As America grew westward in the 19th and 20th centuries, the federal government took land from Indigenous peoples and gave it to states for the creation of public colleges known as land-grant universities. A new Grist investigation reveals how many of these institutions continue to profit from this stolen land, largely through extractive industries including oil and gas production, mining, and logging.

Using publicly available data, our investigation locates millions of acres taken from more than a hundred Indigenous nations to provide ongoing sources of revenue for educational institutions. Our reporting reveals how Indigenous lands and resources bankroll land-grant universities, historically and today, and provides insight into the relationship between colonialism, higher education, and climate change.

Here are five takeaways from our investigation: 

1 Fourteen land-grant universities generate revenue from 8.2 million surface and subsurface acres of Indigenous land.

State trust lands just might be one of the best kept public secrets in America: They exist in 21 Western and Midwestern states, totaling more than 500 million surface and subsurface acres. They are held and managed by state agencies and primarily exist to subsidize education. Using data from these state agencies, Grist located trust lands associated with specific land-grant institutions to determine where they are located and how they are used to benefit those colleges. “A perpetual, multigenerational land trust for the support of the beneficiaries and future generations” is how the Arizona State Land Department describes them.

2 Those 8.2 million acres were taken from at least 123 Indigenous nations through more than 150 land cessions, a legal term for the surrendering of territory.  

Grist was able to compare state trust land data with federal data known as the Schedule of Indian Land Cessions, which documents Indigenous land cessions in the continental United States using extensive information on treaties and other land seizures. By joining these different datasets, we were able to get a glimpse of just how many Indigenous nations were impacted by the creation of these institutions. 

3 Indigenous nations were paid approximately $4.3 million in 2023 dollars for these lands. In many cases, however, nothing was paid at all.

Based on accounting of historical payments to Indigenous nations by the Indian Claims Commission and the Court of Claims, Grist was able to identify the price paid per acre for each land cession and calculate the total amount paid to tribes for trust lands that benefit universities today. It’s important to note that in many cases, Indigenous nations were never compensated for the taking of their territory, and as our reporting reveals, those lands have continued to provide steady revenue streams to land-grant institutions. “Universities continue to benefit from colonization,” said Sharon Stein, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of British Columbia. “It’s not just a historical fact; the actual income of the institution is subsidized by this ongoing dispossession.”

4 Nearly 25 percent of land-grant university trust lands are designated for either fossil fuel production or the mining of minerals like coal and iron-rich taconite. 

Utilizing datasets from state land agencies, we were able to determine what activities generated revenue for land-grant universities. While much of our focus is on the energy industry due to its massive climate impact, we found that grazing is permitted on about a third of the land, or approximately 2.8 million surface acres. Timber, agriculture, and infrastructure leases — for roads or pipelines, for instance — make up much of the remaining acreage. However, despite the somewhat smaller footprint that timberlands represent in our dataset, they are still significant sources of revenue: From statehood in 1889 to 2022, timber sales on trust lands in Washington provided Washington State University with at least $1.1 billion in revenue when adjusted for inflation.

5 In 2022, state trust lands generated more than $2.2 billion in revenue. Between 2018 and 2022: approximately $6.6 billion.

Trust land activities provide significant streams of income to land-grant schools, but most importantly, they subsidize higher education so citizens don’t have to. “Every dollar earned by the land office,” Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard of New Mexico said when revenues broke the billion-dollar barrier, “is a dollar taxpayers do not have to pay to support public institutions.” 

Read our story, Misplaced Trust, or download the data.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Top 5 takeaways of our investigation into state trust lands on Feb 7, 2024.

Advocates express relief but push for greater oversight of facilities statewide By Wilson Criscione /…

The post Idaho youth treatment home exposed in InvestigateWest investigation closes down first appeared on InvestigateWest.

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As day broke over the small mountain town of Elliston, Virginia one Monday in October, masked figures in thick coats emerged from the woods surrounding a construction site. Three of them approached three excavators and, one by one, locked themselves to the machines, bringing the day’s work to a halt. As they did so, several dozen of their fellow protesters gathered around them, unfurling banners and chanting amidst the groaning and beeping of construction equipment.

They made their way across the field, over patches of bare earth, around sections of rusty pipe meant for burial beneath the mountain. Eventually the metal tubes  will form yet another section of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which will soon carry 2 billion cubic feet of fracked methane from the shalefields of West Virginia to North Carolina each day. Their breath billowed in the crisp air. Beyond them stretched a bright blue sky, and mountains tinged with yellow. The past night’s rain pooled on the muddy and compacted soil beneath their feet.

