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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Democratic senators grill Trump's EPA pick, while his Interior Department nominee denies scientific consensus on climate change; Obama slips in one more parting gift for the planet; PLUS: It's official - 2016 was the hottest year on record, for the 3rd straight year in a row... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Hottest year ever and Arctic meltdown put the world on the brink of catastrophe; EPA cranks out toxics rules during Obama’s last days in office; Court blocks Dakota Access Pipeline company's attempt to halt further environmental review; Biologists Investigate Deaths Of 82 Stranded Dolphins In Florida; Ice Crack To Put UK Antarctic Base In Shut-Down; Hawaiian Electric's new, new plan to get to 100% renewables; Twilight of Tokyo's legendary fish market... PLUS: Asian electronic waste generation up 63% in 5 years... and much, MUCH more! ...

It was another hugely busy news day on today's BradCast. But, as usual, we try, at least, to keep our eyes not on the shiny objects, but on the stuff that actually matters. Wish us luck. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

Among the stories we cover on today's show...

• President Obama's final press conference as President of the United States, on Chelsea Manning; Trump; Russia; Cuba; Israel and the need to preserve a free press and protect democracy;
• The World Meteorological Organization declares data from NOAA, NASA, the UK, and the European weather and climate center, as well as other datasets, all find that 2016 set the record for the hottest year ever recorded on Planet Earth. It was the third year in a row to shatter the record, posing what scientists categorize as a "profound threat to both the natural world and to human civilization;
• Billionaire charter school proponent Betsy DeVos, Trump's nominee to become Secretary of Education, gets hammered by Democrats in her U.S. Senate confirmation hearings. She was unphased;
• Oklahoma Attorney General, climate science denier, and enemy of the EPA Scott Pruitt faces tough questions at his confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, as Trump's nominee to head...yes...the EPA. He was also unphased.;
• Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report with at least some good news in our increasingly pretend world;
• And listeners call in with a few time capsule messages for the future...from the final days before Donald Trump will have become President of the United States...

All of that and much more on today's BradCast...

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Follow @GreenNewsReport...

(Or use "Click here to listen..." link below.)

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau admits Alberta's oil sands' days are numbered; 2016 was the 2nd most expensive year for extreme weather disasters for the U.S.; New York State to close Indian Point nuclear power plant; Wisconsin caught deleting climate change from state websites --- again; PLUS: California catches a break in historic drought (sort of)... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Scientists have a new way to calculate what global warming costs. Trump’s team isn’t going to like it; Who's responsible for making plastic packaging more recyclable?; EPA: Fiat Chrysler software enabled emissions cheating; EPA rejects automakers’ bid to weaken fuel efficiency standards; Scott Pruitt, Trump’s EPA Pick, Backed Industry Donors Over Regulators; Poison Fruit: Dow Chemical Wants Farmers to Keep Using a Pesticide Linked to Autism and ADHD... PLUS: US Agrees To Pay Billions To Marines Affected By Toxic Water... and much, MUCH more! ...

On today's BradCast, Green Party candidate Jill Stein speaks to lessons learned during her wildly obstructed attempt at citizen oversight of election results in three states, and a former U.S. Dept. of Energy official joins us with warnings about Donald Trump's disturbing choices to head the State Department, the EPA and the DoE, where a chilling Transition Team memo was recently sent in apparent hopes of ferreting out climate scientists in a witch-hunt reminiscent of the McCarthy era. [Audio link to show posted at bottom of article.]

First up, Stein held a press conference call today to wrap up her attempted "recount" of Presidential election results in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Despite her willingness to pay millions of dollars, only one of those states, WI, allowed a statewide count at all. And, even there, it was done mostly by computer, so the results remain unverified by actual human beings. Still, she and her attorney on the call vowed to press on with a lawsuit in Pennsylvania and other actions meant to try and amend the horrific election practices, processes and laws exposed, once again, during the wildly obstructed and unprecedented attempt at counts and forensic analyses in all three states.

