The Highwire with Del Bigtree - Episode 457: THE CLIMATE AGENDA

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

Happy New Year! The HighWire is kicking off 2026 by releasing ‘Jefferey Jaxen Investigates: A Rush to Green Energy, Part 1’ — normally exclusive to HighWire+ subscribers — for free. We’ve been told that climate change is the greatest threat to our planet, and that it’s our fault. But what’s really driving the rush to green energy? Jefferey Jaxen pulls back the curtain on the politics, the money, and the agenda behind it all. Share this documentary with your friends and family. The conversation is just getting started. And watch Part 2 at HighWire.Plus.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

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if you want hard-hitting news, if you want the truth, go to I candecide.org and donate now. All right, everyone, we ready? Yeah! Let's do this. Action. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.

Wherever you are out there in the world, it's time to say, Happy New Year, everybody. What an amazing year this is going to be. And looking back at what we did in 2025, one last reflective look on one of the most amazing years that has ever been when it comes to medical freedom. Of course, we saw Robert Kennedy Jr. take the chair at HHS, as HHS secretary, the most powerful position in health, immediately started changing so many things everyone had talked about for decades,

whether it was taking chemical dyes out of the food supply of children or lead and arsenic out of baby food and, you know, baby formulas, and finally removing the hepatitis B vaccine, the world's stupidest vaccine for anybody that doesn't have hepatitis B. The list goes on and on and on. Highwire was here. We also put out an inconvenience study, the biggest movie of the year that has swept the world over 100 million views worldwide and climbing. You can still share that with everyone you're partying with. If the party's still going on at your house, go to an inconvenient

study.com and share that film. But there's so much that has to get done. Last year, we won the religious exemption for West Virginia, but it's still in courts because they've got 20 different is lined up, trying to figure every angle to stop kids from being able to go back to school based on their religious beliefs. Well, we are fighting for those beliefs, and that is only possible because of your support. So I hope this year you'll recognize how important it is this work, if we're going to continue this work, to win back and free the five for real. We've got five states. West Virginia is still hanging in the balance until we fully win this. So our goal this year is the free to five to get back exemptions for Maine, New York, Connecticut, West Virginia, and California so that every American is free to make their own medical choices.

That's just the beginning of what we believe is possible. We've got a case going to the Supreme Court fighting for medical freedom there based on a case of Amish children in New York. We think that could change, you know, Jacobson versus Massachusetts. A law since 1905 has just been like this dark cloud over our heads and taking away our rights. It's what they used when they forcibly injected people with vaccines during the COVID pandemic. So all of this hanging in the balances. We move into 2026. We've got an election coming up this year. So much to talk about.

But at the heart of it is another conversation. Is it all just vaccines? Or is there a bigger play? Where's the WEF now? Where is the World Health Organization? What are they all up to? Well, one of the games that they keep playing and talking about is this sort of green energy push and global warming. And now they're starting to tie that to disease and future pandemics and what's going on?

Well, Jeffrey Jackson's done a deep dive into that and he joins me now. Jeffrey, today we're releasing and you're going to show, usually it's hidden behind. the wall at Highwire Plus, but we are going to show the first part of the rush to green energy. Why this investigation? What is it about green energy that you thought this is worth the amount of time you put in these documentaries? It's just incredible and the work and the detail. But why this story? Well, thank you, Del. And happy New Year, one for the history folks we just went through in 25 here. The green energy conversation, like you said, it's being tied into a lot of other narratives and it's being tied into the pandemic response, public health,

medicine, science. And so we thought it's time to knock this peg out and tell the true story and let the scientists and the researchers who really didn't have a seat at the table for decades tell the science that wasn't allowed, but is just as true, is just as accurate. So we tell a story in this, in this rush to green energy it's really the net zero story why are societies reducing the way people live they're forcing reductions upon them you have to drive electric car we're doing this massive switch over to all net zero in germany for example are shutting down coal-fired power plants and why is this happening shutting down farming in the netherlands it makes no common sense and it's for well net zero to save the environment so we tell a story of the actual science underpinning the

the climate change narrative, this Russian net zero. And then we talk alongside this story, we tell a story in Nevada of a lithium mine in Thacker Pass that is going through development right now. It's actually broken ground. It's moving forward. It's a bipartisan because it was going on during Biden's administration and Trump's going forward in both administrations. So this is a political situation here. It's just moving forward. So we're dealing with these conversations in our country here. And one of the issues, with that lithium mine as well, some of it appears to be on native land. The Shoshone, the Paiute, Indian tribes, the Native American tribes, the indigenous tribes.

