croatia.

Visitors have raved about its natural landscapesCredit: Alamy

The tour operator revealed their top trending travel destinations for next year after they crunched the numbers on Google searches and holiday booking data.

While Kyrgyzstan in Asia nabbed the top spot, Europe’s Bosnia and Herzegovina took second place.

In 2023, the country saw a 17.3 per cent rise in visitors in the last year, and bookings to the Balkans, through Wild Frontiers, rose by 70 per cent over the last 12 months.

Even though Bosnia and Herzegovina has plenty to offer – from fascinating history, amazing nature and beaches with clear blue seas – the country often slips under the tourist radar.

A sentiment echoed by travel Blogger, Dan Flying Solo, who said: “Bosnia and Herzegovina remains a relatively off-the-beaten-path – and affordable – destination in Europe.

“After two deep dive visits, I’m convinced the country’s greatest asset is the mesmerising near-photoshopped lakes, the lush countryside, and the lofty hiking trails.

Before getting to grips with the country’s natural landscapes, most Brits are likely to touch down in its capital city of Sarajevo.

Sarajevo has some of the cheapest beers in Europe, with a pint costing £1.75.

There are plenty of places to grab a craft beer too, including Zlatna Ribica and Gastropub Vucko, both of which are popular among locals and tourists alike.

Just like the booze, grub is cheap too, with three-course meals for as little as £11.

The world’s happiest cities to visit – and one is in the UK

The Bascarsija – the city’s oldest bazaar and the cultural centre of the city – is a great place to find traditional dishes like cevapi, flat breads filled with grilled meat, and burek, flaky pastries filled with cheese, spinach or even sour cherry for dessert.

The city’s Turkish influence can be seen in the bazaar, with traditional coffee, clothes and rugs among the many stalls.

Other attractions include the War Tunnel, or Tunnel of Hope, left over from the Bosnian war that was originally built in 1993 to get aid and humanitarian supplies into the city.

It’s one of many sites that help people learn about the fairly recent conflicts that took place in the area.

Where else is there to go?

Perhaps the most famous place in Bosnia is the town of Mostar, with its reconstructed Ottoman Empire bridge, Stari Most, one of the country’s most famous sites, spanning the Neretva River.

Every summer, brave people throw themselves off the bridge as part of an annual diving competition, with the men of the town also jumping from the bridge as a tradition.

Other places to visit include the town of Blagaj, not too far from Mostar, which has been compared to a fairy tale by Responsible Travel.

What’s it like to visit Bosnia and Herzegovina?

SOAK up the sun along the Dalmatian Coast for half the price of Croatia – by crossing into Bosnia and Herzegovina’s little-known share of the shoreline.

With its turquoise waters, pine forests and terracotta rooftops, the Dalmatian Coast is famously pretty.

But while the tourist hordes flock to Croatia for this scenery, you could enjoy it for less by going to the Bosnian beach town of Neum instead.

This budget haven butts into Croatia in between Dubrovnik and Split, a quirk that can be traced back to 1699 when the city state of Dubrovnik, terrified of an attack by Venetians, gave a tiny tract of land to the Ottoman empire to give itself a buffer against Venice.

This means Bosnia and Herzegovina now has the world’s smallest coastline, after Monaco, at just 12 miles.

Graced with daytime highs of 25C in September and within easy distance of both Dubrovnik and Split, the only major difference is the cost.

Even in Neum’s largest and most swanky hotel, the Grand Hotel Neum, a last-minute long weekend this month starts at £49pp per night. That includes breakfast, spa access, a choice of four swimming pools and a private beach.

Food and drink is much cheaper too.

You’d get change from a fiver for a couple of local beers and you can find Bosnian, Mediterranean and international dishes very reasonably priced.

The real crowd-pleaser is Ćcevapi, a popular Bosnian lunch to go.

Locals joke it’s the reason KFC never took off here.