Workers in highlighter-yellow vests and hard hats milled around, some looking amused, others frustrated. One or two engaged with the protesters, only to be told off by an irate site manager. A few miles away at the West Virginia state line, another three dozen or so activists did much the same atop Peters Mountain. One even managed to crawl under an excavator and lock herself in place, despite the cold. The others rallied around, enclosing her in a tight, protective circle.

Some might wonder why they bothered. After all, the project is, by the Mountain Valley Pipeline company’s estimate, 94 percent complete and will be wrapped up before summer. It  stalled for several years amid legal fights over various permits, but Senator Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West VIrginia, almost single-handedly revived it in 2022 in exchange for his support of key Democratic priorities. Since then, the Biden administration and the Supreme Court have all but assured its completion. With the approximately 303-mile pipeline approaching the final stretch after almost a decade’s work, it might seem hardly worth fighting at this point.

A large contingent of steadfast opposition begs to differ, and will enthusiastically explain why. The pipeline is six years behind schedule, about half a billion dollars over budget, and, despite promises that it would be done by the end of last year, delayed once again. The remaining construction is over rugged terrain, with hundreds of water crossings left to bridge. The company recently postponed, shortened, and rerouted its planned extension into North Carolina, a proposal long stymied by permitting problems with the main line. And, just last month, Equitrans, which owns the pipeline and many others across the country, was said to be considering selling itself. The road to the pipeline’s completion remains rocky, its opponents argue, with many opportunities to make finishing it as difficult as possible.

“We cannot let them destroy our land and water,” said a young woman named Ericka. Like many interviewed for this story, she gave only her first name out of fear of reprisal from Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC, which has begun suing protesters in a bid to silence them. She had brought her three children to occupy the land that day. “What are we going to drink? Where are we going to live? People have to come here and stop this.”

Killing the project is their ideal outcome. Barring that, those who have for almost a decade packed public hearings, spent weeks at sit-ins and even lived high in trees for 932 days want to make building pipelines so time consuming, so expensive, so plain annoying, that fossil fuel companies and the politicians who support them think twice about greenlighting any more.

Even as pipeline crews continue steadily boring under rivers and felling trees, activists say each day they can delay construction is another day humanity delays the worst impacts of climate change. The increasingly grave personal and legal risks they face are, they say, worth it, if only for that.

“For  five f****** years, we’ve fought you without fear,” sang the masked figures on Peters Mountain, and “we’ll fight you for five f****** more.”

Morning ripened over the ridge, and the fog rolled in, then out. The pipeline workers retreated, mostly without complaint — followed by the protestors’ calls of “Paid time off! Paid time off!” Some of those gathered began to sing: John Prine songs about beautiful landscapes stripped for coal, union songs, and striking miners’ ballads that reverberated through the same ridges long ago. When their voices grew weary, someone blared dance music through a loudspeaker as police cars rumbled up the gravel access road. They tried not to be afraid as the sirens grew louder, knowing the risk they had taken in coming here and knowing, as many said, that the time of act is now.

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As the nation’s fracking boom reached coal country about a decade ago, pipelines carrying methane began to snake across the landscape. The Mountain Valley Pipeline, or MVP, met instant fury when Mountain Valley LLC proposed it in 2014. Opposition to the project drew a wide range of people, from farmers in West Virginia to Indigenous tribes in North Carolina, together in a united front. Some were alarmed by what it would mean for their land: Razed trees, disturbed landscapes, water running brown from the tap, and, in the end, a frightening risk of leaks and explosions. A pipeline in Pennsylvania run by one of the companies involved in MVP blew up late last year; a couple and their child suffered severe burns and barely escaped with their lives. Then there’s the longer term, irreversible danger of the 90 million metric tons of carbon dioxide that will come from producing, transporting, and burning all that methane over the 40 to 50 years the pipeline is expected to operate.

Residents along the project’s path joined academics, local organizations, and environmental nonprofits in filing lawsuits, seeking injunctions, and packing hearings. As they worked the legal system, other activists staged equipment lockdowns, organized rallies, and took to the trees for months-long sit-ins. The efforts led to some wins. Opponents repeatedly delayed construction, got various permits thrown out, and leveled allegations of water quality violations and illegal work on national forest land. In late 2018, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a series of rulings annulling the pipeline’s access to federal land and striking down a key permit. The next year, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered an end to almost all construction.

