October, 03 2022, 12:46pm EDT
Landowners' Radio Ad Exposes Dangers of CO2 Pipelines with 911 Call from 2020 Explosion
Chilling audio exposes carbon pipeline dangers to human life, livestock, as well as CO2’s ability to stall vehicles, endanger first responders.
WASHINGTON
The Easement Action Teams LLC (Landowners & Lawyers Cooperative), an organization of state-based landowners' groups in Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota and North Dakota who vehemently oppose the use of eminent domain for private gain to seize their property for proposed carbon (CO2) pipeline projects, on Monday released a radio ad campaign that uses actual 911 recordings from a 2020 carbon pipeline rupture in Satartia, MS to highlight the serious dangers to human life - including to first responders - posed by an explosive release of toxic CO2 by these highly-pressurized pipelines.
In the radio ad - that will launch across rural markets in four of the Midwest states where the proposed pipelines are routed - the narrator describes what happened during the 2020 incident in Satartia, MS where a carbon pipeline operated by Denbury Resources ruptured, causing an explosive release of carbon in an immense plume, which was later found by a government-issued report to be toxic for more than a mile from the site of the accident, which was caused by a girth weld failure following a landslide after heavy rain.
The ad then cuts to a 911 recording from a victim who is very concerned and confused about what is happening after her car has stalled - a direct result of the high CO2 concentration making the combustion engine nonfunctional - and her friend is having what she believes is a seizure
The 911 recording was used with permission from journalist Dan Zegart, who obtained it via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in the course of his extensive reporting on the pipeline accident for his article, "The Gassing of Satartia," for HuffPost
(https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gassing-satartia-mississippi-co2-pipeline_n_60ddea9fe4b0ddef8b0ddc8f)
"Since the first correspondence from Navigator, I feel that my family and family farm of almost a century, is being used as collateral damage. The pipeline company and their investors are using this unproven and hazardous idea as a tax scam and will try to take our land for their own private gain. The safety questions go unanswered by the pipelines' representatives, but they continue to state their pipelines are going to be "different" than the one that exploded in Satartia. The farmer and llandowner takes all the risk - including the risk of explosion and death of all living beings in the path of the plume," said Shelli Meyer, Nebraska Easement Action Team member and landowner in Dixon County, Nebraska.
"We are landowners in Woodbury County where some of our neighbors have both pipelines proposed to cross their property. There cannot be enough emphasis upon the danger these hazardous CO2 pipelines pose to humans, livestock and wildlife and the inability of volunteer rescue units to respond," said Deb Main, Iowa Easement Team member and landowner in Woodbury County, Iowa.
"Carbon pipelines are coming into South Dakota like a thief in the night before our fellow citizens have become educated on these extremely hazardous, potentially lethal, pipelines. Unfortunately, we do not have the necessary regulations in place to protect us, our families, our communities and our great state of South Dakota," said Joy Hohn, South Dakota Easement Team member and landowner in Minnehana County, S.D.
"My name is Howard Malloy and I own irrigated farm land in the Missouri river bottomland a few miles north of Mandan. It is very valuable crop land which borders Highway 1806 and Square Butte Creek. Its proximity to the City of Mandan, Highway 1806 and Square Butte Creek also make it very valuable residential development land, as Mandan is growing to the north and there is already extensive residential development in the area. The CO2 pipeline would devalue the land for irrigated farming and greatly devalue the property for residential development purposes. The liability of exposing families to the dangers of a CO2 pipeline rupture would effectively eliminate this property from residential development. This proposed pipeline is far too close to the Cities of Bismarck and Mandan and a danger to its inhabitants," said Howard Malloy, North Dakota Easement Team member and landowner in Morton County, N.D.
The Easement Teams are growing their numbers of landowners daily in each of the four states, holding regular meetings to inform landowners about the pipeline projects and the landowners' legal co-ops. Attorneys with Domina Law Group are currently defending Easement Team-affiliated landowners in court who have refused to allow pipeline surveyors on their property.
Attorney Brian Jorde has also proactively filed suit on behalf of landowners arguing that state laws regarding private property are being violated by the pipeline companies, and the Domina Law Group will represent landowners filing as intervenors in state agency permitting processes in Iowa, South Dakota and North Dakota over the next year.
In addition to radio ads, landowners with the Easement Teams have raised funds to purchase billboards in Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska.
