A Unique Population of Fin Whales Has Rebounded in Northern BC

But an LNG terminal may endanger their recovery, scientists say.

Larry Pynn 12 Jan 2022 | Hakai Magazine
Larry Pynn is a veteran environmental journalist who has received some 30 awards for his newspaper and magazine writing, including eight Jack Webster Awards.

Commercial whaling was thought to have wiped out fin whales, the second-largest creature on Earth, from the Kitimat fjord system in the 1960s. In 2005, they began to return.

 Photo via Shuttterstock.

As mysteries go, they don’t get much bigger.

In a year with plenty of gripping issues to choose from, these were the big draws in our pages.

Reaching lengths of up to 20 metres, fin whales are the second-largest creature on Earth. These behemoths live largely offshore and spend much of their time feeding on krill, squid and small fish in the open ocean. But on the north coast of British Columbia, a globally unique population of more than 100 fin whales frequents the Kitimat fjord system, navigating the myriad deep trenches that wend through the Great Bear Rainforest, and sometimes swimming within 20 metres of shore.

This is considered to be the only fjord system in British Columbia or elsewhere that fin whales regularly inhabit.

The mystery is, why?

A new collaborative study based on 15 years of research has set out to answer this question. Led by Eric Keen, science co-director with British Columbia’s North Coast Cetacean Society, the research team has explored the confluence of factors that makes the Kitimat fjord system so uniquely inviting to these gigantic whales.
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For one, the scientists note that the coastal, enclosed and inland habitats in this fjord system are more dynamic and productive than open ocean ecosystems. Strong bottom currents and features on the seafloor cause nutrients to upwell, supporting vast numbers of zooplankton for the whales to eat.

The complex twists and turns of the glacially carved channels that comprise this fjord system, some of which are as deep as 700 metres, may make the fin whales feel more comfortable than in other inlets, Keen suggests, since they offer multiple options for escape from predatory killer whales.

Adding to the mystery, commercial whaling is thought to have extirpated fin whales from the fjord system in the 1960s. Whaling records show that of the 24,862 whales slaughtered on the B.C. coast from 1908 to 1967, a total of 129 individuals, or 0.5 per cent of the total, were taken at or near the fjord system. Nearly 100 of those were fin whales.

With their numbers depleted by whaling, fin whales were not observed in the fjord system again until 2005. Since then, however, the local population has rebounded to between 100 and 120 individuals as the whales have started to reclaim their former home. Most of these whales visit from June to October. Just over half travel in groups of two to 12, while the rest swim alone.

This points to another explanation for what may be drawing the whales to the fjord system. Fin whales, Keen and his collaborators say, may also be attracted to the fjord system by the area’s remoteness and lack of human impacts. The region is free from intensive boat traffic, which limits underwater noise and ship strikes, and features relatively little pollution, coastal development and habitat degradation.

But that is about to change.

The construction of a new LNG export terminal and a number of other proposed industrial developments in the Kitimat region mean that the whales’ nirvana could soon be threatened once more.

According to the study, if all proposed shipping projects currently under review go forward, large vessel traffic through the area will increase 13-fold.

Joe Gaydos is the science director with the SeaDoc Society and was not associated with the study. Gaydos says it is gratifying to see fin whales, including mothers and calves, making a comeback to the area post-whaling.

But he also cautions that fin whales are known to be particularly vulnerable to ship strikes, especially in confined coastal areas.

“When you get animals feeding almost perpendicular to a shipping lane, there’s a good chance of making contact with a boat,” says Gaydos. “It allows them to get T-boned.

 These are giants, right?”


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A complicating factor is that because of their ongoing recovery, scientists with the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada recommended that the federal government downlist the status of Pacific coast fin whales from “threatened” to “special concern.”

Threatened status prohibits the destruction of a protected species’ critical habitat, along with other measures, while special concern requires only the drafting of a management plan, the report notes.

Currently, the Canadian government is weighing the recommendation.

Keen is concerned that downlisting the species based on the fin whales’ relatively abundant overall numbers could minimize protection for the few that frequent the fjord system.

“The legal teeth to enforce protection in the coastal area where most of the impacts are concentrated will be undermined,” he says.

Guess Who’s Leading the Charge for Nuclear Power in Canada?

Small reactors make no economic sense, despite the boost by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and lobbyists.

David Climenhaga 10 Jan 2022 | Alberta Politics

‘Real solution’ for Canada? Former heads of nuclear regulatory committees in the UK, US, Germany and France just announced that ‘nuclear is not a practicable means to combat climate change.’ 

Image via Shutterstock.


Small nuclear reactors don’t make any more economic sense now than they did back in the summer of 2020 when Alberta Premier Jason Kenney took to the internet to tout the supposed benefits of the largely undeveloped technology being promoted by Canada’s nuclear industry.

In a year with plenty of gripping issues to choose from, these were the big draws in our pages.

Now that Kenney has taken to Twitter again to claim atomic energy is a “real solution that helps reduce emissions” and that so-called small modular reactors can “strengthen and diversify our energy sector,” it’s worth taking another look at why the economics of small nuclear reactors don’t add up.

As I pointed out in 2020, “as long as natural gas is cheap and plentiful, small nuclear reactors will never make economic sense.”

Natural gas is somewhat more expensive now than it was then, but not enough to make a difference to that calculation when the massive cost of any new nuclear-energy project is considered.

Even “small modular reactors,” so named to reassure a public skittish about the term nuclear and wary of the costs and risks of atomic reactors, are extremely expensive. It would be more accurate to call them “medium-sized nuclear reactors.”
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For example, two such reactors built by Russia starting in 2006 were supposed to cost US$140 million. They ended up costing US$740 million by the time the project was completed in 2019.

Getting approvals for smaller reactors is time consuming, too. As environmentalist and author Chris Turner pointed out yesterday, the first small nuclear reactor approved in the United States “submitted its application in 2017, got approval late last year, could begin producing 700MW by 2029 if all goes perfectly. Solar will add double that to Alberta’s grid by 2023.” Indeed, the estimated completion date of the NuScale Power project may be even later.

The small reactors touted by many companies, often entirely speculative ventures, are nothing more than pretty drawings in fancy brochures. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there are about 50 concepts, but only a couple in the United States and Russia with massive amounts of government money behind them are anything more than pipedreams or stock touts’ pitches to investors.

And small nuclear reactors are less economical than big reactors, so power companies aren’t interested in building them; all but one proposed design requires enriched uranium, which Canada doesn’t produce, so they won’t do much for uranium mining in Alberta; and all the safety and waste-removal problems of big nukes continue to exist with small ones.

These points are documented in more detail my 2020 post, which also discussed why smaller reactors will never create very many jobs in Alberta, although they could be a boon to Ontario if the technology took off.

Kenney’s most recent tweet — which provides a link to a slick video touting nuclear power produced by the British newsmagazine the Economist, was posted on Jan. 6.

By coincidence, presumably, a communique issued the same day by the former heads of nuclear regulatory committees in the United Kingdom, United States, Germany and France concluded that “nuclear is not a practicable means to combat climate change.”

