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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: 'No climate, no deal!' --- Democratic Senators demand climate policies stay in Biden's Build Back Better Act; A quarter of all critical U.S. infrastructure is at risk of failure due to flooding; Mounting costs of extreme weather disasters in 2021 already surpass all of 2020; PLUS: President Biden restores Bears Ears and two other national monuments... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Congress Might Blow Its Biggest Opportunity To Tackle The Climate Crisis; More Than 30 Countries Join U.S. Pledge to Slash Methane Emissions; Madagascar Prays For Rain As U.N. Warns Of 'Climate Change Famine'; New California Law Bans Gasoline-Powered Lawn Mowers, Leaf Blowers; Mass Floods Hit China’s Coal Hub, Threatening Power Supplies; Climate Action At COP26 Could Save Millions Of Lives, WHO Says... PLUS: Can the World’s Most Polluting Heavy Industries Decarbonize?... and much, MUCH more! ...

The good news is that one of the Southern California beaches hit hardest by last week's toxic oil spill reopened today. The bad news comprises the rest of today's BradCast.

The beach at the SoCal town known as Huntington Beach --- in the heart of "Surf City USA" --- was reopened on Monday, after last week's oil spill of anywhere from 25,000 to 144,000 gallons of crude. It leaked from a fractured, 17.5 mile pipeline terminating in Long Beach from a complex of platforms about 5 miles offshore in federal waters. It took anywhere from 10 hours to several days --- we still don't know --- to shut the pipeline down after it cracked, perhaps due to being dragged by a ship anchor along the ocean floor.

But, by the weekend, earlier than expected, there were no longer toxins associated with petroleum at detectable levels in the water off of Huntington Beach, according to officials, even as crews continued to remove tarballs from the sand onshore. That beach, at least for now, has been reopened. Neighboring beaches remain closed to the south, including those at Newport Beach and Laguna Beach. The Orange County Oil Spill was just the latest in a long series of disastrous oil spills that have fowled the CA coastline going back decades, and it has renewed calls to ban offshore drilling in the state.

We're joined today by REP. ALAN LOWENTHAL (D-CA), a member of the House Progressive Caucus whose 47th Congressional District includes Long Beach in Orange County and parts of western L.A. County. Last week, appearing at a news conference with Gov. Gavin Newsom in Huntington Beach just after the spill, Lowenthal called for "a plan to not only stop new drilling, but to figure out how do we stop all drilling that's going on in California." The Congressman joins us today to discuss just that. Long story short, but none of it is easy and for many reasons.

"In California, there have not been any new offshore pipelines in forty years, so there is no new technology. It's all old technology, it's all corroding, it's all waiting for the next disaster to occur," he tells me, before we dive into the murky waters of what would be required to end both leasing and drilling permits at the federal level --- in federal waters, 3 or more miles offshore --- as well as in California waters. Here, the Governor argued last week, it's easy to block new leases (the state hasn't issued any in decades), but shutting down existing platforms and pipelines, and replacing those jobs, is far more difficult.

Lowenthal, who has served in the House since 2013, after many years as a CA Assemblyman and then Senator, is calling for a Congressional probe into the OC Spill and fighting to keep language banning new offshore federal drilling leases in the Democrats' Build Back Better Act. But those provisions could be targeted by West Virginia's fossil fuel friendly Senator Joe Manchin, as Democrats battle with Manchin and Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema to pass Biden's agenda into law. In a best case scenario, the BBB Act would only ban new drilling leases off shore, while permitting existing leases to be developed. Back in the state, on the other hand, a bit more can and should be done, he argues. As we discuss, even the progressive Newsom Administration's oil and gas regulators have approved thousands of new drilling permits on existing leases since the Governor took office in 2019.

"There are two things that California can do," says Lowenthal. "One is to stop the pipelines that come from the federal waters. And the second is not to provide permitting. It's one thing when you say 'no new leases,' but once you already have an existing lease that's developing, there are permits to change the flow, to change the direction and California doesn't have to issue those permits. They can stop it."

There was much more from the Congressman, both enlightening and frustrating at various times. I'll urge you to tune in for the full discussion.

Then, we've been discussing on several recent shows how the media are failing to adequately sound the alarm bells about the terrifying and dangerous rise of rightwing authoritarianism in the U.S., as Trump threatens to run again in 2024 after blatantly trying, but failing, to steal the 2020 election. This time, according to a lengthy and very disturbing monologue from Bill Maher this weekend, he is laying the groundwork to avoid the mistakes he made last time. "He's like a shark that's not gone. Just gone out to sea," Maher warns of the "slow moving coup", before explaining why "we're gonna need a bigger boat," as the GOP is now playing along with his long con. That, as the media begin to repeat many of the very same mistakes they made before his 2016 election.

How can we, in the media, avoid those mistakes and do a better job of informing the nation about the unprecedented assault on democracy itself that we all now face? I really don't know. But we discuss that and open up the phone lines to listeners at the end of today's show to at least begin that critical, much-needed conversation...

