Fracking for natural gas can cause flames to shoot out of water faucets and pollute groundwater with unknown chemicals – and yet the EPA has little authority to regulate this process used by the natural gas industry in 38 states. In this rebroadcast edition of Earthbeat, Host Daphne Wysham speaks to Abrahm Lustgarten about the 60 stories he’s written about fracking for the non-profit investigative journalism group – ProPublica.
Then, a discussion on how the rest of the world is leaping forward on a clean energy future with Lester Brown. Lester is the president of the Earth Policy Institute and the author of an editorial in the Washington Post and the book, Plan B 4.0 Mobilizing to Save Civilization.
The People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth was a three-day conference that took place in Cochabamba, Bolivia and focused on giving a voice to indigenous people, environmental justice activists and others locked out of the United Nations’ previous Copenhagen Climate Conference.
Host Daphne Wysham’s reporting from Bolivia includes a conversation with Beverly Keene, the international coordinator of Jubilee South, a network of organizations that work on debt and development.
Plus, a discussion of how the world’s governments are giving cash and carbon credits for ending illegal activity – gas flaring – under the UN ‘clean development mechanism.’ Wysham speaks to Nnimmo Bassey, Nigeria’s executive director of Environmental Right Action / Friends of the Earth about these open air flames burning off natural gas and his impressions of the Bolivia conference.
Clayton Thomas Muller is a longstanding champion for environmental justice. He’s a member of the Cree Nation in Canada and he heads the Indigenous Environmental Network’s project on Tar Sands project. We hear from Clayton at one of the town hall-style meetings he’s been holding across Canada about his experience at the UN climate meeting in Copenhagen.
Earthbeat Host and IPS Fellow Daphne Wysham conducted a special one-hour interview with Dr. James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist, as an Earth Day 40th anniversary special.
In the interview, Dr. Hansen discusses the role of nuclear power in the climate crisis, the need for alternatives to cap and trade as a solution to climate change, and the possibilities that Earth will become like Venus due to fossil fuel consumption.
Host Mike Tidwell reviews the highlights of seven years of hosting Earthbeat. Including a conversation with famed film critic Roger Ebert on the significance of Al Gore’s movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ – a conversation with a merchant sailor who stood on the deck of the first commercial ship ever to sail through the Northwest Passage – and frequent guest Joe Romm on how warmer waters will lead to more frequent and intense hurricanes. Mike Tidwell will continue his work on climate at the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.
The Supreme Court opens the floodgates for corporate money to flow directly into elections. We’ll discuss how this stampede of special interests will affect climate change laws.
Joining host Mike Tidwell to discuss the implications of the Supreme Court vote is Rich Thomas, the general counsel and senior vice president of the League of Conservation Voters.
Then, what can Brown do for you? We speak about the surprise election to the US Senate of a Republican from Massachusetts – Scott Brown. Joining the conversation are two environmentalists who know Brown more than most. Jack Clarke is the director of public policy for Mass Audubon, the oldest and largest environmental group in the Northeast USA, and Lora Wondolowski, the executive director for the Massachusetts League of Environmental Voters.
There are less than 4 thousand wild tigers in the entire world. Now a new study shows how one out of every 10 of these tigers may be underwater within the next 100 years due to climate change. Joining us in our Washington, DC studios is Colby Loucks, the deputy director of the conservation science department at the World Wildlife Fund and the author of the new study in the scientific journal Climatic Change.
Image copyright World Wildlife Fund
Music for this edition of Earthbeat includes instrumental versions of Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.”Our theme music is Baladi by Tony Anka, Bellydance Superstars vol. 2.
If you’d like to hear this edition of Earthbeat – please send us an e-mail
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To give to the people of Haiti affected from a massive earthbeatquake – we suggest Doctors without Borders, Partners in Health or Mercy Corps. Also, our friends at Other Worlds, with three decades of experience working with social movements in Haiti, have this message to share
with you: Other Worlds.