“The central message, repeated again and again, that a new generation of nuclear will be clean, safe, smart and cheap, is fiction,” the communique states.

Nuclear energy is neither cheap enough nor safe enough to provide an effective strategy against global climate change, the communique authors argued. “To make a relevant contribution to global power generation, up to more than 10,000 new reactors would be required, depending on reactor design.”

Among their key points:

Nuclear power more expensive than renewable energy on a similar scale
None of the problems of waste disposal have been solved
It’s so expensive financial markets won’t invest in it, so it requires massive public subsidies
No one is prepared to insure against the full potential cost of environmental and human impacts of accidental radiation releases
Construction timelines are too long for it to make a contribution to stopping global warming


So why are Canadian provinces like Alberta so enthusiastic about the idea?

Well, it provides a way for governments captured by the fossil fuel industry to show they’re doing something about climate change without actually doing anything about climate change.

Of course, just because nuclear power generators might reduce the carbon footprint of oilsands extraction, that doesn’t mean the oil extracted would not be burned elsewhere, contributing to climate change.

For a government like Kenney’s United Conservative Party, it’s also an opportunity to make positive-sounding announcements about new jobs in a new industry on days when news media would otherwise be concentrating on the latest scandal — nowadays pretty well every day.

Moreover, the UCP Government is being actively lobbied by the Canadian Nuclear Association, “the voice of the Canadian nuclear industry since 1960,” which “promotes the industry nationally and internationally.



Are Thousands of New Nuclear Generators in Canada’s Future?

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According to the Alberta Lobbyist Registry, Calgary-based New West Public Affairs, a firm with close ties to the Kenney government headed by former Harper government minister Monte Solberg, has been engaged to “facilitate introductions for the Canadian Nuclear Association and share information on small modular reactors” with various government departments.

New West was hired “specifically, to generate support for the technology and to identify if there is an opportunity in Alberta’s mining and oil and gas sectors for the deployment of new low carbon energy sources, including nuclear,” the registry entry says.

The CNA is also using Ottawa-based Earnscliffe Strategies, one of Canada’s best-known lobby firms, to seek “support for clean electricity — including nuclear electricity — as a foundation for emissions reduction in Canada.” In addition, Earnscliffe is lobbying for “support for the research and development of small modular reactors.”

Kenney and lobbyists.

David Climenhaga   is an award-winning journalist, author, post-secondary teacher, poet and trade union communicator. He blogs at AlbertaPolitics.ca. Follow him on Twitter at @djclimenhaga.

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=NUKE+ALBERTA

This Is ‘Kenneyism’
How the unpopular premier’s recipe of intimidation, disinformation and sweeping new laws is transforming Alberta’s culture.

Taylor Lambert 

17 Jan 2022 | TheTyee.ca
Taylor Lambert has written three non-fiction books about Alberta. He lives in Calgary. Find him on Twitter @ts_lambert.

LONG READ

Kenney’s authoritarian tactics aim to quash dissent and have targeted not just academia and unions but even art students. Illustration for The Tyee by Bob Krieger.

When Jesse Drwiega won the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Award for Performing and Visual Arts in 2020, he was thrilled. The prestigious honour provided the 25-year-old actor, singer and dancer from Red Deer a $5,000 scholarship as he prepared to pursue his master’s in theatre studies.

In a year with plenty of gripping issues to choose from, these were the big draws in our pages.

As requested, Drwiega wrote and recorded an acceptance speech and, on the night of the online event, tuned in to watch. But when his name was announced the ceremony moved on without playing his video statement.

Drwiega quickly realized what was going on.

A few days before, he’d received a call from an Alberta government official who’d asked him to re-record his video. Specifically, would Drwiega drop his brief mention of being disappointed with recent cuts to arts funding? The lieutenant-governor was going to be in attendance, and the government would prefer such views be deleted.

Drwiega had said no. He believed he had a right to respectfully express an opinion — especially given the ceremony was dedicated to students in the arts.
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It had made him mad to have to stand his ground. And now, upon seeing himself all but erased from the event, anger gave way to shock.

So he posted the missing 85-second video to Facebook, including the part where he said he was “saddened” by the government’s cuts to arts and education, and also the part where he cheerfully thanked the 25th legislature, under Ralph Klein, for establishing the award in the first place. Noting that there are many other students in Alberta in need of such support, he hoped one day to be able to “use this privilege to help them achieve their dreams and goals.”

Drwiega’s post soon went viral, and the ensuing media coverage forced the government to defend itself against charges of censorship.

“As an artist, your most powerful tool is your voice,” Drwiega told The Tyee. “I deserve to have this platform to talk about this, and you’re not going to take that away from me.”

It may be tempting to see the whole episode as one of comic ineptitude — a government clumsily turning mild criticism that would have likely gone unnoticed into the top story of the day.

But this is just one example of heavy-handed tactics employed by Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party government against those it deems adversaries. So many such instances have piled up that the ability to speak one’s mind increasingly feels under threat in a province whose citizens famously extol personal freedom. The torque exerted by Kenney and his team is distorting the province’s political culture.

The relentless headlines generated by this approach can at times seem amusingly if depressingly surreal. But a glance south of the border provides sobering context for ignoring, dismissing or tolerating increasing authoritarianism.

That’s a heavy word. But even in Alberta, which has had its share of ideological governments, the UCP’s tenure is notable not only for the details of its agenda, but the zeal and tactics with which it pursues it. As premier, Kenney has overseen practice and policy that undermine individual rights and the democratic process, used the power of the state to target perceived enemies and sought to distort public information.

This is a government that established the Canadian Energy Centre, better known as the “energy war room,” a propaganda machine for the fossil fuel industry.

It launched a public inquiry into foreign funding of environmental groups and industry critics, alleging a vast and probably criminal conspiracy that never was unearthed.

It unilaterally closed the office of the election commissioner while it was investigating Kenney’s victory in the 2017 UCP leadership race.

It introduced multiple pieces of legislation that experts say may violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including laws empowering cabinet to make protesting illegal in arbitrary locations or letting people purchase memberships in political parties in someone else’s name without their permission or knowledge.

With an eye to the future, Kenney is radically reforming basic lessons taught to children, while dismissing experts who decry the new curriculum and undercutting the corps of educators who might resist such efforts.

And in this era when social media drives political discourse, Kenney’s “issues managers” aggressively hound critics of the government online, earning six-figure public salaries for their service.

Sometimes it’s a member of cabinet practicing such intimidation. In the span of roughly two months in 2020, former minister of health Tyler Shandro went to a doctor’s home to yell at him about a social media post the doctor had shared, sent threatening emails to citizens — including one vowing to send the province’s protective services after a woman — and used his position to obtain confidential contact information in order to call doctors who had protested against his health-care cuts. (Shandro is now minister of labour and immigration.)

The overall picture is of a provincial government determined to quash dissent and systematically weaken the bases of power of their opponents — not just the NDP, but academia, unions, even theatre students on awards night.

So, is authoritarianism too strong a word to apply to such methods? Try “Kenneyism.”