Then, my guest today is Dr. Joe Romm, physicist and former Deputy Asst. Secretary of Energy at the U.S. Dept. of Energy. He is now a Climate Progress blogger and author and he joins me to discuss, among other things, Donald Trump's nominations of former TX Gov. Rick Perry to head up the DoE (which, when he could remember its name while a Presidential candidate, he vowed to shut down entirely); Climate science denier and Oklahoma A.G. Scott Pruitt as DPA chief; and ExxonMobil's enormously interest-conflicted CEO Rex Tillerson as Sec. of State.

As Romm notes, "the Department of Energy is a very poorly understood agency" which most Americans, including Trump and Perry, likely know little about. It's a sprawling federal agency that carries out nuclear energy research as well as oversight and disaster clean-up. "So you have the weapons labs, you have all the national labs, which do energy and all sorts of work, including the nation's physics labs," he explains. "The Department of Energy has the highest ratio of PhDs per employee of any of the agencies, because it's doing all of this physics and energy research, and weapons research. So it's a good thing that Rick Perry got those glasses that make him smart."

On Trump's nomination of Tillerson to head up the State Department, Romm describes the conflicts of interest with the ExxonMobile CEO's pending $500 billion deal with Russia, observing: "If we didn't live in this topsy-turvy world where Donald Trump is President and naming people to run agencies who are anti-everything the agencies stand for, it would be ridiculous. Secretary of State is one of the most important, maybe the most important cabinet positions there is. Historically, it goes to someone who really understands diplomacy and many aspects of international policy." But Tillerson, he argues, has "literally no qualifications other than the fact that he has negotiated oil deals around the world."

As disturbing as Trump's nominations may be, however, even more chilling may be the story told by the McCarthy-esque survey recently sent by someone at the Trump Transition team to the Dept. of Energy, asking them to identify scientists and other career civil service employees who have worked on climate change and renewable energy issues at the federal agency, or even those who may have simply attended a U.N. climate conference. Romm speaks to all of the above, which he describes as "unprecedented" and details why there are newly disturbing reasons to be concerned about, "literally, the fate of the next thousand years."

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report, with more on the above and, believe it or not, some arguably good news she was able to find from the U.S. Congress, of all places!...

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A federal court victory for Jill Stein in Wisconsin; a federal court hearing in Pennsylvania; the fight to restart counting in Michigan; and the case for a recount in Florida. Yes, in Florida. But that's just the tip of the iceberg on today's very busy BradCast! [Audio link to complete show follows below.]

First up, some encouraging news from the New York Attorney General concerning his intentions to hold Donald Trump's nominees to head up the Environmental Protection Agency and Dept. of Labor accountable to the rule of law. Then, a bit more good news out WI today, where a federal court dismissed a Team Trump attempt to stop the ongoing Presidential "recount" in the state.

Meanwhile, a federal court in PA heard Jill Stein's case calling for a statewide count and forensic analysis of voting systems today. And, following the the hearing, in a press conference outside the courthouse, University of MI Computer Science and voting systems expert Prof. J. Alex Halderman explained again why such a study is necessary.

"Over the past ten years, we've found every one of the [voting and tabulation systems in the U.S.] susceptible to hacking. Doesn't matter whether they're plugged into the Internet directly or not," he said. "The evidence on the paper ballots, the evidence on the software in the machines --- that's what we're asking to examine. And that's the only way we're ever going to know for sure whether our votes were counted correctly or not in the 2016 Presidential election. We think that by looking at that evidence, which seems to me like just a common-sense security precaution, we can increase voter confidence, and help everyone know their that their votes really counted." Those comments come on the same day that the Obama Administration announced plans to release a report on charges that Russian hackers attempted to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election.

Then, we're joined by long time election integrity champion, Susan Pynchon, founder of Florida Fair Elections Coalition and a central character in HBO's Emmy-nominated 2006 documentary Hacking Democracy, joins us to discuss a lawsuit [PDF] filed late last week calling for a statewide hand-count of paper ballots in FL(!)

Pynchon explains the reasons why it was filed, which include not just the surprising result in the state's Presidential race, but also reports that a Florida-based corporate vendor by the name of VR Systems --- a company contracted by about a dozen states --- was reportedly hacked earlier this year. She says they provided "voter registration and other services in 64 of Florida's 67 counties. Voter databases, management and tracking of mail-in ballots, and election reporting services on election night." (And here is that Exhibit T [PDF] from the complaint that I referenced during the show, concerning troubling voter registration problems reported on Election Day in several Sunshine State counties, including Broward and Lee.)

