Mafia redefining eco-terrorism

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This article was published 14/09/2010 (5681 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LONDON, U.K. — Eco-terrorism is not only on the rise, it’s also branching out.

First we had the “peaceful” direct action of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club. Next the torching of luxury homes, SUVs and crops, courtesy of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and others. Today, however, we must redefine what we think of as “eco-terrorism,” as evidence shows that organized crime is increasingly cashing in on the enormous public subsidies on offer for wind and other green energy projects.

According to the corporate-security consultancy Kroll, the $8.7 billion set aside for clean energy projects by the EU until 2013 has attracted the Mafia and other organized crime syndicates, especially in Italy, Spain, Bulgaria and Central and Eastern Europe.

Since 2007, however, the sheer scale of the scams has escalated with developments of wind farms in southern Italy — one of Europe’s least windy countries — causing most concern. Many turbines have stood idle while, Kroll maintains, some were never built at all. Sicily alone has seen an explosion of wind projects, with more than 30 wind farms now dotting its western hills — especially in the Mafia heartland of Corleone, made famous by the Godfather films.

In 2009, approval was granted for 60 more sites before officials smelled a crime syndicate “rat” and froze processing of an additional 226 applications.

Last year, eight people in the Trapani and Salerno areas of West Sicily were arrested after an investigation into a string of wind projects by anti-Mafia magistrates. By November, a further 15 people had been arrested, accused of trying to embezzle as much as $38 million in EU funds. One of them was the president of Italy’s National Wind Energy Association. Local officials in the Spanish Canary Islands and in Corsica have also been arrested on suspicion of trying to cream off millions in similar scams.

The recent invasion of Britain’s Cairn energy deepwater drilling platform off Greenland is typical of what we tend to think of as “traditional” green eco-terrorism. But eco-terrorists generally are increasingly upping the criminal ante.

In July, a group of “anonymous activists” set ablaze two crops of Spanish experimental GM maize. In August an armed James J. Lee was shot dead after taking hostages at the Maryland offices of the Discovery Channel. Interestingly, Lee’s bizarre 11-point manifesto, headed by his chief demand that saving the Earth would mean getting rid of the people, is a key theme for many modern eco-warriors.

In January last year, the gasoline-bombing of a former oil executive’s luxury home in Edmonton was almost certainly the work of eco-terrorists. In 2008, two separate bombings of a pipeline transiting dangerous hydrogen sulphide gas in British Columbia was yet more of their handiwork. And American environmental groups, including the violent ELF, are currently circling the eco-wagons as a warning against the potential piping of Canadian oilsands-based oil to the U.S.

Forget al-Qaida. When the ELF burned down luxury homes at Woodinville, Seattle, in March 2008, causing $7 million of damage, the FBI reminded Americans that eco-terrorism remains the U.S.’s No. 1 domestic-terror threat. In the years leading up to the Seattle attack, the FBI estimated eco-attacks were responsible for causing more than $100 million of damage — one cell alone being responsible for more than $40 million.

According to the FBI, around 1,800 criminal acts had been perpetrated by eco-terrorists from the turn of the century to 2008.

For all the mounting evidence of soaring criminality, a romanticized public view of eco-terrorism persists. In 2008, six U.K. Greenpeace climate activists were put on trial after committing $46,000 of criminal damage to the Kingsnorth power station. They were attempting to prevent a vital upgrade to the coal-fired facility. After hearing the six claim “lawful excuse” in pursuit of “protecting property elsewhere,” the jury acquitted. As a consequence, the Labour government — many of whose ministers shared Greenpeace’s ideological objections — shelved Kingsnorth’s upgrade. While the case was a cause celebre, one conservative newspaper saw the decision as offering a “green light for anarchism.” But others saw something darker in the verdict. Left-wing journalist Brendan O’Neill saw the political cause-and-effect deferment of Kingsnorth as green-lighting “state-sanctioned radicalism.”

Fed on a constant diet of Hollywood eco-disaster movies, the romantic public persona attached to the eco-terrorist appears hard to budge. The eco-flick, from the aptly titled The Age of Stupid to Leonardo DiCaprio’s personal commitment to making 11th Hour, to the most successful eco-movie of all, Avatar, has become its own genre. You might think the latter just a jolly 3-D science-fiction romp. Think again. Eco-activist director James Cameron himself states that Avatar is, in fact, “the perfect eco-terrorism recruiting tool.”

They consider themselves the self-appointed “saviours of the planet,” but eco-terrorists are progressively ratcheting up the social ante. In doing so, they confront us all with an “offer you can’t refuse” mentality that insists: Do it my way — or else.

Whether its eco-terrorist or eco-Mafia, the moral distinctions seem increasingly “blown away.”

Peter C. Glover is the international

correspondent for Troy Media.