That’s the term John Carlaw, a political scientist at Ryerson University, coined in his dissertation about Jason Kenney’s style, which he sums up as “a creative form of authoritarian populist politics.”

Kenney is “a movement conservative,” Carlaw told The Tyee. “I think he definitely sees his role as a large ideological struggle.”

Kenney was honing Kenneyism well before he arrived to Alberta politics. As immigration minister in Stephen Harper’s federal government, he probed ethnic communities for receptiveness to right-wing messaging in an attempt to broaden the support of a government whose policies would have a substantively negative impact on those same communities.

Much earlier, as a student senator at the University of San Francisco, he waged war on a group of women law students for their support of reproductive rights, equating such views with support for pedophilia and the Ku Klux Klan. When his small, Jesuit-run university sided with the women’s right to free speech, Kenney threatened to petition the Vatican to strip the school of its Catholic designation. “There are certain absolute values that cannot be actively worked against,” he said at the time.

“The demonization of opponents is really a through line” in Kenney’s career, according to Carlaw. “That’s part of his political style and approach. He likes to be on the offensive, it seems.”

After the NDP’s 2015 victory shattered the myth of Alberta as conservative monolith, Kenneyism became the prescribed cure. Kenney moved west, forged a merger between two conservative parties, defeated Rachel Notley in 2019, and began his quest to not only rebuild that myth, but strengthen and entrench it like never before.

“These are fundamental changes they’re making to our institutions,” notes Mount Royal University education professor Roberta Lexier. “And they’re not going to be easy to backtrack on once the government changes.”

If you can’t beat ’em, fire ’em

The UCP is Kenney’s creation, his promised amalgam of the long-reigning Progressive Conservatives and the upstart, even more right-leaning Wildrose Party. But his victory in the party’s first leadership race in 2017 came under a cloud of suspicion of fraud.

The race was seen as essentially between Kenney and former Wildrose Party leader Brian Jean. But the campaign of the distant third-place candidate, Jeff Callaway, was in fact being stage-managed by Kenney’s people behind the scenes, serving as a proxy for attacking Jean to allow Kenney to rise above the fray.

In November 2018, the provincial elections commissioner received an anonymous complaint about illegal donations to the Callaway campaign, prompting an investigation. Weeks later, the story of the “kamikaze” campaign broke. By March 2019, the RCMP was involved.

Allegations and documents continued to leak, showing the extent to which Callaway’s campaign was being controlled by Kenney’s then-deputy chief of staff Matt Wolf. As the election commissioner’s investigation progressed, the commissioner levied a total of $210,000 in fines against 15 people.

But that work came to a sudden halt. Seven months after his UCP creamed Rachel Notley’s NDP government, winning a massive majority, Kenney fired the commissioner in the midst of the investigation.

The media gasped and Notley accused Kenney of “an absolutely unprecedented abuse of power.”

A report in April 2020 cleared Kenney and the UCP of ethics violations, saying the UCP did not stand to directly benefit by the move. The RCMP investigation is ongoing.

Involuntary memberships

For decades, Alberta was often termed a virtual “one-party state,” so reliable was support for the Progressive Conservatives. But Kenney, whose polled support is low and keeps dropping, acts less like the premier of a natural ruling party and more like someone who thinks he needs to rig election rules to retain power.

Consider Bill 81, introduced last month, which the UCP government says “strengthens our electoral system” and “show[s] our commitment” to democracy. Who could argue with that?

In fact, the bill is so controversial that it caused debate in the legislature to run until nearly 3 a.m. and prompted three UCP MLAs to vote with the NDP against its passage.

The law appears to open the door for individuals to purchase memberships in a political party in bulk, even in the name of other people, even without their consent or knowledge. An effort by UCP MLA Dave Hanson to add seven words to the bill — “with the written consent of that person” — was filibustered by UCP cabinet members.

Their justification was that the UCP’s own party bylaws do not currently allow buying a membership for someone other than a spouse or dependent child. The party, however, has been accused of just that in the past.

Free speech, except where we say so

The 2020 Indigenous-led blockade of national railways in support of the Wet’suwet’en caused inconveniences for many and hurt the profits of businesses. Kenney came out swinging in his rhetoric, calling the protests “eco-colonialism.”

“This is not about Indigenous people. It’s not about carbon emissions. It’s about a hard-left ideology that is, frankly, opposed to the entire modern industrial economy. It’s about time that our police services demonstrated that this is a country that respects the rule of law,” he said. And then he and his government got busy grabbing sweeping new powers.

The UCP drafted Bill 1, which makes it illegal to protest on, obstruct or interfere with the construction of “essential infrastructure.” The legislation includes a list of such categories, such as highways, pipelines, railways, refineries, utilities, dams and so on; these have specific legal definitions — a “highway” under the Traffic Safety Act, for example, includes all city streets, sidewalks and ditches.

On top of that, the law grants cabinet the power to declare whatever it likes as “essential infrastructure” on an ad hoc basis — in effect, the government can arbitrarily declare peaceful protest illegal wherever and whenever.

Hundreds of protesters, including supporters of public education and health systems, marched outside the United Conservative Party annual general meeting in Calgary in November 2019. Kenney has made a regular target of medical professionals and academics, cutting funding and ordering a reboot of K-12 curriculum he claimed was the secret plot of ‘radical socialists.’ In 2020, his government drafted a bill that granted it the power to arbitrarily declare peaceful protest illegal wherever and whenever. 

Photo by Dave Chidley, the Canadian Press.

As I wrote at the time, this law has clear roots in white supremacy and a colonial mindset. Though it was crafted as an intimidation tactic against Indigenous people and communities, it ominously received royal assent as Albertans took to the streets to support the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Now it’s available to be used, in theory, to quash any public dissent against the government.

If you can’t say something nice, [redacted]

Academics across the country cried foul when Kenney, during a 2019 legislative session, dismissed critical analysis by University of Calgary political scientist Melanee Thomas by pointing out that she had been a candidate for the federal NDP in 2004 and 2006. The implication, crystal clear, was that Thomas was not a highly qualified expert in her field but just a partisan hack fighting for her team.

“I have to be honest: to be directly targeted by a head of government is chilling,” Thomas wrote on Twitter. “It is more so when that person is responsible for your institution’s funding and has just gutted its budget for the current fiscal year.”

In response, more than 600 academics from across Canada signed a letter to Kenney, condemning his words as an attack on academic freedom “consistent with an increased disregard for expert knowledge,” and reminding the premier of his “position of enormous power.”

This should not have been surprising. Before they even won power, the party clearly demonstrated a willingness to demonize individuals to make political hay. In 2018, Ed Whittingham, the former director of the Pembina Institute, was named to the board of the Alberta Energy Regulator by the Notley government. The UCP didn’t hesitate.

“It’s outrageous that the NDP government would appoint a foreign-funded, anti-oilsands, anti-pipeline activist like Mr. Whittingham to such an important government body,” blared a press release by UCP House leader Jason Nixon, now minister of environment and parks.