The project languished until the summer of 2022, when Manchin, a key Democratic senate vote who often challenges his party, made his support of Biden’s climate agenda contingent upon the pipeline’s completion. Last summer, he included a provision in the debt ceiling deal that effectively cleared away any remaining hurdles. A short time later, the Supreme Court lifted a stay on construction through a 3.5-mile stretch through Jefferson National Forest. Crews returned to work with renewed vigor.

So too did the protestors. Morning after morning, week after week, pipeline workers clocked in only to find their work impeded. Grannies locked to rocking chairs in the pipeline path, teenagers glued to construction equipment, worksites crowded by 20 to 30 people intent on stopping the day’s progress, more often than not, successfully. The campaign drew college students from nearby Roanoke, neighbors from across the mountains, seasoned organizers and newer activists with little experience, all part of a near decade-long coalition, all activated by the pipeline’s anticipated completion, and many ready to face legal consequences for opposing it.

Jammie Hale is a bespectacled and bearded 51-year-old from Giles County, Virginia. Before he joined the campaign to stop the pipeline five and a half years ago, he was depressed and struggling with addiction. It didn’t help that the ruckus of construction invaded his waking and sleeping hours as it got closer and closer to his home, which lies within the 500-foot blast zone that could level his house in an explosion. “After a while, you hear all that, it kind of gets under your skin,” he said with a gentle intensity. “You build these angers up inside you, and how do you release these angers? Through self harm?” He became sleepless, consumed with visions of his family, and the land he plans to deed to his children, going up in flames.

When people began to organize, he and others in the community joined in. He found a will to live in the work. “I’m five years sober because of this project,”  Hale said. “Because, you know, I wanted to be useful.”

Hale attended permit hearings, tested water, and, when people started sitting in trees, hiked up the mountain to support them. He brought home-cooked meals, blankets, and supplies, and rallied on the forest floor to boost their morale. “I instantly fell in love with these people because they were just so badass,” Hale said. He and his neighbors began to take more concerted action, filming and peacefully confronting pipeline company surveyors who came unannounced to survey their land for construction. Eventually, he found himself engaging in civil disobedience, fully aware of the risks he faces.

Hale is among a growing number of protesters the Mountain Valley Pipeline company has targeted with injunctions, a potentially costly legal hassle that could lead to jail time for anyone found on a construction site. Local authorities are taking an increasingly dim view of folks like Hale and show little hesitation in pursuing them for even minor infractions as the company continues to seize their land through eminent domain. These days, Hale supports protestors from afar by making signs and sharing food, among other things. There’s still some risk, he says, but if he lands in a cell or a courtroom, so be it.

“I’m not scared,” he said. “It’s kind of strange that they’re trying to get people for trespassing when they are the ones that have been trespassing.”

Another longtime pipeline fighter who goes by Larkin is no stranger to arrests, or to supporting people whose civil disobedience has landed them in court time and again. A soft-spoken health care worker from nearby Blacksburg, Virginia, Larkin, who is in her late 30s, has been fighting resource extraction in Appalachia since she was a teenager. She spent the better part of a decade marching onto dusty strip mines, locking herself to equipment, and demanding a federal ban on mountaintop removal coal mining. Ten years ago, that energy shifted toward the region’s multiplying pipelines. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline was proposed alongside the MVP; it met with similarly vehement opposition, and eventually died amid mounting legal costs and project delays. In short, protest worked, Larkin said.

With the  Supreme Court greenlighting the MVP, it seems to Larkin and others that there’s only one thing left to do. That is, throw their bodies upon the gears, in hopes of at least slowing things down for one more day, every day, for as long as possible, by force if nothing else.

“We knew from the get-go that a chapter of the fight requiring an escalated level of resistance is going to come if folks have any hope in pushing back,” Larkin said.

Despite the risks, Larkin, and many others, feel they are taking ownership of their future and their dignity. When we fight, they say, we win, and it’s better that fossil fuel companies know their encroachments won’t go unchallenged. Larkin also feels it will deter future projects like the MVP. Without organized opposition, she feels the whole regulatory system will continue to rubber-stamp permits until the ocean overtakes Washington.

“Old men with no thought to the future are ruining things for all of us,” Larkin said. “It really is down to us to just be mad. And do it with our bodies and be in the way.”

She  knows she’s never far from becoming a target of the Mountain Valley Pipeline company’s ire. Over the years, she’s seen friends locked up and beaten down at various protests, and sometimes it makes her feel old. After so long in the fight, her knees and back ache, and she can’t spend hours sitting on the floor painting banners like she used to. When she began this work, she burned herself out quickly, believing that the world would end if she didn’t give everything she had.

