Catalog

Extinction Rebellion ONE of TWO – Dr. Rupert Read

In October 2018 about one hundred academics signed a call to action. They established Extinction Rebellion in the United Kingdom. The movement has become international with Naomi Klein, Vandana Shiva and Noam Chomsky signing their support to the second letter.
The goal of Extinction Rebellion is to use non-violent resistance to bring about radical change to prevent climate collapse, loss of biodiversity and to reduce the risk of human extinction.
Dr. Rupert Read is teaching Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. He is a long time Green Party politician and a former Green Party spokesperson for transport.
He spoke on February 6, 2019 at the University of East Anglia.

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Kevin Anderson: Talk to the Oxford Climate Society, TWO of TWO

Opening with Greta Thunberg addressing EU politicians in Brussels – In August 2018, at age 15, Greta Thunberg started the first school strike for climate outside the Swedish parliament building. She skipped classes and maintained a regular presence every Friday. By the time she addressed the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2018 in Katowice, Poland, and the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, in January 2019, her courageous and well researched talks were seen by hundreds of thousands via the internet. This is part of her talk to EU politicians on 2/21/2019.
Greta Thunberg and Prof. Kevin Anderson have great respect for each other. They agree on the urgency of the task and on many details of the solutions. [ . . . ]

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Kevin Anderson: Talk to the Oxford Climate Society, ONE of TWO

On Jan 25, 2019, Professor Kevin Anderson, the chair of energy and climate change at the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering (MACE) at the University of Manchester spoke at the Oxford Climate Society.
He is one of the rare academics with a background in mechanical engineering even worked on oil platforms as a young man. I addition to producing peer reviewed research he engages with European governments on issues ranging from shale gas, aviation and shipping. He also brings a strong sense of justice and equity into his recommendations on how to prevent climate chaos.
He said that it’s twenty-eight years since the IPCC’s first report on climate change and over a quarter of a century since the 1992 Rio [ . . . ]

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Kevin Anderson – A Rule Book for the Climate Casino

Even though climate scientist Kevin Anderson has given up flying he attended, via train and ferry, most of the annual COPs, the Conferences of the Parties. They are held under the auspices of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change. And, as Deputy Director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in the UK, he contributes to the science.
Kevin Anderson says that we have known since 1990 about the need to end fossil fuel use. However now, 28 years later, emissions of greenhouse gases are still going up and are now a staggering 65% higher than in 1990.
The economists Thomas Piketty (in “Carbon and Inequality”) found that only 10% of world population are responsible for 30% of CO2 emissions. [ . . . ]

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Professor Peter Wadhams – The Fate of the Ice Sheet on the Top of the World

In early 2019 news about accelerated melting in Arctic and Antarctic made me return to trusted sources. For the Arctic I returned to Prof. Peter Wadhams, the UK’s most experienced sea ice scientist, professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.
As opposed to the Antarctic, a continent of mountains and valleys covered in ice, the North Pole is an ocean covered with an ice sheet that touched the coast lines of Greenland, Canada, Alaska and Siberia for 100.000 years. In only 30 years the retreat from the coast lines during the Arctic summer accelerated and an ice free Arctic in September may [ . . . ]

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NASA Scientist Eric Rignot on Melting Glaciers in Antarctica

A collaboration between Radio Ecoshock and TUC Radio archive Even mainstream media reported at the beginning of February, 2019, a sensation in sea level rise. NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, confirmed that a huge cavity — two-thirds the size of Manhattan and almost 1,000 feet tall — has melted into the bottom of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. This glacier is about the size of Florida, and is currently already responsible for about 4 percent of global sea level rise.
Thwaites is sometimes called a culture changer since the collapse of that one glacier would raise the oceans by two feet, threatening so many centers of civilization that are built on the coast lines of the world.
Eric Rignot of [ . . . ]

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Happy 16th Anniversary, Seniors for Peace

From the archives of TUC radio, recorded in 2003  I’m recording this introduction on January 29, 2019 after returning last night from a huge, heart-warming celebration of the Senior for Peace in Mill Valley, CA. They live in the Redwoods Retirement Community just North of the Golden Gate bridge. Every Friday from 4 to 5 pm, rain or shine, ongoing and for the last 16 years, they walk to the busy intersection with banners, posters and hand drums, Cymbals, guitars and a violin and amaze passing drivers and the student of the high school right across with their songs and message for peace and justice.
On their web site millvalleyseniorsforpeace.org they explain that they first came out in January 2003, when [ . . . ]

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Mary Oliver

When the poet Mary Oliver passed in her 83rd year on January 17, 2019, the huge response revealed her as one of the most popular writers of our time. That despite her refusal to be famous or rich, and the rare interviews she gave. She wanted her poems to speak for themselves and came up with titles such as Owls and Other Fantasies, The Leaf and the Cloud, Wild Geese and the Truro Bear.
A dear friend wrote to me: “I can’t think of a contemporary poet who better than Oliver expresses such depth of feeling and thought about the natural world, and what it is to experience earth as an animal in the web of life. And I like the [ . . . ]

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Ray McGovern – RussiaGate: The Absence of Evidence? (TWO of TWO)

Includes a clip from Noam Chomsky explaining his skepticism of the RussiaGate claims.
Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst for 27 years, from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. His duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief to Ronald Reagan’s security advisers from 1981 to 1985.
After retiring he became a trusted source of information on the falsified intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that was used to bring the US into the disastrous war on Iraq.
For over two years McGovern has focused on what came to be dubbed RussiaGate and in part ONE you heard about his assessment of Julian Assange, and the so-called hacking of e-mails of the [ . . . ]

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Ignacio Chapela: The Story of Corn -TUC Archives, October 2002 (TWO of TWO)

The contamination of the cradle of corn with genetically engineered seeds
Ignacio Chapela from the University of California, Berkeley discovered that genetically modified corn had contaminated the cradle of corn in the remote mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. The Zapotecan Indians have cultivated corn there for over 10,000 years.
In Part TWO Chapela questions why a biotech company can take out a patent on a living seed after making minor changes in the DNA. He also warns of horizontal gene transfer whereby an engineered gene from one organism may enter the genome of another species, including humans.
Ignacio Chapela is now (2018) associate professor of microbial ecology at UC, Berkeley.

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The Soul of Soil – John Jeavons

This is part of a TUC Radio mini series on Soil, a response to the devastating forest fires in California in 2018.
John Jeavons is a master farmer, educator, researcher, author and Director of the non-profit Ecology Action. He has spent the last 43 years developing and teaching a way of farming and gardening that is free from fossil fuel chemicals; and instead of depleting the soils to grow food is actually enhancing and building the soil. When I first met him at KPFA radio in Berkeley 30 years ago he made the organic farmers uncomfortable by suggesting that they were still not sustainable as long as they imported huge quantities of compost from somewhere else.
John Jeavons gave me permission to [ . . . ]

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Governor Jerry Brown. Last chance to do the right thing for Death Row

Mike Farrell, activist, humanitarian, actor, author, and president of Death Penalty Focus is appealing to Jerry Brown as he is getting ready to leave office at the end of December 2018. Farrell’s petition asks Brown to declare a moratorium on executions and to commute all death sentences to life in prison.
Today California has the largest population on death row of any US State. Of 747 condemned, 60% are people of color. Twenty US states have already abandoned the death penalty – why not California?
I heard Mike Farrell’s appeal on Thom Hartmann’s program on December 4 and got permission to quote from their conversation. I explained to the Hartmann’s that I had a rare recording of Jerry Brown from 1998, when [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)