The 27th meeting of the United Nations Climate talks, or COP27 is happening in Sharm El-Sheikh, a coastal resort town in Egypt. The gathering is happening amidst a crackdown on Egyptian civil society by the government around climate issues and food shortages.
Listen in: https://apple.co/3EiyqIK
Green and Red Podcast gets an update with a climate activist on the ground in Sharm El-Sheikh.
pic via Wild Earth Guardians
cross-posted from Censored News
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO—Adding to growing calls for President Biden to follow through on his promise to stop fossil fuel leasing on public lands, groups today delivered more protests in response to the Bureau of Land Management’s latest proposal to lease over 260,000 acres of public and ancestral tribal lands across Wyoming, New Mexico, and Kansas at its proposed May 2023 oil and gas lease sale.
In response to the short 30-day comment period deadline, advocates representing the Permian Basin Climate Justice Coalition and the Greater Chaco Coalition rallied in front of Bureau of Land Management New Mexico Headquarters in Santa Fe to deliver over 20,000 public comments, thousands of pages of technical comments and exhibits, as well as a letter requesting an extension of the reduced public comment period.
Today’s action underscores long-standing calls from environmental groups and environmental justice advocates for President Biden to keep his promise and end new fossil fuel leasing and phase out oil and gas development, despite recent hostage provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that ties continued federal oil and gas leasing to renewable energy investments.
“More oil and gas leasing is the exact opposite of what is needed to address the climate crisis. It furthers our dependence on fossil fuels while placing Black, Brown, Indigenous, and frontline communities at higher risk of harmful and unacceptable health and environmental consequences,” said Miya King-Flaherty, Organizer for Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter.
Thousands of organizations and communities across the U.S. have called on President Biden to halt federal fossil fuel expansion and phase out production consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Multiple analyses show emissions from existing fossil fuel projects have already pushed warming well past the threshold of climate catastrophe.
“Opening hundreds of thousands of additional public and ancestral tribal lands for more oil and gas drilling only serves to shackle regions such as the Permian for decades to come to boom-and-bust cycles that come with an oil-fueled economy,” said Kayley Shoup, Organizer for Citizens Caring for the Future. “Continuing a legacy of pollution and extraction zones is egregious at a time when addressing the impacts of climate change and investing in renewable energy should be a top priority.”
Over 3,000 acres of federal public land are being offered for auction in Eddy, Lea, and Chaves counties in southeastern New Mexico’s Permian Basin. The area is already known as a “climate bomb” where oil and gas development has more than quadrupled in the last decade, producing as much climate pollution as 24 coal plants. In New Mexico, 144,377 people, including 38,749 children, currently reside near or attend schools or daycares within a half-mile radius of active oil and gas operations.
“Continuing to lease our public lands for more oil and gas drilling proves President Biden is prioritizing Big Oil profits over future generations,” said Raena Garcia, Fossil Fuels and Lands Campaigner at Friends of the Earth. “Communities are knee-deep in climate catastrophe, with intensifying wildfires and hurricanes foreshadowing what’s to come if the fossil fuel industry keeps exploiting public lands. Biden must stop auctioning off our public lands if he wants to be the climate leader he claims to be.”
New Mexico is the fastest-warming and most water-stressed state in the continental U.S.; the oil and gas industry is flooding funds for political campaigns whilst contributing more than half of the state’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Supercharged by the warming climate, this year brought record-breaking fires and an unprecedented drought season not seen in over 1,200 years. For the first time in 40 years, the Rio Grande River went dry in Albuquerque.
“It’s long past time for our federal government to phase out oil and gas fracking and to prioritize our climate, environment, and public health above a profiteering industry that got us into the climate crisis in the first place,” said Rebecca Sobel, Organizing Director for WildEarth Guardians. “It’s imperative that the federal government end leasing on public lands if the Biden administration has any hope of meeting its climate goals and avoiding catastrophe.”
cross-posted from Wild Idaho Rising Tide 
Media Advisory
October 30, 2022
Media contacts:
Helen Yost, Wild Idaho Rising Tide
wild.idaho.rising.tide@gmail.com, 208-301-8039
Maig Tinnin, Rogue Climate
maig@rogueclimate.org, 541-852-2496
Stop GTN Xpress Week of Actions
Regional organizations and grassroots activists of 350 Spokane, Extinction Rebellion Palouse, Idaho Chapter Sierra Club, Rogue Climate, Veterans for Peace Spokane Chapter 35, and Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) are co-hosting three early November protests of the Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN) Xpress pipeline expansion project. These allied groups are publicly demonstrating in solidarity with frontline, indigenous, Wet’suwet’en protectors of their sovereignty and unceded territories from Coastal GasLink pipeline construction in British Columbia. The Canadian fossil fuels parent company of GTN, TC Energy (formerly TransCanada), notoriously owns Coastal GasLink and the incomplete Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
As an essential part of its application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), GTN must disclose pre-arranged, binding, precedent agreements with natural gas utilities, to demonstrate economic need and public interest in the project. Cascade Natural Gas, headquartered in Kennewick, Washington, has reserved an extra 20 million cubic feet per day of GTN Xpress gas, for delivery to Oregon and Washington customers. Intermountain Gas based in Boise, Idaho, has agreed to accept 79 million cubic feet of gas per day, more than half of GTN Xpress gas capacity. Only passing through the sparsely populated north Idaho panhandle, GTN Xpress gas for southern Idaho would displace some Williams Northwest pipeline gas across the Snake River Plain utility service area.