This was echoed in the pages of Canada’s largest newspaper chain. “Alberta’s NDP government has done it again — it has appointed an enemy of Alberta’s oil and gas industry to oversee it, regulate it and advise on it,” wrote Postmedia columnist Licia Corbella. (The Calgary Herald later admitted she had failed to disclose to her bosses or readers that she was a UCP member who voted in the party’s leadership race while simultaneously covering it.)

Oddly, this characterization as an enemy of the industry was not shared by the industry itself. Rather, Whittingham “provided a balanced voice to help bridge the divide in the economy versus environment debate,” Shell Canada president Michael Crothers has said. The Financial Post in 2016 called Pembina “the green group that industry could work with,” and said it had “collaborated with industry for decades to improve environmental practices rather than demand its demise.”

The two main lines of attack from the UCP and its allies were both familiar. One was that all who favour stronger environmental regulations are “anti-Alberta” by virtue of not wanting unchecked oil and gas expansion.

The other charge levied was that Pembina received vast sums from foreign “anti-Alberta” interests in order to wage war on the province and its oil and gas extractors. This line of attack, like the first, was not true.

But the Big Lie is a prime tactic of authoritarians because often it works — by inventing simplistic villains to rally against and blame for complex problems that actually require good faith to solve. As for Whittingham the foil, he quickly became the most hated man in the province. When the UCP released its platform for the provincial election, one specific pledge was to “Fire Ed Whittingham.”

The UCP won nearly 55 per cent of the popular vote. The day before Kenney was to be sworn in as premier, Whittingham submitted a resignation letter that noted “much effort was made to defame my character.” In response, Kenney tweeted, “It was gracious of Ed Whittingham to resign a day before we could fire him. Our government will never appoint people like him who are avowed opponents of Alberta jobs.”

Two months later, a public inquiry into supposed foreign funding of environmental groups was announced. In other words, let the show trials begin.

Enemies of the state

The inquiry was a campaign promise, predicated on the allegation that a sinister network of foreign funding was being directed to groups and activists for the purpose of attacking the Alberta oil and gas industry.

The notion was little more than a conspiracy theory, as demonstrated by the $3.5 million public inquiry launched by the UCP and conducted by forensic accountant Steve Allan. After requesting an extension for his deadline three times, Allan’s report found no illegal actions by any individuals or organizations. “Indeed, they have exercised their rights of free speech,” he wrote.

The New York Times headline said it all: “Alberta Took on Environmental Groups, But Only Proved They Did Nothing Wrong.”

The terms of reference for the inquiry were changed multiple times, broadening the scope from investigating those who used foreign funding to spread misinformation about oil and gas to include any groups who received foreign funding, even if they told the truth

.

Kenney unveils the war room, otherwise known as the Canadian Energy Centre, in Calgary in December 2019. Shielded from public scrutiny and producer of one self-embarrassing headline after another, the propaganda factory nevertheless serves to advance authoritarian populism by projecting a narrative of endless warfare against villainous ‘anti-Albertan’ conspirators. 

Photo by Greg Fulmes, the Canadian Press.

The inquiry itself brought to mind the U.S. Senate hearings led by Representative Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s that trampled people’s rights and reputations in pursuit of a supposed legion of Communist subversives within America’s institutions and among the wider populace.

Allan’s inquiry, too, started with the premise that certain people who disagreed with the state were threats to be exposed and punished. Like McCarthy’s inquisition, Allan’s two-year effort was lent a veneer of legitimacy and seriousness by the state; and as with the McCarthy hearings, the absurdity of its pretext risks obscuring its truly dangerous quality.

The government didn’t let reality get in the way of the narrative it preferred. “These groups were real, they targeted [oil and gas], they celebrated it when the projects were cancelled,” said Energy Minister Sonya Savage while announcing the report. “And I’m pretty convinced that they’re not the sole cause; they’re a pretty darn big cause of what happened to all our energy projects in Alberta.”

In November, several environmental organizations named in the report threatened to sue Kenney personally for defamation if he failed to retract and apologize for statements saying the inquiry found that they spread misinformation about the oil and gas industry. The government has retained outside counsel for the premier.

Undercutting intellectuals

The Kenney government’s overhaul of higher education, released in April 2021, is premised on the idea that post-secondary education should serve the needs of the private sector by being, essentially, a publicly-funded pipeline delivering human capital and “commercialized” research to the specifications of industry.

The plan, known as Alberta 2030, tilts towards polytechnic and trade schools and away from the province’s four research universities. That is evident in the funding cuts imposed by the Kenney government. The University of Calgary’s funding has dropped 18 per cent over the past two years, now receiving less in operational support from the province than in 2011.

The province’s flagship institution, the University of Alberta, has been hit worst of all. Despite consistent rankings as one of the top research universities in Canada, and despite contributing billions of dollars to the provincial economy each year, the school’s funding has been cut by more than $170 million under the UCP, including a $60 million reduction in the 2021 budget just two months before the Alberta 2030 plan was released.

“The UCP is a particular brand of anti-intellectual that I think is incredibly problematic for higher education, and universities in particular,” said Lexier at Mount Royal University. Kenney and his government harness free-market, neoliberal narratives as they go about slashing university budgets and raising tuition rates.

“The problem with that,” said Lexier, “is that it turns students into clients and customers, where they’re paying a hell of a lot of money to get a certain experience. So their relationship to the institution has changed, and our role as faculty has changed as well — we’re now employees rather than a community of scholars.”

The youth are our future

If Kenney perceived academia as something of a political or cultural threat, he seems to have seen elementary and secondary education as an opportunity.

When the NDP carried on the work of a long-overdue curriculum update initiated by the previous Progressive Conservative government, he feverishly attacked them as radical leftists with a “socialist agenda” who were remaking education “in secret” behind closed doors. “If the NDP tries to smuggle more of their politics into the classroom through their curriculum, we will put that curriculum through the shredder and go right back to the drawing board.”

Once elected, that’s just what the Kenney government did, as Education Minister Adriana LaGrange appointed a panel to revise the NDP’s revisions. When the draft curriculum was leaked in October 2020, it was widely panned by parents, teachers and education experts as racist and Eurocentric, promoting a burnished image of the oil and gas industry and seeking “balance” in lessons about climate change.

David Scott, an associate professor of education at the University of Calgary, wrote an article on the UCP’s approach. “Seen within the context of the rise of authoritarian populism, the advisory panel’s various recommendations reflect a belief that societal values are trending in the wrong direction, and the K–4 program can be used as a tool to reinstate what are perceived as traditional values and beliefs,” wrote Scott.

He pointed to the removal from the K-4 curriculum of any reference to residential schools, “notions of equity and an ecological world view” as “an attempt to ensure that children will not be exposed to histories, values and beliefs [the UCP] associated with left-wing ideologies.”

Instead, the recommendation that students memorize “a particular and common body of historical facts points to fears that society is losing the authority of a legitimizing historical narrative that has sustained Canadian society in the past, which social studies has a mission to re-establish.”

