A Guide to Operation Prison Camp

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 toxic cocktail.

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.

What could possibly go wrong?

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.

Everything's under control!

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.

Yet Another 'Disaster' That Actually Wasn't

The East Palestine, Ohio derailment “disaster” presents us with an interesting twist on the way that the public relations professionals exert control over both political parties. Usually, when there is a Republican president in office and something goes off the rails (pun intended) in the environmental world, Democrat media types quickly develop talking points designed to paint the party in power as indifferent and/or incompetent. The MSM, fulfilling its role as the primary public relations tool of the Democrat party, dutifully follows suit.

With East Palestine, the roles are reversed. Many in the Republican party have now assumed the hand-wringing role, no doubt following the instructions of their own PR professionals. (Note to J.D. Vance: it's not a "chemical rainbow," it's a petroleum sheen. Next time your car leaks a little hydraulic fluid and there's a rainstorm, you can enjoy watching one appear in your driveway.) I take little pleasure in pointing out the error of the party’s ways in this case, but err they did. The same, sadly, is true of Fox’s Tucker Carlson, who is usually a reliable and thoughtful source of commentary. He too got this one wrong.

The East Palestine derailment was no disaster. Disasters require multiple bodies, or extensive/expensive property damage, or long-term environmental harm, preferably all three. East Palestine includes none of those elements. The one thing East Palestine had that allows people to label it a disaster is ugly visuals. I get it. Everyday, non-technical people who don’t understand dispersion, or exposure, or risk see that big black cloud and think “that’s what disasters look like!”

Looks worse than it was.

Those politicians and journalists who tried to use the East Palestine derailment as a means to attack the Biden administration and its secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, played the same game as their Democrat counterparts regularly play. Their concern sounded sincere, but there was nothing of substance to be had in their declarations. It’s the political equivalent of Professor Harold Hill whipping up the citizens of River City against the evils of pool. I have no idea what qualifies Buttigieg to be in the cabinet, but using a train derailment to criticize the guy is the political equivalent of kicking a puppy, and a not very clever puppy at that.

There are facts about East Palestine that are true, but don’t actually matter. Toxic materials were present and some had been released into the environment. True, but immaterial. Burning off the contents of a tanker containing vinyl chloride released potentially toxic chemicals into the air. Also true, but also immaterial. Some potentially toxic chemicals could possibly seep into the water table, significantly affecting the quality of well-water that is used by some nearby residents. True again, but ultimately of no concern.

How can I make such claims? What makes me right and the vast majority of politicians and journalists wrong? The flip answer is this: I’m a chemist. They’re not. I’ve got 38 years experience dealing with atmospheric chemistry, dispersion modeling and risk evaluation. They don’t. Releasing potentially toxic chemicals into the environment does not necessarily mean that the environment will suffer, either in the long term or the short term. Generating potentially toxic pollutants and releasing them into the air does not necessarily put anybody in the public at risk. The toxicity of the chemical doesn’t matter. The amount of the chemical released doesn’t matter. The only things that ultimately matter are the following:

  1. What is the maximum dose of a chemical to which a person can be exposed and how does that dose compare to established (and quite conservative) public health guidelines?
  2. Can the chemical release cause actual, long-term damage to eco-systems or to natural resources that we depend on?

The chemically contaminated soil in East Palestine may be removed and replaced with clean fill. Alternately, it might be left in place for naturally-occurring bacteria to clean up, which they do quite well. The state and the feds will closely monitor the course of the spill to ensure that no one using wells drinks or uses contaminated water from them. It would not be a surprise to find the railroad hooking all well water users in the area up to city water. There will be no long-term environmental damage or danger to the local water supply if local officials and the railroad continue to do the right things.

The dispersion model says not to worry.

How about that ugly black cloud. Surely it put people at risk!? No, it didn’t. We have the tools to determine potential exposures to airborne pollutants to very high degree of accuracy in virtually any situation. Tried, tested, and true environmental tools called dispersion models enable us who are part of the environmental world to predict how plumes containing pollutants will behave upon being released to atmosphere.

The primary pollutant of concern generated by the vinyl chloride burn was hydrochloric acid. You may also know it as muriatic acid. Among other things, it does a great job of removing stains from concrete. The vast majority of the chlorine in vinyl chloride will form hydrochloric acid when burned. There are other, more toxic, chlorine compounds that can form during a burn, but the realities of chemistry means they will form in very small amounts that can be ignored.

