more relevant is first where they see the success of groups like isis and how one individual who may not even be organize with a larger group one individual act can cross chaos and draw attention to a cause so specifically right now what's happening is the climate change issue many environmentalist and mainstream environments are terrified and think that the planet is going to be doomed and the rhetoric coming from even the top leaders of the united nations top scientists said used to be affiliated with nasa are in a way giving potential eco terrorists the justification to do it they're saying that essentially we are doomed that civilization is and that we must stop this so that the attitude by many activists looking at the climate scare is they have to act alone because governments are not acting or not acting enough or in many cases or just acting you know defiant to their concerns so i do think that the environmental movement is going to be using the climate campaign the climate scare

if you will to justify more extreme headlines in the next five to ten years and the oil industry is actually suing cream peace and other and by mental illness ations for inciting terrorism jaring the dakota pipeline protests now at the los it didn't have mary the corporations wouldn't have started it so what will happen if the likes of greenpeace are convicted of inciting terrorism well it's going to be hard to do that in court i mean the court cases like that are very difficult but yes in the case of the dakota pipeline they're talking about a billion to a billion dollars in damages for these environmental protests and what i think is going to happen this would have a major effect but not necessarily against the actual eco terrorists themselves greenpeace you could argue you know some would argue is a radical environmental group but it's not an eco terror per se they've done civil disobedience so even if the groups themselves lose a court case it may actually. the perverse effect of inspiring the individual acts

are the small cells many of these cells in a liberation groove the earth liberation movement they'll drive across country in a car they pick up radical members that they may have met on social media it's very hard to actually track and find them but you're right big big industry is fighting back on them now and this is going to be. very interesting court case coming up to see how this is decided and the dakota pipeline protests received so much attention nationwide because of the initial have a handedness of the police why didn't the oil companies and this work with environmental activists instead of ignoring their opinion the whole crisis could have been avoided well that's been the case the dakota pipeline what happened they got the native americans involved and originally they had hearing after hearing and there was really not much interest certainly not among the native americans and the environmentalist allegedly recruited the native americans to get involved which really brought the dakota access to life and i think yeah there were allegations

that i think was actually not the police the private security by the to go to access point where they came in and were very rough and with mace and other things when they first got there there's a lot of video footage of that that's always a good question is how does the industry handle that when people are doing that kind of defiance and disobedience also i'm just wondering is it right to used the world were terrorism here terrorism means to instill terror fear in people i mean blowing up twin towers is terrorism and shooting people in charlie hebdo is terrorism and blowing up london metro is terrorism. but eco activists targeting machinery really terrorists you know that they're getting into semantics what i would say yes it is it's an eco terrorism you don't say terror you say eco terrorism the reason it's that whether they're blowing up in animal rights or torching s.u.v.s in a parking lot. or you know it goes even further when i was in the united states

senate environment public works committee i was one of the researchers we actually held a hearing actually we forgot there with one of the animal rights former animal liberation front leaders dr gerry of last week who actually openly said for every scientist experimenting on animals that they can kill they can save untold amounts of animals so they're perfectly willing the leaders this is one of the former leaders of elf and other environmental groups of radical eco terror groups openly calling for killing scientists experimenting on animals because it will save animals lives in the scientists lives are expendable because you're only talking a few scientists and many countless of animals that would be saved so this is threatening people when when the logging protester puts the spikes in a tree and someone comes by the chainsaw the chainsaw breaks when it hits a spike there's been at least several port instance of people being massively injured in disfigured so their people do get hurt it is a form of terror it terrifies the people in the industry doing it and whether right

now the target is being pipeline protesters exxon mobil you fill in the blank they're being told that they're guilty by nasa's former lead scientist by the way of crimes against humanity evoking any odd response and tracing can mark when you're saying that it's only semantics i feel like they it's not just semantics the federal government classifies eco activism as terrorists and makes it a very potent legal weapon against a case they will charge with arson in protest against excessive locking in the two thousands were actually facing life in prison they had to agree to plea deals. and served their sentence in terrible conditions i mean they're just kids stay don't be had people they don't shoot people why should they be so tough on them. well i think it's you know this comes down to law enforcement this is you could actually have the same argument with drug laws the united states should have marijuana offender who's buying a local dealer have the same kind of automatic jail sentences after

a couple times that a cocaine or heroin dealer i think what the federal guidelines are doing here is they're treating what you would call the gateway eco terrorist very seriously so they can nip it in the bud and that's what they're trying to do here and that is an argument for law enforcement i'm not sure the you know what the actual line there is because you do want to distinguish between civil disobedience and again i've referenced nessa's lead global warming scientists james hansen who just retired a few years ago but he's been he's been arrested at least half a dozen times protesting pipelines in the united states for causing global warming that's not as that's not eco terror but when you go the step further and you get into property destruction and you get into threats and you get into people getting hurt and going after scientists who do experiments and actually gloating about it in congressional testimony as jay last week did the former elf leader then you're going into a different area but you're absolutely right there has to be a very fine line between the civil disobedience and the full blown eco terrorism so