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Hopefully today's BradCast is at least slightly less chaotic than Capitol Hill right now. We do our best to help you make sense of the Democrats' attempts to move four critical bills through to law, as they all come due at about the same time, and all must overcome obstructionists from both the Right and the Left. One bill today, has made it through. The fates of the other three --- and those of the nation, the economy, the Presidency and the Democrats --- are less than clear at this hour.

Among the stories covered, discussed, referenced and/or ranted upon on today's program...

• We start with some listener email in response to our interview last week with NASA climate scientist Dr. Peter Kalmus, who argues that our planet's climate emergency is far worse and more immediate than many other climate scientists are willing to say. Emailer RC concurs, and explains why current plans to curb carbon emissions by both the US and EU are not nearly enough to meet the moment, and entirely unfair to the rest of the world.

• With those thoughts underscoring much of the rest of our coverage today, we move to the ongoing mess in D.C., where Dems must pass four different pieces of critical legislation in the next few days and/or weeks for various critical reasons. One is a bill to keep the government open and operating after midnight tonight. After a Republican filibuster and a decoupling of that measure from the lifting of the debt ceiling before the government runs out of the ability to borrow money on October 18, the bill to keep the government open was passed by both chambers today (and signed by the President tonight). That Continuing Resolution will keep the government operating until December 3rd, when this ridiculousness will happen again, and Republicans are sure to create still more chaos and uncertainty...just because they can. Their filibuster of raising or suspending the debt ceiling, however, continues to march toward fiscal calamity [PDF] and deep recession as of October 18, unless they relent or Dems come up with some other idea.

• As we went to air today, it was still unclear whether a vote would be held in the House on the bipartisan $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill, which all Democrats in both chambers agreed to couple for passage with the much larger, very popular $3.5 trillion Build Back Better social spending and climate change bill that encompasses the bulk of the Biden agenda. At least it had been coupled until a small handful of shameless corporatist Dems in the House and Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate reneged on the original agreement. Now, they are trying to force Pelosi into calling a vote on the smaller bill, which was already passed by the Senate, and which House progressives have vowed to vote against unless the larger bill is adopted along with it. And though we hadn't seen anyone else make this point before airtime (Josh Marshall mentions it tonight), while House Repubs have been whipping against the smaller bill in the House, if they really wanted to muck things up for the Dems, they could vote in favor of the measure that many of their Republican colleagues in the Senate have already approved. That would replace the votes of the objecting progressives and remove pretty much all of the leverage they currently have to force passage of the larger reconciliation bill. So don't tell Republicans.

• The log jam on that larger bill, of course, has been Manchin and Sinema. And while neither Democratic Senator had made their objections to the measure particularly clear --- other than they didn't want to spend that much money (even though, unlike the deficit spending of the bipartisan infrastructure bill they supported, the larger one is actually paid for with tax increases on corporations and the wealthy!) --- at least Manchin was open to negotiation. Sinema, who is a terrible person, has said she wouldn't negotiate on the larger bill at all until the smaller one was passed. That is, apparently, still her position. But as of shortly before air today, we now know a bit more about Manchin's position. That, based on a bullet-point memo [PDF] obtained by Politico, which he gave to Chuck Schumer in late July, detailing his demands. Among them, the bill can't spend more than $1.5 trillion, and the coal state Senator (whose family makes millions on fossil fuel extraction each year) really really wants to undermine the critical climate components at the heart of the Biden agenda. We discuss.

• While Democrats are trying to move their wildly popular agenda forward, despite the obstructionism from both the Right and Left, Republicans and their media machine are busy lying to the public about the effort. We do our part to correct the record today with more information on what Democrats are actually hoping to do --- so you can help be the media and counter the rightwing lies on social media and elsewhere. (Pretty please?) Among those lies, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) offered a whopper today, describing the Biden agenda as "Marxism" on Twitter. And fake news site Newsmax is lying to their gullible viewers about the bipartisan infrastructure bill including an 8-cent per mile "driving tax". It doesn't. We try and help correct the record on both scores.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report. Today, we have yet another California utility company coughing up billions to settle with residents after their negligence led to disaster following the largest methane leak in U.S. history; New polling finds a dramatic spike in concern among a majority of Americans regarding our climate crisis; And another major automaker makes another major bet on our electric vehicle future...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Hurricane Ida's destruction caused a record number of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico; Today's children will face more climate disasters than their grandparents, new study warns; Senate GOP obstruction blocks disaster aid for hurricane victims; Biden EPA moves to cut powerful, climate-warming HFCs; PLUS: California utility PG&E faces new manslaughter felony charges in wildfire that killed four people... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Explosion at Louisiana chemical plant leaves 5 injured; Emerging Impact? Global Warming Effect on Fertility; SoCalGas agrees to pay up to $1.8 billion in settlement for 2015 Aliso Canyon gas leak; Ford Unveils Record $11B Bet On Sprawling EV Factories; PennEast Becomes The Latest To Scuttle A Natural Gas Pipeline Project; 21 States Urge EPA To Toughen Vehicle Emissions Rewrite; Iceland Turns On The World's Biggest Machine To Pull Carbon Out Of The Air; Former Fox News Host Sues Facebook Over Climate Fact Checks... PLUS: Race To The Bottom: Disastrous Blindfolded Rush To Mine The Deep Sea... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast: Several hours after we got off air from yesterday's program, our first-in-the-nation scoop on the pretty hilarious results of the Cyber Ninjas' Arizona "audit" was confirmed by the national media, including New York Times, Washington Post and CNN, not to mention the Arizona Republic and other local outlets. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