It’s worth pointing out, as Scott does, that the existing social studies program was considered “one of the most forward-thinking” of its time when introduced in 2005. To quote the program itself, teachers should help students become “engaged in the democratic process and aware of their capacity to effect change in their communities, society and world.” The premier at the time was noted radical socialist Ralph Klein.

“Education is an incredibly powerful tool for social change,” Lexier observed. “It can also be an incredibly powerful tool to prevent social change.”

Ministry of Bigfoot bashing

Every government spins, trying to frame the narrative in ways that benefit it. But Kenney’s approach is to manufacture propaganda at an industrial scale. Exhibit A: The creation of the Canadian Energy Centre — more widely known as the “energy war room.”

The war room was established by the government as a private corporation, thus placing it outside the reach of freedom of information access. It has picked some big targets — like the New York Times, which it declared an enemy of Albertans for publishing a story that accurately noted investors were shying away from the oilsands.

Eventually war-roomers trained their guns on Bigfoot. That would be the animated Netflix children’s film called Bigfoot Family, attacked for spreading unacceptable misinformation about the oil and gas industry. Kenney said the film’s intent was to “defame in the most vicious way possible, in the impressionable minds of kids, the largest industry in the province.”

Widespread mockery ensued. “Alberta’s war room counters ‘Bigfoot Family’ with $50 million production of ‘Peter the Pipeline,’” quipped satire site the Beaverton.

Underlying the farce, however, is the uncomfortable reality that a Canadian government spent millions in public money to wage a public relations war on behalf of wealthy corporations that ran the gamut from purchasing misleading billboards in Times Square to attacking free speech in cartoons. Even more uncomfortable is that many Albertans supported it.

‘Imagine’

Though such tactics may seem alarming and unprecedented in this country, it’s important to note that the Canadian colonial project is itself authoritarian, designed to impose a particular worldview on unwilling people, by force if necessary. The heavy hand of the state is hardly novel for many, particularly Indigenous and Black people. Strikingly, as more Canadians have slowly but increasingly begun to recognize these ugly truths, Kenney has clung to the myths and symbols of colonialism.

He rushed to defend Canada’s racist first prime minister John A. Macdonald, for example, as “an imperfect man [who] was still a great leader” at the moment when the discovery of unmarked graves of Indigenous children heightened outcry about Canada’s residential schools.

For Lexier, the UCP government’s actions are by purpose and design. “I think it would be nice to think that this was just their semi-competent, stumbling-through mess that they make it seem like it is,” she said, reflecting on boondoggles like the war room. “But we should give conservatives a lot more credit for their strategy and really intense thinking about society and how it functions and where the bases of power are.”

When Lexier talks about how it feels to live under Kenney’s government as a person who doesn’t share its politics, she describes the state using its might to punish and reward in order to create division. “It’s about silencing us, driving us out of the province and undercutting our power as much as possible.”

Many who can afford to are indeed leaving. In response to the UCP’s policies, more than four in 10 of Alberta’s doctors have considered exiting the province. Though the government downplayed such things publicly, it was tracking hundreds of rural physicians considered at risk for closing or altering their practices — and, in character, it acted unilaterally to bar doctors from leaving en masse.

Lexier said that while there are plenty of UCP supporters in academia, the overall mood is one of exhaustion. She said 12 of her colleagues have left the province in the last two years, and she estimates that “more than half” of those remaining are actively looking for positions elsewhere, including herself.

“A lot of people have left because this province is horrible for academics,” she said. “Before the UCP was elected, I thought this would be the place I would stay. I was happy to settle here. I hadn’t looked at a job posting in 10 years, and now I’m looking all the time.”

Drwiega, who described his views as “very conservative” before leaving Alberta for his undergrad, is now pursuing his master’s in musical theatre in Scotland. He said that he doesn’t see himself returning to build a career in Alberta, not only because of the lack of investment in the arts, but also the direction of the political culture.


The Emperor Kenney’s New Clothes

READ MORE

“I’m not a big, huge name,” said Drwiega, “but the government felt the need to squash my little speech. I think it was an excellent example of the United Conservative Party and the kind of government that they are.”

History shows that authoritarian governments tend to arise when times get harder and less certain for the citizenry, which is certainly part of how the UCP got elected. And while Alberta’s economy is picking up again thanks to rising oil prices, pumping more bitumen while slagging those who toil in other sectors, from hospitals to renewable energy to university classrooms, isn’t likely to bring back the boom times. More likely, such a strategy will only drag out Alberta’s economic pain — and the resentment it engenders — for those who feel it most.

“When your life is shitty and you’ve lost your job and everything sucks, people are going to turn to that explanation of blaming other people,” said Lexier. “I’m scared, honestly.”

She then referenced another idea that Kenney has floated. “Imagine,” she said, “a province like this having its own police force.”

Beware the Hawkish Pundits Pushing for War Over Ukraine

Readers seeking riotous calls to violence in Eastern Europe should turn to the Times and the Post, but those who are interested in a thoroughgoing portrait will be disappointed.


A billboard hanging outside a night club reads: "No War!" on January 18, 2022 in Berlin, Germany. Tensions between Europe, Ukraine and the U.S. on the one side and Russia on the other remain high as the threat of war through a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to loom.

 (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)


GREGORY SHUPAK

January 19, 2022

 by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

With the United States and Russia in a standoff over NATO expansion and Russian troop deployments along the Ukrainian border, US corporate media outlets are demanding that Washington escalate the risk of a broader war while misleading their audiences about important aspects of the conflict.

Alexander Vindman (New York Times, 12/10/21): "A prosperous Ukraine buttressed by American support" could persuade Russians "to eventually demand their own framework for democratic transition"—i.e., regime change.

Many in the commentariat called on the US to take steps that would increase the likelihood of war. In the New York Times (12/10/21), retired US Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman wrote that "the United States must support Ukraine by providing more extensive military assistance." He argued that "the United States should consider an out-of-cycle, division-level military deployment to Eastern Europe to reassure allies and bolster the defenses of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization," even while calling for a strategy that "avoids crossing into military adventurism." He went on to say that "the United States has to be more assertive in the region."

Yet the US has been plenty "assertive in the region," where, incidentally, America is not located. In 2014, the US supported anti-government protests in Ukraine that led to the ouster of democratically elected, Russia-aligned Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych (Foreign Policy, 3/4/14). Russia sent its armed forces into the Crimea, annexed the territory, and backed armed groups in eastern Ukraine.

Since then, the US has given Ukraine $2.5 billion in military aid, including Javelin anti-tank missiles (Politico, 6/18/21). The US government has applied sanctions to Russia that, according to an International Monetary Fund estimate, cost Russia about 0.2 percentage points of GDP every year between 2014 and 2018 (Reuters, 4/16/21).

Furthermore, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—a US-led military alliance hostile to Russia—has grown by 14 countries since the end of the Cold War. NATO expanded right up to Russia's border in 2004, in violation of the promises made by the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton to Russian leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin (Jacobin, 7/16/18).

"Russia has shown its intent to violate its international commitments by demanding NATO cease expanding," Rob Portman and Jeanne Shaheen argue in the Washington Post (12/24/21)—ignoring the US's violated commitment to not expand NATO eastward.

