Private companies proposing interstate carbon-capture pipelines through the nation’s Corn Belt are refusing to submit safety data to the Iowa Utilities Board (IUB). The IUB is charged with siting and routing of hazardous liquid pipelines and has requested the safety information leading up to oral arguments scheduled on December 13.
At issue are two documents the IUB and private landowners want to review. The first is a risk assessment and consequence analysis, and the other is an emergency response plan, labeled respectively as Exhibits L1 and L2. They are important because liquefied carbon dioxide (CO2) is a life-threatening substance, as evidenced by past pipeline ruptures in Mississippi.
One of the companies, Summit Carbon Solutions, has been dodging the Iowa Department of Justice since April, repeatedly refusing to submit the safety data on the grounds that it “would be a guidebook for how to cause harm or damage to the pipeline.”
But the latest excuse from another of the pipeline companies, Navigator Heartland Greenway, LLC, is markedly more egregious toward private property owners, claiming that neither they nor any state agency is justified in requesting the safety information.
Uncle Sam Knows Best?
In a “Reply Brief on the Issue of Federal Preemption” filed Wednesday, Navigator wrote that pipeline safety “is exclusively regulated by the federal government” under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and its Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).
Navigator claims that “the federal government completely occupies the field of interstate pipeline safety regulation,” and that state law is “expressly preempted.” The company also sites judicial precedent preempting “any attempts by a state to regulate, interpret or otherwise require information related to safety of interstate pipelines.”
Moreover, says Navigator, “If a route is compliant with PHMSA requirements … the Board cannot alter that route to — in the Board’s judgment — make it safer.”
“Put plainly,” the brief concludes, “neither the Board nor any of the parties in this docket [e.g. private landowners] can substitute their judgment for PHMSA’s or the DOT’s.”
Defending Their Land
Farmers, on the other hand, are of the opinion that their judgment is best when it comes to their property. Iowa landowner George G. Cummins filed a response on Thursday noting that the responsibility for reviewing siting applications “rests solely with the IUB and determination of hazardous pipeline route is governed by state law.” Additionally, because “routing decisions implicate public and environmental safety, federal law reserves to the states the power to consider safety protocols of private pipeline companies.”
The Iowa Farm Bureau Federation also submitted a detailed reply brief arguing that the IUB “is not preempted by federal law.” It emphasizes the obligation of the three pipeline companies — Summit, Navigator, and Wolf Carbon Solutions, which together plan more than 1,500 miles of pipeline across the Hawkeye State — to submit the vital safety information, arguing that the IUB cannot properly analyze pipeline permits without it.
Nullification
Regrettably, none of the briefs filed in defense of farmers mentions the most powerful solution to the land grab that these pipeline permit applications represent. That is the legal principle of nullification, enshrined in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution.
“Nullification … is a powerful tool for protecting our liberties and limiting the federal government,” explains The John Birch Society (JBS). “State legislators must use it to counter the far-left and unconstitutional policies currently emanating from the federal government.”
One of the advantages of nullification is that it “would have an immediate effect and is not dependent upon approval by the federal judiciary.” In fact, it “can immediately push back against significant portions of the federal government,” which include any attempt by the DOT or PHMSA to impose the bureaucracy’s will on private landowners.
JBS recommends that states act now to implement a comprehensive nullification process “for systematically reviewing all federal actions and nullifying them if found unconstitutional.” Lawmakers in Texas and Wyoming have already introduced model legislation to this effect.
Such a process would come in handy for Iowa farmers in view of the Biden administration’s net-zero fantasies, its billions in taxpayer dollars dedicated to wasteful carbon-capture projects, and its mad rush to implement Agenda 2030, the UN program that proposes totalitarian control over all areas of life and the abolishment of private property.
Eminent Domain
Farmers are also concerned about their own state utilities board selling them out to these private, for-profit ventures by imposing eminent domain. “Board members have repeatedly declined to publicly reveal how they might rule” on eminent-domain requests from the pipeline companies, reports Jared Strong of the Iowa Capital Dispatch. “Eminent domain uses government authority to force property owners to accept easements on their property for projects deemed to be of public benefit.” Landowners argue that eminent domain should not be used to enrich private companies such as Summit, Navigator, and Wolf. Invoking it now would be unprecedented.
“The eminent domain laws are already in place but are being ignored! How do you play the game when the rules are constantly changing?” asks Linda McNeill, a JBS member from Iowa who has been closely following the issue and working to help the farmers’ voices be heard in media. She vows she “will keep up the good fight because God is on the side of truth.”
Agenda 2030
Birchers such as McNeill have been working for decades to warn Americans about threats to their private property rights posed by Agenda 2030, which encourages the illegitimate use of eminent domain. Agenda 2030 is the latest iteration of Agenda 21, the UN plan of world government introduced at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Officials then dubbed it a “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society.” The UN-approved book Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet, explained that “effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced.”
Now that Covid-19 and the Great Reset have blatantly exposed world government plans, more Americans are harkening to JBS warnings that radical environmentalists are using fear of so-called man-man climate change to steal our God-given rights.
JBS Board member Tom DeWeese recently toured Iowa to rally the farmers against the pipeline. His well-received message exposed how carbon-capture pipelines forward Agenda 2030 aims by destroying valuable farmland and ushering in food insecurity and shortages.
“As less farmland is available, the Great Reset scheme is to grow most of our food inside factories, providing only synthetic substitutes such as the fake meat currently on the market,” DeWeese recently wrote for The New American. “It’s interesting to note that Bill Gates is right in the middle of this scheme. He’s been busy buying up millions of acres of farmland, and he’s one of the biggest promoters of synthetic beef.”
What may seem surprising is that these plans are only unprecedented in scope. In his latest book, End Game: COVID and the Dark State Quest for Bio-digital Convergence in a Transhumanist World, author Dennis Behreandt details how deadly famines imposed by communist dictatorships in Ukraine under Stalin, China under Mao Tse-tung, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and Ethiopia under Mengistu were microcosms of what Deep State planners have in mind for the world.
Each of these deadly famines was artificial and state-contrived; the millions of lives lost were intentional murders. Behreandt explains that these precedents were micro-models of the dystopia “that the West’s international elites desire to create on a global scale via the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Great Reset — key component parts of the Agenda 2030 plan that has emanated from the United Nations.”