The main part of our exclusive news yesterday was that Trump's sore-loser, publicly financed, privately purchased and secretly carried out 2020 "audit" in Maricopa County found that the hand-count of 2.1 million hand-marked paper ballots cast there, as tallied by Dominion Voting Systems' tabulators prior to certification, were, in fact, tallied almost entirely accurately. The evidence-free lie that there had been some nefarious conspiracy to hack the Dominion systems on Joe Biden's behalf by communists in China, Cuba, Venezuela, along with George Soros, the "deep state" and "antifa", proved to be the bullshit most of the not-brainwashed Americans had presumed.

In fact, according to the Ninjas' own hand-count, Joe Biden picked up 99 votes over the state certified totals while Donald Trump lost 261, widening Biden's slim margin of more than 10,000 votes in Arizona by another 360. The "audit" hand-count of the state's U.S. Senate race also found a larger margin for the Democratic candidate than certified, though both candidates lost some votes in the Ninjas' count. Republican Martha McSally lost 541 votes, while Democrat Mark Kelly lost just 60, for an overall increase of 481 votes for Kelly, the certified winner.

We were a bit more general and circumspect during Thursday's show than we usually like to be, in our description of those findings while breaking the news in order to protect sourcing. But with the Ninjas three volume report now full released you can download it yourself for inspection. The numbers in the Presidential and Senate race are, however, buried way back in the report's third volume [PDF] for some odd reason. That's another reason we felt it important to break the news before the Ninjas put their purposefully diverting spin on things.

As Phoenix' NPR station KJZZ reported last night, even Randy Pullen, a spokesman for the state Senate and major proponent of the "audit" was forced to concede: "Was there massive fraud or anything? It doesn't look like it."

Today, Arizona's GOP state Senate held a forum to allow the Ninjas and friends to present their findings, though the Senate's feed crapped out about an hour into it (and long before Ninja CEO Doug Logan ever conceded that his hand-count confirmed the previously certified Democratic victories, if he ever offered such a concession. You can watch a replay of the three-hour forum now here.), We'll almost certainly pick up any newsworthy information or legitimate concerns from the hearing and/or the report in the not too distant future, if warranted.

All of this nonsense, of course, is a perfect way to disguise and distract from the fact that the GOP is now a broken political party with absolute no actual legislative agenda. But it comes at a time when when humanity itself is hanging in the balance, unfortunately, and when a legitimate opposition party to the Democrats might be very useful.

Earlier this month, NASA climate scientist and author DR. PETER KALMUS responded to recent calls from President Biden and nations around the world, to reach "net zero" greenhouse gas emissions "by 2050", by citing "two fatal flaws" in that plan: "One is 'net zero,'" he wrote at The Guardian, "the other is 'by 2050'."

Kalmus' argument comes as climate disasters around the world are now happening much sooner, more broadly and more fiercely than long predicted by climate scientists, and as new U.N. reports argue that even if the nations of the world meet their current pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, we will still see catastrophic, humanity-threatening disaster by century's end. That, as a handful of so-called "moderate" Democrats in the House and Senate this week hold up efforts to at least begin facing this challenge, as designed in the Clean Energy Performance Program (or CEPP, offering financial incentives for utility companies to move to renewable energy production) built into the heart of President Biden's proposed $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act.

"In my opinion, and I think many of my colleagues would agree, the climate science community is pretty surprised by how fast climate breakdown is progressing, in terms of extreme heat, which kicks off the fires, along with the extreme drought in the Western part of the US, the extreme flooding that we've been seeing in the Eastern part of the U.S. All of this is coming a lot faster than we thought as a community," Kalmus tells me, explaining why he is calling for "climate emergency mode" in which "a lot of things in society would have to change pretty drastically and quickly."

When there's an emergency," he argues, "you don't typically just keep doing what you were doing." He notes that most calls for net zero by 2050 assume some sort of negative emissions or carbon capture technology which either doesn't yet exist or, where it does, is not nearly robust enough to remove anywhere near the amount of greenhouse gas that must be removed from the atmosphere to even make a dent in our quickly worsening climate crisis.

