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I'll bet you didn't even know that this country built not only the Panama Canal, which we certainly deserve back for the effort, but the Suez Canal, too! Certainly, the least we deserve -- the very least! -- is free passage for all our ships through both of them, if not to "reclaim" them! In fact, an exclamation point isn't faintly enough to make the -- yes! -- point!! Who, of a certain age, can't remember the moment when "we" first built the Suez Canal, a mere 150 or so years ago? Certainly, Donald Trump can, or why would he have recently demanded free passage through it?
Oh, and then there's Greenland! I mean, how much more obvious could it be that such a giant iceberg of an island filled with rare metals and minerals is "in our future"? Honestly, those critical minerals are worth a fortune in a world where every idiot and his brother or sister believes in climate change. And like President Trump, you don't faintly have to believe in it yourself to want to control them. After all, it's just a matter of time until we Americans do, right?
It all makes such sense, doesn't it? Or do I mean, in the world of Donald Trump's greed, so much senselessness? Now, let TomDispatch regular Joshua Frank, author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, take you deep into the strange and deeply destructive world of Donald Trump and green (or do I mean greed) energy. Tom
Donald Trump's Feverish Lust for Green Energy Resources
It's Not About the Climate, It's About Greed
By Joshua Frank
Ancient oak trees rise above gigantic boulders scattered across a high desert mesa in Arizona's Tonto National Forest. This is Oak Flat (Chi' chil Bildagoteel), a sacred site for Native Americans, including the Western and San Carlos Apache. And like many other lands across the West, it's under grave threat from multinational mining interests, all in the name of climate mitigation, but most importantly, for the money.
Oak Flat is as stunning as it is vast, and even though it's only an hour's drive from the concrete sprawl of Phoenix, when you're there, you feel as if you're on an entirely different planet. When I say that the place is sacred, if anything I may be underestimating its significance. To the Apache and others, Oak Flat is the birthplace of life on Earth, their spiritual Eden.
"Here is the creation story of where a woman came to be, and where the holy ones came together," Wendsler Nosie, tribal leader of the San Carlos Apache tribe, explains. "This is where we originated as people."
Beneath this biologically rich landscape, home to a variety of dry-land species including the endangered hedgehog cacti and the ocelot wildcat, lies a rich deposit of copper, the conductive metal vital for the technologies needed to power the world's green-energy transition.
The Apache and environmentalists have been fighting a legal battle over the future of Oak Flat, which the U.S. government promised to protect in the 1852 Treaty of Santa Fe. Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, Oak Flat has been shielded from mining for the last 60 years. However, that protective status came under attack in 2014 when Arizona Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake undermined the agreement by attaching a rider to the National Defense Authorization Act, handing over 2,400 acres of Oak Flat to Resolution Copper, a joint mining venture between Rio Tinto, the world's second largest metals and mining corporation, and BHP, possibly the world's largest mining company. It was a blatant and sinister land grab.
The legislation, later signed into law by President Barack Obama, intentionally undermined the National Environmental Policy Act through a subtle maneuver that allowed the mine's approval to proceed, regardless of any adverse environmental impact findings that might result, by shortening the approval process before a judicial review could take place. The Arizona senators had manipulated the process to benefit the mining conglomerates, no matter the damage it would cause, which, by any measure, would be insurmountable. The two senators didn't come up with that backroom scheme on their own. Flake had spent time as a paid lobbyist for Rio Tinto and, in 2014, the late John McCain was the company's top recipient of campaign contributions.
The plan today, according to the mining juggernaut, is to gut Oak Flat using a novel process called "block cave mining," which involves blasting the copper ore from below, causing the ground above it to collapse under its own weight. The results would be catastrophic, creating a 1.8-mile-wide, 1,000-foot-deep crater.
Such impacts are apparently just the cost of doing business (and supposedly fighting climate change) these days. Resolution Copper estimates that mining Oak Flat could yield more than 40 billion tons of copper over 40 years, generating more than $140 billion in profits and providing enough copper to power 200 million electric vehicles (EVs). In addition to the massive hole that the mine would create, the toxic waste from the operation, expected in the end to be 50 stories high and cover an area three times larger than San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, would also bury an unknown number of historic and traditional cultural sites of the Apaches and other neighboring Indigenous nations.
Ultimately, Oak Flat would simply be rendered unrecognizable.
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