in a famous case in the u.k. discovered by the guardian newspaper and government agents until traded an eco activist group and carus them to damage a power plant why are governments provoking activists into radical action to have an added excuse to crack down on them. and this is something you know you see this all the time the government this is why you know when they do mob informants and other sorts of infiltration it's always called is the legal word is entrapment and obviously that's could be a case of government overreaching if you go. it's going to infiltrate a group that usually should just be for information when they go beyond and they encourage acts so that they can arrest people that becomes problematic in and of itself you know if you go throughout history governments have been the most violent institutions in the world so you hate to give them too much power when they do that however when you're going after groups that are potentially damaging life property

. and making these kind of threats you know it makes sense that they infiltrate but they have to draw that again fine line between egging them on and getting them trap them into doing even more worse things than they would otherwise do you saying that you had to deal with terrorism when you were the communications director for the sentence and violent and public works committee is term pressure on lawmakers groups like past him chamfered a crackdown on extremism our politicians are afraid they will look bad going after those to decide and then will writes for instance yeah as i mentioned i was there when i was there with the united states senate environment public works we've had multiple hearings on that we supported legislation federal legislation the cap of currently i believe is ten thousand if you do more than ten thousand for the damage it becomes a federal violation of eco terrorism otherwise it's still dealt with on the state and local level in terms of politicians standing up to this you know well it depends on the news cycle and what we're talking about when it's torching s.u.v.s

when it's going after logging especially if you're a political leader from a logging area with logging or area with auto industry you do it's generally easy to stand up it's other politicians who aren't directly affected or their constituencies are they generally don't want to get involved in eco terrorism things first of all by the nature of the business it's usually very isolated small doesn't seem to be well coordinated and it's not something that happens like a daily in the news we'll take a short break right now when we're back we'll continue discussing whether environmentalists activism poses a serious threat ways around former director. of communications for the u.s. sentencing commission stay with us.

we live in surreal times a short time ago even imagining a negotiated end to the tensions on the korean peninsula was a flight into fancy but here we are this is becoming a foreign policy victory for trump. in the heart of the swiss alps this is a place probably more secretive than the pentagon more mysterious than the cia and better guarded than for knox swiss customs place all the science is controlled by them and they impose the openings on. opposite because it is from his office the procedures in place of the strictest in all europe must to pieces by artists like they can so and modigliani can't boards unsold inside this warehouse that's where the report comes in it covers up deals with naturally discrete commercially

discrete steps but also discreet because they concern fraud. some of those paintings are linked to dark secrets nobody knows how many of these secrets kept inside the geneva freeport system you'll never obtain an inventory of all the works in the freeport who knows how many there are three hundred three thousand three hundred thousand is it a matter of confidentiality only is it the world's black box of the art business. anything that interrupts free trade interrupts freedom and anything in terms freedom is a reversion back to neo futile ism and we see that happening right now in the united states and presumably here in canada as well them is concentrated in the few or fewer hands bradly a river of the risk of neil feudalism on the horizon crypto is is the answer in my view and it is an asset class and it is gobbling up market share and the us

dollar is doing all three our money is still. global warming sell you on the idea that dropping bombs brings police to the chicken hawks forcing you to fight the battles they don't. produce offspring of tell you that will be gossip and coupled with the most important news today. on the positive after it has been telling me you are not cool enough and want to fight their product. all the hawks that we along the border would want. and we're back with the mark moran former director of communications for the u.s.

senate environment committee discussing radical environmental movements and the threat they pose of them at wired now animal rights groups are more prone to taking drastic measures and environmental defenders i always wondered why do you have an answer to that well i actually interviewed uncovered a peter singer the princeton bioethicist who actually two famous quote was christianity is harmful to animals and the idea. that motivates animal rights activists they believe that humans and animals are an actual equal playing that humans have no more rights than animals when i interviewed peter singer few years back he actually said that if termites were eating his home that he doesn't know that he could actually kyra an exterminator to kill the termites because the termites have equal right to life as he does access to his house this is their ideology so when they see humans essentially acting above our species in their minds that we're you know if we clear a forest or we use animals for experimentation or we domesticated animals for

farming or eat animals that offends their entire world view that animals and humans are on the same plane and i think that is one of the biggest motivators and this is one of the reasons that animal rights activists part of this is one of the. strongest and most activists wing of the eco terrorists terrorism like you said earlier some animal rights groups target not just slaughterhouses but also institutions of science like labs where things are tested on animals animal testing is going out of fashion and stop cool to do it in cosmetics for instance are signs . this is one going to have to give up on testing because of the pressure from the radical green well i don't know that it's pressure here's what happens and it's a free society usually peta for instance and other groups can do a video on how mcdonald's chicken big nugget i don't know if it was peta but another view about how it's mcdonald's she can make nugget is made or how animals