Online version of the radio ad:
Nebraska Easement Action Team (NEAT)
https://nebraskaeasement.org
South Dakota Easement Team (SDET)
https://southdakotaeasement.org
North Dakota Easement Team (NDET)
https://northdakotaeasement.org
Iowa Easement Team (IET)
Easement Action Teams LLC
Bold Alliance is a non-profit organization fighting fossil fuel projects, protecting landowners against eminent domain abuse, and working for clean energy solutions while building an engaged base of citizens who care about the land, water and climate change.
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'Serious Disregard for Human Life': Dem Senators Press Hegseth on Yemen Civilian Casualties
"President Trump has called himself a 'peacemaker,' but that claim rings hollow when U.S. military operations kill scores of civilians."
Apr 25, 2025
A trio of Democratic senators on Thursday demanded answers from embattled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth regarding U.S. airstrikes in Yemen, which have reportedly killed scores of civilians including numerous women and children since last month.
"We write to you concerning reports that U.S. strikes against the Houthis at the Ras Isa fuel terminal in Yemen last week killed dozens of civilians, potentially more than 70," Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Tim Kaine (D-Va.) wrote in a letter to Hegseth.
The lawmakers noted that "the United Nations Protection Cluster's Civilian Impact Monitoring Project has... assessed that March 2025 marked the highest monthly casualty count in Yemen in almost two years, tripling the previous month, with a total of 162 civilian casualties."
"If these reports of civilian casualties are accurate, they should come as no surprise," the senators said. "Using explosive weapons in populated areas—as these intense strikes appear to do—always carries a high risk of civilian harm."
"Further, reports suggest that the Trump administration plans to dismantle civilian harm mitigation policies and procedures at the Pentagon designed to reduce civilian casualties in U.S. operations," the letter notes. "And the Trump administration has already dismissed senior, nonpartisan judge advocates, or JAG officers, who provide critical legal counsel to U.S. warfighters, especially when it comes to the laws of war and adherence to U.S. civilian harm mitigation policies."
"The Defense Department also recently loosened the rules of engagement to allow [U.S. Central Command] and other combatant commands to conduct strikes without requiring White House sign-off, removing necessary checks and balances on crucial life-and-death decisions," the senators added. "Taken altogether, these moves suggest that the Trump administration is abandoning the measures necessary to meet its obligations to reducing civilian harm."
The senators asked Hegseth to answer the following questions:
- Has the Department of Defense (DOD) assessed the number of noncombatant and combatant casualties in each of its strikes inside Yemen?
- What has DOD's process been for assessing the acceptable civilian casualties for individual strikes inside Yemen, and assessing estimated levels of civilian harm and collateral damage?
- What role have legal advisers, including JAG officers, played in reviewing the legality of U.S. strikes in Yemen?
- What DOD instructions or orders currently govern department civilian harm mitigation and response actions?
- Were the civilian harm mitigation and response experts at CENTCOM and/or at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence consulted in planning for these strikes?
- How does the department plan to engage with the families or communities affected by these strikes, including acknowledging civilian harm and exploring avenues for potential redress?
Last month, Hegseth
announced that the Pentagon's Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Office and Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which was established during the Biden administration, would be closed. Hegseth—who has
supported pardons for convicted U.S. war criminals—lamented during his Senate confirmation hearing that "restrictive rules of engagement" have "made it more difficult to defeat our enemies," who "should get bullets, not attorneys," according to his 2024 book The War on Warriors.
Asked during his confirmation hearing whether troops under his leadership would adhere to the Geneva Conventions, Hegseth replied, "What we are not going to do is put international conventions above Americans."
During his first administration, President Donald Trumprelaxed rules of military engagement meant to protect civilians as he followed through on his campaign pledge to "bomb the shit" out of Islamic State militants and "take out their families." Thousands of civilians were killed during the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria as then-Defense Secretary James "Mad Dog" Mattis announced a shift from a policy of attrition to one of "annihilation."
Meanwhile, noncombatant casualties soared by over 300% in Afghanistan between the final year of the Obama administration and 2019.
Overall, upward of 400,000 civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen have died as a direct result of the U.S.-led War on Terror, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
In Yemen, the U.K.-based monitor Airwars says U.S. forces have killed hundreds of civilians in 181 declared actions since 2002. Overall, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis have died during the civil war that began in 2014, with international experts attributing more than 150,000 Yemeni deaths to U.S.-backed, Saudi-led bombing and blockade.
The U.S. bombing of Yemen has not received nearly as much coverage in the corporate media as the scandal involving Hegseth's use of Signal chats to share plans for attacking the Middle Eastern country with colleagues, a journalist, and relatives. However, critics say the mounting backlash over the high civilian casualties there is belying Trump's claim of an anti-war presidency.
