EcoTalk's Archives

Toronto Mayor David Miller and the Clinton Climate Initiative

Toronto Mayor David Miller talks about representing one of the sixteen major world cities (plus five major banking institutions) to cut carbon emissions by renovating city-owned buildings with the Greenest of practices and the Clinton Climate Initiative: "This is a win win win win win win." This what it takes! Teamwork, optimism, and practical business.  LISTEN (11 min)

IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), Part 3

This is where the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) stuff gets really interesting: whereas the first to parts, released earlier this year, documented the global scientific consensus on climate change and forecast several possible effects, Part 3, to be released tomorrow, offers an array of solutions to minimize the impacts of climate change, and halt any further effects. Will the nations of the world implement these recommendations? Given their obsession with the wording of this document, there's a good chance they will. Center for American Progress Senior Fellow (and author of Hell and High Water) Joseph Romm: "This report has to be signed off on by 120 governments, including the United States, and oil countries like Saudi Arabia. And they can veto any word. So you can take to the bank anything that all those countries agree to." LISTEN (10 min)

Stanford University Climatologist Stephen Schneider

Stanford University Climatologist Stephen Schneider is on the Synthesis Committee for the IPCC report: "IPCC doesn't tell the world what to do. That's the job of decision makers, ranging from everybody out there deciding what car or refrigerator to buy, to government officials trying to figure out what industries to support and what industries to tax. What we will do is survey the literature, summarize the arguments of various sides, from the coal industry to the enviro groups. Then we'll go beyond that and we'll talk about the scientific merits in those arguments." LISTEN (8 min)

Greenpeace Canada Targets Prime Minister Harper For Climates Crimes

Greenpeace Canada Climate and Energy Coordinator Dave Martin comments on the Harper Administration's rather crafty emissions plan: " (Canadian Environment Minister John) Baird characterized it as turning the corner. I would describe it as hitting a dead end. What Mr. Baird came out with was a deliberate deception." LISTEN (10 min)

Schwarzenegger tells the EPA to shape up

Governor Schwarzenegger's environmental adviser Terry Tamminen (author of the kick-ass book Lives Per Gallon ) stops by to break down the Governator's letters to EPA head Steve Johnson, threatening a lawsuit if the EPA does not release California (and a line of other states around the corner) from the Clean Air Act. Doesn't sound very environmental to you? Well, considering that climate change isn't currently being addressed under the current version of the Clean Air Act (we'll see what happens, now that we're post-Mass v. EPA), Schwarzenegger is here actually asking permission to address climate change. But it doesn't sound like he'll be merely asking for long. EcoTalk loves it. LISTEN (10 min)

Elizabeth Kolbert: Field Notes From A Catastrophe

Elizabeth Kolbert's vivid, intimate accounts of climate change through the eyes of people in the Netherlands, Iceland, and Alaska were initially published in the New Yorker Magazine and later compiled in the book Field Notes from a Catastrophe. Since "Field Notes" was first published, Kolbert has written a stunning piece on ocean acidification, and has profiled one-time boy wonder of the environmental movement Amory Lovins, now 49 years old and still the eternal optimist.
PART ONE (11 min) PART TWO (7 min)

Science Teacher faces Harrassment for teaching Common Sense

Oregon Teacher of the Year Award Recipient John Borowski tells Betsy about the pressure he's faced from school administrators to stop teaching his students how science can be practically applied to the largest challenge that they will inherit from us, climate change. Mr. Borowski points to corporate pressure on science teachers nationwide not to tell our kids too much about their future, but he teaches undeterred, determined to respect his students' education and teach them to think critically about the world: "I ask kids to take a newspaper article on the environment and analyze it. I always told them that I'll grade the paper based on two things: you presentation of facts, and how well you analyze those facts. But I'm not going to grade them on their opinion."  LISTEN (11 min)

Newsweek: Save the Planet...or Lindzen

EcoTalk gives major props to the bevy of magazines that are doing entire issues dedicated to one of the only issues that really matters, but when one single page in Newsweek seeks to debunk the other 80 or so pages of the magazine, EcoTalk must take out its scalpel and dissect that malignant piece of paper.
Oh, What a surprise! Noted climate change skeptic Dr. Richard Lindzen! Climate Institute Chief Scientist Dr. Michael MacCracken says that while Dr. Lindzen holds his scientific colleagues to incredibly high standards, he lowers the bar a bit for his own statements: "As I read that piece, and it's only about 7 or 8 paragraphs, I noted down a dozen things that were quite misleading or deceptive."   LISTEN (11 min)

Ross Gelbspan on IPCC part 2

Journalist, author of "Boiling Point", and helmsman of the always up-to-date The Heat is Online website, Ross Gelbspan here offers his wide-ranging thoughts on the second part of the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released last Friday: "Things that were considered off the charts and unthinkable six or seven years ago are now becoming conventional wisdom." Betsy sizes up the wisdom of her local gym.
PART ONE (11 min)  PART TWO (7 min)

Greenpeace's IPCC Preview

Greenpeace Climate Change expert Chris Miller comments both on the paradigm-shifting Supreme Court decision in Mass. v. EPA, as well as the forthcoming second part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report "The devil is in the details on global warming. The report released this week will be those details. It will reference everything from the plight of the polar bear, to impacts to Greenland ice sheets, extreme weather, hurricanes in the Atlantic, draught situations in the Midwest..."  LISTEN (11 min)