Also, Pynchon details the high "invalid vote rate" ("votes that weren't actually counted --- undervotes, overvotes, and invalid write-in votes"), which she says is "more than double in this election than it was in 2008 and 2012. We need to take a close look at that because it's not normal. It's not typical of past elections." She goes on to describe how one county was also found to have "ordered duplicate sets of [security] seals," asking: "So how secure is that when you're sealing a ballot box with a seal that could then just be replaced with your duplicate set of seals?"

Coincidentally, part of Halderman's remarks from outside of the federal courthouse in Philadelphia this afternoon, which we play in full on the show today, referred to how easy it is to break into those voting machine security seals. He says they are "easy to remove in just a few seconds with a hairdryer or a screwdriver."

"You know, if you'd asked me this ten years ago, I would have said, well, maybe it sounds like science fiction, someone hacking into a country's national election by tampering with the voting machines," warns Halderman. "I think it's only a matter of time before this happens, if it hasn't happened already."

Finally today, an incredibly chilling missive was confirmed to have been sent to the U.S. Dept. of Energy from the Trump transition team, seeking the names and details of scientists and other employees there and at national laboratories involved in climate change and other related studies...

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On today's BradCast, state and federal court rulings, shameful 'recount' laws and other outrageous obstacles preventing citizen oversight of Presidential election results in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and elsewhere. And, as if that's all not disturbing enough, wait until you hear who Trump is reportedly tapping to head up the Environmental Protection Agency! [Audio link posted below]

Our "Recount" 2016 coverage continues today, on the heels of "dueling" federal and state court rulings on Tuesday night in Green Party candidate Jill Stein's fight to continue hand-counts in Michigan, hundreds of precincts across the state (including tens of thousands of ballots) are being declared "unrecountable" by state officials --- for often absurd reasons. We explain those rulings as we await what is likely to be a federal court order ending all counting in the state by tomorrow, despite Trump's razor thin 10,000 vote statewide margin of just one-tenth of one-percent over Hillary Clinton.

Another court ruling comes down today against Stein's suit for a forensic analyses of 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems used in Philadelphia, prompting plans to seek same in state court. And the counting (and computer re-scanning) continues in Wisconsin, despite efforts by Team Trump to stop counting and oversight immediately in all three states.

We're joined today by author, former attorney and longtime election integrity advocate Paul Lehto to discuss all of the above and much more, including how failed tabulation systems, woeful election law, and extraordinary legal challenges in at least six courts in three states to block all oversight is little more than an invitation for future fraud.

On MI's "outrageous" law resulting in hundreds of "unrecountable" precincts in Detroit alone, Lehto charges: "All you need to do is add an extra ballot without adjusting the poll books, which makes it easier to do fraud or easier create an error. And that error or fraud is insulated from ever affecting the results. If somebody did want to do fraud, it's like a dream for them."

"But here's the thing: it doesn't really matter, from the perspective of democracy, whether it's an error or whether it's a fraud. Because we're only interested in the true vote count," he tells me. "But in this case, Michigan law itself is protecting and creating 'safe harbor' for both errors and fraud."

"Don't count on anything happening after Election Night," Lehto has long warned. "Why? Number one: everybody wants to avoid embarrassment. Nobody wants to be the next Florida. So everybody in the state government and the elections bureau is working really, really hard not to be embarrassed, and that's a non-partisan interest that really goes against transparency. The other thing is that 100 percent of all election law is made by election winners, who absolutely do not want their victories to be questioned. So that's another factor why you can never really count on getting good election laws for post-election remedies, because everybody that's voting on it is a winner and they don't want losers --- or what they would call 'sore losers' --- questioning their great victory. So basically that leaves democracy defenseless."

As he describes the evolution of the Election Integrity movement over the past decade, Lehto concludes our system amounts to "basically: certify first, ask questions later." He says post-election audits or "recounts" are ultimately "not sufficient, no matter who you are. The only option is to get it right on election night."

Also on today's show, in case you still don't believe elections and democracy matter: Trump will reportedly nominate Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt --- a climate change denier, opponent of environmental regulations, and long-time fossil-fuel industry tool --- to head up the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

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