They have a claim to that land as well because that's ancestral land for them. And it doesn't seem to really move the needle for the government too much. So I was actually really fortunate as a documentary filmmaker to be invited in to speak to the elders, some of the elders there to speak about not only their story, but the story of what these lands mean, how this lithium mine came about on their land. It was actually during COVID. And the process really, as you can see by the documentary,

it really wasn't a process that was grounded in the community. They actually didn't give the community much of a voice. We're also trying to do that here and tell this big story about why we're moving forward with these conversations and on land here in America that it's supposed to be somewhat You know, and it really brings up a big question I have, and I'm going to say it before we get into this, I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. I still consider myself an environmentalist based on the original definition of that. I'm not into authoritarian governments. I'm not into trading carbon credit scores where I watch billionaires fly around in, you know, leer jets while we're all stuck in a 15-minute city, you know, walking everywhere we go. That is obviously not, I think, a fair future or an equal future for anybody. I would love to see third world nations have the same opportunity we have to use resources like oil and coal to start, you know, building their infrastructure, their roads,

their high rises, their elevators, their cars, something that is being crushed by this, which also seems incredibly unfair. But the point you're making, a lithium mine, digging into the ground for lithium to stop the harm of mining. for coal, we're mining for lithium. I mean, this trade-off, it just, you know, I don't think it's lost on as many people as it used to be. And it's so important to this conversation, right? There's no perfect fix. I get it. There's no perfect fix. But also, you know, there's no perfect problem either. There's ways we have to look at this, you know, really quickly, Jeffrey. I think I've told you this story, but I had a really life-changing moment when I was traveling

you know, right after Vax and going from state capital to state capital, trying to get them to work on a religious exemption law like we're about to change in West Virginia with our lawsuit there, but I was in West Virginia where the coal mining is the heart of that issue there. And I went, I remember I was sitting in office. I was waiting for a senator to arrive and they put me in his office early. And I'm looking around and it's all pictures of coal mining, you know, shot from inside of coals. in coal mines, it became clear to me that whoever this senator is, he must have been a coal miner. And I'll never forget this great guy, just strong, you know, rounded shoulders, hard worker came and sat down in his suit. And I said to him, you know, looks like you must, you were once a

coal miner. And he says, oh, no, I still am a coal miner. He's in fact, I was just in the mines this morning. And I remember saying, really, you know, and I asked him questions about coal mining. I was like, it's such a dirty job. You must hate it, you know. I mean, these poor people have to, you know, be stuck down. You don't get to see the sun. He's like, on the contrary, Del, we are a brotherhood. There's nowhere on earth any of us would rather be than down in that mine.

We love what we do. Not the story I heard growing up in Boulder, Colorado. And he talked about all the initiatives that they were doing to try and make, you know, the coal mining cleaner in West Virginia. As he said, we do this cleaner than anywhere in the world. And I even asked him because at that moment, you know, with Donald Trump had just gotten to office the first time, you know, is that are things changing? And he said the confidence is changing. My boys are back to work in West Virginia is up and running.

And I remember when he said that, I just thought to myself, you know, having grown up in Boulder, where we were like anti coal mining and anti, and I remember we would say things like, well, you know, we should just teach them to make solar panels, right? I mean, a great idea, but we never sent in people to teach West Virginia how to make solar panels. We just took away their jobs, crushed their families, drug abuses running rampant, you know, people have no, you know, nothing else they can do. There haven't been retrained. We just destroyed that state that actually has a beautiful capital. You can tell how, you know, affluent that state was when coal mining was really happening in its heyday. But then I thought, but all we did was. shut down this mine because we're worried about the jobs and lives that might be lost in the

future. Should the ocean get a foot deeper? Should the earth heat, you know? So let's preemptively destroy lives to potentially save the hypothetical problem of lives being hurt in the future, which made no sense. And then I looked at how much energy we're now buying from China that's ramping up more coal mines and ramping up more nuclear. It's producing all the energy at wants. And it's definitely not doing it as clean as we are. So then I just realized, Jeffrey, we didn't end coal mining. As you pointed out, we're turning into lithium mining. We're offshoring our coal mining to other countries where they're making the money.

They're getting the jobs. And we're just destroying our own people. And I just thought something's got to change. Man, this is not the way forward. There's a huge wake-up moment for me. I believe in America. I believe in our lives here, just as every other country should be strong and believe in their nation, too. But here we should be protecting our jobs, not sending them, you know, off somewhere else.

We should be making our own energy. We should be on top of that. I'm not against green energy, but don't tell me it's cleaner if you're digging holes in the ground and polluting rivers, all right? And so I think that that's, you know, a big part of why I'm happy that you did this investigation into a space that many would say, what does that have to do with, you know, I can and our mission statement dedicated eradicating man-made disease? Well, all of these things have side effects. All of these things can lead to disease. And certainly, if we are a poor nation, we're not affluent, that brings in a whole host of other issues that deal with our health. And then, you know, yeah. Yeah, and you made a great

point there, too, because in making this film, and making this documentary as a journalist, I tried to step back and just set the table. I didn't want this to be about me. I wanted them to tell the story, all the guests I had on to tell the story, the facts and the data. So there are two competing conversations here, because as you'll see in this documentary,

there is a business aspect of this. China owns a lot of these earth minerals, and we need them to expand, you know, net zero, climate change, but also electronics and things like that. So there's an economic position there for America to try to figure out a way to not have this monopolized by China, at the same time you have you have companies extracting minerals from sacred land to fulfill a narrative of settled science that was only settled because it kicked out the the researchers and and the

doctors that said things inconvenient against that narrative so there's a lot going on here to talk about and who knows what's right but i i hope this adds to a conversation a public conversation that we really need to have more of i agree i'm looking forward to of course we're off this part one of your documentary, The Rush to Green Energy as a way to inspire people to recognize what's happening at High Wire Plus. This is our way of giving back to our recurring donors. So as you're watching this documentary, if you are not right now a recurring donor to ICANN the High Wire, then we would ask that you consider doing so. Just think about what this documentary was worth to you, what this show is worth to you. Then think about all the lawsuits we're