This simple yet filling meal consists of mini grilled meat kebabs and raw onion slices stuffed inside a warm pitta bread. Again, you would struggle to spend £5 on this beloved staple.

By Laura Sanders

Its highlights include a monastery, which was originally built for a Dervish cult.

However, for the more traditional holidaymakers who like to spend their getaways by the beach, there’s more than enough to enjoy.

Neum town is arguably the best place to visit the Bosnian seaside, with Beach Searcher praising its scenery and its waters.

They wrote; “Neum town is located in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and famous for its magnificent mountain scenery and turquoise waters of an incredible deep colour.

“It seems that nature created it for one purpose – to make your vacation unforgettable.”

Bosnia’s lakes are also another draw for holidaymakers, and among the standouts are Bilećko Lake, Boračko Lake and Perućac Lake.

The last of those has waters that are around 22C during the summer months, making it a lovely place to cool down on a hot day.

Mostar is a popular destination in the countryCredit: Getty

What else do I need to know?

Both Ryanair and Wizz Air operate direct flights from the UK to Sarajevo, with flights starting from £15 for a one-way ticket.

Flights from the UK to Sarajevo take roughly two hours and 40 minutes.

Accommodation is also cheap, with overnight stays costing, on average £56 per night, according to the research from eurochange.

Sun Online Travel have found an overnight stay at the Pigeon Square Rooms, which is just 150 yards from the city centre, for £38 per night.

There are other options too, including a five-star hotel called Enjoy Apartments, which also costs £38 per night per room.

There are three local languages in Bosnia & Herzegovina, including Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian – although English is likely to be spoken at most hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions.

The Convertible Mark (KM or BAM) is the country’s official currency, with £10 getting 23.43 KM/BAM.

Wild Frontier’s Top Trending Destinations for 2025

HERE are the full list of Wild Frontier’s expert predictions for trending travel destinations in 2025.

Armenia
Bolivia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Cambodia
Egypt
Ghana
Kyrgyzstan
Montenegro
Nepal
North Africa (Algeria & Tunisia)
Romania
Saudi Arabia
Sri Lanka
Turkey
The Balkans

Here’s another little-known holiday destination not far from Moldova, but with cheap flights and beer.

And we’ve recently revealed our favourite spots for an autumn break.

Hotels, pints and food is cheap in Bosnia and HerzegovinaCredit: Alamy

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Business

GB News seeks court injunction to stop watchdog’s sanctions process

Published

30 mins ago

October 2, 2024

NewsAdmin

Stay informed with free updates

GB News is seeking to use the courts to stop regulator Ofcom from being able to carry out sanctions over breaches of the UK broadcasting code by the media group.

The UK broadcaster, which is part-owned by hedge fund boss Paul Marshall, has applied to the High Court for “interim relief” to prevent Ofcom from taking steps in sanction proceedings.

The move is highly unusual in an ongoing and public sanctions process. Ofcom has rarely faced attempted injunctions, according to one person with knowledge of the situation.

Details of the timing of the court case — which will be heard in the High Court in London on Thursday morning — were published on Wednesday afternoon.

GB News was in May found to have failed to preserve due impartiality in a live TV debate with then-prime minister Rishi Sunak — a breach that Ofcom said was “serious and repeated” and that would lead it to consider the imposition of a statutory sanction.

Ofcom received more than 500 complaints about the programme, including claims that it lacked due impartiality.

Ofcom has opened 19 investigations against the channel, and found it in breach 12 times.

The regulator’s chief Melanie Dawes told the FT this week that it was now “moving to sanctions on the most recent of those breaches”, given the build-up of code breaches in coverage by the UK broadcaster. However, no decision has yet been made to sanction the broadcaster.

Sanctions could typically start with a fine, Dawes said. Ofcom has been criticised by some media commentators as being toothless in the face of the repeated breaches of broadcasting rules by GB News, which have so far resulted in little more than stern warnings.