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While the US Senate continues to stall on climate change – allegations continue into oil company lobbyists writing legislation suggested by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski. Joining host Daphne Wysham to discuss these Senate shenanigans is Steven Biel of MoveOn.org and Courtney Abrams of Environment America.
Then we discuss presidential power and climate change with Kevin Bundy of the Center for Biological Diversity. He’s one of the authors of the new report “Yes, He Can.”
Then a critical discussion on agriculture and climate change. Rachel Smolker of BioFuel Watch joins us to discuss agribusiness, biochar and agricultural offsets.
Music from this edition of Earthbeat is by the Haitian band Tabou Combo from their album Taboulogy. Our theme music is Baladi by Tony Anka, Bellydance Superstars vol. 2.
As climate legislation continues to crawl through Congress, standing in the way of any real action on climate change are Senators who seem more concerned about oil company profits than climate change effects. On this hour of Earthbeat, host Mike Tidwell reviews two Senators who are obstructing climate change legislation.
Both come from powerful political families, both are Democrats, and both represent states that are uniquely affected by climate change.
Louisiana is arguably the US state that is most affected by climate change, and yet Senator Mary Landrieu has proudly proclaimed herself “the most fervent pro-drilling Democrat in the Senate.” Montana is the home to Glacier National Park and its forests are being ravaged by a explosion of beetles that now live through warmer winters. However Senator Max Baucus is proud to be the only Democrat to vote against climate legislation, and he did so be says its carbon emission targets are too high.
Then, the recent explosion in solar energy across America. Solar power is stronger, faster and cheaper than ever before. Joining us to discuss solar is author Amanda Little. Her book ‘Power Trip‘ describers her first-person journey across American to catalog our energy landscape.
Finally, a commentary by host Mike Tidwell about how – against the odds – we’re winning more than we’re losing when it comes to fighting climate change – based on his recent editorial in the Baltimore Sun.
Music: Two renditions of the Pink Panther Theme, one by Bobby McFerrin and a second by Alfred Choral. Our theme music is Baladi by Tony Anka, Bellydance Superstars vol. 2.
Coming down from Copenhagen – we review what happened, and what didn’t at the recent United Nations Climate meeting in Denmark. Host Daphne Wysham speaks to Erich Pica, the President Friends of the Earth, and Janet Redman the co-director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies in our studios; and joining us on the telephone just having returned from Copenhagen is Earthbeat co-host Mike Tidwell.
Washington Senator Maria Cantwell introduced a bill seeking to plug some of the problems with carbon cap and trade. The Friends of the Earth’s Erich Pica stays in our studios to discuss the bill with David Bookbinder, the senior climate counsel for the Sierra Club.
Then a conversation about the largest World Bank loan ever to Africa – for building two new coal-fired power plants. We speak to Sunita Dubey of the U.S. offices of the South African environmental justice group Groundwork.
Image via the Sierra Club’s Glen Besa, all rights reserved
If you’d like to hear this edition of Earthbeat – please send us an e-mail
Image by Andrew Revkin, all rights reserved.
Friday in Copenhagen:
President Obama made his long-awaited speech here in Copenhagen just a few minutes ago and there was nothing encouraging about it. “The time for talk is over,” he said, and then failed to commit the U.S. to any new climate-saving actions.
“After months of talk, and two weeks of negotiations, I believe that the pieces of an accord are now clear… Mitigation. Transparency. And financing. It is a clear formula – one that embraces the principle of common but differentiated responses and respective capabilities.”
Unfortunately, there was nothing really clear or new about his speech. The President stuck to the previous U.S. weak commitment of a 4 percent reduction in carbon emissions below 1990 levels. This commitment practically assures climate collapse worldwide in coming years. He also simply repeated Hillary Clinton’s Thursday pledge that the US would “help secure” $100 billion per year by 2020 for poor nations coping with global warming.
The huge problem with Obama’s speech today was this: there was no commitment to a binding treaty leading the world to 350 parts per million carbon in the atmosphere. That’s the only level that Dr. James Hansen of NASA says is safe by the year 2100.