fighting for you and just think you're $1, $2, $5, $10, $26 for $2, $2,000, $2, $2, $2, $2, $2, $2, $2, $2, $2, $2, $2, $2, $2, $2, $2, $2, $2, $2, $2, 2026 is our new number if you, you know, want to give that donation or more if you've done very well in life. We are fighting for the future of our species. We're fighting for a reality, for truth, for reason, and we're standing up against a global system that is agendas, I think, outside of what their narrative is telling us, which is the heart of this brilliant documentary. So without further ado, this is the rush to green energy, part one. Climate change. Climate change. Climate change.

Climate change. Climate change. And a media war over that crisis. We're going to take a deep dive tonight into the science surrounding climate change. What we're talking about here is really the climate conversation that's dominated science and the conversation in society for decades. The climate has varied over billions of years, sometimes huge. We have done this project right and not everybody agrees that we've done it right. You can file a claim on public land anywhere and you have the right under the money.

right under the mining law to work that claim. Regardless of whatever people say, they're sacred sites that are out there. We've been told that our ever-changing climate is the greatest threat facing our planet. And we've been told it's our fault. What has ensued is a rapid shift to alter society in ways many didn't agree upon to follow science that a select few have told us is settled. Dr. Judith Curry is an American climatologist. She's authored several books on climate science,

has been part of multiple U.S. federal climate agencies, and is a published researcher. researcher. Really in 1992, this is when this conversation really starts. You have the UN Convention Treaty on Climate Change, and they put forth kind of a doctrine or a treaty on climate change. Could you tell me a little bit about that and what they focused on? This goes back to the 1980s, and there was interests primarily from the UN environmental program on globalized approach to dealing with environmental.

issues and they keyed on climate change as the vehicle that would encompass all of this. And the UN formed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. And they prepared the UN Framework Treaty of 1992. A hundred and ninety-six countries signed on, including the US. And what this treaty was aimed at was eliminating dangerous human cause climate change. Now for some perspective on this, why did they think that human cause climate change would be dangerous? Well, there was no particular reason to think that back in 1992.

Global temperatures had been cooling from the 1940s through the 1970s, and it started to warm in the 1980s. So it wasn't like there was this abundance of science pointing to climate change. It's worse than that because the IPCC, the intergovernmental panel on climate change, They formed in 1988, and their first assessment report came out in 1990, and they found that, yes, we've seen a little bit of warming, but it's well within the bounds of natural variability. And that was the conclusion. The first IPCC assessment report, nevertheless, they used the precautionary principle to justify this treaty. There was very little basis for this back then, and there was no reason to think that warming was dangerous or caused by humans. There couldn't be a better day to address the issue that I believe is the single most serious

manifestation of the environmental crisis, which now characterizes the radical change in the relationship between human civilization and the Earth's environment. The planet's been here for billions of years. How has the climate changed before humans started industry? Was it pretty stable? Was it cyclical? Ice ages come and go massive volcanic eruptions. Since the last ice age, we've seen a lot of variation in the climate.

In fact, the warmest period was around 7,000 years ago. We call this the mid-Holocene optimum when sea level was higher and things were generally warmer. And then we've overall cooled since then. With some ups and downs, there were massive volcanic eruptions in the early 1800s. and one of them was Tambora, and they called this the year without a summer. In the 1870s, there was massive monsoon failures and big weather disruptions all over the world, and this was associated with changes in the Pacific Ocean circulation. Mass famines, it was a terrible time.

In the 1930s, we saw the worst weather in U.S. history. We saw the worst heat waves, the worst drought, droughts, the worst fires, even the worst U.S. landfalling hurricanes. This was the 1930s. So there's plenty of climate variability and plenty of bad weather before human emissions became any kind of a factor in the climate. If you cherry pick and start your timeline in 1970s, which is when we have good satellite data and that's the excuse for starting in 1970, yeah, the trend has been upwards.

But if you look back further, the story is much more complex. We do know that there's other things that cause natural variation on the planet. What are some of the internal mechanisms that cause that on the planet of this fluctuation outside of people? There's volcanic eruptions. Other big one is the sun. The sun has very complex interactions with the climate, many different time scales and cycles and there's indirect effects related to cosmic rates.

and magnetic field, not just the heat from the sun. The ocean and ice sheets have some long time scales. Internal variability. When we have an El Niño or a La Niña year, big changes in our weather, but changes in large-scale ocean circulation patterns. And ice sheets also have their own time scales and their own internal processes.

So the ice sheets can be doing something that isn't directly related to the surface climate, because there's lots of time lags. So the ice sheets and oceans act as flywheels on the climate. Prime movers like large-scale ocean circulations, ice sheet patterns, and unpredictable solar activity combine to make climate predictions nearly impossible, especially when science has put their effects as secondary to human activity in key climate models affecting policy. Dangerous human-class climate change.