A growing Northwest movement and emerging coalition are planning peaceful, effective citizen pickets on nearby walkways outside fossil fuels corporate offices, to confront the perpetrators of the Coastal GasLink and GTN Xpress gas pipelines and attract a broad range of public involvement. Volunteer organizers encourage participants and supporters of these lively demonstrations to bring friends, families, signs, banners, and props, and share this event announcement and flyer and other issue outreach materials.
Issue Background
Attempting to foist stranded “natural” gas assets on unwitting citizens and utility ratepayers, TC Energy has stealthily secured approval by government regulatory agencies for increasing volumes in a dozen other pipelines, instead of building new, more controversial infrastructure. GTN has applied to FERC for a required certificate of public convenience and necessity for GTN Xpress, to upgrade the capacity of three compressor stations and move an additional 150 million cubic feet per day of methane gas along its 1,354-mile pipeline from British Columbia, through north Idaho, eastern Washington, and central Oregon, to southern Idaho and California. The 61-year-old, potentially explosive, fracked gas pipeline is dangerously located under the Spokane, Washington, area and below Sandpoint, Idaho and a nearby Schweitzer ski resort parking lot. The Athol, Idaho, pump station proposed for expansion stands only two miles from the popular visitor destination and precarious rides of Silverwood Theme Park.
As another industrial corridor for increasing corporate profits and imposing risks with few benefits on neighboring communities, GTN Xpress would extend fossil fuels extraction and industry and government violence toward First Nations people and their lands and waters around the pipeline origin, and would dismiss the public input process rights and jeopardize the health and safety of directly affected, rural and tribal residents close to the pipeline route and compressor stations, with higher exposure to volatile and cancer-causing emissions and hazardous gas leaks, explosions, and accidents. With current GTN pipeline volumes already double the market demand that is rapidly decreasing, while renewable energy costs decline, GTN Xpress would boost Northwest gas consumption, burden utility ratepayers with expensively investing in prolonged fossil fuels infrastructure, and disproportionately impact low-income communities with worse respiratory diseases. This boondoggle would increase the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change by 3.25 million-plus metric tons per year (up 16 percent in Idaho, 7.7 percent in Oregon, and 3.8 percent in Washington) and exacerbate the extreme droughts, wildfires, storms, floods, and global air, water, and climate pollution attributed to fossil fuels.
During its comment period on the GTN Xpress draft environmental impact statement (EIS) that closed on August 22, FERC received over 1,300 oppositional petition signatures and extensive remarks from concerned citizens, climate and environmental groups, and tribal, state, and federal government officials, denouncing deficient climate effects analysis, inadequate evidence of economic need, and the pipeline expansion’s significant contributions to worsening climate change, while the Northwest transitions off outmoded, destructive fossil fuels toward more sustainable, renewable energy sources.
The attorneys general of Washington, Oregon, and California filed joint comments calling on FERC to deny a GTN Xpress permit and motioning to intervene in the FERC case. They raised concerns that the pipeline expansion would force more fossil fuels on West Coast state residents for at least another 30 years, violate state policy commitments to reduce climate-polluting emissions by 80 to 95 percent by 2050, and make these ambitious but crucial targets more difficult to achieve. In more recent comments to FERC, Idaho senators, congressmen, and the governor disputed the legal basis of the West Coast state attorneys general arguments. The commission still has not granted, and GTN has motioned against, the case involvement of these attorneys general. With postponed release of a final EIS anticipated on November 18 and a conclusive FERC decision on GTN Xpress expected in February 2023, Northwest communities are acting swiftly to halt this proposal and oppose any new or expanded fossil fuels extraction, transportation, and infrastructure projects.
For further information, visit the WIRT website and facebook pages describing GTN Xpress impacts and updates and pipeline resistance opportunities:
https://wildidahorisingtide.org/2022/10/24/stop-gtn-xpress-week-of-actions
cross-posted from Stop Camp Grayling
For immediate release:
Stop Camp Grayling Protesters Hang Banner, Light Fireworks at DNR Director’s Home.
Forest defenders descend on DNR director Dan Eichenger’s home to demand he reject the land-use agreement with the Michigan National Guard… (and) call on the DNR to return the land to its rightful stewards: the Ojibwa, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples.
’We know the military exists to bring pain and misery to our relatives and our earth,’ said a group member. ‘The war machine must be stopped, and our targets have names and addresses. ’We will be back.’
Full release: 