In the Washington Post (12/24/21), Republican Sen. Rob Portman and Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen jointly contended in Orwellian fashion that the Biden administration should take "military measures that would strengthen a diplomatic approach and give it greater credibility." They wrote that "the United States must speed up the pace of assistance and provide antiaircraft, antitank and anti-ship systems, along with electronic warfare capabilities." The authors claimed that these actions "will help ensure a free and stable Europe," though it's easy to imagine how such steps could instead lead to a war-ravaged Europe, or at least a tension-plagued one.

Indeed, US "military measures" have tended to increase, rather than decrease, the temperature. Last summer, the US and Ukraine led multinational naval maneuvers held in the Black Sea, an annual undertaking called Sea Breeze. The US-financed exercises were the largest in decades, involving 32 ships, 40 aircraft and helicopters, and 5,000 soldiers from 24 countries (Deutsche Welle, 6/29/21). These steps didn't create a "stable Europe": Russia conducted a series of parallel drills in the Black Sea and southwestern Russia (AP, 7/10/21), and would go on to amass troops along the Ukrainian border.
Afghan precedent

Max Boot (Washington Post, 12/15/21) suggests the US should point out to Russia "that Ukraine shares a lengthy border—nearly 900 miles in total—with NATO members Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland." Pretty sure they're aware of that, Max.

Max Boot, also writing in the Post (12/15/21), argued:

Preventing Russia from attacking will require a more credible military deterrent. President Biden has ruled out unilaterally sending US combat troops to Ukraine, which would be the strongest deterrent. But he can still do more to help the Ukrainians defend themselves.

The United States has already delivered more than $2.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since 2014, with $450 million of that coming this year. There are also roughly 150 US troops in Ukraine training its armed forces.

But Ukraine is asking for more military aid, and we should deliver it. NBC News reports that "Ukraine has asked for air defense systems, anti-ship missiles, more Javelin antitank missiles, electronic jamming gear, radar systems, ammunition, upgraded artillery munitions and medical supplies." The Defense Department could begin airlifting these defensive systems and supplies to Kyiv tomorrow.

Later in the article, Boot contended that the US should help prepare Ukraine to carry out an armed insurgency in case Russia intensifies its involvement in Ukraine. He said that "outside support" is "usually the key determinant of the success or failure of an insurgency": Because of aid from the US and its allies, he noted, the mujahedeen in Afghanistan "were able to drive out the Red Army with heavy casualties." Amazingly, Boot said nothing about the many alumni of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan who joined the Taliban and al-Qaeda (Jacobin, 9/11/21).

That it might be possible to reach an agreement in which Ukraine remains neutral between NATO and Russia (Responsible Statecraft, 1/3/22) is not the sort of possibility that Boot thinks is worth exploring. He apparently would prefer to dramatically increase the danger of armed conflict between two nuclear powers.
Whitewashing Nazis

The Nation (5/6/21): "Glorification of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators isn't a glitch but a feature of today's Ukraine."

US media should present Americans with a complete picture of Ukraine/Russia so that Americans can assess how much and what kind of support, if any, they want their government to continue providing to Ukraine's. Such a comprehensive view would undoubtedly include an account of the Ukrainian state's political orientation. Lev Golinkin in The Nation (5/6/21) outlined one of the Ukrainian government's noteworthy tendencies:

Shortly after the Maidan uprising of 2013 to 2014 brought in a new government, Ukraine began whitewashing Nazi collaborators on a statewide level. In 2015, Kyiv passed legislation declaring two WWII-era paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes and freedom fighters, and threatening legal action against anyone denying their status. The OUN was allied with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust; the UPA murdered thousands of Jews and 70,000–100,000 Poles on their own accord.

Every January 1, Kyiv hosts a torchlight march in which thousands honor Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, who headed an OUN faction; in 2017, chants of "Jews Out!" rang out during the march. Such processions (often redolent with antisemitism) are a staple in Ukraine….

Ukraine's total number of monuments to Third Reich collaborators who served in auxiliary police battalions and other units responsible for the Holocaust number in the several hundred. The whitewashing also extends to official book bans and citywide veneration of collaborators.

The typical reaction to this in the West is that Ukraine can't be celebrating Nazi collaborators because it elected [Volodymyr] Zelensky, a Jewish president. Zelensky, however, has alternated between appeasing and ignoring the whitewashing: In 2018, he stated, "To some Ukrainians, [Nazi collaborator] Bandera is a hero, and that's cool!"

Furthermore, according to a George Washington University study, members of the far-right group Centuria are in the Ukrainian military, and Centuria's social media accounts show these soldiers giving Nazi salutes, encouraging white nationalism and praising members of Nazi SS units (Ottawa Citizen, 10/19/21). Centuria leaders have ties to the Azov movement, which "has attacked anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, media outlets, art exhibitions, foreign students, the LGBTQ2S+ community and Roma people": the Azov movement's militia has been incorporated in the Ukrainian National Guard (CTV News, 10/20/21). Azov, the UN has documented, has carried out torture and rape.

Absent information

The fact that that Ukraine's government and armed forces include a Nazi-sympathizing current surely would have an impact on US public opinion—if the public knew about it. However, this information has been entirely absent in recent editions of the New York Times and Washington Post.

From December 6, 2021, to January 6, 2022, the Times published 228 articles that refer to Ukraine, nine of which contain some variation on the word "Nazi." Zero percent of these note Ukrainian government apologia for Nazis or the presence of pro-Nazi elements in Ukraine's armed forces. One report (12/21/21) said:

On Russian state television, the narrative of a Ukraine controlled by neo-Nazis and used as a staging ground for Western aggression has been a common trope since the pro-Western revolution in Kyiv in 2014.

Nothing in the article indicates that while "controlled" may be a stretch, the Ukrainian government officially honors Nazi collaborators. That doesn't mean Russia has the right attack Ukraine, but US media should inform Americans about whom their tax dollars are arming.

In the same period, the Post ran 201 pieces that mention the word "Ukraine." Of these, six mention the word "Nazi," none of them to point out that the Ukrainian state has venerated Holocaust participants, or that there are Nazis in the Ukrainian military. Max Boot (1/5/22) and Robyn Dixon (12/11/21), in fact, dismissed this fact as mere Russian propaganda. In Boot's earlier Ukraine piece (12/15/21), he acknowledged that the UPA collaborated with the Nazis and killed thousands of Polish people, but his article nevertheless suggested that the UPA offer a useful model for how Ukrainians could resist a Russian invasion, asserting that "all is not lost" in case of a Russian invasion, because "Ukrainian patriots could fight as guerrillas against Russian occupiers":

They have done it before. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was formed in 1942 to fight for that country's independence. Initially, it cooperated with Nazi invaders but later fought against them. When the Red Army marched back into Ukraine in 1943, the UPA resisted. The guerrillas carried out thousands of attacks and inflicted thousands of casualties on Soviet forces while also massacring and ethnically cleansing the Polish population in western Ukraine. The UPA continued fighting until the 1950s, forcing Moscow to mobilize tens of thousands of troops and secret policemen to restore control.