So that's what the UN is focusing on. Is there an objective point to which this human clause climate change becomes dangerous over the natural variability outside the natural cycles, as do we know? Dangerous is a human value judgment, and you have to ask dangerous for who, when, and where. If you live in Canada or Siberia or northern China, warmer temperatures would be great. Your land would become productive agriculturally and things like that. The dangers that they talk about relate to sea level rise, which is really a slow creep, and extreme weather events.

But there's very little evidence that warming makes extreme weather events worse. And so we're left with not very much in terms of actual dangers. There was this epic snowstorm last winter. Yes. Really deadly and destructive. It's blizzard of 22. But that's not an indication that those are going to get worse? No, because we had the blizzard of 77, the blizzard of 85, 81, blizzard of 37.

I'm not saying that our severe weather is going to disappear. It's still there. Yeah. In fact, snow amounts have remained steady in all of this. It doesn't seem to be getting worse. Despite robust evidence that human-caused climate change actually causes extreme weather events, the media has seized upon the opportunity to force this point, despite the lack of evidence. While hurricanes and rainstorms have always been around, climate change is making them worse.

Hurricanes are getting stronger. And scientists say climate change is to blame. 2024 was the hottest year on record. Now, not even two weeks into the new year. We're watching strong winds and extremely dry conditions fuel historic wildfires that are destroying large swaths of Los Angeles. In terms of dangers, the bigger issue is land use,

getting rid of natural floodplains and wetlands and things like that that increase our vulnerability. population increase, development and building in vulnerable coastal regions. Deforestation, this is what increases our vulnerability to extreme weather, not any worsening of the extreme weather itself. We've been told that warming is dangerous, right? So is there a measurement to how much warming is dangerous from humans? In spite of the wording in the 1992 treating dangerous human-caused climate change,

The UN struggled to define what dangerous even is, and it wasn't until 2010 that they came up with two degrees centigrade of warming post pre-industrial. And that was an arbitrary thing that they came up with. And then the models then were used to relate how much emissions do we have left till we reach two degrees. And then the emissions target net zero then became the goal. The goal was displaced away from actual danger to a temperature increase and then to an emissions amount because it's harder and harder to relate warming to actual dangers. When they say two degrees, that's an average because it fluctuates two degrees just outside this door throughout the year. Every place has different temperatures.

The difference between day and night is way more than two degrees, not to mention winter and spring and Texas versus South Dakota. Seems more like regional resilience would be the answer as opposed to some kind of arbitrary number for the entire world to adapt to. That's exactly the case. In the rush to control world energy supply and emissions, adaptation has really been ignored. Adaptation was regarded as the enemy of climate change because if we adapt, then we let the evil fossil fuel producers off the hook. But now people realize that we have to adapt. We've always had bad weather. We're having it right now, and we will in the future. So we need to figure out how to make ourselves less vulnerable.

Known as the Hockey Stick, the popular graph and accompanying paper was published in the journal Nature in 1998, kicking off a media blitz. The media seized upon the science to confirm humans are bad for the Earth. The Hockey Stick was an icon in 2001, the third of settlement. report right behind John Houghton who was giving the press release for the IPCC report and this became the icon for global warming and it was based on very very flimsy science and even what I have called image fraud in terms of splicing on the historical record onto the paleo record and hiding the fact that the paleo record actually showed a decrease in temperatures in recent decades and so I was calling that out. I think I thought climate change wasn't political. In your dreams.

It's been political right from the start. From the 1980s, the policy cart has been way out in front of the scientific course on this from the very beginning. Is the hockey stick graph still widely accepted as a factual point in the climate change conversation? I think we'd all agree that tree rings are lousy thermometers. This is a very complex situation. You really need expert statisticians to deal with and we don't have broad enough sampling of the proxies to really do a global temperature.

We need to do research into better proxies, better statistical methods, and we need wider sampling. This is widely accepted. However, the paleo-climate community has been stuck in confirmation bias mode with endless studies to confirm the hockey stick. They use the same data. They use essentially the same or even worse statistical methods, and they come up with essentially the same thing. So this whole field has gone nowhere in the past two decades because they're all trying

to confirm the hockey stick when instead they should be using better proxies and focusing on regional climates, not trying to do a hemispheric or global temperature average. If the science settled, detractors, silenced, and ignored, it was now time for the rapid societal change by mandating an electrified world. Unprecedented pollution limits on cars. At least 54% of new vehicles sold in America would basically need to be electric or maybe hybrid by 2030. The push towards a green battery-powered future comes with a major trade-off. Where does the electric car fall into this? Because in the United States, at least, there was a...

goal set to have at least half the cars be electric by 2032. This seems like a very aggressive and also just a manufacturing point, almost not having to do with the climate at all. This mandating of one particular technology, I think, is a bad idea. Toyota is going hydrogen. That's pretty exciting. Toyota people are not stupid. I want to see what they come up with. Synthetic fuels, whether that's going to scale up, I don't know, but that's another alternative that seems very viable to me.

They're just banking on electric cars seems to be a mistake. We have to experiment and try a number of different technologies. The change would be accomplished from both sides, regulate the current industry out of existence as government hyper-incentivized electric. Tim Crowley is vice president of government and external affairs at Lithium Americas, a mining corporation currently developing the Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada. John Hatter is the director of Great Basin Resource Watch, a 501C3 nonprofit organization founded in 1994

by a coalition of environmental, Native American, and scientific community representatives. Looking at headlines, I'm seeing the word, the white gold rush. This is lithium, and this is a bigger part, an integral part, of this green energy push. We have this really aggressive push and not the materials to back that up.