He is calling for much more drastic measures --- such as the nationalization of the fossil fuel industry --- than most of the climate scientists and experts we've interviewed on the program, or who are usually allowed to speak in the national media.

While Kalmus concedes many of his arguments "might sound a little too radical" for many now, he believes that with each successive disaster, people will begin to understand more and more the consequences of failing to take appropriate action to meet the moment. He argues that while carbon capture technologies will not save us, neither will kicking the can down to 2050 to reach net zero. That, Kalmus explains, needs to happen more like by 2035 and, he believes, it is actually doable.

His case "might sound a little too radical to some of your listeners," the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist (who notes he's speaking on his own behalf) concedes, but "my response to them would be that they haven't fully understood just what an emergency we're in, or just how irreversible the damage that we're doing and leaving for future generations is going to be."

Kalmus, whose research at the nation's space agency employs satellite data and models to study our rapidly changing Earth, warns: "I see what is coming in the future years, and I'm just trying to get people to respond now to what I know is coming. And that's really hard. I take a lot of criticism for that. But I know I'm right. So I keep trying."

"Ten years ago when I was saying similar things, but it wasn't so immediate to people, no one was listening," he says, adding: "Recent years have started to shift that balance. It's just basic physics and it's continuing as we continue to emit these greenhouse gases. So I can say with complete confidence that in the coming years, what I'm saying now that sounds radical to people will not seem radical anymore. I just wish that people would listen now."

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: President Biden pushes for unified climate action at U.N.; China vows to end international financing of coal plants; 2021 wildfires set new record for carbon dioxide emissions; OSHA will protect workers from extreme heat; PLUS: Illinois passes landmark clean energy and climate justice law... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): EPA to cut HFCs, thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide; Entergy Resisted Upgrading New Orleans' Power Grid. Residents Suffered; WHO Slashes Guideline Limits on Air Pollution From Fossil Fuels; California's Reliance on Dams Puts Fish in Hot Water; Will Taxpayers Bear Cost Of Cleaning Up America's Abandoned Oil Wells?... PLUS: Nitrogen: The Environmental Crisis You Haven't Heard Of Yet... and much, MUCH more! ...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Humanity on a 'catastrophic pathway,' new U.N. climate report finds; Good news and bad for climate action at the U.N. General Assembly; Climate change already fueling migration in developing countries; PLUS: Good news and bad for the world's last stand of giant sequoias... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Is this the beginning of the Category 6 hurricane?; They Knew: How the U.S. Government Helped Cause the Climate Crisis; Big Reefs in Big Trouble: New Research Tracks a 50 Percent Decline in Living Coral Since the 1950s; Will this metal recycling startup revolutionize the battery and clean energy sectors?; 9 questions about the Civilian Climate Corps, answered; Biden Confronts Extreme Heat, A Silent Climate Killer... PLUS: The Great Lakes Region Is Not a 'Climate Haven'... and much, MUCH more! ...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Tropical Depression Nicholas adds insult to injury in storm-battered Louisiana; Biden continues to pitch clean energy solutions and urgent action on climate; States move to hold producers responsible for plastic pollution; PLUS: Vermont is latest state to sue the fossil fuel industry for lying about global warming... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Children around the world experiencing climate anxiety and anger; Faroe Islands: Anger over killing of 1,400 dolphins in one day; Most nations fall far short in plans to curb warming: report; Rate of global warming over next 25 years could be double the previous 50 years; The planet depends on the next Federal Reserve chair; MN releases plan to make 3M pay for PFAS cleanup; Rupert Murdoch promises news outlets will move away from climate denial... PLUS: Late night shows plan 'Climate Night'... and much, MUCH more! ...

Our guest on The BradCast today is virtually begging those on the environmental center and left to come together, to put aside their various (if important) pet projects, in hopes of coming together for two key elements in the blueprint for the Democrats' $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package. It is, he details, our last, best chance for likely more than a decade to soften the blow of our climate emergency. Do that, he says, then "we can resume fighting like a bag full of cats in a couple of months." [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

But, first up, a quick follow-up from yesterday's BradCast, during which we broke the news that someone at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell's bat-crap insane three-day "Cyber Symposium" in South Dakota this week to "Stop the Steal," released digital image copies of three hard drives containing Dominion Voting Systems actual Election Management System software, as used in real elections across the country. These copies seem to have come out of the County Clerk's office in Mesa County, Colorado. The elected County Clerk there, Tina Peters, is a hard-right official who appeared at Lindell's "symposium" that promised to reveal (then spectacularly didn't) how China supposedly flipped millions of votes over the Internet in 2020 to steal the election from Donald Trump.

