2016

In 2016 I began focusing on climate change.

Climate Scientist Kevin Anderson on The Unforgiving Math for Staying Under 2 Degrees

By MariaMay 4, 20162016Climate Change

Part TWO of TWO
Two numbers haunted the climate negotiations of COP 21 in Paris in December 2015: 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius. Finally the vast majority of the world’s countries agreed that global warming may not go over 2 degrees and that we really ought to stay under 1.5 degrees to save the island states and low coastal areas that are already flooding at the current 1 degree C warming.
Politicians and some scientists claim that we will invent technologies that remove carbon from the atmosphere and therefore no urgent action is required now. Anderson explains BECCS, Biomass energy carbon capture and storage, the so far elusive promise to extract the already emitted CO2 from the air and store it underground. [ . . . ]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:58 — 19.9MB)

Climate Scientist Kevin Anderson on: The Unforgiving Math for Staying Under 2 Degrees

By MariaApril 26, 20162016

Part ONE of TWO
Much was made of the April 22, 2016, signing of the Climate Treaty negotiated in Paris last December. At the ceremony in New York UN Secretary General Ban-Ki-moon said that we are in a race against time, and that the window for the goal set in Paris for keeping global temperate rise well below two degrees Celsius, let alone 1.5 degrees, is “rapidly closing.”
During the negotiations in Paris in December 2015 some scientists had already warned that even a 2 degrees Celsius limit in temperature would be almost impossible to maintain unless we were to make significant changes within the next 5 years. Kevin Anderson is one extraordinary and important voice among them.
Anderson is Professor of Energy [ . . . ]

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

The Atomic Age: Humans and Other Living Beings Come Last

By MariaApril 26, 20162016

In all the memories recorded about the nuclear technologies and the disasters of our time the fate of humans exposed to radiation comes last. That was the leading concept of a Fukushima/Chernobyl anniversary talk by Norma Field. She hopes to rescue humans and other living things from oblivion and from the real harm inflicted upon them now and into the future.
Some argue that Norma Field risked her academic standing as professor of East Asian studies at the University of Chicago by not only teaching Premodern Japanese Poetry and Prose, and Women Studies, but also by being public and vocal in her indictment of nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
Born in Tokyo in 1947 to a Japanese mother and American serviceman father [ . . . ]

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

Chernobyl 30 Years Later: Lucas Hixson’s Diary

By MariaApril 13, 20162016

Anniversary Date: April 26, 1986
In September 2015 a next generation nuclear field engineer from Chicago went to Chernobyl to join the 3,500 workers on site. They are completing the largest movable structure humans have ever built: Tall enough to enclose the Statue of Liberty and wide enough to cover the exploded Unit Four of the Chernobyl power plant including the sarcophagus that was built over the plant in 1986.
Bechtel corporation, the lead contractor, says the $1.3 billion confinement structure will keep water out and radioactive dust and debris in — for at least a century. Radiation levels in some locations are still high enough to cause premature failure of structural materials. The gigantic arch had to be built away from the destroyed [ . . . ]

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

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson – Israel’s Influence: Good or Bad for America?

By MariaApril 6, 20162016

Against the background of an increasingly more urgent debate over the sources of conflict in the Middle East, the growth of ISIS, the refugee crisis, and the role of the US armed interventions in Iraq, Libya and Syria; this question takes on great importance: Who is setting Middle East policy in the US? These and other topics were addressed at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on March 18, 2016, at the conference on Israel’s Influence.
Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson is the highest ranking US foreign policy whistle blowers to date. He was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff from 2002-05 during the fateful time of the US war on Iraq.
Before coming to the State Department, Wilkerson served [ . . . ]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:59 — 19.9MB)

Edward Snowden and Glen Greenwald on Privacy and Surveillance

By MariaMarch 30, 20162016

Excerpt from the March 25, 2016, event at the University of Arizona
Edward Snowden, Glen Greenwald, and Noam Chomsky were exploring the urgent topic of privacy in todays surveillance state at the event entitled: “Conversation on Privacy”.
NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden was participating by video-stream from Russia. The excerpts in this program focus on him and Glen Greenwald. Greenwald is best known as having met with Edward Snowden on his way into exile in Hong Kong in 2013. He received the documents that Snowden had taken in order to prove the extraordinary depth of government spying that Snowden had observed while employed by the CIA and as contractor for the NSA.
Greenwald was a columnist for the British Guardian and is now founding [ . . . ]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)

Michael Parenti: Cuba, the Spanish American War and the Rise of US Imperialism

By MariaMarch 22, 20162016Parenti

Updated as essential backstory for Obama’s visit to Cuba
As President Obama became the first sitting US President in almost 90 years to visit Cuba he took the same stage where Calvin Coolidge in 1928 lectured the Cubans on democracy. The US then controlled Cuban national and foreign politics and the Cuban economy and had done so since the end of the Spanish American War in 1898. The US had refused to end the military occupation of Cuba unless Cuba changed its constitution and ceded its sovereignty to the US.
The infamous Platt Amendment of 1901 gave the U.S. the right to intervene unilaterally in Cuban affairs and included a clause that eventually led to the perpetual lease of Guantanamo Bay.
All this [ . . . ]