 “When it’s so obvious that the world is on fire, it does feel like you have to put it out on the table all at once,” she said. “Just like, why think about the future, we have no future, kind of thing. And here we are, eight years later in this fight.”

Yet there are moments, even now, when the pipeline seems inevitable, when she feels the joy of having taken a stand, of having made lifelong friends, of having done the right thing.

“I freaking love to have daybreak on a new blockade that has gone up in the night,” Larkin said, smiling. “And I think the other thing that I love is that I have really met and built real relationships of trust and solidarity with neighbors, people in my community who I wouldn’t have otherwise known.”

The pace is fast and the emotions run hot right now, but the stakes have felt high for a long time, Larkin said. She’s watched friends get sick, both from burnout and from the environmental risks of living near extraction, and watched some die of environmental illnesses and illnesses of stress and poverty. When trying to pinpoint exactly how the fight has lasted so long, Larkin points to the constant influx of new activists, particularly energized young people from nearby towns and colleges, and from other, similar campaigns.

One activist who goes by Gator had only just turned 18 and drifted north after a working-class childhood on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. He felt disconnected and adrift at a military high school, beset by a gnawing sense of climate apocalypse and a bleak future. “My home is disappearing,” he said bluntly.

Gator found his way to the Weelaunee “Stop Cop City” occupation in Atlanta last summer. The connections he made there led him to the woods of Virginia and West Virginia, where he camped in the pipeline’s path and met people who shared his feelings of desperation and urgency.

He felt himself cross a Rubicon of sorts during a stint in jail after his arrest at another demonstration. He spent several days locked up, not knowing how much time had passed and listening to guards mock the people around him. As he sat there on the cold concrete bed, he knew there was no return to regular life, to regular expectations for himself.

“It used to be that you’d be like, ‘I want to keep my nose clean, because I have a chance of having a career and  having, at least for me, and the people I love, a comfortable life,’” Gator said. “But even that is disappearing.”

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The atmosphere in Elliston was, like the movement itself, at once nervous and defiant. Like environmental justice advocates most everywhere, those standing up to the Mountain Valley Pipeline are facing ever greater restrictions on their protests and increasingly harsh punishment for their actions.

In September, Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC filed a lawsuit against more than 40 individuals and two organizations — Appalachians Against Pipelines and Rising Tide North America. The suit  seeks more than $4 million in damages and a ruling prohibiting the defendants from accessing construction sites, planning demonstrations, or raising funds for protest activities. The company said it decided to sue because protestors endanger themselves and workers, and because they’re breaking the law.

“If opponents were truly interested in environmental protection,” said MVP spokeswoman Natalie Cox, “they would have engaged with us to address their concerns through honest, open dialogue, which we respectfully offered on numerous occasions, rather than wasting agency resources and burdening the courts to support their myopic agendas.” Cox also blamed protesters for disrupting landowners and limiting the region’s economic opportunities.

Such lawsuits — which activists and their attorneys often call a strategic action against public participation — are usually filed by corporate or government entities against people who speak out on a matter of public concern. Those fighting the pipeline say the suit is intended to chill protest and intimidate them. Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC has been regularly adding defendants to the suit, often after identifying them near protests or reading their names in the news. Many protesters have been charged with felonies in recent months, all for blocking construction.

Despite a relative lack of trouble at the Peters Mountain lockdown – authorities arrested two people and quickly released them – the arraignment later that week proved more contentious. The two young activists were unexpectedly re-arrested and prosecutors slapped each of them with a felony kidnapping charge – presumably, protesters say, for asking construction workers to leave their vehicles – and held without bond.

According to Appalachians Against Pipelines, another protester, who goes by Pine, turned themself in on a felony warrant; they were charged with kidnapping and theft for holding up a work vehicle. A judge set bail at $25,000. Another protester was sentenced to six months, with three of them suspended, for similar charges. They are free pending an appeal.

“This system is seeking to doom us to a future that will not even exist,” Pine said in a statement. “However, there is solidarity everywhere … these ridiculous charges that I received do not make me afraid, since I know I do not stand alone.”

Fear of arrest and imprisonment remains a restless undercurrent for many activists, said a young organizer who gave only her first name, Coral. She stepped away from fighting pipelines on tribal land to answer a call for support in central Appalachia..

