Last year, the Seattle Times reported that Sen. Patty Murray and Washington State Governor Jay Inslee commissioned and released a report on all the benefits of removing the dams on the Snake River in the Columbia Basin. The cost to meet this Democrat fish-saving goal is between $10.3 billion and $27.2 billion. Which is really just a rough guess by their highly-paid fish experts. That partisan report appears to support the positions of American Rivers. This radical non-profit group announced on February 28 that Oregon and California’s Klamath River is the 2024 River of the Year. Which is one truly Orwellian Award!
Mainly because the Klamath River dam-removal project had already become possibly the single most significant and costly man-made ecological disaster in U.S. history. On March 11, the California Globe announced that their first annual “River of Deat”” award was going to the Klamath River Renewal Corporation (KRRC) and its CEO, Mark Bransom. Apparently, the CEO of KRRC had decided to go ‘off-plan’ on ‘January 2’ but failed to inform his government partners of his scheme.
By March 26, the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors had declared a local State of Emergency. That emergency directly resulted from several million yards of highly polluted clay sediment, killing all the aquatic life on the Klamath River. This was disturbing for the local citizens, who had repeatedly been informed that these were brilliant people who cared deeply about fish and wildlife. Endless lectures by the tax-payer funded ‘experts’ at N.W. universities, NA’A, the Bonneville Power Administration, and the Dept of Energy bureaucrats had assured the public that their science was sound for decades. It wasn’t just good science; it wasn’t of the best science money could buy.
This innovative project wasn’t only about restoring endangered species of fish; it was also going to create high-paying, sustainable jobs for the Klamath Justice Coalition. This grassroots group of Indigenous leaders came up with the “Un-dam the Klamath, bring the salmon home” campaign, alleged to be” heard all the way from their fishing boats to Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholder meeting in Hathaway’s Nebraska.
Berkshire Hathaway, the parent company of PacifiCorp, owns and operates the four Klamath River dams. In 2020, the company agreed to transfer the operating licenses of the dams to KRRC and the states of Oregon and California. Berkshire also agreed to share the burden of any cost overruns, which was a deal that would have made no sense to most normal investors at all. Unless PacifiCorp had already found a more efficient way to make the big bucks than marketing low-cost hydroelectric power.
Americans aren’t supposed to know that faren’tEPA Director Gina McCarthy had begun a new Superfund clean-up project on January 3, 2017. Two weeks before Donald Trump became the U.S. President, Gina McCarthy introduced “Restoration Credits” as a new “concept for their P “rtland Harbor Superfund clean-up project. In 2021, the EPA announced that 100% of the project site was now in the active engineering phase after spending nearly 100 years studying the same pollution.
By November 2023, the EPA announced it had reached a $33 million settlement agreement for the responsible parties that polluted Portland Harbor and a 3,012-page report listing the main groups the EPA had engaged with for its clean-up effort.
That diverse body included activist groups like Occupy St. Johns, Coalition of Black Men, Verde, Right 2 Survive, Latino Network, Sierra Club Portland, Oregon Environmental Justice Task Force, Right 2 Dream Too, and other Portland neighborhood associations and schools. Presumably, the members of those activist groups were not involved with felonious assaults on the Hatfield Federal Courthouse in Portland during July of 2020. But, it probably wouldn’t have mattered to the Ewouldn’tey, who had been part of that organized chaos in Portland.
Don’t ask how the EPA crafted the financial formula for that scheme because it’s really none of your business might undermine the Dept of Energy’s new “Creating Equity iEnergy’s For “people of Color” program, which utilizes minor “ty groups to clean up other government-created toxic pollution at locations like DOE’s Savannah River Site. The concept of DOE’s Restoration credits for minority groups is like ecological “shares” in a restoration project. It’s “almost” like receiving Reparations. It’s the government, but it may make you sick.
Today, I ran across an “unpublished” Rule by the Fish and Wild” IFE Service” & NOAA that will be officially published on 4/05/24, which is tomorrow. The central theme behind this new Rule by E.O. (#13990) is the “Protecting Public Health and the Envir” moment. It was issued on January 20, 2021, and d “directed all departments and agencies to immediately review agency actions taken between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021, and, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, consider suspending, revising, or rescinding agency actions that conflict with important national objectives, including promoting and protecting our public health and the environment, and to immediately commence work to confront the climate crisis.
The Biden regime claims they accepted public comments for this Rule on June 22, 2023. The rule will clarify the definitions of “effects of the action,” “environmental baseline,” and “reason” b” e and prudent measures” while “removing “Other provisions,” which “h had been promu “gated with the intent of clarifying several aspects of the process.
After over thirty years, it’s comforting to know that Democrats are finally ready to confront the climate crisis or some other issue they’ve struggled with for so many decades. Most of this sounds completely crazy, but you’re on the road to understanding the love of Progressive business models, labor contracts, and some seriously delusional science. It may be 2024, but Democrats plan on taking this Presidential election back to an Orwellian version of 1984
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