The tsunami of lies that issued from leadership during the Covid hoax has created a hypervigilant populace which flares into suspicion given any excuse. The balloons, the unpopular Ukraine war, government-caused inflation, the parade of food production facilities bursting afire, the unacknowledged excess deaths, have contributed to an almost universal mistrust of anyone official. And then came East Palestine.
The Norfolk Southern railroad was carrying vinyl chloride which when ignited, turns into dioxin, the great-grandmother of all toxins Within days, it spread across the 75,000 family farms of Ohio, across the Nebraska wheat fields into the underground aquifers and has killed, so far, 45,000 fish. Birds fell out of the sky, and most think that anyone pregnant in the vicinity is at extreme risk. The fire released the largest plume of dioxin in history.
The government tried to blame the fire chief of a town of 5,000 for lighting the chemicals. That is not how it works in rural America. The Department of Interior through its various agencies micro-manages every watercourse, farm, range and forest. Whoever gave that order was at the top of the food chain: the governor, advised by Interior by the Office of the President. Every single interest was consulted and signed off in a prescribed chain of decisions, before the train car was drained of vinyl chloride and the fire was lit.
The following is a concision of populist opinion, observations, and theory:
Even the Wall Street Journal is expressing “concerns” about food production in the region after the Norfolk Southern crash. That, of course, is nothing compared to the anguish in the village itself, where people are developing all manner of symptoms, wheezing, coughing, throats closing up, migraines, seizures. The EPA finally demanded the railroad test for dioxin. On its website, the agency warns that even a small amount of backyard burning of vinyl chloride and dioxin released from burning is dangerous.
Nor did it help that Norfolk Southern initially offered each resident a mere $1,000. Researchers like Erin Brockovich have pointed out that the Camp Lejeune vinyl chloride pollution was 10 percent of the scale of East Palestine, damaged one million people, and insurers were paying out for decades.
In January, the Biden administration released a ‘blueprint’ for the decarbonization of the transportation sector. Transportation issues more carbon dioxide than any other sector, so must be contained. As usual with environmental “blueprints,” the language is vague and faux-compassionate.
Under the leadership of President Biden, EPA is working with our federal partners to aggressively reduce pollution that is harming people and our planet – while saving families money at the same time,” said U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael S. Regan. “At EPA, our priority is to protect public health, especially in overburdened communities, while advancing the President’s ambitious climate agenda. This Blueprint is a step forward in delivering on those goals and accelerating the transition to a clean transportation future.
Consider the incompetence in not knowing that vinyl chloride when ignited turns into dioxin. Consider that those are the people who will be "reimagining" transportation, people so hapless that they cannot contain the most toxic chemical man has ever created. Or was it incompetence? Suspicion is building that the accident was deliberate in order to clear the region for Intel moving into Ohio, so that water now used by residents and farms, can be reassigned to the factories. Norfolk Southern is owned by hedge funds, Vanguard and BlackRock, who own Intel.
That this suspected collaboration is an almost perfect case study of an Agenda 2030 move has not escaped notice. "Climate change" panic provides the impetus to draw down activity in the heartland. This conveniently sequesters resources for multinationals with no allegiance to place or people.
Transportation corridors as outlined in the Biden administration's plan are meant as its endpoint, to act as smart rail connectors between major metropolitan areas, or fifteen-minute cities. As in the famous Biodiversity Treaty, much of the U.S will be off limits to humans. Food production will take place in concentrated regions. The frightening increase in food production facilities’ fires and explosions is thought to be a way to force food production into prescribed zones, as desired by Agenda 2030’s Sustainable Development Goals.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals, were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity. The 17 SDGs are integrated—they recognize that action in one area will affect outcomes in others, and that development must balance social, economic and environmental sustainability.
Countries have committed to prioritize progress for those who're furthest behind. The SDGs are designed to end poverty, hunger, AIDS, and discrimination against women and girls. The creativity, knowhow, technology and financial resources from all of society is necessary to achieve the SDGs in every context.
An empty America serves to stop "climate change." An empty America means lost species will recover and acquire the exact right balance. Both these theories are nonsense. Leaving aside the intellectual insult of "catastrophic anthropogenic climate change," biodiversity increases around human population. We have perfect examples of this courtesy of the U.N.’s Conservation International, which has cleared tens of millions of indigenous and traditional peoples from their lands in the developing world, after which biodiversity in those regions collapsed.
Rural people can point to conserved lands in their counties and show that, shorn of human care, they almost immediately run to wildfire, desertification and invasive species. Productive rangeland turns to desert within ten years. Farmland does the same: invasive species, desiccation, desertification.