What Obama SHOULD have said is that the U.S. stands in solidarity with the 112 nations who on Thursday endorsed 350 ppm — or no more than 1.5 degrees warming by 2100 — as the goal for any meaningful climate treaty.
Here was the immediate reaction to Obama’s speech from 350.org founder Bill McKibben:
“In the face of leaked UN documents showing that this agreement is a sham, we were hoping for some movement from the President. Instead, his response was take it or leave it. 100 other nations are not making reasonable demands because they want to make the President’s life harder. It’s because they would like their countries to actually survive the century.”
Late Thursday I interviewed the prime minister of Tuvalu, a Pacific Island nation that will totally disappear with three feet of sea-level rise. Apisai Ielemia was fasting along with his entire diplomatic delegation here for 24 hours as part of the “International Climate Fast” called for by McKibben and others (I fasted too!). Ielemia made it clear that he would not sign a treaty that doesn’t commit to a pathway to 350 ppm. “Why sign something that guarantees my nation will drown?” he asked.
Exactly.
What will happen in the final hours of negotiating here? Rumors at the Bella Center are that there might be a “political agreement” for a goal of 2 degrees Celsius and a commitment to figure out the specifics of who will pay what toward the $100 billion-per-year goal for poor nations. But if that’s all that comes out of Copenhagen, then it’s basically nothing meaningful. We’ll just be kicking the can down the road to the COP 16 in Mexico City a year from now. That is UNACCEPTABLE. As President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives said last night in Copenhagen, “We cannot keep moving the goal posts on a climate deal. We have to stick to a deadline and solve the problem. The deadline is now. The place is Copenhagen.”
Just before Obama’s speech I had the fascinating experience of interviewing a correspondent with the Greenlandic Broadcasting Corporation. Katja Nyborg lives in Nuuk, Greenland, and is here covering the talks. She told me the warming in southern Greenland is now so bad that hunters are killing their sled dogs because there is nothing to sled on. The snow and ice are vanishing.
Katja Nyborg is a radio journalist from Greenland. She tells Earthbeat Radio that hunters there are killing their sled dogs because of vanishing snow and ice. But the warming, perversely, is bringing a boom in tourists who want to witness the climate calamity first hand.
The prime minister of Tuvalu also told me that there were almost no major beaches left in his island nation. “When I was a child in the 1960s, there were wide, beautiful white beaches throughout my country. Now they are almost all gone due to sea-level rise from global warming. We’re now just asking the world to let us survive.”
With firsthand testimonials like this, and with the maddening lack of real progress from world leaders, it can get discouraging here in Copenhagen. One testimonial that gives me hope, however, is my conversation with Australian Anna Keenan. She is on day 42 of a “climate justice fast.” And despite losing 33 pounds, she is amazingly full of passion and energy. She said a lot of people have called her courageous for doing this fast, which will end Saturday. But she agrees it’s courageous only in the sense of the original French meaning of the word “courage.” It literally means “raging heart.” (Please see that video interview below)
She said her heart of was full of passion, of hopeful and loving rage, to solve the climate crisis as a matter of justice toward all living things and all future human generations.
Here in Copenhagen, it’s hard not to feel some rage toward the dysfunctional international process — with huge responsibility falling on the U.S. But despite the challenges and setbacks, it’s also hard not to have a full heart — full of love and abiding hope — as you see all the world’s countries here, all the races, all the languages.
Miracles happen. The world needs one here in Copenhagen today. Let’s hope our leaders have the courage it takes to make it happen.
Steve Kretzmann of Oil Change International says America must finance clean energy development in poor nations by phasing out U.S. taxpayer subsidies to Big Oil and Big Coal. Watch the Earthbeat Radio interview from COP15 in Copenhagen.
Protesters at Copenhagen climate talks walk out on Wednesday, Dec 16th, over U.N. decision to dramatically limit participation by activists. Earthbeat Radio footage of a standoff with police outside the conference.
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