[✔️] August 19, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Disaster capitalism - Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, Rebeca Watson, Lewis Black, Dave Roberts, 2015 Methane leaks.

[Richard Pauli]

/*August 19*//*, 2023*/

/[ Disaster capitalism aggressive opportunism - video and transcript 
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/8/18/maui_wildfire_sirens ]/
*Plantation Disaster Capitalism: Native Hawaiians Organize to Stop Land 
& Water Grabs After Maui Fire*
Democracy Now!
Aug 18, 2023

With the death toll from the Maui wildfires at 111 and as many as 1,000 
still missing, we speak with Hawaiian law professor Kapuaʻala Sproat 
about the conditions that made the fires more destructive and what's yet 
to come for residents looking to rebuild their lives. Decades of 
neocolonialism in Hawaii have redirected precious water resources toward 
golf courses, resorts and other corporate ventures, turning many areas 
into tinderboxes and leaving little water to fight back against the 
flames. Now many Hawaiians say there is a power grab underway as real 
estate interests and other wealthy outsiders look to buy up land and 
water rights on the cheap as people are still reeling from the loss of 
their family members, livelihoods and communities. "Plantation disaster 
capitalism is, unfortunately, the perfect term for what's going on," 
says Sproat, who just published a piece in The Guardian with Naomi Klein 
and is professor of law at Ka Huli Ao Native Hawaiian Law Center and 
co-director of the Native Hawaiian Rights Clinic at the University of 
Hawaii at Mānoa School of Law. "The plantations, the large landed 
interests that have had control over not just the land, but really much.

transcript https://www.democracynow.org/2023/8/18/maui_wildfire_sirens ]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck7kwvi951o

- -

/[ violations beyond the flames  - clips from long article in the 
Guardian ]/
*Why was there no water to fight the fire in Maui?*
Naomi Klein and Kapuaʻala Sproat
Big corporations, golf courses and hotels have been taking water from 
locals for years. Now the fire may result in even more devastating water 
theft
Thu 17 Aug 2023
All over Maui, golf courses glisten emerald green, hotels manage to fill 
their pools and corporations stockpile water to sell to luxury estates. 
And yet, when it came time to fight the fires, some hoses ran dry. Why?

The reason is the long-running battle over west Maui’s most precious 
natural resource: water. That’s why, on Tuesday 8 August, when Tereariʻi 
Chandler-ʻĪao was fleeing the fires in Lahaina, she grabbed a bag of 
clothes, some food – and something a little unconventional: a box filled 
with water use permit applications.

Despite her personal calamity, Tereariʻi, a grassroots attorney, already 
knew that the fight for Maui’s future was about to intensify, and at its 
heart would not be fire, but another element entirely: water. 
Specifically, the water rights of Native Hawaiians, rights that a long 
parade of plantations, real estate developers, and luxury resorts have 
been stifling for nearly two centuries. As the flames approached, 
Tereariʻi feared that, under cover of emergency, those large players 
might finally get their chance to grab west Maui’s water for good...
- -
Even long after most of those original plantations closed, the 
infrastructure and dynamics of water theft remained. Today, many Native 
Hawaiian communities, who have lived in Maui Komohana since time 
immemorial, remain cut off from water for their basic needs, including 
drinking, laundry and traditional crop irrigation. For instance, Lauren 
Palakiko, whose family has resided in Kauaʻula for centuries and has 
priority water rights under the law, last year testified at a state 
water commission hearing that she had to bathe her baby in a bucket 
because not enough water reached her home. That’s because the streams 
that once flowed through their valley are diverted for luxury 
subdivisions, which often occupy plantation-controlled lands...
- -
Together, the communities have been fighting for their right to manage 
their own water rather than watch as it is diverted for often frivolous 
uses. June 2022 saw a historic victory: heeding the overwhelming demands 
of Native Hawaiians and other residents, the water commission voted 
unanimously to designate west Maui as a surface and groundwater 
management area. Under Hawaii’s water code, this designation invokes the 
commission’s permitting authority to protect priority Native Hawaiian 
rights and the environment over the historical and ongoing 
overexploitation of water by plantations and developers.