With our confirmation yesterday that the Dominion software is now confirmed to be in the wild, even as the Gubernatorial Recall election is now under way in California (where Dominion's software is used in about 60% of the state), there are very serious concerns about what effect the security breach could have on the Recall election --- not to mention others coming up across the country this November. Marilyn Marks, a regular guest on the show, whose non-partisan election watchdog group, the Coalition for Good Governance, is suing the state of Georgia in federal court to stop them from forcing voters to use Dominion's unverifiable and vulnerable touchscreen voting systems in every polling place, tweeted yesterday about the "looming dark cloud over the Nov. elections," following the exposure of the EMS software. She wonders when and if election officials in the Peach State might pay attention to this breach, not to mention when national media, which seems to be all but asleep at the wheel on this, might cover the story as well.

The founder of Georgia Tech's new School of Cybersecurity, Prof. Richard DeMillo, who joined us on the show earlier this week before the stolen hard drives were leaked, to discuss vulnerabilities recently uncovered by an expert witness [PDF] in Dominion's system in the Georgia case, told me via email today that he is "still processing" the breach. But, he told me, the "news points to the urgency" of unsealing the report by the Coalition's expert witness in the case, at least to other cybsersecurity experts and election officials. "The fact that the Dominion EMS images are now public increases the likelihood that [Dominion] ImageCast voting software [as used on their touchscreen voting machines] was also leaked. The only antidote is to conform to standard industry practice and publish their vulnerabilities so that Dominion and their customers can take public steps to mitigate the risks to election infrastructure."

For the record, a number of large jurisdictions in California use the exact same Dominion touchscreens as are used across Georgia, including San Diego, San Francisco and Riverside. Are state officials here in CA even aware of this latest, serious leak? We will continue to follow the story in the days ahead, and hope that national media --- or even just CA media! --- jump in and try to get some answers from election officials about what this serious concern may mean for ongoing voting in the Recall.

Then, along with the news today from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that July was declared the hottest month on the planet in recorded history, we're joined by a longtime progressive climate and energy journalist who is trying to help Democrats and climate activists understand the necessity of supporting two key provisions in the Democrats landmark, $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill. He described this matter recently as America's "last big shot at climate change policy for a decade or more."

The great DAVID ROBERTS, publisher of the must-read Volts newsletter, joins us today to explain the importance of those two initiatives, the development of a Clean Energy Standard (CES) and clean energy tax credits in the reconciliation bill. The huge measure can be passed with simple majorities in both chambers, as long as all 50 Senators who caucus with Democrats and almost all of the Democrats in the House play along. Those two provisions together, he wrote and explains today, "would revolutionize the US electricity system" and finally give us the chance to reach net-zero emissions from the electric grid in the very few years climate scientists now tell us we must, in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Never mind other ideas that climate hawks may have for now, such as a carbon tax or cap-and-dividend. They are not part of President Biden's menu of options. It's this "or we will get nothing that will tackle fossil fuels this decade," he warns.

It may sound a bit wonky, but it really isn't. Roberts spells out, in simple terms, what both a clean energy standard and clean energy tax credits mean in the context of the critical goal of decarbonizing our electricity system, even as he has preached that the answer to ending the dangerous burning of fossil fuels is to "electrify everything", from transportation to buildings.

"Right now, roughly a third of our emissions come from electricity. But the whole plan for decarbonization is to move transportation --- which right now runs on gasoline and diesel --- to move that over to electricity. And to move buildings --- right now buildings are heated and cooled largely with fossil fuels, mainly with natural gas --- to move that over to electricity," he says. "So if you move the other two big chunks of emissions onto the electricity grid, then you see that, oh, having a clean electricity grid is the core strategy for decarbonization.  It's not just one sector. This is the sector that is going to clean up all the other sectors. So there's nothing more important for short-term, immediate decarbonization than cleaning up the electrical grid."

Both the Clean Energy Standard and tax credits will serve to move the entire grid to renewables. "Renewables are the cheapest form of clean energy. And the overwhelming effect, as any analyst will tell you, if we pass this policy, is going to be giant surge of renewable energy projects."

There is, of course, much more to this conversation, but the bottom line is that, as Roberts warns, "the stakes are enormous," and with Democratic majorities so narrow right now in both Congressional chambers, virtual any Senator or faction can sink both this bill and the smaller but still critical $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that's paired with it.

"If Democrats fail, they all fail, and they're going to get crushed in 2022," Roberts tells me, as he explains how it may be that a fossil fuel-loving Senator like Joe Manchin from coal state West Virginia, may still find a way to support these efforts which will, necessarily, hasten the demise of fossil fuels.

"So Manchin and [Bernie] Sanders are going to have to find a bill that they can both sign," Roberts argues. "[Kyrsten] Sinema is going to have to find a bill she can sign. I don't think even she wants to be responsible for the whole Democratic agenda going down, including her precious, beloved bipartisan infrastructure bill, because that would go down too. So it all sinks or swims together. It's a unique situation in my lifetime."