"President Trump has called himself a 'peacemaker,' but that claim rings hollow when U.S. military operations kill scores of civilians," the senators stressed in their letter. "The reported high civilian casualty numbers from U.S. strikes in Yemen demonstrate a serious disregard for civilian life, and call into question this administration's ability to conduct military operations in accordance with U.S. best practices for civilian harm mitigation and international law."
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As the Trump administration faces a metastasizing controversy over reports of U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's use of the commercial messaging app Signal, including to discuss U.S. strikes in Yemen, the legal group National Security Counselors on Friday sued on behalf of a journalist to secure three months worth of conversations that took place on the encrypted platform.
According to The Hill, which was first report the news of the lawsuit, the complaint requests Hegseth's Signal messages and the messages from other top Trump officials.
The plaintiff in the lawsuit is journalist Jeffrey Stein, the founding editor of the outlet SpyTalk. Stein sought the three months worth of chat records via Freedom of Information Act request and is now taking legal action to obtain them, according to the complaint, which was filed in federal court.
News about my Signalgate iceberg lawsuit for @spytalker.bsky.social: it's OUT!
[image or embed]
— National Security Counselors 🕵 (@nationalsecuritylaw.org) April 25, 2025 at 12:35 PM
"The heads of at least five of the most powerful agencies in the national security community were freely texting over an app that was not approved for sensitive communications and setting it to automatically delete everything they said," Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, told The Hill. "Since then we've learned that we were right to be worried, thanks to the news about Hegseth's Signal chat with his wife and personal lawyer about bombing plans."
In what's now become known as "Signalgate," The Atlanticrevealed last month that its editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg had been accidentally included in a Signal group chat with top administration officials where they discussed forthcoming U.S. strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. The Atlantic later published messages from the chat.
Members of the chat, dubbed "Houthi PC small group," included Hegseth; National Security Adviser Mike Waltz; Vice President JD Vance; CIA Director John Ratcliffe; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The defendants listed in the lawsuit from the National Security Counselors are the Department of Defense, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the CIA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The New York Timesreported last week that Hegseth had shared information about impending U.S. strikes in Yemen in another Signal group chat included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer on March 15. The outlet cited four unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter.
In response to the Times' reporting, a spokesperson for the Pentagon wrote on April 20: The the newspaper "relied only on the words of people who were fired this week and appear to have a motive to sabotage the secretary and the president's agenda. There was no classified information in any Signal chat, no matter how many ways they try to write the story."
The Times responded a day later saying that it stood by the reporting, that the Pentagon had not denied the existence of the chat, and that the story did not characterize the information in the chat as classified.
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Speaking of the lawsuit filed by National Security Counselors, McClanahan toldThe Hill that "this administration has proven again and again that it is allergic to accountability and transparency."
"And we are bringing this case to make sure that they can't just put national security at risk for their own convenience and then destroy all the evidence afterwards," he added.
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The report from the Institute for Policy Studies, Athena Coalition, and PowerSwitch Action notes that Amazon—described as a "perfect case study in what is wrong with our tax code"—has "used credits and loopholes to avoid paying even the sharply reduced" 21% statutory corporate tax rate established in 2017 by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which President Donald Trump signed into law early in his first term.
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Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon's CEO in 2021 but still serves as executive chairman, has also benefited substantially from the skewed U.S. tax code. The report estimates that Bezos, one of the wealthiest people in the world, "pocketed $6.2 billion as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act's failure to address the disparity in tax rates on income from wealth versus income from work."
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Andy Jassy, the company's current CEO, has "pocketed at least $6.6 million in savings over the past seven years thanks to the TCJA's reduction in the top marginal income tax rate," according to the new report.
"To stop autocracy, we need to challenge the corporations and billionaires behind and benefiting from oligarchy, not give them more tax breaks."
The report was published as Republicans in the U.S. Congress, with full support from President Donald Trump, work on tax legislation that's expected to renew individual provisions of the TCJA that would otherwise expire at the end of the year.
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The advocacy groups said they produced the report out of "shared concern that a rising oligarchy is building an economy that bankrolls billionaires while leaving workers and small businesses behind."
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Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action, said in a statement that "Amazon and Jeff Bezos have made billions squeezing every drop of profit they can out of our communities by breaking workers' bodies, poisoning our air, and sucking up public subsidies, and now they're selling out our fundamental freedoms."
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