After protracted struggle, and despite predictable opposition from 
industry, the community and the water commission prevailed, instituting 
a new permitting system that the community hoped would restore public 
control over water that had been stolen for over a century. The Palakiko 
family and others began filling out water use permit applications 
requesting water for their household needs, like bathing their babies, 
and also water for Indigenous wetland agriculture...
- But here’s the cruelest irony: the deadline to submit those permit 
applications to the water commission was on Monday 7 August. And the 
fire that devoured Lahaina was the very next day.

The Hawaii governor’s administration wasted no time in issuing emergency 
proclamations that suspended a series of laws, including Hawaii’s “state 
water code, to the extent necessary to respond to the emergency”. The 
plantation successors leapt into action, attempting an end run around 
the designation process that they had been unsuccessful in stopping 
before the emergency proclamation. In the days after the fires, WML 
demanded the water commission suspend protections for streams across 
Maui Komohana – even in areas untouched by fire – and insinuated that 
the commission’s deputy director, Kaleo Manuel, who had been the 
agency’s public face throughout the designation process, was to blame 
for the destructive fire. The commission chair granted the request, 
allowing the corporation to divert the streams to fill the reservoirs 
that service its luxury developments. WML finally requested that the 
entire designation process “be suspended and ultimately modified”. Its 
own executive publicly stated: “I would love to see it gone” – a move 
denounced by the Earthjustice managing attorney Isaac Moriwake as an 
attempt to “use this tragedy for cheap advantage”.

Then, on Wednesday, with searches for survivors still very much under 
way, the administration announced it was “re-deploying” Manuel, 
effectively relieving him of all duties and banishing him to an unknown 
different post. The move has left the commission without an 
administrative leader.

This is a classic case of the most craven disaster capitalism: a small 
elite group using a profound human tragedy as their window to roll back 
a hard-won grassroots victory for water rights, while removing civil 
servants who pose a political inconvenience to the administration’s 
pro-developer agenda...
- -
Many Maui Komohana communities refuse to accept WML’s rewriting of 
history. They know, for example, it was actually high winds that 
prevented helicopters from fighting the fires, and when they were 
ultimately used, seawater proved more accessible. They also understand 
that the desiccated conditions that made the region so vulnerable are a 
result of over a century of settler colonialism, in which Indigenous 
resources have been hoarded by the plantations and their successors. As 
Hawaii’s poet laureate, Brandy Nālani McDougall, explained, if “water 
was allowed to flow, where it was allowed to be created and continued to 
feed and nurture everyone it should, this wouldn’t have happened”.

If there is a cause for hope, it’s that Maui’s people have learned from 
their history. Yes, irreplaceable historical and cultural artifacts have 
been lost to the flames but not the teachings that those artifacts 
represent. Native Hawaiians know what their rights are – to stay on 
their ancestral lands, to restore streamflows to those lands, and to 
ensure their Indigenous lifeways will persevere in the face of a climate 
crisis fueled by colonial pillage. Indeed, those traditional lifeways 
historically restored abundance to the islands, while plantation 
mismanagement has turned the land into a desert. That’s why grassroots 
organizers like Tereariʻi knew to take that box of precious papers 
relating to water rights, filled with notes collected during careful 
community engagement and consultation...
- -
This hard-won knowledge is also why, as soon as the real estate 
developers started circling, local residents began organizing to call 
out disaster profiteering. Many have also committed to securing the 
resources required to get families back into rebuilt homes – and to be 
the authors and architects of their own post-disaster reconstruction, a 
process grounded in aloha ʻāina, the ethos of deep reverence for natural 
and cultural resources.

That ethos is the reason that water is a public trust in Hawaii, not 
owned by anyone – not the governor, WML or even Native Hawaiians with 
ancestral ties to the resource. Instead, under Indigenous law, water is 
zealously stewarded for present and future generations so that all can 
thrive. While politically inconvenient for some, this principle is what 
will preserve life on these fragile islands. Aloha ʻāina enabled Native 
Hawaiians to flourish in Hawaii for a millennium, and it’s precisely 
this kind of biocultural knowledge that is needed to navigate the path 
forward in a time of climate crisis.