Ofcom is contesting arguments by GB News that the regulator acted unlawfully by commencing and then making public its investigation, according to a person close to the matter. This would stop the UK media regulator from reaching a final decision on the imposition of sanctions.

Central to the argument appears to be whether Sir Keir Starmer had agreed or was expected to agree to participate in a similar programme — which would indicate impartiality — and whether Ofcom’s move frustrated GB News’ efforts.

Ofcom claims that it is not arguable that it acted unlawfully by starting the investigation in public, and contends that GB News failed to schedule any linked and timely programme that might achieve the necessary impartiality.

The channel’s court application also asks that the judge grant confidentiality regarding certain correspondence relevant to the case. GB News declined to comment.

At the time of the Ofcom decision, GB News objected to the ruling and said the “threat to punish a news organisation with sanctions for enabling people to challenge their own prime minister strikes at the heart of democracy at a time when it could not be more vital”.

Ofcom declined to comment.

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Money

Six ways to make your dishwasher work even harder and more affordably

Published

31 mins ago

October 2, 2024

NewsAdmin

Six ways to make your dishwasher work even harder and more affordably

FOR many busy families, the dishwasher is an essential kitchen helper.

But you can make yours work even harder and more affordably with a few simple tricks.

Here’s what you need to know . . .

CHEAPER CLEAN: Dishwasher tablets are pricey so cut them in half if you have a smaller machine.

The reduced dose is usually still enough to get dishes sparkling.

And buy bigger packs to get the best value. For example, Sainsbury’s all-in-one dish-washer tablets 60-pack is £5.60, which breaks down to 9.3p per tablet, whereas a 30-pack is £3.10, equalling 10.3p each.

Deal of the day

Swan 1.7-litre pyramid kettle, £29.99 at Home BargainsCredit: Home Bargains

BOIL a brew with this stylish Swan 1.7-litre pyramid kettle, down from £69.99 to £29.99 at Home Bargains.

SAVE: £40.

Cheap treat

Cadbury’s Salted Caramel Dairy Milk, £1.65 for a 120g bar at TescoCredit: Tesco

SWEETEN your day with a delicious salted caramel spin on Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, £1.65 for a 120g bar at Tesco.

What’s new?

THERE’S a refreshed brunch menu at Frankie & Benny’s, with new items including loaded bagels and buttermilk pancakes, stuffed calzones, giant mozzarella sticks and baked pretzels.

Top swap

New Look’s take on the trend, for £45.99Credit: New Look

MAKE a style statement with these Mint Velvet snake-print ankle boots, £149 from Next. Or step up your savings with New Look’s take on the trend, for £45.99.

SAVE: £103.01

Little helper

STRICTLY dancer Amy Dowden has designed this T-shirt for Asda’s Tickled Pink campaign. It’s £10 and profits from sales go to the charities Breast Cancer Now and CoppaFeel.

PLAY NOW TO WIN £200

JOIN thousands of readers taking part in The Sun Raffle.

Every month we’re giving away £100 to 250 lucky readers – whether you’re saving up or just in need of some extra cash, The Sun could have you covered.

Every Sun Savers code entered equals one Raffle ticket.

The more codes you enter, the more tickets you’ll earn and the more chance you will have of winning!

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News

Biden deploys 1,000 soldiers as Helene death toll rises to 175

Published

38 mins ago

October 2, 2024

NewsAdmin

Biden deploys 1,000 soldiers as Helene death toll rises to 175

Hurricane Helene’s devastating impact in 100 seconds

US President Joe Biden has deployed an additional 1,000 active-duty soldiers to bolster aid efforts in the south-eastern US, after the region was pummelled by Hurricane Helene.

These soldiers will join the 6,000 National Guard members and 4,800 federal aid workers already fanned out across six states hit by extreme weather.

At least 175 people are now known to have been killed by Hurricane Helene, one of the deadliest storms to hit the US in recent times.

