Gas fracking companies revealed in a private PR conference that they're using military psychological warfare tactics (Psyops) on U.S. soil, and described citizens concerned about fracking's threat to health, water and the climate as "an insurgency."

With apologies to Francis Ford Coppola, welcome to Frackalypse.

Now, for more information, visit www.DeSmogBlog.com/Fracking

Also check out MarkFiore.com.

Your morning open thread begins below.

This is your Moment of Clarity #233: For the first time in 3 million years the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide is over 400 parts per million. Scientists say this is well beyond a sustainable level, and it's increasing every day.

Keep fighting,

Lee

Today, Monday May 13th, New Yorkers from Occupy the Pipeline, Occupy Sandy, and over twenty partner groups will march and rally to greet President Obama when he attends a fundraiser with members of the 1% at the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue.

Carbon dioxide levels have now surpassed 400 parts per million, a long-feared milestone. We must act now.

Join us if you stand against fossil fuel pipelines, against fracking, against tar sands, and FOR a country powered by wind, water and solar.

Gather in Bryant Park starting at 5 (meet near the fountain off 6th avenue at 41st Street). Reverend Billy and his choir will lead us off with a rousing blessing and song. We'll begin to march at 5:30, then rally in front of the Waldorf Astoria at 6:30. Please wear yellow and orange to demonstrate your support for a clean energy future.

RSVP and Share on Facebook!

Event Partners: 350 NYC, 350 NJ, 350.org, 99Rise, Brooklyn For Peace, Coalition Against the Rockaway Pipeline (CARP), CREDO, CUNY Divest, Food & Water Watch, Global Kids Inc., Green Party of NY, Human Impacts Institute, NYC Friends of Clearwater, NYU Divest, Occupy the Pipeline, Occupy Sandy, Restore the Rock, Sane Energy Project, Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter, Sierra Club National, United for Action, World Can't Wait, WESPAC, YANA (You Are Never Alone).

-- from the ‘Your Inbox: Occupied’ team

The Faulkner County Citizens Advisory Group conducted independent tests on the air and water from Lake Conway in response to the Exxon tar sands oil spill, and presented the findings during a Townhall gathering in Mayflower, Arkansas this week. Residents were alarmed by what they heard.

KTHV 11:

John Hammons lives near an area known as "The Cove," a body of water sitting across from Lake Conway in Mayflower.

"We can smell it. So I know it's there," Hammons said, who is concerned about his three children and wife, who is seven months pregnant.

"She's broken out in hives, had nose bleeds, (and) respiratory problems," he explained.

The Hammons were among a group of concerned people in the area who met for the town hall meeting.

Chemist Wilma Subra said ExxonMobil is being attentive to those inside the Northwoods subdivision, where thousands of gallons of heavy crude oil spilled nearly one month ago, but others in the area have suffered with little attention.

"There's a population all around that's been made very, very sick by the emissions," Subra said.

To evaluate the situation, Subra independently analyzed air and water data captured from the Lake Conway area, claiming the carcinogen Benzene is present in the region.

While Exxon denies the claims, State health officials are saying the same thing as Exxon -- that "all air quality tests returned safe levels for people in the area."

Yet Subra's claims were echoed by Scott Smith of OPFLEX Solutions, a company that offers solutions for absorbing oil. Smith's preliminary findings indicate the presence of tar sands oil in Lake Conway, both in "the cove" of Lake Conway and in the larger lake beyond the cove.

Also, InsideClimate News has reported that the oil spill probe has fallen to an understaffed governmental agency with close ties to the oil industry, including PHMSA administrator Cynthia Quarterman, for example, having served as legal counsel for Enbridge, the culprit in the Michigan spill, before moving to her current position at the federal agency.

You can view a series of recordings taken by an attendee of Mayflower's Town Hall meeting if you just click here.

From our friends at NASA comes this amazing 13-second animation that depicts how temperatures around the globe have warmed since 1950. You’ll note an acceleration of the temperature trend in the late 1970s as greenhouse gas emissions from energy production increased worldwide and clean air laws reduced emissions of pollutants that had a cooling effect on the climate, and thus were masking some of the global warming signal.

The data come from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York (GISS), which monitors global surface temperatures. As NASA notes, “All 10 of the warmest years in the GISS analysis have occurred since 1998, continuing a trend of temperatures well above the mid-20th century average."

From Superstorm Sandy to soaring temperatures in Australia, ongoing drought that has parched more than 60% of the U.S., and flooding from hurricanes around the world, we are experiencing the consequences of our carbon pollution now. We are paying the cost of these dirty weather disasters and other climate impacts through taxes, medical bills, and insurance rates (to name just a few). It’s past time to talk about the real cost of carbon pollution and to take action so that the polluters are paying their fair share.