Holly Fretwell, a fellow at the Property and Environmental Research Center and a professor at the University of Montana, showed through digging into the bowels of the forest service that almost every significant fire in the American West for the past twenty years, was caused by "sustainable" forestry practice forced by the Department of Forestry. Which is to say letting the forests run wild, fire ladders of brush climbing every tree, thousands of tiny trees growing like perfect tinder. Her book is conclusive. The hundreds of millions of burnt forests were caused by government-led sustainable forestry forced by environmental NGOs, out of the U.N.
An empty America may appeal to the fever dream of suburbanites working in concrete jungles. It means the death of the countryside and the assignment of the future to pitiless multinationals bringing cataclysm, assisted by a government cruel beyond measure.
Article tags: Agenda 2030, Biden Administration, Biodiversity, East Palestine, EPA, Holly Fretwell, Norfork Southern, sustainable development, U.N.
We’ll be cliffdwellers gazing wistfully over the horizon at the empty lands.
Well those with a window on the outside shell of the 15 minute hive.
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JROD - Thanks for the feedback. I would only give you a "meh" on PPE when welding if you were using a welding rod 1 mile long, which is the minimum size of the exclusion zone during the East Palestine burn. Otherwise, I too take my PPE very seriously, having performed thousands of stack tests (including some in Midland!) over the past 38 years. It's always about potential exposure, which is about how close you are to the source, which is why we're as damned careful stack sampling as you are when welding. But the crew and I generally don't worry too much about the plume when were back at the hotel several miles away. As for the temperature of the burn, I could do the calcs for you, but I'd probably screw up a decimal place somewhere. Or I could say that olefins (hydrocarbons with double bonds) burn like hell, but that's hardly scientific. So I'll refer you to relevant literature: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0002889718506429#:~:text=By%20means%20of%20a%20variety%20of%20analytical%20techniques%2C,a%20VCM%20flame%20ranges%20from%20950%C2%B0%20to%201466%C2%B0C. Minimum flame temperature for vinyl chloride monomer is 950 C (or 1740 F), FAR above dioxin formation temperature.
I will not refute your expertise on chemistry, but I do question your assessment of the burn in East Palestine as a controlled burn. By doing a burn of the contents as it drained instead of setting up a flare to ensure complete combustion I question whether the vinyl chloride could burn off completely without carryover in the plume.
I have a lot of skepticism since the authorities in charge have spent so much of their effort deflecting and hiding what happened in this incident.
@Richard Trzupeck-I'm glad you're not my safety person at places like D*w Chemical when I work there. Having to re-clad the inside of process vessels and welding on pipe that is "clean" but has been permeated with chlorine/chloride type chemical by your reasoning and logic wearing the proper PPE would be ........."meh, you don't need it". In my trade, I know what it is like and have read about and listened to the stories of people who have been exposed to fumes created by "oxidation" of chemicals described. Understanding the exposures and the results of them, even on a smaller scale, makes me question your knowledge of the situation. I have read plenty of MSDS of chemicals I have had to weld(oxidation/thermodynamics) on pipe that has had these exact chemicals run through them. I understand the difference between the temps of welding 1000-1200 degrees but we have to be careful and wear the proper PPE any time an arc or open flame even comes in contact with contaminated alloys ranging from carbon steel to nickel. I guess you knew the temperatures that were present at the site, the acrid smoke plume was A-OK, just make sure you don't ingest so many parts per million?
I am pleased to contribute to a site that encourages multiple perspectives on issues. That said, I must respectfully disagree with Ms. Nickson's assessment of the East Palestine accident and burn. As a chemist who understands oxidation chemistry and thermodynamics, the assertion that the controlled burn released the largest dioxin plume in history in uninformed hyperbole. Like phosgene, dioxin is a byproduct of incomplete combustion of chlorinated compounds that forms in small quantities in even the worst of conditions. Additionally, dioxins can only form in a relatively narrow temperature range. Given the heating value of vinyl chloride, it is very unlikely that the conditions to form significant amounts of dioxin were present at all. The vast majority of chlorine in that burn turned to hydrogen chloride. Not a great chemical to have floating around for a day or two, but hardly the disaster of the century - or even this year.
The reason EPA issues warnings about bark yard burning, is because household waste typically contains significant amounts of moisture, which inhibits complete combustion and allows for the fire to stay within that relatively cool dioxin formation range. Also burning polyvinyl chloride - a very stable polymer often present in household waste - is much different than burning vinyl chloride, a gas not available at your big box stores. Unlike PVC, vinyl chloride makes for a terrific fuel (except for the whole hydrochloric acid thing).
There are a great deal more technical inaccuracies and exaggerations in this piece. They are all surely the result of lack of technical knowledge rather than malice, but honest errors are still errors. I admire and agree with much of Ms. Nickson's work battling the eco-fascists. But this time she got it wrong.