Hawaii is indeed in an emergency, but it needs emergency proclamations 
that operationalize aloha ʻāina, not ones that push it aside by 
opportunistically suspending inalienable water laws and dismissing 
diligent public servants. What this governor does next will determine if 
Maui Komohana will remain a space for Indigenous and other local 
families like the Palakikos, or if companies like WML and its affluent 
customers are empowered to complete their takeover of land and water in 
west Maui.

Right now, the eyes of the world are on Maui, but many don’t know where 
to look. Yes, look to the wreckage, the grieving families, the 
traumatized children, the incinerated artifacts, and donate what you can 
to community-led groups on the ground. But look below and beyond that 
too. To the aquifers and streams, and the plantation-era diversion 
ditches and reservoirs. Because that’s where the water is, and whoever 
controls the water controls the future of Maui.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/17/hawaii-fires-maui-water-rights-disaster-capitalism

- -

/[ Maui wildfire video rant "climate change and colonialism"  ]/
*Maui Fires: Was it Space Lasers or Colonialism?*
Rebecca Watson
Aug 16, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mpWHaY7GF0

- -

/[ Elephants in the room - another critical comic rant ]/
*Paradise is Burning - Lewis Black's Rantcast*
Lewis Black
Aug 18, 2023  Lewis Black's Rantcast
Lewis discusses the wildfires that devastated the island of Maui in 
addition to a few other "elephants" in the room.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDYnmaL1Dvo



/[ Podcast --  Dave Roberts interviews his pal ]/
*A conversation with Saul Griffith*
What it says on the tin.

AUG 18, 2023
If you are a Volts subscriber, you are almost certainly familiar with 
Saul Griffith. I've been following him and his work for years, and I 
think I can say without hyperbole that he is the smartest person I have 
ever met.

An Australian by birth and an MIT PhD by training, he got his start as a 
tinkerer, inventor, and entrepreneur, responsible for, among other 
things, the kite-based wind power company Makani and the innovation 
incubator Otherlab.

A few years ago, alarmed by the lack of progress on climate change, he 
turned his attention to public advocacy, authoring the book Electrify 
and co-founding Rewiring America. That organization has, in relatively 
little time, become incredibly influential among US thought leaders and 
policy makers. It played a key role in the passage of the Inflation 
Reduction Act.

In 2021, Griffith and his family moved back to Australia, where he 
helped found Rewiring Australia, and sure enough, it has already become 
as or more influential than its American counterpart. As Volties know, I 
am currently down in Australia. I was scheduled to do a public event 
with Griffith, so I thought it would be fun to meet up a little 
beforehand to record a pod.

Neither of us had particularly prepared for said pod, but it will not 
surprise you to hear that Griffith was nonetheless as fascinating and 
articulate as always, on subjects ranging from IRA to Australian rooftop 
solar to green steel. Enjoy.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/a-conversation-with-saul-griffith?utm_source=podcast-email%2Csubstack&publication_id=193024&post_id=136183245&utm_medium=email#details



/[The news archive - looking back at methane. - Nothing natural about 
Natural Gas  ]/
/*August  19, 2015 */
August 19, 2015:
The New York Times reports:

    "A little-noted portion of the chain of pipelines and equipment that
    brings natural gas from the field into power plants and homes is
    responsible for a surprising amount of methane emissions, according
    to a study on Tuesday.

    "Natural-gas gathering facilities, which collect from multiple
    wells, lose about 100 billion cubic feet of natural gas a year,
    about eight times as much as estimates used by the Environmental
    Protection Agency, according to the study, which appeared in the
    journal Environmental Science and Technology.

    "The newly discovered leaks, if counted in the E.P.A. inventory,
    would increase its entire systemwide estimate by about 25 percent,
    said the Environmental Defense Fund, which sponsored the research as
    part of methane emissions studies it organized."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/science/methane-leaks-in-natural-gas-supply-chain-far-exceed-estimates-study-says.html?mwrsm=Email 



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