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IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: It’s our 500th episode of the Green News Report …coincidentally on Earth Day! So, since every day is Earth Day for us, we thought we’d take a look back at the GNR’s beginning and where it and climate coverage have gone since then. For better or worse. All that and more in today’s very special Green News Report!
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IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): Apple will now recycle your old products; Cowboys and Indians descend on Washington to Protest Keystone XL Pipeline; First Nations see no compromise on BC tar sands pipeline; Scientists discover way to generate solar power in the dark; Polluted Superfund site now home to solar panel farm; Environmental activist missing in Ecuador; Lead poisoning nightmare in Nigeria may be easing … PLUS: BP Oil Spill Anniversary: 4 years later, the legacy of disaster in the Gulf … and much, MUCH more! …
STORIES DISCUSSED ON TODAY’S ‘GREEN NEWS REPORT’…
- It’s Our 500th ‘Green News Report’!
- Our very first episode: ‘Green News Report’ – February 17, 2009 (The BRAD BLOG)
- Check out ALL of our episodes at GreenNews.BradBlog.com (The BRAD BLOG)
- Climate Change is THE Issue of Our Time, Says EPA’s Gina McCarthy:
- VIDEO: Jon Stewart jokes with the EPA’s Gina McCarthy about Texas, burning trash, and his Hummer: Classic Jon Stewart: “All these regulations put the mom ‘n’ pop oil companies out of business!” (Grist):
- Climate Change: Yes, We Can Solve the Climate Crisis:
- How to Solve Global Warming: It’s the Energy Supply (Scientific American):
Carbon storage has to expand rapidly, or coal burning has to cease, if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change.
…
Restraining global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius will require changing how the world produces and uses energy to power its cities and factories, heats and cools buildings, as well as moves people and goods in airplanes, trains, cars, ships and trucks, according to the IPCC. Changes are required not just in technology, but also in people’s behavior. - Climate Panel Stunner: Avoiding Climate Catastrophe Is Super Cheap – But Only If We Act Now (Climate Progress) [emphasis added]:
Now you might think it would be a no-brainer that humanity would be willing to pay a very high cost to avoid such catastrophes and achieve the low emission “2°C” (3.6°F) pathway in the left figure above (RCP2.6 – which is a total greenhouse gas level in 2100 equivalent to roughly 450 parts per million of CO2). But the third report finds that the “cost” of doing so is to reduce the median annual growth of consumption over this century by a mere 0.06%.
You read that right, the annual growth loss to preserve a livable climate is 0.06% – and that’s “relative to annualized consumption growth in the baseline that is between 1.6% and 3% per year.” So we’re talking annual growth of, say 2.24% rather than 2.30% to save billions and billions of people from needless suffering for decades if not centuries.
- March Was 4th Warmest on Record Globally (Climate Central)
- The 3 Most Sobering Graphics From The U.N.’s New Climate Report (Climate Progress):
The overall message of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s newest report is simple: a rapid shift to renewable energy is needed to avert catastrophic global warming. The science behind that message, however, is less simple.
- UN’s IPCC report summary censored by governments around the world (Sydney Morning Herald):
A major climate report presented to the world was censored by the very governments who requested it, frustrating and angering some of its lead authors …[E]ntire paragraphs, plus graphs showing where carbon emissions have been increasing the fastest, were deleted from the summary during a week’s debate prior to its release. Other sections had their meaning and purpose significantly diluted. They were victims of a bruising skirmish between governments in the developed and developing world over who should shoulder the blame for, and the responsibility for fixing, climate change.
- Earth Day at 44:
- Let’s Rename Earth Day (Joe Romm, Climate Progress):
I wonder if the next planet we destroy will also get its own holiday.
- ‘Fuck Earth Day’: Let This Year’s Be The Last (Wen Stephenson, Common Dreams):
Fuck Earth Day.
No, really. Fuck Earth Day. Not the first one, forty-four years ago, the one of sepia-hued nostalgia, but everything the day has since come to be: the darkest, cruelest, most brutally self-satirizing spectacle of the year.
Fuck it. Let it end here…
- Greens push Earth Day agenda (The Hill’s e2 Wire)
- Forty-Four Years of Earth Day (NY Times):
America’s environmental problems are less severe, thanks in part to a market economy’s ability to produce new technologies and in part to the political action that the environmental movement produced. But the global problem — like choking smog in developing economies, rising sea levels and the rise in the planet’s temperature — remains worrisome.
Here is our overview of how the environment has changed in the 44 years since April 22, 1970…
- We’re the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Cheap Date (The Nation)
‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (Stuff we didn’t have time for in today’s audio report)…
- Cowboys And Indians Descend on Washington To Protest Pipeline (TIME):
A coalition of ranchers, farmers and native tribes are staging protests against the Keystone XL pipeline on the National Mall this week with teepees, horses and a sacred fire that will burn for days.
- Many Canadian aboriginals see no compromise on oil sands pipeline (Reuters)
- Apple will now recycle your old products and give you store credit (Grist):
Forget smashing your old iBook Office Space-style. Just send it back to Apple, and if it isn’t ancient, you could get some sweet sweet store credit. Even if it is ancient, Apple will recycle it for you.
- Scientists Discover How to Generate Solar Power in the Dark (The Atlantic):
Meet ‘photoswitches,’ a breakthrough set of materials that act as their own batteries, absorbing energy and releasing it on demand.
- 4th Anniversary of BP Oil Disaster In the Gulf: The Gulf Coast, four years after the BP disaster (Grist)
- Compensation Battle Rages Four Years After BP’s U.S. Oil Spill (Reuters)
- Louisiana, Texas, Maryland, Private Pension Funds File Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Fraud Suits Aganst BP (New Orleans Times-Picayune)
- Four Years After the BP Gulf Disaster — More Spills, No Safeguards, and a Push to Drill (Oceana)
- BP Is Refusing To Pay for Gulf Oil Spill Research (Salon)
- Offshore Safety Remains Questionable Four Years after Deepwater Horizon (International Policy Digest)
- A Polluted Superfund Site Is Now Home To 36,000 Solar Panels (Climate Progress)
- Thai Environmentalist Goes Missing After Accusing Park Rangers Of Crime (AP)
- Lead Poisoning Nightmare In Nigeria May Be Easing (NPR)
- Delaying The Keystone XL Decision Wasn’t All About Politics (Climate Progress)
FOR MORE on Climate Science and Climate Change, go to our Green News Report: Essential Background Page
Strange that science and religion agree on some things.
Congrats on 500!