If these two bills actually make their way to the President's desk, especially with the two key provisions Roberts is citing as critical to curbing global warming, he says he will "eat crow" from every rooftop in the land, when it comes to his earlier doubts about Joe Biden's centrist, go-along to get-along roots. These measures, if they actually happen, he notes, would easily place Biden into the Democratic pantheon along with folks like FDR and quickly eclipse even Barack Obama's own accomplishments in office.

"Calling your lawmaker matters," Roberts emphasizes, even if you believe they are already on the correct side of this fight. "This is something I hear from Senate offices, from House offices, all the time. The email campaigns? Eh. The letters?  Eh.  But when people take the time to call, it gets collated and marked down, and the Senator hears about it. It matters. They need to hear that there is a public appetite specifically for the climate provisions to get through." Tell them you support a CLEAN ENERGY STANDARD.

"This is crunch time," he warns. "Everybody needs to be talking about it and getting their fellow Democrats fired up. This is the time to fall into formation, to quote Beyoncé, it's time to fall into formation and make this happen. We can resume fighting like a bag full of cats in a couple of months. But, just for a few months, we need to be coordinated and speaking in a single voice. Specifically the Clean Energy Standard. That's the core of it."

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The Washington Post leads its story on this week's startling new climate assessment by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by calling back to the earliest, prescient warnings issued by the panel more than 30 years ago "that humans were fueling a dangerous greenhouse effect and that if the world did not act collectively and deliberately to slow Earth’s warming, there could be 'profound consequences' for civilization itself. "The scientists were right," they declare, citing evidence from the latest alarming iteration of the IPCC's dire report released this week. But, as our guest, one of the scientists who contributed to the panel's 2001 Nobel Prize-winning assessment, explains on today's BradCast, there is still time to act to avoid the worst consequences of having ignored the early alarm bells. But we are very much now on a "knife's edge". [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

First up today, however, some very quick news: On Texas Republicans issuing arrest warrants for Democratic state lawmakers who are fighting to prevent the GOP legislature from instituting new voter suppression measures; On the CDC urging vaccination of pregnant women amid a surge in COVID hospitalizations, miscarriages and deaths of expectant mothers; On California mandating either vaccination or regular testing for all teachers and school staff as the new school year begins; And on the overnight passage in Congress of a framework for the Democrats' landmark $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill that is to designed to expand health care, child care, education and much more, including long overdue measures to finally take on our worsening climate emergency by reducing reliance on the fossil fuels that are quickly hastening the deadly effects of global warming.

Amid a summer marked by seemingly endless and catastrophic heat waves, wildfires, floods and droughts across the globe, the 6th IPCC Climate Assessment comes not a moment too soon. Described by the U.N. Secretary-General this week as a "code red for humanity", the latest report, coming 8 years after the previous one, now cites "unprecedented" warming that has already occurred, and unstoppable catastrophes to come if the nations of the world are unable to immediately begin to sharply decrease the dangerous burning of fossil fuels.

We're joined today by DR. MICHAEL E. MANN, Distinguished Professor and Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. He is also the author of more than 160 peer-reviewed publications and numerous books on climate change and the battles to avoid its most cataclysmic effects. He is also one of the few climate scientists who spoke up early and loudly about the desperate need for action by our political leaders. Happily, as we also discuss today, there are now many more such scientists who have joined in that existential effort.

"What's different about this latest report is that now the scientists really are standing on the rooftop of the tallest building, shouting at the top of their lungs that dangerous climate change is here," Mann tells us. He says the new IPCC assessment "finally connects the dots in a way that previous reports haven't. And it does so in a profound way, because we are literally watching the disastrous impacts of climate change playing out right now in real time."

Mann breaks down what the new, non-partisan study, compiled by nearly 250 of the world's leading climatologists, synthesizing some 14,000 peer-reviewed studies from over the past 8 years, means for the public in general, policy makers specifically, as well as the fossil fuel industry and even his fellow scientists.

Policy makers "have to act now," he charges. "Not ten years from now. Not twenty years from now. We need to decarbonize the planet, our global economy, as quickly as possible." Mann also notes the "fortuitous timing" of the $3.5 trillion budget bill from President Biden and the Democrats now moving through Congress, which, he says, "really does have meaningful climate policy" to narrow "the implementation gap" between what politicians are saying and the "policies that actually get us there."

As to the science revealed by the U.N.'s new assessment, Mann details our various potential paths outlined by the report, predicated on the choices that world leaders now make, and whether any of those paths can prevent us from exceeding the maximum 2 degrees Celsius warming over pre-industrial times that scientists have long warned would result in irreversible damage to nature, society, and humanity itself.

"The report, I think, defensibly concludes that we can still prevent the worst impacts from playing out, if we can hold temperatures below 1.5C.  I think the weight of evidence suggests that we can still keep all of this within what you might call our 'adaptive capacity' as a civilization.  Once we go beyond 2C, you're starting to test the limits of that adaptive capacity. Once you get to 3C, 4C, or 5C, it's appropriate to start talking about civilization-ending climate change," Mann explains, before adding: "But we can avoid that.  That's a critical point.  That does not have to be our future. That's a future of inaction."