What are your thoughts on that? Lithium is one that's rising up quite a bit, but there's also copper, there's interest in malibdum. What we've always kind of heard is that we need the minerals and we need them now. That's always been the message. Our mining law, which goes back to 1872, basically states that mining is really important. In fact, it essentially says that mining is almost the most important thing we do in public lands, if not the most important thing that we do. We haven't changed that in all these years, despite movements to protect wilderness,

to protect water system, clean air act, clean water act, all this stuff, mining law stays the same. It has no protections for a community, no protections for the environment. In fact, under the mining law, you can file a claim on public land anywhere, and you have the right under the mining law to work that claim.

As humanity, we sit here, we're at a historically significant point. Because of the ease of that mining law, kind of just greasing the skids and not really having changed much since this inception. And now, mining companies are now asserting that we're also part of the solution to climate change. We are the green saviors because we're going to provide minerals

for new technologies, which are better than the old technologies. The problem is that any kind of extraction is enormously damaging to the environment and often is very divisive for communities as well. So there is a damage that's done. There are lots of legacies of the damages that have been done by extraction, oil and gas and mineral. There's some odd 154 superfund sites out there that are mining sites. It's going to cost billions of dollars to clean them up if they ever will get cleaned up. So there's a significant legacy that's out there.

The new gold rush underpinning the electric switchover comes with a massive need for earth minerals like cobalt and lithium, which China currently holds major portions of. Lithium is one of the most coveted materials in the world right now. Thacker Pass is home to possibly the largest lithium deposit in the world.

Thacker Pass lithium mine development in humble County. Today, General Motors announced it wants to invest $650 million in it. Lithium Americas, you're looking to be the largest lithium producer in America. We're in the middle of building a very large processing facility out in Thacker Pass, Nevada. Thacker Pass is in northeastern Nevada, and it's a very special place. There was a super volcano eruption about 16 million years ago, and with that eruption, mineralization, can came into the atmosphere and it settled over many, many years, into this caldera, this volcanic lake.

And at the bottom of this lake, you had sediments, including lithium. Mostly it's clay, there's ash, and a combination of minerals. And the topography has changed since then. This was 16 million years ago. The lake is gone. A couple mountains have pushed up since then.

But the thing that's really special is that lithium has stayed intact. How Lithium America has become involved in Thacker Pass. Yeah, so it's taken us a long time to get to where we are today. And it's a long process because it requires a lot of exploration. You have to find it in a place that has high concentrations, that you can process it easily, that you can mine it economically, and that it has low impacts to the environment,

to the surrounding areas. And so all of that assessment takes years and years, which we've gone through. And we're really proud to have gone through that entire process. We have done this project right. There have been lawsuits, and we've survived that process too. And that's obviously some of the controversy here. Walk me through what this takes.

The claim is the first step. If there's a notion that there's a mineralization that you can benefit from, somebody is gonna stake a claim. So it was Chevron in the 70s, and they started looking and they did find lithium. We spent years and years taking what Chevron had started and really developing it and making sure we understand what we're working with. No guess work. On the front end, we spent about $100 million just on

drilling and environmental work to make sure this is the right place. And once you get a plan of operations together, you say, okay, this is the boundary, this is how we want to do that. Then there's a lot of engineering work that goes into designing your plants, a lot of process test work like we do here, and then there's permitting. And permitting is extensive in that you work with all types of regulatory agencies to make sure that you're managing the air right, the water right, the biology right, the topography right, the communities right. And that's what the National Environmental Protection Act is all about, is to be as comprehensive as possible that people have a good voice, so it takes a long time.

And so once we got the green light from the circuit court, we went right into construction. the Inflation Reduction Act, how does the compliance work on that? Because this is the big incentive, because the car companies are obviously manufacturing a lot more electric vehicles, so there's a tax incentive in order to get buyers to shift this market from gasoline to electric. How does that incentive work and how does lithium America's work with that incentive? It's a really, really smart move that the Biden administration has put in place to really kickstart this industry and help with that transition away from

combustion engine vehicles. The reason that's so important is that there is no greater source of carbon in our society than from combustion engine sources. The United States produces 5,000, 6,000 tons of lithium carbonate a year. And when we get started, we're going to start at 40,000 tons a year, and then we're going to scale up to 80,000. And that's enough for around 2 million electric vehicles per year. legacy mining operations in Nevada have a sordid history of environmental concerns it was little

surprise when the new lithium operations faced immediate scrutiny there's the environmental concern obviously so there's the sulfuric acid and then Chevron found uranium there how are those things not negatively impacting the environment in that space we're building a zero discharge facility so no water that comes onto our property can leave our property. It will either collect in ponds that we will build and use it in our process or will prevent it from coming on our site. There is no uranium in our ore body. Chevron did find some in that area, but it's much lower.