"All is not lost," for Boot, though the lives of thousands of Poles and Jews were, the latter of whom he didn't bother to mention. Calling the perpetrators of such atrocities "Ukrainian patriots" is a grotesque euphemism that, first and foremost, spits on the victims, and also insults non-racist Ukrainians. After a two-paragraph interval, Boot wrote that,

the Ukrainian government needs to start distributing weapons now and, with the help of US and other Western military advisers, training personnel to carry out guerrilla warfare. Volodymyr Zelensky's government should even prepare supply depots, tunnels and bunkers in wooded areas, and in particular in the Carpathian Mountains, a UPA stronghold in the 1940s.

Evidently neither the UPA's precedent of fascist massacres, nor the presence of similarly oriented groups in contemporary Ukraine's armed forces and society, give Boot pause. He'd rather the US continue flooding the country with weapons; the consequences aren't a concern of Boot's.

Readers seeking riotous calls to violence in Eastern Europe should turn to the Times and the Post, but those who are interested in a thoroughgoing portrait will be disappointed.

© 2021 Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)



Gregory Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto. His book, "The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media," is published by OR Books.

How a powerful company convinced Georgia to let it bury toxic waste in groundwater

Documents reveal Georgia Power went to great lengths to advocate for risky waste storage.

By

 Max Blau

 -

January 19, 2022

SOURCEProPublica

Image Credit: Max Blau/ProPublica

For the past several years, Georgia Power has gone to great lengths to skirt the federal rule requiring coal-fired power plants to safely dispose of massive amounts of toxic waste they produced.

But previously unreported documents obtained by ProPublica show that the company’s efforts were more extensive than publicly known. Thousands of pages of internal government correspondence and corporate filings show how Georgia Power made an elaborate argument as to why it should be allowed to store waste produced before 2020 in a way that wouldn’t fully protect surrounding communities’ water supplies from contamination — and that would save the company potentially billions of dollars in cleanup costs.

In a series of closed-door meetings with state environmental regulators, the powerful utility even went so far as to challenge the definition of the word “infiltration” in relation to how groundwater can seep into disposal sites holding underground coal ash, according to documents obtained through multiple open records requests.

Earlier this month, Georgia Power was on its way to getting final approval from the state to leave 48 million tons of coal ash buried in unlined ponds — despite evidence that contaminants were leaking out. Georgia is one of three states that regulate how power companies safely dispose of decades worth of coal ash, rather than leaving such oversight to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency itself.

But last week, the EPA made clear that arguments like the ones Georgia Power has been making violate the intent of the coal ash rule, setting up a potential showdown among the federal agency, state regulators and the deep-pocketed power company. In a statement last week, the EPA said that waste disposal sites “cannot be closed with coal ash in contact with groundwater,” in order to ensure that “communities near these facilities have access to safe water for drinking and recreation.”

The EPA’s action follows a joint investigation by Georgia Health News and ProPublica that found Georgia Power has known for decades that the way it disposed of coal ash could be dangerous to neighboring communities.

“The coal ash rule was clear from the beginning, but industry had tried to inject uncertainty into plain language,” said Lisa Evans, an attorney who specializes in hazardous waste law for the environmental advocacy nonprofit Earthjustice. “The EPA has made it crystal clear what the plain language of the coal ash rule means.”

Georgia’s environmental regulators said it’s too soon to determine exactly how the EPA’s actions will play out in the state. In a letter dated Jan. 11, the EPA asked the Georgia Environmental Protection Division to review whether coal ash permits it has issued to Georgia Power are “consistent” with the federal agency’s guidance. Georgia Environmental Protection Division spokesperson Kevin Chambers, who declined to answer questions about Georgia Power’s lobbying or make any regulators available for an interview, said that the state agency is “awaiting further clarification” from the EPA on how the announcement will impact future permits for Georgia Power’s ash ponds. The agencies are scheduled to meet about the issue later this month.

John Kraft, a spokesperson for Georgia Power, said in a statement that the company intends to “comply with environmental regulations.” The utility has repeatedly denied that its coal ash ponds have contaminated residents’ drinking water or caused health problems in communities near its plants. He declined to answer ProPublica’s questions about the company’s lobbying efforts.

“We are evaluating EPA’s position,” Kraft said. “We will continue to work with them, as well as Georgia EPD, to safely close our ash ponds.”

For those living near coal ash ponds, the EPA’s decision couldn’t come soon enough. Gloria Hammond, a longtime resident of the tiny rural town of Juliette, Georgia, relied for decades on a private drinking well to pump water to her home from an underground aquifer. But two years ago, a sample of her well water taken by an environmental advocacy group revealed unsafe levels of contaminants often found in coal ash. Now, Hammond drives 10 minutes to a Baptist church to access a supply of clean drinking water.

She and others suspect those contaminants leaked into Juliette’s groundwater from a nearby disposal site at Plant Scherer, the largest coal-fired plant in the Western Hemisphere. The disposal site, less than a mile from Hammond’s house, holds nearly 16 million tons worth of coal ash in an unlined pond.

“They need to get the coal ash out of the drinking water,” Hammond said.

In early 2019, Chuck Mueller, GEPD’s top waste official, was grappling with a pivotal question that would impact thousands of Georgians for decades to come: How much of Georgia Power’s coal ash could legally remain buried in a pond without a protective liner? The utility had proposed disposing of 48 million tons — roughly half of its existing coal ash — that way. Mueller asked employees of his branch to figure out the answer.

After draining water from the ponds where ash is stored, Georgia Power is required to move the resulting dry ash into a landfill with a liner designed to prevent groundwater contamination — unless it can meet a set of requirements to leave the waste buried in an unlined disposal site.

The federal rule, which was enacted in 2015, allows utilities to bury the waste in an unlined ash pond only if they “control, minimize, or eliminate” water from coming into contact with the buried waste “to the maximum extent feasible.” Stan Meiburg, a former EPA acting deputy administrator, says the rule is important because allowing water to mix with coal ash can lead to toxic heavy metals found in the waste migrating beyond the disposal site.

State regulators tasked with answering Mueller’s question read through dense Georgia Power filings and concluded that ash ponds at Plant Scherer, along with those at four other sites — Plants Hammond, McDonough, Wansley and Yates — contained waste that is submerged in groundwater, which some experts and regulators believe violates the federal coal ash rule.

Those findings were sent to one of Mueller’s top aides, William Cook, who oversees the state’s solid waste management program. Cook regularly met in private with Georgia Power representatives to get progress reports on the closure of the company’s ash ponds. That spring, Georgia Power representatives argued that state regulators could narrowly interpret the definition of a single word — “infiltration” — in the federal coal ash rule. The company believed this interpretation would allow millions of tons of waste to be left submerged in groundwater.

Georgia Power hoped to store coal ash in a way that only prevented water — such as rain falling from the sky — from seeping through a cover over the dry ash. They hoped regulators would disregard the presence of any groundwater that would soak the dry ash and potentially carry its heavy metals toward drinking wells.