That, as the report notes global temperatures have already spiked by about 1.1 Celsius (almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit) on average since the 19th century, a trend which will almost certainly require decades to reverse, even under the best-case scenarios.

There is, of course, much more to our conversation, including what Mann derides as "doomism" among those inclined to take action to meet necessary goals such as reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century, if not earlier, but who may have decided that it's just too late, that only a miracle can save us now. He compares "doomism" to the worst of "denialism" by the fossil fuel-funded nihilist fighting AGAINST taking action. He also takes another shot at billionaire Bill Gates, whose book on climate Mann and I discussed on his previous appearance on the program earlier this year.

"To reduce carbon emissions, as the report says we need to, as energy experts say we can, we don't need a miracle , Bill Gates. Sorry. But we have the technology now to do this. What we need is the political willpower. If we do that, we really can keep the warming to a level we can adapt to."

Whether he's right remains to be seen. So far, however, the scientists have been right about pretty much everything else on this front. The only real question is if we're finally willing to listen to them and take the immediate action they have long been urging us to take...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Looks like Infrastructure Week is finally happening; Major U.S. interstate in Colorado shut down indefinitely by wildfire-related mudslide; County in Washington State passes America's first-ever ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure; PLUS: Massive new wildfires force evacuations in Greece, Turkey and Italy... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): The Bipartisan Bill Enters The Amendment Process, Length TBD; Big banks, financial firms hatch plan for Asian coal-fired closures; Western Wildfires Are Sending Carbon Offsets Up in Smoke; Tokyo Olympics may be hottest ever; Biden mileage rule to exceed Obama climate goal; Shell sponsored a museum exhibit on climate solutions, with strings attached; A Geothermal Energy Boom May Be Coming, and Ex-Oil Workers Are Leading the Way; Google is quietly trying to find out if hard drives are recyclable... PLUS: DHL Express buys electric cargo planes for U.S. package delivery... and much, MUCH more! ...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: While we were out...Historic heat wave killed hundreds, sparked wildfires and shattered all time record temps in Pacific Northwest and Canada; Record heat wave 'virtually impossible' without climate change; ExxonMobil lobbyists caught on tape admitting company funds climate denial front groups; PLUS: Record-breaker Tropical Storm Elsa makes landfall in Florida... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): That Heat Dome? Yeah, It’s Climate Change; Can You Trust a Weather Report from Fox News?; Tribe Becomes Key Water Player With Drought Aid To Arizona; Billions In Fishing Subsidies Finance Social, Ecological Harm; Senate approves bill to help farmers profit on climate action; Human Activity Influencing Global Rainfall; EV deal shows 'Lithium Valley' could be for real... PLUS: No, A Tanker Full Of Fossil Fuels Isn’t "Carbon Neutral"... and much, MUCH more! ...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Cold weather knocked out Texas power in February, and heat threatens to do so now; Intensifying mega-drought stokes water conflict in Oregon; Judge blocks Biden's temporary suspension of oil and gas leasing on public lands; PLUS: Colorado state legislature approves slew of climate action and plastic pollution legislation... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Earth Is Now Trapping An ‘Unprecedented’ Amount Of Heat, NASA Says; How Long Can the West Survive Republican Obstruction on Climate?; U.S. nuclear regulator approves fuel for next-generation reactors; Florida Power Leaving Coal for Solar, Hydrogen; Climate crisis is suffocating the world’s lakes, study finds; Louisiana Gas Industry’s Answer To Lax Safety Enforcement? Loosen It More... PLUS: Tabasco: Making Hot Sauce And Working To Save Wetlands... and much, MUCH more! ...

While the nation claws its way out of a pandemic and the Republican party continues to crack up --- or carry out its slow-motion attempted coup, take your pick --- a landmark moment occurred for the planet a week or so ago, which has left the fossil fuel industry reeling and describing as "Black Wednesday", even as it's received much less attention than it should have. On today's BradCast we aim to make up for that imbalance a bit. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

First up today, however, while Donald Trump has reportedly been telling anyone who will listen that he expects to be "reinstated" as President of the United States in August, the rightwing Charlie Cooke at the rightwing National Review confirms that reporting himself, while attempting to offer a dose of reality to his party at the same time. As he explains, even if it's true that Joe Biden and the Democrats and dead Hugo Chavez and Dominion Voting Systems and China actually did hack thousands of voting systems to steal the election from Trump (and, as he notes, they absolutely didn't), there is still no legal or Constitutional mechanism to simply "reinstate" Trump as President. It doesn't work that way in America, and the idea is, as he describes, both "otherworldly and obscene". Anyone who is deluded to the contrary, Cooke correctly explains, is "unmoored from the real world" and "living in a fantasy world" along with the disgraced former President.