Carbon pollution is not only disrupting our lives, it’s hitting our wallets. Comedian and musician Reggie Watts shows how, laying out the billion-dollar connection between fossil-fuel energy and dirty weather events like Superstorm Sandy caused by carbon pollution.

In the spirit of moving forward to solve the climate crisis, it’s time to jump-start a real carbon conversation.

For more information, visit The Climate Reality Project.

The explosive new documentary short Cyanide Beach has been released on Youtube. The 25-minute film, which premiered in Tucson, was made by longtime investigative journalist John Dougherty. Frances Causey, Co-Director of Heist: Who Stole the American Dream was a consulting producer on the project.

Cyanide Beach connects Vancouver, BC mining executives who want to build the controversial Rosemont open pit copper mine on the outskirts of Tucson, to a defunct Italian gold mining operation in Sardinia, Italy. Many of the same executives who want to build the Rosemont mine, directly contributed to an unfolding environmental and financial disaster in Sardinia.

“Cyanide Beach” provides insight on what could happen in Southern Arizona if the proposed Rosemont Copper mine is allowed to go forward.

Rosemont Copper Company intends to dump billions of tons of mine waste laced with mercury, lead, arsenic and other poisons on more than 3,000 acres of the Coronado National Forest. American taxpayers would receive no royalties for the five billion pounds of copper that would be mined over two decades. Rosemont intends to export all of the copper to overseas markets, where it will be refined and re-imported into the U.S.

Extensive supporting documentation for the film, including a timeline of the business history of the top officers in Augusta Resource, supported by thousands of pages of corporate disclosures, is posted at Dougherty’s InvestigativeMedia.com.

Up to 15,000 people have taken to the streets of the Greek city of Thessaloniki to protest against a planned Canadian gold mining project.

The demonstrators say the mine will cause irreversible environmental damage to the area.

Al Jazeera's John Psaropoulos reports from Thessaloniki.

Fort Berthold in North Dakota

By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica

Native Americans on an oil-rich North Dakota reservation have been cheated out of more than $1 billion by schemes to buy drilling rights for lowball prices, a flurry of recent lawsuits assert. And, the suits claim, the federal government facilitated the alleged swindle by failing in its legal obligation to ensure the tribes got a fair deal.

This is a story as old as America itself, given a new twist by fracking and the boom that technology has sparked in North Dakota oil country. Since the late 1800s, the U.S. government has appropriated much of the original tribal lands associated with the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota for railroads and white homesteaders. A devastating blow was delivered when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri River in 1953, flooding more than 150,000 acres at the heart of the remaining reservation. Members of the Three Affiliated Tribes — the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara — were forced out of the fertile valley and up into the arid and barren surrounding hills, where they live now.

But that last-resort land turns out to hold a wealth of oil, because it sits on the Bakken Shale, widely believed to be one of the world's largest deposits of crude. Until recently, that oil was difficult to extract, but hydraulic fracturing, combined with the ability to drill a well sideways underground, can tap it. The result, according to several senior tribal members and lawsuits filed last November and early this year in federal and state courts, has been a land grab involving everyone from tribal leaders accused of enriching themselves at the expense of their people, to oil speculators, to a New York hedge fund, to the federal government's Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The rush to get access to oil on tribal lands is part of the oil industry's larger push to secure drilling rights across the United States. Recent estimates show that the U.S. contains vast quantities of oil and gas. As fracking has opened new fields to drilling, and the U.S. has striven to get more of its energy from within its borders, leases from Louisiana to Pennsylvania have been gobbled up. Now the pressure is increasing on one of the last sizeable holdouts — lands owned by Native Americans.

A review of tribal and federal records as well as lawsuit documents reveals a dizzying array of lowball, non-competitive deals brokered by numerous companies, often entwined with the tribal council and with individual landholders on the reservation. But at heart the alleged practices are simple: Tribal leaders and outsiders set up companies to buy drilling rights cheap and flip them later for spectacular profits — in one case earning as much as a 200-fold return in just four years.

Continue reading »

The American Lung Association released this Red Carriage television advertisement to highlight the efforts of big corporate polluters who are working to block clean air protections. Children, seniors and millions of others with chronic lung disease need to be protected from air pollution.

The ad highlights what's at stake if Washington weakens clean air protections, and drives home the implications of the choice we face as a nation -- a dirty coal fired future, or one powered by clean, renewable energy.

The Clean Air Act reduces our exposure to the harmful effects listed above by regulating emissions of ozone, particle pollution, and other pollutants. Nationally in 2010, the Clean Air Act prevented:

160,000 premature deaths;

1.7 million instances of asthma attacks;

41,000 respiratory hospital admissions; and

45,000 cardiovascular hospital admissions.

For additional information, check out the following:

Healthy Air Resources

American Lung Association