Georgia Power representatives “believe that EPA would have written it in” if they wanted specific kinds of infiltration removed, Cook scribbled in his legal pad.

When Georgia Power representatives referenced an EPA document key to their understanding of “infiltration,” Cook asked his colleagues to review the document — which is 1,237 pages. They struggled to reconcile the case Georgia Power was making with the text of the regulation itself. John Sayer, head of environmental monitoring for the solid waste program, emailed his wife, an issues manager at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for advice on the meaning of the word “infiltration,” which he wrote had caused “contention” in this context.

Eventually, Sayer emailed a colleague that he’d found a federal report that noted “groundwater would qualify as infiltration.” But Georgia Power kept pressing GEPD officials to narrow its definition of infiltration to only include rainwater falling from the sky. After months of research by Sayer and other state employees, Mueller was left to make the decision.

Later that summer, Chris Bowers, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, sent Mueller a report that highlighted the flaws in Georgia Power’s plans. As part of the SELC report, a veteran hydrogeologist named Mark Hutson analyzed the plans for ash ponds at the five plants where waste was below the water table. Huston concluded those plans “will not control, minimize, or eliminate” water from coming into contact with the dry ash.

At a subsequent meeting with GEPD, Bowers shared another state’s approach to the meaning of infiltration. Duke Energy Indiana had asked state regulators to let the company bury coal ash in an unlined pond in the southwest part of that state. When state regulators realized Duke Energy Indiana had not described how it would comply with federal guidelines to prevent groundwater from wetting the dry waste, regulators told the company they would only approve the plan if the company could stop infiltration “from any direction.” (Duke Energy Indiana later responded that removing the ash could cause a “very high safety risk” at the site. State regulators ultimately allowed some coal ash to remain buried there, so long as the company took steps to minimize groundwater from soaking the waste.)

Environmental regulators in other states such as North Carolina have forced utilities to scrap plans that didn’t comply with this portion of the coal ash rule. But Georgia Power, as well another power company in Ohio, pushed ahead with their controversial plans. The financial stakes were high. At Plant Scherer alone, installing a liner could cost $1 billion, according to one state official.

“Georgia Power wanted to rewrite the rule to say there’s a limitation it doesn’t have,” said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with SELC. “It’s a preposterous proposal.”

One of Bowers’ clients, an environmental group called the Altamaha Riverkeeper, was grappling with this very issue in Juliette. The group soon discovered that water in the wells of Hammond and dozens of other Juliette residents contained concerning levels of contaminants found in coal ash. The group was worried that groundwater might be moving from the coal ash pond toward residents’ wells.

After the test results were publicized, Fletcher Sams, head of the Altamaha Riverkeeper, attended a closed-door meeting in February 2020 with several Juliette residents, local officials, state lawmakers and Georgia Power lobbyists. (ProPublica and Georgia Health News described parts of the meeting in a story last year.) The environmental advocate told attendees that his samples had revealed concerning levels of boron, calcium and sulfate — all indicators of coal ash. There was also evidence of a contaminant researchers had linked to cancer, hexavalent chromium, which had previously been discovered in some California drinking wells by environmental advocate Erin Brockovich. Georgia Power has acknowledged the presence of boron, calcium and sulfate but said that the hexavalent chromium is “naturally occurring.”

Sams, along with the Juliette residents, hoped Georgia Power would excavate Plant Scherer’s coal ash and put it in a lined landfill. But Aaron Mitchell, one of the utility’s top environmental lobbyists, insisted the company’s plan complied with environmental standards. However, after being peppered with questions by Sams, Mitchell acknowledged that the coal ash would still be submerged in groundwater if its plan to bury the waste was approved by state regulators.

Hearing that, Sams turned to the lone state regulator in the room, Chuck Mueller. He asked Mueller if Georgia Power’s plans to let water come into contact with dry ash met the state’s environmental standards.

“It’s allowed by the rules,” Mueller replied.

Shortly after Joe Biden was elected president, he chose a new EPA administrator with deep knowledge about the perils of coal ash. Michael Regan was the head of the environmental agency in North Carolina, a state that had seen one of the nation’s worst coal ash disasters in 2014, when a ruptured pipe sent 39,000 tons of coal ash pouring into the Dan River. Six years later, Regan convinced the state’s largest utility to excavate coal ash from its unlined ponds, which was done in order to protect residents from possible groundwater contamination.

Following Regan’s confirmation, environmental advocates urged federal officials to address the language in the coal ash rule that Georgia Power had tried to exploit. GEPD pushed ahead with the narrower definition of infiltration.

In June 2021, three months after Georgia Health News and ProPublica’s investigation into Georgia Power’s coal ash handling practices in Juliette, EPA officials met with GEPD to discuss the issue of infiltration. According to records obtained by ProPublica, state regulators said that Georgia Power could leave waste below the water table because the company had placed monitoring wells around the edge of those ash ponds to detect if heavy metals were migrating toward nearby residents’ homes.

The following month, GEPD began the process of issuing permits for unlined ponds where ash would remain submerged in groundwater. State regulators issued a draft permit for the first of these sites, one of Plant Hammond’s ash ponds, a step that then allowed the public to comment on the closure plan. Chambers, the GEPD spokesperson, said that the agency used “the commonly accepted meaning of ‘infiltration’” — and determined that Georgia Power’s proposal was “allowable under the rule.”

Last week, the EPA rejected the premise that groundwater legally could remain in contact with the dry ash — a statement that will likely impact Georgia Power’s closure plans at Scherer and four other plant sites. In its letter to GEPD, the EPA urged the state regulators to review the reasons why the federal agency intended to deny a plan to bury waste at southeast Ohio’s General James M. Gavin Power Plant, one of the largest power stations in the country. In that proposed decision, the EPA noted that the plant operators had failed to demonstrate how their closure plan would prevent infiltration.

The EPA’s filing notes that “infiltration” explicitly means “any liquid passing into or through” the coal ash pond “from any direction, including the top, sides, and bottom of the unit.” To Sams, the EPA’s announcement means that Georgia Power and GEPD cannot move forward with an “incorrect interpretation” of the country’s coal ash regulation. The EPA “restated in bold-crayon-block letters what we’ve been saying: You can’t store this waste full of toxic metals in groundwater,” Sams said.

Meiburg, the former EPA deputy administrator, said utilities could still challenge the agency’s clarification on the concept of infiltration because it did not go through the full rule-making process. But if GEPD ultimately approves permits that are less protective than what the federal regulation requires, the EPA has the power to strip Georgia of its ability to issue permits, according to Evans, the Earthjustice attorney.

Gloria Hammond, for her part, sees the EPA’s announcement as an important first step toward someday restoring the quality of Juliette’s groundwater. In the coming months, GEPD is expected to make a decision about Georgia Power’s permit at Plant Scherer. After feeling long ignored by environmental regulators, she hopes that GEPD requires Georgia Power to remove the ash from Juliette’s aquifer for good.

“I’m praying Georgia will take that into consideration,” Hammond said. “I hope they follow the EPA.”