 dystopian time. The first thing that I want to talk about is the Line 3 pipeline that is making some headlines recently. The first thing that I want to show us is a video from Democracy Now. For those of you who haven't kept up, this is just a really brief explainer video, but it's really, really informative. Heelscourt has denied an appeal aimed at halting construction of the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline in northern Minnesota. In a two-to-one ruling, the court upheld Minnesota Public Utilities Commission's approval of the 340-mile-long pipeline. More than 700 people have been arrested since June in indigenous-led protests against the pipeline. Indigenous lawyer Tara Houska of the Ginu Collective condemned Tuesday's ruling. Today's ruling from the Minnesota Supreme Court is yet another example of Minnesota not responding to the climate crisis, not respecting indigenous sovereignty, and continuing to ignore what's happening in real time all around us with smoky skies, the world burning, the rivers and drought, and water protectors being brutalized by police that are being paid by Enbridge. And one thing that I want to add to that is Roots Action is showing some really great videos of the footage from the protests. You see people marching, I believe, like thousands of people here, and now the situation has come to this where a lot of people, including many lawmakers, progressive lawmakers, are exerting pressure on the Biden administration to halt the construction of the Line 3 pipeline. This is also from Democracy Now, and I just want to read this real quick before I take it to the panel. So more than two dozen Democratic lawmakers are calling on President Biden to halt construction on the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota until a thorough environmental review is undertaken. Meanwhile, indigenous leaders Winona Laduk and Tara Huska met with UN Special Rapporteur I haven't said that word out loud in like years on human rights defenders last week to share the police violence suffered by water protectors at the Line 3 construction site. Activists say law enforcement ramped up their brutal attacks last week, dislocating one person's jaw, but land and water defenders say they will continue their resistance repertoire, I think it's going to bug me. So basically this feels like a repeat of history a couple of years ago towards the end of 2016, we saw the same thing with the Dakota Access Pipeline where we had this private military slash police force that was brutalizing protesters, literally sickening dogs on peaceful protesters. And really we got word from the Obama administration that he would just kind of wait to see how everything happens and we're in the same situation essentially now where we're hoping that the Biden administration takes action. He hasn't necessarily spoken much about this if at all. And he's not really reacting to pressure and it just feels a little bit surreal to still be talking about the construction of new pipelines in 2021 after the IPCC just told us that we're basically fucked when it comes to climate change. So Mac, you've talked a lot about the Line 3 pipeline. What are your thoughts on this situation? Yeah, I mean, this is just one of those examples. I feel like where Biden, you know, he'll go out there and he'll make speeches where he's paying lip service to how he cares about addressing climate change. And then you just see him go radio silent on something like this. It's like, it's completely ridiculous. Like you said, I mean, we've seen this game play out before. And, you know, I mean, there's no reason why after again, the IPCC report that you just said giving us as much of a red alarm as you could possibly have on climate change, then, you know, there's no excuse right now for even staying silent, but even allowing something like this to happen. It's just it's ridiculous. Yeah. And it's frustrating because, you know, there's only, I think the article said it was like 40 lawmakers or so. But really, or two dozen Democratic Party lawmakers, I mean, every single Democrat who purports to care about climate change, I mean, this should be their go to issue. They should be exerting pressure on the Biden administration because this is again, like not only is it egregious because of the lack of proper environmental review, but we're not respecting indigenous rights. I mean, we've seen throughout history, the United States government isn't honoring treaties with indigenous peoples. And it's just it's it just feels like history is repeating itself. Dylan, what's your take on this? Generally, my take is that first off, I would like to say that I support anybody engaging in direct action on the ground right now. Physically going out there and putting yourself in the way of police batons, pepper spray, police dogs, all of this takes an enormous amount of bravery. And you're putting your body at an extreme risk to do this. So I just want to give like a direct like round of applause to the people who are actually putting themselves on the ground to do it. Because if it wasn't for that, then the Dakota access pipeline would have been a non issue for most people, because the media wasn't good. We didn't cover it until the violence against protesters started. And it was very clearly that the local community did not want that to go through the same thing is true here, that the media didn't cover this until people put themselves in between the profit motive and their local community. That is when people started to cover this. So the first thing all compliments need to go to them. The second thing is this should be rallying cry for people trying to push on climate change and trying to fight climate change. Right now, Biden has the opportunity to go after this, to go after this issue. He did the same thing he proved that he can do it. He did it with Dakota on the first day in office. We saw him do this. So it's not like he doesn't have the ability or he doesn't have the political leanings to do it. He has the ability to do it. So for me, I think it's merely a conversation of how are we going to pressure Democrats into doing this? Because the Republicans are a lost cause on this one. There's no way in hell we're going to get Republicans to be able to care about indigenous people's rights, the Republican Party, or about the environmental impacts that this could have. And the thing is, if you look at the demands that are being made, these are on extremist demands like you need to blow up the project. A lot of these are just give it larger environmental review. And if that itself cannot even be met, then I don't know what could possibly meant. Just literally a question of having a conversation with the community, because it feels like if you can't even put in the effort to put in the larger scale environmental review on a project of this size, then it feels like you don't even want to have the conversation with the community. It sounds like you don't really care about what the community thinks. So you shouldn't be surprised when the community comes out in force and stops you from doing your project. Yeah, I wanted to, great points, by the way, Dylan. I wanted to ask, Farron, because you oftentimes cover a lot of legal issues and whatnot. And a lot of what we're seeing with the Biden administration, what's being greenlit, and a lot of the continuation of the projects from the Trump era is all the result of Attorney General Merritt Garland. Do you know who in the Biden administration is pulling the strings here? Because it feels weird when Biden came into office, I was giving him credit for cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline, being to the left of the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. But now we see basically an action on line three. And what do you think is the underlying motivations here for the Biden administration? I think they do things when they think they're going to get a lot of good reaction from it. They looked out over the country. They saw the opposition to Dakota. They saw the opposition to Keystone. So they understood by doing this, we're going to make a lot of people happy. We're going to get some good publicity in these early days. We're going to get some progressive street cred. But line three, nobody knows what that is. There's been no coverage of this. Yes, we know about it. We've talked about it. But outside of these small circles, most people aren't familiar with this. This is not an issue that has been as well covered, I guess, as it should be. So they don't see, I'm assuming, and I don't think they see any benefit to it right now. So as Dylan pointed out, we have to make this a bigger issue. We have to make sure that we continue talking about it. It's the same thing that we did with the Keystone XL pipeline. I mean, I was writing for Dismog blog about the problems with Keystone all the way back in 2010. And back then people, well, what is this thing? What's it about? It took a long time. And unfortunately, as we know from the IPCC report, we don't have that kind of time. So these lawsuits are great. And honestly, legally speaking, it is kind of shocking that this Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in the way they did. Because if a proper environmental review was not done legally speaking, the project should not be allowed to go forward. So that kind of blows my mind. We just saw a project in Alaska last week put on ice because they did not do a proper environmental review. So we're seeing progress in some areas. We're seeing nothing in other areas. And what concerns me about it is that's what we saw with Obama. We had really great action in some arenas when it comes to environmental protection, emissions, the Mercury and air toxic standards act was wonderful. And then we increased offshore drilling to a level never seen before in this country. Domestic oil production was booming, fracking was exploding. So good and bad negates progress. And we're in a position, we can't negate progress. Now, we have to be moving forward, especially after four years of moving backwards. So if it's a whole publicity thing, they don't know that enough people care about Enbridge to actually do something about it, then it is up to us to make a big fuss about it to publicize this and to make sure everybody knows what this is and why it's such a bad idea.