Republicans turning Black Hills, Dakotas into sacrifice zones

International Space Station photo of the Missouri River in South Dakota

Energy independence is code for the elites will make Gazans of us all.

Powertech is now dominated by Chinese ownership with Hong Kong headquarters. Allowing a foreign company to profit from such vast use of our land and excessive use of our aquifer water, and to encourage others to do the same, would be a national defeat and a robbery of immensely precious resources, now and for all ages. With such cumulative impacts, at what point will South Dakotans put a stop to the abuse of the Black Hills region as a national sacrifice area? Will our legislators protect us – our health and our agriculture and tourism economies – from this dangerous and polluting industry by enacting state laws with teeth? Will South Dakota pressure the EPA and NRC to shun influence by the monies they receive from the industries they regulate, and look skeptically upon the unsubstantiated assurances of mining corporations? [Sylvia Lambert, Pierre Capital Journal]

Economy, environment at stake in fate of endangered sage grouse: http://t.co/58hWhLf9uv via @mtstandard http://t.co/nWLj9nTlos #sdsen #mtpol
— interested party (@larry_kurtz) January 12, 2014

Drilling Productivity Report

Clay Jenkinson writes at the Bismarck Tribune:

As long as there is money to be made—and the money to be made dwarfs anything North Dakota has ever seen or dreamed about—oil companies are going to come get it. The drilling of any one individual well is a highly-efficient, nearly miraculous example of human technological ingenuity, and the environmental “footprint” of any given well is comparatively light, especially once the fracking process is over. But add all those drilling events together—systematic oil extraction in every direction—and then add in the pipelines, the storage tanks, the transfer facilities, the natural gas processing plants, the new roads and railroad spurs, the bypasses, the giant parking lots for idle trucks and pipe, and the industrial “hospitality” infrastructure, and—voila--you have transformed western North Dakota from a quiet rural countryside into an overwhelming hive of pell-mell industrial activity. It’s as if there are two types of currency in North Dakota today—the currency of our state’s 125-year history, in which we toiled and scrimped and wound up moderately prosperous because of the quality of our character and our work ethic, and the new currency of unbelievable stacks of carbon money, funny money, that staggers the imagination and overwhelms any discussion of “higher laws.” [Jenkinson, Are there no “higher laws” in North Dakota life?]

Am I supposed to feel safer because corporations, not terrorists, are exploding fertilizer plants, drowning towns in oil & poisoning water?
— The Daily Edge (@TheDailyEdge) January 12, 2014

US Geological Survey finds disturbance due to #natgas drilling in #Pa happening in sensitive forests: http://t.co/uhQIaAAdT7
— Laura Hancock (@laurahancock) January 13, 2014

Scientists at the American Geophysical Union are circling around the mass movement of soil as the boundary at which the Anthropocene began. Tina Ghose at LiveScience:

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) could also serve as markers. These are formed from combustion in natural wildfires, but also come largely from the burning of fossil fuels.

Western North Dakota, eastern Montana, and all of Wyoming are sacrifice zones: red states where the Right to Work for less will kill workers and ecosystems. West Virginia is a wasteland already plowed under by coal and death.

shale gas property value externalities: "large negative impacts on nearby groundwater-dependent homes" http://t.co/qziTFrkWjy
— jfleck (@jfleck) January 13, 2014

Now, the grim reaper comes for South Dakota. Chris Hedges at Democracy Now!

Pine Ridge is a Lakota reservation in South Dakota. The average life expectancy for a male is 48. That is the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti. At any one time, 60 percent of the residents have neither electricity or running water, 80 percent alcoholism rate, because you break—you break these people. You create a culture of dependence. You make self-sufficiency impossible. And then people anesthetize themselves. But it’s incumbent upon us to look at these sacrifice zones to understand what happens when there are no restraints, no impediments on corporate capitalism, because they’re doing this globally.

There are 83 vacancies on the federal bench in a country that purports to have a right to a speedy trial: the resulting bottlenecks are burying cases that should enjoy sunlight to be settled by the very corporations creating sacrifice zones.