“I’ve been grappling with the repression piece a lot because it is working,” said Coral, who identifies as Indigenous but would not state her affiliation for fear that it might help identify her. For her, and many of those fighting alongside her, the effort to stop the pipeline is a commitment to protecting unceded Indigenous land, and to building a world free from old, colonial, and extractive social structures. That obligation weighs heavily on her, though. The killing of an environmental activist at an ongoing forest blockade in Atlanta and the ceaseless violence against Native land defenders worldwide is never far from her mind. “Our people were persecuted and killed for fighting for our land,” she said.

And yet, despite it all, the pace of protest has increased since construction resumed. Few weeks go by without people locking themselves to equipment, blocking the pipeline route, or picketing banks that support the project and the company building it. Despite several frightening incidents, including one in which crews reportedly felled trees dangerously close to an activist, the blockades and lockdowns continue. The hope, many activists said, is to draw a critical mass of supporters to the region. The fight, they said, is far from over, and they hope to bring the same kind of energy sparked by the massive Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

In Elliston, as the crisp October day warmed, the crowd was as energized and raucous as ever, echoing demands that have evolved over decades of environmental organizing in central Appalachia. Many hands unfurled colorful banners connecting the fight against climate change to movements opposing war, genocide, incarceration, and the theft of Indigenous land. Before long, though, several police cars slowly rolled up the road from the main highway, blocking the group’s exit. As officers stepped from their cars and made their way up the hill, some protesters with children in tow began to worry about their safety but remained for the moment.

As the police amassed, a young person of about 20, bundled in warm clothing and locked to an excavator, called down to the crowd. Their face couldn’t be seen, but their voice sounded small and very young. “I’m here because…these mountains are beautiful,” they called, laughing. “Appalachia is beautiful. This planet is beautiful!” Some in the crowd, though anxious, smiled at the voice speaking for them. The crowd held one another and swayed in the breeze as the drums started up again.

“The judge has had it up to here with y’all,” one exasperated police officer remarked as some in the group talked him down from arresting everyone in sight, mothers and children and all. Other officers took photos of license plates and threatened to increase their retaliation if they saw any of the cars at another protest.

When the group moved on to a neighboring plot owned by someone sympathetic to their cause, the police followed them, threatening to cite anyone who stuck around. Everyone knew that probably meant being added to MVP’s lawsuit. They decided to move along, but vowed to return another day.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Inside the last-ditch effort to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline on Jan 16, 2024.

“Blue Oval City” sounds like some kind of fantastic, utopian megalopolis of the  future. In reality, it’s a massive automotive manufacturing complex that will provide several links in the EV supply chain. The joint venture, between Ford and Korean company SK Innovation, promises 6,000 good-paying jobs for residents of the small, rural communities around Stanton, Tennessee. Many expect it to benefit surrounding towns like Covington, Brownsville, and Jackson as well, while reaching south into Mississippi and north into Kentucky, too.

But the multibillion-dollar project raises complicated feelings for many in the working-class, largely Black communities that dot the farm country and marshy bottoms of west Tennessee. They pride themselves on a slower way of life, and feel lucky to have good drinking water from a reliable aquifer. Development on such a large scale will, they fear, change the community, suck up water and electricity, and prompt an influx of newcomers and development.

They are only the latest to face uncertainties with energy transition projects, which, from solar fields to wind farms, have prompted reservations about their size, industrial activity, and environmental impacts. But rather than accept their fate, the constellation of towns orbiting Stanton are sitting down with Ford and SK to negotiate a binding agreement that will ensure they benefit from Blue Oval City as much as the companies do.

During a series of community meetings held over the past few months, the coalition has drafted a list of stipulations, called a community benefits agreement, that it wants Ford/Blue Oval SK to abide by. It is asking for community resources like youth facilities, support for road maintenance, and apprenticeship pathways run by local union chapters. It also seeks a binding assurance that the joint venture will dispose of its waste properly. And although Ford has announced many community programs, local residents want the automaker to give them some say in such things.

“They didn’t really reach out,” Michael Adriaanse, who serves on the committee drafting the agreement, said of Ford’s efforts. “I know a lot of people who feel like it happened overnight.”

So how does such a process begin? Generally with meetings that bring stakeholders together to draw up a list of demands in a broad public conversation the company cannot ignore.

“The argument a community can make is, ‘If you want our resources, you have to contribute back to the health and welfare of the community you’re gonna be a part of now,’” said Kathleen Mulltigan, who leads the National Labor Leadership Initiative at Cornell University. “What we’re really trying to do is bring real democracy into the economic realm, because a lot of the work of shaping the economy happens without workers having any voice in it.”