I looked at emissions from the East Palestine burn using the most conservative dispersion model available, USEPA’s SCREEN3 model. It is designed to overestimate downwind exposures and we know it does just that because SCREEN3 results have been compared to real world measurement:

So let’s look at the plume generated by the East Palestine burn in those terms. As expected, the model predicts very high concentrations close to the burn, over 3,000 ppmv 100 meters away. That’s in the middle of the ugliest part of the cloud. There are also no people there. When you do a controlled burn you create an exclusion zone to keep everyone safe.

As the plume travels downwind, concentrations steadily drop. The exclusion zone during the burn was reported to be a one mile by two mile area downwind of the burn. That’s roughly 1,500 meters by 3,000 meters. At 1,500 meters the model predicts a peak concentration of 3.0 ppmv and at 3,000 meters the model predicts a peak concentration of 1.1 ppmv. Both values are far under the hydrochloric acid IDLH and comfortably under the OSHA PEL. The burn was ugly to see, but one is forced to conclude that the actual risk to people who followed orders to stay out of the exclusion zone was negligible. (If you want to see all my assumptions and calculations, use this link to download an Excel workbook that contains that information.)

Democrats who chant “follow the science” rarely do, especially when environmental issues are in play. How about we on the right use East Palestine as an opportunity to show them what following the science actually looks like, instead of playing their silly games?

ESG investors and the East Palestine Disaster

The derailed train in East Palestine, Ohio, has created significant environmental hazards, not only to the residents of that town but also to countless other communities along the Ohio River. The derailment led to an enormous chemical fire, with hundred-foot flames and a plume of black smoke exposing local communities to a variety of chemicals, including the carcinogen vinyl chloride and phosgene, the latter of which was used as a chemical weapon in World War I.

These highly toxic chemicals were spread into the air, water, and ground, and are threatening public health and displacing residents. The Ohio River is a source of drinking water for multiple states, and the E.P.A. is concerned that it has been seriously compromised. It is estimated that some 3,500 fish have been killed by the pollution thus far. Meanwhile, residents of East Palestine who have been assured that it is safe for them to return home have been complaining of nausea and severe headaches.

So it is a supreme irony that substantial shareholders in the railway involved, Norfolk Southern, include two of the biggest promoters of ESG investing: BlackRock and Vanguard.

According to various sources, top shareholders in Norfolk Southern Corp. are the Vanguard Group, and subsidiaries of BlackRock and JP Morgan. Specifically, as of this week, CNNMoney.com lists the Vanguard Group, Inc. as the top shareholder with 7.68 percent. BlackRock Fund Advisors and JPMorgan Investment Management tie at 4.54 percent as other top investors. As of December 31, 2022 Norfolk Southern’s own website lists Vanguard, BlackRock Institutional Trust Company and JP Morgan Asset Management as top shareholders.

The latest information about the cause of the accident and toxic discharge, indicates eleven of the fifty rail cars were carrying hazardous materials.

Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, criticized Norfolk Southern’s response in a Wednesday letter to Shaw, saying that mismanagement by the company had put first-responders and residents “at significant risk.” He said the rail company’s personnel made decisions without talking to state and local agencies, caused first-responders to have a lack of awareness, gave state officials inaccurate information about the impact of the controlled release of vinyl chloride and “failed to explore” alternatives to the controlled release that might have been safer.

“Norfolk Southern has repeatedly assured us of the safety of their rail cars — in fact, leading Norfolk Southern personnel described them to me as ‘the Cadillac of rail cars’ — yet despite these assertions, these were the same cars that Norfolk Southern personnel rushed to vent and burn without gathering input from state and local leaders,” Shapiro wrote.

Although not right now.

Both Vanguard and Black Rock are notable for having promoted investments based not on traditional criteria to which fiduciaries have been bound, such as profitability and capital accounts, but rather on how these investment managers assess the ESG (environmental, social and governmental) policies of the companies in which they place investment funds. Of course, their analyses are utterly subjective, fluid, and difficult to quantify. Unsurprisingly, these investments are generally underperforming. As we’ve frequently noted in this space in the past, a number of states are fighting back against placing investments through these operations for these very reasons.

Maybe, to be consistent with ESG policies, investors should shun Vanguard and BlackRock over their role in the disaster in East Palestine.