So we're never going to get into that depth to find uranium. Every little bit of our operation has been scrutinized, the engineering, the design, and so we're really pleased that it's not only going to protect the environment and the things that are of huge value to society, like water and air and wildlife. We're really putting our best foot forward and doing it right and making sure

that we reuse the things that we need over and over and over. 86% of the water we use will be recycled over and over and over again. When we look at the draft environmental impact statement, and this was one of the worst environmental impact statements I've seen since I've been doing this work. Water is life, and in Nevada, this saying takes a deeper meaning. Human and environmental water usage is running headlong into mining needs.

One of the pieces of contention for this project as far as the environmental impact is the water usage and the water rights. So is Lithium America borrowing these water rights or are you owning these water rights? To acquire water rights is we bought a ranch in a nearby community called Orvada. That ranch and farm has been growing alfalfa for years and years and years. So we're going to stop growing alfalfa and use the water that was growing that plant to generate 40,000 and ultimately 80,000 tons of lithium carbonate. And then that's not all the water we needed. We also bought some from a rancher nearby who's getting out of the farming business.

Securing water rights was a major action item for lithium Americas, because according to their own environmental impact statement, they didn't have access to enough water. The Bureau of Land Management, signed a record of decision, without the company having clear access to the amount of water they said they need. We don't have much surface water. It's almost all groundwater. Nevada has been divided up into over 200 what they call hydrographic water basins, and this is how we manage it.

And there's a certain amount of water available for use in each one of those basins. You go above that water use and it's presumed that the water table will start to drop. Unsustainable. Thacker Pass is what they call fully allocated, which means that there's no water available. It's at its limit. So that means that the company has to acquire somebody else's water rights. Obviously they have gotten some water rights

and they're working on options, but as of the time of signing of the Environmental Impact Statement, they did not have access to all of it. Access to water is one barrier. Another issue from mining comes from the used water discharged after processing. Explain what the tailings are and what you saw as maybe a a concern with their environmental impact statement on those tailings in the groundwater.

The term tailings means tail end. Once you take the ore and you process it, there's some kind of chemical processing. And then what's left over, the unused portion of the rock material, the ore, that's tailings. It's a waste product. It's a problematic waste product. Tailings facilities can be enormous. And there have been a number of issues around the world with these facilities, which are often built into drainage where they've ruptured and then caused an enormous amount of pollution down gradient from them. The fluid, the liquids in these tailings, is often toxic and you have to treat it.

In fact, or past, they will have, of course, these tailings as well. The mining wastewater, called tailings, are traditionally stored in large pools. Lithium Americas is using a common process called filter tailings. However, they've added an additional step of creating clay tailings, but is it really environmentally safe? The moisture content in these tailings is not small. There's a fair bit of water in there.

The question that we asked was you're doing an acid treatment of these tailings facilities. So isn't there going to be residual acid in the tails themselves? Is there going to be some leftovers? What's the residual chemical signatures left over? So we looked at the data and basically the data said, yeah. Once these tailings get wet, once the precipitation come and there's drainage coming off of it, it's going to be acidic and it's going to be a cocktail of toxins. That's their own data that came out.

And so we're like, whoa, okay, all right, well, that's bad. So our question was, what's going to be the profile of drainage over time, what's going to be its toxicity over time, and how are you going to manage it? We weren't getting a good answer from that. We weren't getting it from the company. We weren't getting it from the state of Nevada. The process of lithium mining creates dust and other airborne contaminants. Many had concerns about how those were being addressed.

How is the air situation when it comes to the environment? How does that plan affect the air and what is being done to keep it a neutral situation? The biggest air concern is dust, and that's where water comes in, is that we need that water on the front end for dust suppression. That's the biggest piece, and then in our sulfuric acid plant, we've gone with the best available technology, and the emissions coming out of our sulfuric acid plant will be akin to about a Ford super duty diesel truck, very, very low emissions. We will abide and exceed the requirements of the Clean Air Act. So there is some atmospheric release from this plant, and in this environmental impact statement,

they quoted numbers of what they expected the release of sulfur dioxide to be. And this was something that put up a red flag for you as well, because it seemed that it was lower than you thought it would be for such a plant of this size. In the Thacker Pass mine plan, they're using an acid leaching process. So they're going to actually make sulfuric acid on it. on site. They're importing molten sulfur and then they're going to effectively burn it and then combine that with the water. So that's a lot of where the consumptive water use comes from is making the acid itself. It's not uncommon for

mining operations to do this. It's in a double-edged story because when I asked Tim Crowley about that at Lithium Americas, he said, well, it's going to be less transportation if we do this on site, but then you're doing it on site and that poses a whole another challenge. He's right about the transportation issue. Transporting sulfuric acid is not an easy thing, but it is going to be a chemical plant, which makes it a more complex mining operation. They're going to be burning sulfur and making sulfuric acid. A byproduct is going to be sulfur dioxide.

Now, they want to capture as much of that sulfur dioxide as they can to make the acid. So it's in their best interest to not let it go into the atmosphere. Their mine plan called for in a very clean acid plant, one of the cleanest in the world probably. So immediately, I thought, OK, you're talking about state of the art now. Funding is needed to create the research to counter and create an environmental impact statement. This becomes cost prohibitive for local communities and grassroots organizations.