are treated on the slaughterhouse when people watch a video like that and a lot of times you could say their propaganda shows like they picked the worst possible scenario people are grossed out they're sick they can actually influence public opinion so i would say scientists especially in cosmetics are facing much more public opinion backlash against what at least they would consider as unnecessary or not vital research on animals because public opinion has shifted not because of the acts of eco terror but because of the you know promotion and the promoting the cause of it in the mass media and education of our kids kids are indoctrinated very young age that they have to be green that humans have destroyed the earth so kids are growing up many would say brainwashed with this ideology so as we go forward it's going to be harder and harder for scientists to do that now medical research i think is still a lot of that's going to be harder to stop that but i think with cosmetics and other things where people do animal testing even allergies i think they're going to

have they're definitely cutting back because public opinion isn't there but i really wonder about science was going to happen today u.c.l.a. behavioral science professors home was firebombed and his colleagues were bullied into giving up research in behavioral science apes in the may two thousand easy to terrorism powerful enough to actually step back scientific progress in these fields not yet but as we said if they get more coordinated and if there's a projection the next five years eco terrorism is going to come in its own and yes it will in the climate debate scientists who are skeptical. of the united nations al gore of you have been driven from the field roger poky jr has been intimidated investigated it actually is eleven year old son asked if he was going to jail he left the field of climate research just because of political hassles now if you're actually talking about threatening livelihood it gets that much more intense a few years ago on the mall in d.c.

i interviewed pipeline protesters who said by any means necessary they will stop the keystone pipeline any means necessary i asked if that meant violence and they repeated any means necessary well when pipeline workers and their families are starting to get threatened or explosions go off that will have an impact but it and then there will also be a backlash lawsuits and more federal crime and law enforcement coming down on them so. the opposition to stem cell research is animal rights extremism coming closer and position to more conservative and religious way wing groups i mean can there be an alliance between these two for a common goal that's a good question yes in the united states for instance with the stem cell research we had president george w. bush when he was president did he compromise where you can all because a pro-life groups were very you know did not want the stem cells to be used. to create life to destroy it so it only had to be existing lines of stem cell research could be used but yes i don't know that pro-life groups now would align themselves

with the eco terrorist groups on that however there would be political kinship between some environmental groups and that but not to the radical eco terror groups but that's just the kind of stuff again you have labs you have i remember interviewing christopher reeve the old actor who played superman who was out there strike and came to d.c. to save the silver spring monkeys because they were doing research on him and you know that was not a radical movement at the time but people get so worked up over that that if research labs are attacked it will have a chilling effect on the scientists that work there and the companies that. actually do the research what's european is animal cruelty justified when it's done in the name of science shoots science has been limited by what they can and can't do to any malicious test subjects yes i mean you should have serious guidelines and you should have issues with sentient with it whether they can if pain issues will

kind of pain pills you give them you would want an animal to necessarily suffer and you should also try to reduce animal testing to the absolute minimum that you would be absolutely necessary in a society and i think that's happened public outrage over that and more guidelines and strict adherence and oversight has made we made long strides towards doing that because the public just doesn't like the idea of animals being you know certainly anything that evolving cruelty. certainly but it's one of those things where you know it's one person's scientific experiment with with humane treatment is another person's cruelty it's a it's hard to justify some animal rights activists are just upset that we eat meat period which makes no sense by the way because animals eat other animals and we're supposed to be equal with animals but suddenly they don't want to humans eating other animals so in a sense they're saying that animals have the right to eat other animals but humans don't have a right to eat other animals even though they think we're all equal so some of there's a logical inconsistency there stems i think even when you're not talking about

radical fringe groups like the earth liberation front and the animal liberation front we have the more mainstream greenpeace and they use direct action as well but have with the destruction of property not including grammy and ships and open seas why is greenpeace considered more acceptable than those fringe groups stair calls terrorists. well you know as you know. they've been jailed i believe a couple countries have tried to declare or have declared greenpeace's activities terrorism. and it's all again it's all a fine line and greenpeace generally stays within the guidelines of civil disobedience but you have activists like christopher. christopher out in utah who is now being people are trying to declare him a terrorist because he's gone after a lot of the industrial activities through lawsuits in cars and huge amounts of cost huge amounts of money and delays the projects and they're saying it's a form of financial terrorism so you can go through civil disobedience you go to