But has Trump actually lost touch with reality while living in exile at Mar-A-Lago? Or is there another, more insidious reason entirely that he would want his MAGA Mob to believe he is about to be reinstated to the White House this summer? Yes, in fact, there is such a reason, as we discuss.

Then, it's on to "Black Wednesday". For context, however, we go back to an explosive report from 2018 [PDF] in which the non-profit Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) detailed a treasure trove of internal documents from Royal Dutch Shell, going back to the 1950s, revealing that the company's scientists were not only aware at the time, but very concerned about the threat of climate change due to the release of CO2 from the burning of their products. In 1962, one of their scientists warned, according to the memos unearthed by CIEL, that "greatly increasing use of the fossil fuels...is seriously contaminating the earth's atmosphere with CO2," leading their Chief Geology Consultant at the time to urge "serious consideration of the maximum utilization of solar energy."

By 1991, the company had even produced a documentary called Climate of Concern, warning of the threat of global warming thanks to the unfettered release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Just a few years later, however, Shell took a u-turn and joined with Exxon and other major fossil fuel producers to fund the climate change denial industry, while lying to shareholders about the threat of our now-worsening climate emergency and the stranded assets all such companies are likely to face in the years ahead.

That denial, however, may have come to a screeching halt a week ago Wednesday for Royal Dutch Shell, following a court ruling by a Dutch court ordering them to cut emissions by 45 percent and, on the very same day, by shareholder "rebellions" at both Chevron and ExxonMobil. That landmark day, May 26th, which our guest today describes as "sending shockwaves" through the industry, has now come to be known as "Black Wednesday".

We're joined today by CARROLL MUFFET, President and CEO of CIEL, whose report on Shell from three years ago (which he joined us to discuss at the time), helped play a role in last week's court ruling against Shell. Today he explains those "shockwaves" throughout the industry and just how momentous "Black Wednesday" will likely prove to be for Shell, Chevron, Exxon and others, after their very bad day in both the courtroom and the boardroom.

"This last week has been nothing short of extraordinary," Muffett extolls. "It's been a watershed moment for the industry, and a watershed moment for those us who have been working for decades to hold the industry accountable --- not only for its past, but for what its business models mean for the future."

For Chevron that day, shareholders voted to impose long-overdue emissions targets on the company, and Exxon's shareholders elected at least three "activist" candidates to the company's 12-member Board of Directors, displacing the company's preferred directors with climate advocates from a newly formed investment firm. The vote at Exxon was backed by major investors like BlackRock and Vanguard.

Muffett describes the "remarkable convergence" of that day. "Liabilities that we've been warning about for a decade, responsibilities that we've been warning about for a decade, and financial risks that we've been warning about for a decade, are finally no longer fringe. They are mainstream. And now it's investors and courts saying to these companies what we've been saying for a very long time."

He explains how the Dutch court held Shell "responsible for all of the emissions that result from its operations. And that includes not only the emissions that come from Shell pulling the oil out of the ground, but the much greater emissions that come when the oil and gas are sold and burned." He also details how the shareholder votes at both Chevron and Exxon ("the biggest shakeup of them all") was even more stunning in a number of ways, as all three companies will now be forced to make "significant changes" to their business models and what they invest in. In Shell's case, for example, "the court is saying that it is not enough to reduce the emissions associated with producing the oil, you effectively have to produce less oil."

That ruling has sent an unmistakable message, he suggests, to all of the major oil companies, one which they should have heard --- and, arguably did, but ignored and/or lied about --- long ago. "It's important to recognize that, if you look at the major oil and gas companies, they've been under-performing the S&P 500 for a decade," Muffett tells me. "Even before the pandemic began, they were losing money, losing value, they had begun writing off billions of dollars in assets --- phenomena that were accelerated by the pandemic. What's become clear to a growing number of investors is that these business models are putting not only the planet, not only human rights, not only human lives on the line, but they're also putting investors' money on the line. Unfortunately, that's what it took to get investors engaged."

But with both investors and courts now engaged, "Black Wednesday" has become both a "remarkable shockwave" and "a wake-up call" to investors and, hopefully, the world. "I would say that the entire future of these companies will be defined by litigation of one kind or another. How long that future will last, I don't know.  It is unlikely to outlast the litigation," says Muffett...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: International Energy Agency releases landmark roadmap for the world to reach net zero emissions by 2050; Biden Administration moves to innovate buildings; PLUS: Ford unveils its game-changing all-electric F-150 Lightning truck... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): White House Brings Back Climate Scientist Forced Out By Trump Admin; Banks Always Backed Fossil Fuel Over Green Projects — Until This Year; Biden’s Climate Chops Face A Big Test On Old-Growth Forests; Planting A Million Trees In Semi-Arid Desert To Combat Climate Change; 'Free-for-all' used car export threatens climate goals; Kerry Says US Examining Carbon Border Tax... PLUS: Intruder Pests May Drain Trillions From Africa’s Economies, Study Finds... and much, MUCH more! ...