The research that goes into this environmental impact statement by this company is paid for by the company. Where is the independent research? This is important question. What are the consequences of this mine plan? What are the full consequences? How do we know that the information that we're getting is correct? A lot of the technical analysis is coming essentially from contractors paid for by the mining company. And in our view, there really isn't an independent assessment. We're very concerned about the analysis not fully laying out.

What are the consequences of the mine plan? There isn't an independent assessment unless someone ponies up the money to get it done. In the case of Factor Pass, Edward Bartell, a rancher out there. He paid for his own hydrologist because very concerned about water, because that's part of his business, very important part. So he paid for his own hydrologist to get an independent look. And the results are interesting because his hydrologists basically said, well, they didn't do a very good baseline or analysis.

They had a lot of holes in their project. The communities need to have access to independent analysis that they can trust. And it is a problem with permitting because are we getting the full story here? Do we know all the consequences that are going to happen in this mine project? And when a company comes and talks to a community, well, they're kind of making a pitch statement. They want to get community acceptance. So the mining companies don't reveal everything. And once the communities find out that there was something that's not revealed, that's it.

They lost the trust relationships, gone. That happened at Thacker Pass. What is your relationship? What is your relationship to this land? What does this mean to you? I pray every morning when I get up and I offer water to the ground. water to the ground and hope that my prayers can reach out there to the creators. I'm speaking for the generations to come. I want my relatives and my people to learn how to

take care of things. We need to protect the land and we need to do what we can do so that the mines don't just leave devastation to the land for the next generation. That mine promised to treat the environment and treat the land respectfully, but that's not what happened. Mm-mm. You know, our water will be polluted. We won't have anything. Well, obviously, powerful documentary, you know, it really gets the heart of the same problem we see over and over again.

The moneyed interests only investigating what they want to see and not investigating what they don't want to see. two gets even deeper into this, but all of this is being offered to you today on New Year's Day as a way to maybe inspire you that by, if you really want to make a difference, if you watch these documentaries and you're used to seeing and saying, well, I mean, that sucks, but what can I do about it? We're actually different than anything you've ever seen. We do not just point out the problem. We go out and we do something about it. We look at lawsuits that can maybe change the conversation or get to the bottom of it, but certainly fight for people's rights

to clean air, clean water, clean food, and the right to body autonomy, which is at the heart of any freedom that there is. No one is fighting harder. No one has won more lawsuits in this space than we have, but we can't do it without your support, which is why we created High Wire Plus. High Wire Plus is our way of giving back to you. We also want to incentivize those of you that have just been watching to just take that next step. Feel what it feels like to be part of making a difference in the world. We're going to say, I don't know what I can do about it. If you're that person that's had that,

why do you do something where every time you, you know, have that question in the future, what can I do? Well, you know what? At least I'm donating to the highway. Look at the lawsuit they just won this week. Or look at the brilliant documentary they just put out that is really making a difference and waking up people around me

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This is Highwire Plus. Every week on the High Wire, we bring you the truth the world is trying to hide. But for the most passionate health freedom warriors, sometimes you want to go further. That's why we created High Wire Plus, a space designed for our dedicated supporters, the ones who crave deeper dive, stronger insight, and the full story. On off the record, I sit down with today's luminaries of health freedom, and we go places we've never gone before. Raw conversations, honest questions, and unfiltered truth. And Jeffrey Jackson takes you even deeper in Jeffrey Jackson investigates. He breaks apart long-held assumptions about science, medicine, and the environment,

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It's how you join the mission. And when you become a monthly donor to ICANN, you're not just unlocking Highwire Plus. You're powering our investigations, our legal victories, and our ability to informant and educate the entire world, boldly and without compromise. If you believe in this movement, if you want more depth, more tools, and more truth, then it's time. Become a monthly recurring donor, unlock High Wire Plus, and step into the full High Wire experience that High Wire Plus can offer to you. All right, well, as we wrap up this show, the first day, I'm so excited the highway. I got to talk to you on day one because I think 2026 is going to go down as one of the most important years in the United States of America. We're really going to see whether we can cross this fulcrum point and get the energy moving our side.

I said at the end of 2025, we are in the offensive position. We have now got Goliath on his heels, but will we get the knockout? I think we will know at the end of this year, whether we got the knockout, whether we could really deliver, whether we could all stay focused and not celebrating before, you know, just because we won the battles, have we won the war? This year is about winning the war, and we're going to be standing with you doing that. We need your support on every front that we are fighting on for you, with you, with Aaron, Siri. All of the work we want to do, the dreams that we have are only made possible. That's why we would love it if you would become a recurring donor, High Wire Plus is just one of the gifts we're giving back to you.

But $26 a month for 2026, boy, how many times do I get to say that this year? Looking forward to it, though. Thank you for everybody that has supported us all through the years. What an amazing year 2025 was. We did things that even we did not believe were possible. That's saying something. So let's do that again this year. We're going to do that with your help.