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

Arnie Gundersen Visits the Refugees of Fukushima

By MariaMarch 16, 20162016Fukushima

After the explosions and melt-down of the Fukushima Nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011, 160,000 people were evacuated. Five years later almost 100,000 of them are still living in refugee housing because their homes, land and towns are still too radioactive for life. The current Abe government of Japan has begun a campaign to end the refugee crisis by a variety of measures: by changing the radiation standards and telling the exiled that it is now safe to go home, by ending disaster payments as well as cost of living allowances unless they return to the broken down ghost towns or relocate to other parts of Japan.
In several cases Arnie Gundersen was the first outsider who came to [ . . . ]

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

Silent Summer – Professor Timothy Mousseau – Radiation and Birds

By MariaMarch 9, 20162016

What happens to the lives of birds, insects and plants in the radiation zones around Chernobyl and Fukushima?
Tim Mousseau is a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina. For 15 years he and his scientific collaborator Anders Moller from the University of Paris, Sud, have done research in the most contaminated areas of Chernobyl. When Fukushima Daiichi exploded they began field work there as well. They study birds, insects, microbes, and plants at over 1,000 sites, creating the most diligent inventories of each study area and returning year after year. They found significantly increased rates of genetic damage in proportion to the level of exposure to radioactive contaminants.
This is an update given on September 2, 2015, at [ . . . ]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)

A Conversation with Maggie and Arnie Gundersen

By MariaMarch 1, 20162016

From Fairewinds Energy Education
The Gundersens came to California for a speaking tour at the end of 2015 and offered to meet me in the afternoon before giving a Fukushima update at the Point Reyes Dance Palace. Both worked in the nuclear industry, Maggie in public information, Arnie as an engineer and executive. He was fired from Nuclear Energy Services in 1990.
I started by asking them a question that had troubled me for a long time – given that Arnie Gundersen is one of only a handful of whistle blowers. How early did people in the nuclear industry become aware that they were dealing with a monstrously dangerous technology?
Arnie and Maggie Gundersen are a close team in the nuclear [ . . . ]

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

Fukushima, Five Years Later – Arnie Gundersen

By MariaFebruary 24, 20162016

As of February 2016 Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates is on a one month speaking tour of Japan to assess the status of the cleanup. He arrives at a crucial moment. Even though polls show that at least 70% of Japanese do not want the nuclear power plants reopened that were shut down 5 years ago, the Abe government is determined to put many of them back on line and has begun the process. And to make things worse the Japanese government is planning to burn plutonium mixed with uranium in their aging reactors, a practice that has been abandoned in the US due to the high risk.
This program includes a phone report from the ghost towns around Fukushima [ . . . ]

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

Arnie Gundersen: WHAT DID THEY KNOW, WHEN DID THEY KNOW IT?

By MariaFebruary 17, 20162016

TUC Archive UPDATE.
On the 5th anniversary of the Fukushima disaster the new Japanese State Secrets Law enacted in 2014 limits information and threatens journalists with jail time. And even Western media make it appear as if the worst has passed.
Acknowledging the reality of this accident with global consequences at least 100 years into the future is not only frightening for just plain folk but would be economically devastating to the energy corporations. When former nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen was asked by his family in early 2011 where the next nuclear power plant accident would take place he said he was unable to say where but that he was convinced that it would be a Mark I or II General Electric [ . . . ]

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

When the FBI Knocks on the Door – How the peace movement resisted FBI infiltration and accusations of terrorism

By MariaFebruary 10, 20162016

The largest deployment of FBI agents for a political case since the Counterintelligence Programs against the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Young Lords occurred on September 24, 2010. In a joint, national operation the FBI targeted homes and offices of people who had organized rallies against the post 9/11 wars. This time the accusation was “providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations”. In the end this giant and expensive FBI operation did not yield a single charge.
However the 2010 raids and the confiscated materials were used against two prominent activists who were affiliated with the peace movement: the Brown Berets co-founder Carlos Montez, and the Palestinian American Rasmea Odeh, leader [ . . . ]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:59 — 19.9MB)

Bush Radio, Cape Town – South Africa’s First Community Radio Station

By MariaFebruary 3, 20162016

In celebration of World Radio Day and Black History Month 2016
This is a rebroadcast of an interview with Brenda Leonard, one of the founders of Bush Radio. When I met her in May 2009 in San Francisco she was on a US tour of community stations and gave presentations about the iconic, now world famous radio station that came out of the resistance movement against Apartheid.
Denied a license under the old Apartheid regime, Bush Radio went on the air illegally in 1993. Two broadcasters were arrested and the equipment confiscated. After the historic elections of 1994 the first broadcast licenses issued by the Mandela government were specifically for community broadcasters. In August 1995 Bush Radio began licensed broadcasts.
For this [ . . . ]

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

World Radio Day 2016: Live Coverage of the Napa Earthquake in California

By MariaJanuary 27, 20162016

World Radio Day is an international annual celebration of radio, why we love it and why we need it today more than ever. Their February 2016 events are focused on emergency broadcasts. Here is a TUC Radio special documentary for the occasion. (The exact date is February 13)
This is part of the story of a community that has built their station in response to a devastating fire in their own signal area at the Point Reyes Peninsula – determined to be ready for the next emergency. KWMR in Point Reyes Station has been on the air since 1995 with a rich offering of music and public affairs. But – more than most other community radio stations they have built infrastructure, [ . . . ]

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