The scientists of Earth Friendly Futures were working as fast as they could to complete tests on the soil and water samples they'd gathered from around the U.S. during 2004 and 2005. Then they started on samples that were being sent to them from other environmentalists around the world through the IOPF.
Most of the next few years would be spent doing nothing but testing and analyzing and comparing the results of the analyses with test results from as far back as they could find records. The initial findings were not good... the results the EPA had hoped to achieve with the regulations they had imposed on industrial chemical and fossil fuel emissions over the last thirty years had not been realized.
Air, soil and water quality in areas heavily populated and surrounded by industrial emissions and runoff was even worse than when EPA regulations had been imposed. Nothing had improved... everything was worse. Which must've meant that either none of the EPA's regulations had been enforced or were just ineffective and the test results they'd gotten over the years had to have been falsified...
And the test results from other parts of the world were no better. All of the scientists and all of the environmentalists who'd been pushing for years to make everyone understand that they were literally "killing" the planet, were shocked to find that almost everything they'd tried to do had been undermined. Most of their work and their suggestions for halting the destruction of the environment had been thwarted...
It was no wonder the climate changes were getting worse and worse every year... including volcanic and seismic activity! The planet itself was probably trying to destroy this infestation of human parasites...
We were sucking it dry... killing all the vegetation by contaminating the ground with nuclear waste and non-degradable petroleum by-products... clogging the air with toxic chemicals and carbon emissions and poisoning the waters with industrial waste. The Garden of Eden would not be restored...
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By the end of 2006, so many environmentalists were pushing the issue that the U.S. government finally had to act like it was paying attention. All of a sudden, they made it sound like they were ready to jump on the "green technology" bandwagon and they were going to push whatever they could to start saving the environment.
They started talking about looking more into the possibility of investing federal funds in solar and wind power technology. There was talk of setting up huge solar arrays in desert regions and erecting wind turbine farms in many areas, especially coastal areas that benefited from steady ocean breezes... until some rich, snotty bastards started yelling nimby...
not in my back yard!!!
And some filmmaker had made an independent expose' on what had happened to the EV-1 electric vehicle, posing the question,
Who Killed The Electric Car?
Megan Richards-North had so wanted to be involved with that film, but she could not in light of her husband's position with the FBI. But she had made sure to anonymously pass along all the information she had dug up over the years...
Interestingly enough, no automakers even brought up the idea of bringing back an all-electric vehicle. They were only coming out with hybrids... gasoline engines with electric/battery back-up power sources, which gave slightly better fuel-efficiency and slightly less emissions. Megan still smelled the putrid, oily fumes of OPEC's control...
Over the next few years, the IOPF continued to thwart as many of the planned major terrorist activities they could without tipping off OPEC that most of their terrorist cells were being monitored from the inside. The only thing that was frustrating OPEC was the fact that every single major strike they tried to plan against U.S. and other major world targets were always discovered before they could pull them off...
And that's when they made their most crucial mistake... they pressured their U.S. government contacts to start leaking intelligence from the various investigative branches. That way OPEC figured they would be able to learn how the CIA and the FBI were discovering their plans and how they were being thwarted.
The first few times some Senators and Congressmen requested intel information, no one thought anything about it. But when some IOPF members reported to their CIA contacts that the information was being discussed among some terrorist cells several weeks later, the Agencies sat up and paid attention. It had alerted the U.S. intelligence community to the fact that some government officials may have leaked the information...
Anyone who had requested the intel reports were immediately put under surveillance by the FBI. Phones were tapped, cell phones were traced, calls were recorded and many of them were followed. By the end of 2008, there were at least 12 known U.S. Senators and Congressmen who were in direct contact with members of OPEC from time to time. But the requests for further digging into other means of communications between them were denied.
There was no apparent cause for alarm... most of those U.S. government officials had participated in many talks and negotiations with the members of OPEC over the years. There were any number of reasons why they would still be in touch... keeping the lines of communication open in order to ensure friendly relations, for one.
However, a couple of the Senators had no known reasons to be in contact with anyone from OPEC... So why were they? The Senator from New York claimed that she'd met one of the ministers on a diplomatic tour of Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion had ended in 2003 and they'd been in friendly contact ever since. The Senator from Michigan had a similar plausible explanation.