Hundreds of others remain missing, with search and rescue teams struggling to reach remote areas.

Aid deliveries have been made by airdrops and mules. The US government has said the clear-up effort could take years.

Biden travelled to the badly-affected states of North Carolina and South Carolina on Wednesday, while Vice-President Kamala Harris headed to neighbouring Georgia.

Both North Carolina and Georgia happen to be key swing states in November’s presidential election – and the storm has already become political after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump took his own trip to Georgia earlier in the week.

In North Carolina, Biden took an aerial tour of western areas of the state impacted by the storm. He is due to travel to other parts of North Carolina and South Carolina, as well as affected communities in Florida and Georgia on Thursday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announced.

“The Biden-Harris administration has remained focused on using every tool available to help people and their communities begin their road to recovery and rebuilding,” Ms Jean-Pierre said.

Helene hit the US on Thursday as a Category 4 hurricane – the most powerful on record to strike Florida’s Big Bend – before tearing through neighbouring states and downgrading to a tropical storm.

The scale of the rainclouds were unusual, and the storm lingered for relatively long periods. Saturated ground from previous rains was also an aggravating factor.

The BBC’s US partner CBS News has reported 175 deaths, recorded across six states: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia.

The toll surpasses that of Hurricane Ian, which in September 2022 became another of the 21st Century’s deadliest storms – claiming at least 156 lives.

According to CBS, almost half of the deaths caused by Helene have been in North Carolina alone, where six months’ worth of rain fell.

The state’s mountainous areas suffered particularly heavy rain – as is typical in storm conditions – which resulted in homes and bridges being washed away.

One emergency official in Buncombe County – which includes the hard-hit city of Asheville – said the state had experienced “biblical devastation”.

A volunteer involved in relief efforts told the BBC on Tuesday they knew someone who had “lost everything” in Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and had moved to Asheville, only to be devastated again nearly two decades later.

“Looks like she’s wiped out again,” the volunteer said. “She has no drinking water. No gasoline. The food in her fridge has rotted.”

The extreme weather has also forced the closure of mines in Spruce Pine, a small town that is home to the world’s largest-known source of high-purity quartz.

In Tennessee, state authorities are investigating the operator of a plastics factory where 11 workers were swept away by rushing floodwaters on Friday. Five of the employees were rescued. Two have been confirmed dead and four more remain missing.

Impact Plastics told CBS in a statement it had monitored weather conditions around its Erwin plant in north-eastern Tennessee, and dismissed employees “when water began to cover the parking lot and the adjacent service road, and the plant lost power”.

But in interviews with local outlets, employees said they were allegedly told to continue work in the factory until it was too late for a safe exit.

Jacob Ingram, a mold changer at the factory, filmed himself and four others waiting for rescue as vehicles and debris were carried away by the muddy water surrounding him.

“I was working at impact when the storm hit yesterday,” Mr Ingram wrote in a post on Facebook, adding he and 11 others were trapped on the back of a semi-truck. “I’m lucky to be alive.”

Inside a donation centre for those impacted by Hurricane Helene

Rebuilding efforts could take years, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said. Biden has allowed survivors to apply for federal assistance money by making disaster declarations in various states.

On Monday, Biden referenced reports that up to 600 people were unaccounted for. “God willing, they’re alive,” he said. “But there’s no way to contact them again because of the lack of cell phone coverage.”

More than a million people in some of the affected states also remained without power on Wednesday morning, according to monitoring site Poweroutage.us.

Initial analysis of the storm already suggests that human-induced climate change played a significant role in the amount of rainfall that was dumped.

After Helene hit late on Thursday, record flood crests were measured in at least seven locations in North Carolina and Tennessee.

In parts of western North Carolina, records that had stood since the “Great Flood” of July 1916 were smashed.

The Atlantic hurricane season continues until the end of November. The waters of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean are currently above average temperatures, meaning that it is possible that still more powerful storms could develop.

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