actual physical violence financial implications people have different definitions of terrorism and impacts so it's again i did mention semantics and you can actually go back and forth but i think where we can agree no semantics are involved is when you're affecting physical property and human lives that's where it is a full blown eco terrorism and everything else short of that is a little different you know delaying a project blocking access to a project those are time honored traditions of of all groups not just animal rights or environmental activists but going back to the civil rights movement past has another mainstream organization with a lot of celebrity support today in the its methods are more like intimidation public shaming shock ads can you kill some of the extremes in me a war they find when war it's well you know it depends on how far they go one of the interesting things about peta is they set up their own shelters and they use a lot of money and donations in these shelters i believe us some of the highest

kill rates of any animal shelters in other words they take in these animals to try to take care of them and they realize how difficult it is and they end up having to put them down so peta has their own p.r. problem when it comes to that but generally peta does when i was on capitol hill they came out they do things like nude protests where the they paint their bodies and they come out they like to do a lot of the. silly and more humorous stuff but they also have you know they've also inspired or been involved i don't say they've been of all the deathly inspired that kind of strange people getting their fur coats spray painted or mink coats if you don't like that they've encouraged that kind of activism is certainly earlier on of the maybe they've mellowed in recent years but these groups. have all groups actually have a certain elements that are on the fringe in certain members that will be inspired and radicalized beyond the scope of what that group once and i think that is that is what the f.b.i. always looks for those signs of radicalism and we certainly have that you know

obviously going back to the unabomber unabomber ted kaczynski was inspired before he sent those letters and actually there was an alice of the unabomber his writings versus al gore's writings and they were actually very similar so you can see where mainstream environmental ism can be corrupted and taken by someone who maybe isn't right like ted kaczynski wasn't mentally right and then radicalized and used to go off on this kind of you know killing people to engine any radical thought stars with a sharp disappointment in the status quo so with and ran mental activism it is the government's lack of action about pollution wildlife preservation a satire and making people think radically why isn't congress or the white house doing more on that. well why are they doing more on the issues that would make people upset i mean first of all that you know when you're talking for instance on climate the idea that when hurricane harvey hits and suddenly you have all these

main mainstream nut fringe groups mental activists including bill nye not just with harvey but before that calling for the jailing and suggesting that climate skeptics should be put in jail for fraud for not going along with. that far that's that's of course very extreme and i'm not you're a climate change denier but whatever your thoughts on climate change gas emission is a fact coalition is attack urban sprawl i mean when humans do leave it quieted down your footprint on the rat and that's a fact so why can't the white house with the senate do something about it well the white house and what has been doing so the best since one thousand nine hundred seventy in the united states we have radically improved our air and water quality while at the same time increasing economic growth and population and we've done that through technological innovation and smart environmental policy so we've radically improve all of that what i'm telling you i'm not trying to obsess on climate here i'm just saying that climate is going to be the big issue this is

where the radicals are this is where they're trying to send people to death call for a number of trials put them in jail and that is a bigger issue that in a habitat destruction even bigger a blow i think is the climate change issue because people look at it as a earth do love and times many people view it as end times and that's why that is going to be the driver going forward we can look back and say animal rights has been huge but i think it could be the climate eco terrorism of the future the next five or ten years that we're going to be looking at all right mark thanks for being with us today we're talking to mark moran former director of communications for the u.s. senate environment and public works committee discussing is a thin line between activism and terrorism when it comes when it comes to environmental protest that's it for this latest edition of so if you include i'll see you next time.

what politicians do something. like put themselves on the line and they get accepted or rejected. so when you want to be president. or some want to. have to go right to be cross with what about forty three of them or can't be good. i'm interested always in the waters of my house. first city.

hall mile is one of the most controversial products about sun it's a salted vegetable fat that's very cheap. twenty seventeen production grew to sixty three million tons that rapid growth in international demand for cheap oil has led to the massive expansion of palm oil plantations which is the destruction of rain forests. given to these you alone more than ten million typed as of unique rain forest has been destroyed and it's a process that just keeps going. chose seemed wrong. but old rules just don't go all. the way to get to shape our disdained you can stick to it and engagement equals betrayal.

when so many find themselves worlds apart. just to look for common ground. political aims to be the end of the film as i do so when a few fulfill some fantasy that i think it is that my life. when i touch that i sound like something. alarming i likely. will show the world so i leave because well he's slow. and. he's. taking. the. country of the legal up and he's taking.

the family didn't have a difficult time. and these years i live off until i don't. know how same or. similar like it's gonna be if admission from that. place. i. see. i i. i

. the headlines in our to you human rights organization accuses the israeli army of deliberately targeting the legs of protesters in gaza. six hours in surgery and then one week in the intensive care unit and i didn't think my leg would be like for years also to come calls for donald trump to be awarded the nobel peace prize after he takes credit for progress on the korean peninsula and europe braces itself for a trade war with the u.s. as a deadline to extend an exemption for al-ameen steel tariffs is set to expire. and i welcome his five pm here in moscow.