Ultimately, community benefits agreements, or CBAs, are a contract between a corporation and coalition of local organizations that gives the community, through binding arbitration, leverage to ensure the commitments are kept.

Historically, CBAs have been used by those impacted by the entertainment and sports industries, which tend to get big municipal tax breaks and public funding. Some of the first were negotiated in Los Angeles in the early 2000s to address, separately, a sports arena and an entertainment district. After exhaustive negotiations, residents achieved many of their goals, including higher wages, guaranteed affordable housing, and revolving loans for local business. CBAs have since spread nationwide, with folks in Nashville negotiating a high wage floor, onsite childcare, and other provisions at Geodis Park, a $275 million stadium being built for the Nashville SC soccer team.

Now, CBAs are increasingly being used to address clean energy developments. According to the Sabine Climate Change Law Center at Columbia University, more than a dozen have been signed since 2015, many of them in the last three years. The contracts resulted in projects agreeing to give preference to local hires, and in companies sharing revenue with the county in which they operate. An offshore wind facility in Maine even underwrote rural broadband access.

Vonda McDaniel, the president of the Central Labor Council of Nashville and Middle Tennessee, is helping to formulate Blue Oval agreement and plan town halls. The process has been lively. “We haven’t had a whole lot of wilting flowers that have showed up at our meetings, to be honest,” she said.

One reason for that is that locals already see changes. “The community is feeling a bit squeezed; there’s heavy equipment up and down the road every day,” said McDaniel.

Farmland counties in the region known as Middle Tennessee endured rapid urbanization when automakers arrived in Spring Hill, south of Nashville. As investment increased and people began moving in, housing costs skyrocketed. They’re beginning to creep up around Stanton, too. McDaniel says a CBA could forestall that.

“Community benefits agreements are based on the power and leverage that communities build within themselves,” she said. “They’re not just gonna give you a list of things you say you want.” In her mind, these agreements help ensure a measure of democracy in a part of the country where voter disenfranchisement, especially in rural, Black communities, is high and private interests have the ear of state government.

The Blue Oval project received a $9.2 billion loan from the Department of Energy. As clean energy funding and incentives have proliferated under the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, much investment has gone to the Southeast and America’s vaunted EV “Battery Belt.” The region’s famously climate-unfriendly governors have opened their doors wide, with Tennessee Governor Bill Lee seemingly keen on snatching the automaking mantle from the Great Lakes. With $900 million in public incentives approved by the Tennessee legislature, it’s the largest single manufacturing investment in the state’s history.

Amidst the green boom, many have speculated that a part of the South’s draw is its generally lax environmental and safety regulations. Tennessee is a  “right-to-work” state; such locales typically support lower average wages. Tennessee’s preemption ordinance also prevents municipalities from enacting worker standards beyond what state law requires.

This does not mean publicly supported clean energy projects in the South are doomed to a lower standard than those in other places. The president of the Nashville chapter of the United Auto Workers Union has promised that Blue Oval City will be a “union facility.” The Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure law require those seeking federal funding to submit a “community benefits plan” outlining how they will invest in domestic labor, local communities, and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Although similar to CBAs, they’re not the same. Advocates of such arrangements say CBAs are needed to secure accountability and transparency, and to give communities direct input into projects that impact them.

Will Tucker works as the Southern Programs Manager with Jobs to Move America, a national labor advocacy nonprofit. It recently negotiated a CBA with New Flyer, an electric bus manufacturer in Anniston, Alabama, and Tucker feels confident this approach to the transition can work in the South.

“What sets a real community benefits agreement apart from a dressed up community outreach program by another name is the element of negotiations with the company,” he said. Though many companies will set aside funding for local sports leagues, schools, and the like, Tucker considers such moves more of a PR strategy than a way of giving the community power.

If community organizations can present a united front, that pressure usually pushes the company to negotiate, though in some cases, protests and demonstrations heighten the stakes. Michael Adriaanse hopes such pressure will send the Blue Oval City CBA over the finish line.

Ultimately, for a CBA to work, the company in question must sit down with the community. Adriaanse said the coalition invited Ford representatives to a town hall to discuss preliminary demands, but it didn’t work out. McDaniel speculated that the company’s ongoing negotiations with United Auto Workers, which recently concluded a strike, may have slowed some things down. There’s a long road ahead, but Adriaanse and McDaniel are hopeful that with a strong enough coalition, the company won’t be able to dodge any longer.