If you want to watch part two of this incredible series, The Rush to Green Energy, which I know you do because it's going to be affecting your lives. It's literally deciding the cost of your car, whether you're going to have heating. If you're watching this anywhere else in the world, by the way, you can donate too. How about in England where some of you froze the death because they were shutting down your power in the middle of winter? What about rolling blackouts? You got an electric car. You did what everyone said, but now you can't drive or now you can't do anything because the grid can't.

handle it. What about all of those things in our future? Is that the future we want? This is what Jeffrey Jackson's been investigating. I want to bring it back on just to tell us a little bit about part two of the rush to green energy. If we become Highwire Plus members today and go, obviously, have the whole body of work you've done on Jeffrey Jackson Investigates Season 1. But this is brand new. No one has seen this. What can we expect from part two of this documentary series? Yeah, thanks, Del. Well, part two is is it. You ride shotgun with the indigenous elders. You go into the reservation in Thacker Pass, in Nevada.

We have drone footage of the mine. And you can really see not, I mean, it's really, it's all the documentaries I've shot, all the film I've shot. This is the most, I think, powerful and emotional segment I've ever done. And they tell their story and you get to hear their story. We all get a vote on this. And, you know, science is telling us one thing about net zero. So what about, what about indigenous people?

How do they feel about net zero climate change? Are there electric cars on the reservation? Can a lot of them before electric cars? I mean, these are questions that I asked them. You want to hear these answers. And then what we shared with me also was a very personal story that was handed down. You had Elder Myron there in the, we saw him. Story handed down several generations throughout his family.

He recounted for us on film. And this is how we ended this entire documentary about, what type of climate change is really happening and what the earth is really doing and what we should expect the earth to do. And again, one person's story, but this is, it's valuable information to have documented. And Dahl, I want to add also too, we have the most potent legal team in the world when it comes to a health watchdog. That's not argued. After 2025, no one can say that's not true. Our show led people through the COVID response, the fail pandemic, and we brought people out. We inspired hundreds of other broadcasters and influencers to now become medical freedom activists.

And now we have also people may not know this until now, but we have an active professional film house that were kicking out documentaries. In your case, with the Inconvenience Study Award winning documentaries, featured-length documentaries with facts that are impactful to society. This is the triple header here. So please consider donating 2026 here to Highwire. Jeffrey, I love that you're going to be riding shotgun with me on the Highwire every single week. I can't wait to see what we get to report, but there's so many things looming on the horizon just around this green energy.

But AI now is, I mean, it's really starting to, you know, move exponentially. Some of it brilliant, some of it horrifying. All of it's going to affect us, our health. us, our health. I mean, we could see a future where AI is determining whether you're going to get a procedure or not. Insurance companies moving that direction. Legal systems moving into AI. The discussions about do we need a judge and jury if AI can be objective. I mean, some really amazing stuff happening out there. I know you're going to be reporting on all of that. I want to thank you for this incredible series. This is, you know, we're just coming to the end of

season one. I can't wait to see what season two does. But as we finish this up, it's all available at Highwire Plus. Thank you for inspiring people to donate to us by making this content just for Highwire Plus. It's over the top. It's extra to what you're doing here on the High Wire every single week. I want to thank you for that commitment because it's really made a difference. The people that saw that said, hey, I want that. I want to get that content too. Jeffrey, you're a huge part of the work that we're doing here, not just in the reporting, but also inspiring people to get involved and help us as we continue to bring, as you said, some of the most important lawsuits and the most powerful team fighting for health in the legal world. So your contribution

was just, has been incredible from day one. I really look forward to this year working with you and what we're going to do in the future of 2026. All right, thanks. So let's bring it home in 2026. All right. We'll do. For everyone that wants to know, well, what is part two? Here's a little tease for part two of the rush to green energy. Sacker Pass is home to possibly the largest lithium reserve in the world. The company behind it is moving full steam ahead. This thing is moving forward. We're not just mining lithium.

We're turning it into a specialty base ingredient for all of the batteries that you use. Where is the independent research? This is important question. What are the consequences of this money plan? It's going to contaminate our water. We're all for the mine not opening and we're against it. There's evidence out there of generations. generations and generations of ancestors who have lived on this land.

Regardless of whatever people say, we are part of this land. We were here first. The mining companies don't reveal everything. That happened at Thacker Pass. When Lithium America came here to the Council meeting, they insulted the whole community of the Fort McDermott tribe. This was during the COVID response. They did things behind closed doors.

We were paying the price for the lithium. We're losing our ancestral rights. where we're having human right violations. The best way to prosper is to work for our company. These are really attractive jobs that provide high standard of living. Do you think America is a little behind in this race to acquire these rare earth minerals? The push is absolutely appropriate. We are way behind.

To mine lithium, we have to destroy the land. How can that be good from other earth? All right. Well, happy new year. I hope you were as excited about 2026 as I am. I am really looking forward to this year. I think it's going to be about victory. I think it's going to be about winning. And not just the small skirmishes and little battles. I think now we take the land. We take this country. We reaffirm our commitment to freedom as the beacon of light and hope. for the world. So many have fallen around us, even in Europe and England, taking away people's rights to free speech and the right to body autonomy. It's not happening here. It's never going to happen here. Not if the high wire and I can't has anything to say about it. So thank you for tuning in. Thank you for being a sponsor for this work. Definitely sign up becoming a recurring donor if you haven't already. Even if we weren't giving you high wire plus, how about just waking up

and knowing we want another lawsuit that's going to bring freedom to your brothers, your sister, maybe your own children. We are so looking forward to this year. I'm happy to be here, and I cannot wait till next week on the high wire. I'll see you then. Thank you. Thank you.