The coalition still plans to go to the table with Ford, with a complete draft of the agreement in hand, early in the new year. Even if the effort is not immediately successful, community members say, the relationships they’ve built with one another will only get stronger, leaving possibilities for further organizing open down the road.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A huge EV factory is coming to west Tennessee. Here’s how locals are ensuring they benefit. on Dec 18, 2023.

On September 1, 2023, the Biden administration issued a proposal to establish comprehensive staffing requirements for skilled nursing facilities (aka nursing homes) across the country.

Idaho Kids Covered report recommends state legislators revamp Medicaid coverage for children and mothers By…

The post Idaho’s infant, mother death rate is rising, new report finds first appeared on InvestigateWest.

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New research from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences has identified a key to successful forest restoration: long term, local governance by Indigenous peoples or local communities. The more formalized the land tenure rights, the better the outcomes. Research shows that Indigenous and rural communities are the best stewards of the forests they live in, but the study’s novel finding is that community-managed forests yield better, more positive results for both environmental and social outcomes.

“Where people depend upon forest resources for a range of livelihood benefits, like firewood, timber, food, various things, they often have an incentive to take care of those forests. It’s really quite simple,” said lead author Harry Fischer. “When you give communities the opportunity to manage in those ways, you will often see better outcomes.”

Forest restoration is a critical tool for global climate change mitigation, and is particularly important to the 1.8 billion people living in, and relying on, forests for their livelihoods. Restoration projects have historically prioritized environmental outcomes like planting trees to improve biodiversity, or monetizing carbon sequestration through carbon credit schemes. But typically, those interests take precedence over the interests of local communities. The authors argue that a locally-focused, rights-based approach means that those interests don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

The study analyzed data collected by the International Forestry Resources and Institutions over three decades, from 314 community-managed forests, across 15 nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Researchers wanted to understand what the best forests had in common in order to better inform future restoration efforts. The study focused on tropical ecosystems because of the high prevalence of forest restoration efforts in these regions, like the Trillion Trees project and other tree planting initiatives. Common measures of successful forest restoration include healthy biodiversity, like planting trees or stopping deforestation, climate change-mitigation services, like carbon sequestration and carbon credits, and improved livelihoods for local communities in the form of access to forests for food and housing. But the forests with the best results across all three measures were the ones where local communities determined the rules for forest management.

Fischer and the other researchers’ critique of those efforts is that they are target-based. Forest projects focused on planting trees or selling carbon credits saw benefits concentrated in those areas, but poor performance in other areas, particularly when it comes to improving the livelihoods of local peoples. That means that while those projects may be good on paper for international conservation groups or investors, they don’t provide positive spillover effects to the people that live there.

“What we’re saying in our study is, OK, planting trees is not bad,” Fischer said. “Giving power to local people is going to be more effective over the long term. If they have power, the interventions are going to be more legitimate. They’re going to have more local buy-in for that.”

But that transfer of power isn’t being applied. Additional reports show that the world remains off track from reversing forest degradation and meeting decarbonization goals — in part due to a failure to work with Indigenous peoples or local communities, or recognize their rights. A study earlier this month from the Forest Declaration Assessment, a nonprofit that tracks forest conservation efforts, analyzed the National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans of 27 countries with substantial forest ecosystems and Indigenous populations. According to the study, those plans to establish national conservation efforts had gaps where Indigenous peoples were performatively included or completely left out. Less than a third of those countries engaged Indigenous peoples when developing their plans.

Levi Sucre Romero, coordinator of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests and co-chair to the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, says this low rate of inclusion is one of the critical issues on the table at COP28 in Dubai.

“This implies that decisions are still being made from desks, from cities, for an issue as crucial as forests and those of us who are living and protecting those forests are not taken into account,” Romero said. “The world’s rulers must hear that they can no longer continue making promises about the problem of climate change if they are not going to fulfill them.”

Fischer says that a forest restoration approach that prioritizes local livelihoods instead of making them a secondary benefit will take time — but on average will generate the best results for both environmental and social concerns.

“If we’re going to have participation, let’s do it in a way that really sort of redistributes power over a long, long period,” Fischer said. “[Then], people are able to really manage and get practice, and these practices get institutionalized over time.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The best forest managers? Indigenous peoples, study says. on Dec 4, 2023.

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On a 20-acre parcel outside the tiny Southern California town of New Cuyama, a 1.5-megawatt solar farm uses the sun’s rays to slowly charge nearly 600 batteries in nearby cabinets. At night, when energy demand rises, that electricity is sent to the grid to power homes with clean energy.

To make renewable energy from intermittent sources like solar and wind available when it is most needed, it’s becoming more common to use batteries to store the power as it’s generated and transmit it later. But one thing about the Cuyama facility, which began operations this week, is less common: The batteries sending energy to the grid once powered electric vehicles.

The SEPV Cuyama facility, located about two hours northeast of Santa Barbara, is the second hybrid storage facility opened by B2U Storage Solutions. Its first facility, just outside Los Angeles, uses 1,300 retired batteries from Honda Clarity and Nissan Leaf EVs to store 28 megawatt-hours of power, enough to power about 9,500 homes.

The facilities are meant to prove the feasibility of giving EV batteries a second life as stationary storage before they are recycled. Doing so could increase the sustainability of the technology’s supply chain and reduce the need to mine critical minerals, while providing a cheaper way of building out grid-scale storage.

“This is what’s needed at massive scale,” said Freeman Hall, CEO of the Los Angeles-based large-scale storage system company.

Electric vehicle batteries are typically replaced when they reach 70 to 80 percent of their capacity, largely because the range they provide at that point begins to dwindle. Almost all of the critical materials inside them, including lithium, nickel, and cobalt, are reusable. A growing domestic recycling industry, supported by billions of dollars in loans from the Energy Department and incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, is being built to prepare for what will one day be tens of millions of retired EV battery packs.

Before they are disassembled, however, studies show that around three quarters of decommissioned packs are suitable for a second life as stationary storage. (Some packs may not have enough life left in them, are too damaged from a collision, or otherwise faulty.)

“We were seeing the first generation of EVs end their time on the road, and 70 percent or more of those batteries have very strong residual value,” said Hall. “That should be utilized before all those batteries are recycled, and we’re just deferring recycling by three, four, or five years.”

Extending the useful life of EV batteries mitigates the impact of manufacturing them, said Maria Chavez, energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“The whole point of trying to deploy electric vehicles is to reduce emissions and reduce the negative impacts of things like manufacturing and extractive processes on our environment and our communities,” Chavez told Grist. “By extending the life of a battery, we reduce the need for further exploitation of our natural resources, we reduce the demand for raw materials, and we generally encourage a more sustainable process.”

Just as batteries have become crucial to reducing emissions from transportation, they’re also needed to fully realize the benefits of clean energy. Without stationary storage, wind and solar power can only feed the grid when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

“Being able to store it and use it when it’s most needed is a really important way to meet our energy needs,” Chavez said.

The use of utility-scale battery storage is expected to skyrocket, from 1.5 gigawatts of capacity in 2020 to 30 gigawatts by 2025. EV packs could provide a stockpile for that buildout. Hall said there are already at least 3 gigawatt-hours of decommissioned EV packs sitting around in the United States that could be deployed, and that the volume of them being removed from cars is doubling every two years.

“We’re going from a trickle when we started four years ago to a flood of batteries that are coming,” he said.

B2U says its technology allows batteries to be repurposed in a nearly “plug and play fashion.” They do not need to be disassembled, and units from multiple manufacturers — B2U has tested batteries from Honda, Nissan, Tesla, GM, and Ford — can be used in one system.

The packs are stored in large cabinets and managed with proprietary software, which monitors their safety and discharges and charges each battery based on its capacity. The batteries charge during the day from both the solar panels and the grid. Then B2U sells that power to utilities at night, when demand and prices are much higher.

Hall said using second-life batteries earns the same financial return as new grid-scale batteries at half the initial cost, and that for now, repurposing the packs is more lucrative for automakers than sending them straight to recyclers. Until the recycling industry grows, it’s still quite expensive to recycle them. By selling or leasing retired packs to a grid storage company, said Hall, manufacturers can squeeze out more value out of them.

That could even help drive down the cost of electric vehicles, he added. “The actual cost of leasing a battery on wheels should go down if the full value of the battery is enhanced and reused,” he said. “Everybody wins when we do reuse in a smart fashion.”

B2U expects to add storage to a third solar facility near Palmdale next year. The facilities are meant to prove the idea works, after which B2U plans to sell its hardware and software to other storage-project developers.

At the moment, though, planned deployment of the technology is limited. B2U predicts only about 6 percent of decommissioned EV batteries in the U.S. will be used for grid-scale storage by 2027.

“People are skeptical, and they should be, because it’s hard to do reuse of batteries,” said Hall. “But we’ve got a robust data set that does prove reliability, performance, and profitability. We’re at a point where we really can scale this.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Where could millions of EV batteries retire? Solar farms. on Nov 16, 2023.