EnviroVideo
Media Designed to Empower People
EnviroVideo produces environmental and social justice programs for television - including interview and news shows, specials, and documentaries. The underlying premise of EnviroVideo is that there are critical environmental issues at hand that can best be communicated to large numbers of people through the media most favored for news and information - television and now on-line. When there is broad public awareness, pressing environmental matters can be dealt with and action taken to truly resolve them. Our goal is to provide information people can use to make informed decisions and take positive action to create a sustainable future.
Click here to read recent articles by our host Karl Grossman:
"Critics Picked Up on Oppenheimer's All-Too-Timely Warning on Nuclear War"
“US NRC Seeks Greatly Reduced Safety Regulations
for ‘Advanced’ Nuclear Power Plants” – on Common Dreams –
“The new space race is going nuclear” – on Nation of Change -
"Why is there more media talk about using nuclear weapons than about banning them?”
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EnviroVideo's Wide Reach and Audience
EnviroVideo's programs are broadcast on Free Speech TV on nearly 200 cable TV systems in 40 states and on the Dish and DirecTV satellite networks -- reaching 40 million households. Moreover, short segments are made out of the half-hour Enviro Close-Up programs and these air daily on Free Speech TV. Also, our programs are simulcast on the FreeSpeech.org website worldwide. Visit Enviro Close-Up for a complete listing of our award winning programs or watch them here online.
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Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman broadcasts nationwide on FreeSpeech TV. This episode of Enviro Close-Up #688
Fairewinds Energy Education with Arnie and Maggie Gundersen Part 2 will broadcast Sat. April 20th, 2024 at 4:30PM EST on Free Speech TV and simulcast on freespeech.org. + short format daily at unannounced times before & after Democracy Now! and during other Free Speech TV programs.
EnviroVideo
Media Designed
to Empower People
Enviro Close-Up #688 Fairewinds Energy Education with Arnie and Maggie Gundersen Part 2 Arnie Gundersen describes how he was deeply immersed in the nuclear industry, receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nuclear engineering, a reactor operators license “and I worked my way up to become a senior vice president—before seeing the dark side of the endeavor when I found violations in the nuclear industry, and the nuclear regulators turned on me and tried to destroy my career and life actually.” At a Congressional hearing chaired by Senator John Glenn, “I was exonerated for all the issues I brought forward.” Ever since, he has been “working with non-governmental organizations and citizens groups throughout the country and throughout the world” explaining “what’s wrong with the technology.” Maggie tells of being a public relations person in the nuclear industry before she also left and how “the nuclear industry is part of the war industry.” With their Fairewinds Energy Education organization, they focus on an array of threats of nuclear technology including its, as Arnie says, “using the ocean as a dump site for radioactive waste.” They have been deeply involved in challenging moves by Tokyo Electric Power Company in Japan to dump “radioactive water” from its crippled Fukushima nuclear power plants into the Pacific, and in the U.S., Holtec, now owner of the shut-down Indian Point nuclear plants north of New York City, into the Hudson River. They reflect on the false information they were given while in the nuclear industry about the radioisotope tritium, how “we were trained,” as Arnie relates, to believe “that tritium—radioactive water—was perfectly safe.” They provide details about the information-full Fairewinds website (fairewinds.org) and how, says Maggie, “it’s there for anyone to read and use the material.” View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #687 Fairewinds Energy Education with Arnie and Maggie Gundersen Part 1 Fairewinds Energy Education declares: “Our mission is to educate the public about nuclear power and other energy issues.” Arnie Gundersen is its chief engineer and Maggie Gundersen its founder and president. Both spent many years in the nuclear industry—Arnie as a nuclear engineer and reactor operator and a senior vice president and Maggie as a public relations person—before leaving it. In this Enviro Close-Up they relate how—as Arnie says—the nuclear industry is “now hiding behind climate change” when, in fact, the nuclear fuel cycle is carbon intensive and nuclear power plants themselves emit Carbon 14, a radioactive form of carbon. Moreover, nuclear power “doesn’t make any economic sense,” says Arnie. Maggie details how the nuclear industry uses “nukespeak” to hide its dangers. “I was trained on how to use nukespeak,” she says. Arnie refutes the claim of the nuclear industry that “nuclear plants can’t explode” and discusses how, indeed, at Fukushima nuclear plants did explode—and Fairewinds exposed how. The linkage between commercial nuclear power and atomic weaponry is discussed. “I didn’t understand the linkage when I started in the industry,” says Arnie. He tells of how the “small modular reactors” now being promoted by the nuclear industry produce “even more…radioactive rubble” than larger ones. And they speak about how nuclear power isn’t needed, that safe, clean, green energy can provide all the power the world needs. Nuclear power, says Maggie, “shouldn’t be on the planet.” View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #686 Beyond Pesticides with Jay Feldman
The goal of the organization Beyond Pesticides is “to eliminate the use of petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers” explains its executive director, Jay Feldman. Its stated mission: “Beyond Pesticides believes that people must have a voice in decisions that affect them directly. We believe decisions should not be made for us by chemical companies or by decision-makers who either do not have all of the facts or refuse to consider them.” Begun in 1981, the Washington, D.C.-based group believed from its inception that there has to be “an alternative…another way to grow food.” And through the decades it has carefully documented how toxic chemicals aren’t necessary and championed organic agriculture. Feldman tells of how “we engage in science, policy and action.” And he emphasizes: “There are alternatives available to us now.” He declares: “We do have a holistic solution if we choose to use it.” Feldman invites people to join in the efforts of Beyond Pesticides and become “an advocate, a change agent in your community.” He speaks of the “poor regulatory system” in the U.S. with the “chemical industry extremely powerful” and details how Beyond Pesticides takes this on. Feldman further emphasizes how the organic process “intersects” with tackling the climate crisis, decline of biodiversity and health effects from toxic chemicals. Says Feldman: “There’s a huge bright spot out there.” View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #685 Scott Chaskey—Farmer, Poet and Educator
Photo by Lindsay Morris
Scott Chaskey, farmer, poet and educator, is the author of “Soil and Spirit: Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life” and “Seedtime: On the History, Husbandry, Politics and Promise of Seeds” and also “This Common Ground: Seasons on an Organic Farm.” Scott is a pioneer of the Community Supported Agriculture movement who for 30 years cultivated more than sixty crops—organically—at Quail Hill Farm on Long Island, New York, one of the first CSA’s in the United States. He has traveled the world with his involvement with the CSA movement. He is a past president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York. Scott’s poetry has been widely published over five decades. In this Enviro Close-Up, Scott discusses his books, his poetry and his commitment to organic farming—and the need for a new “paradigm” in the growing of food. And he speaks of how he tells “stories that hopefully will heal because all the work that I’ve been involved with all these years has been in healing the soil and to help in healing the earth and the people involved in this great enterprise.”
Enviro Close-Up #684 Commander Robert Green and Security without Nuclear Deterrence
“I do feel that we’re in more dangerous times than in the Cold War at the moment and people don’t realize it,” says Commander Robert Green, retired from the British Navy. He was deeply involved in its readiness to use nuclear weapons. As a bombardier-navigator, he flew in a Buccaneer nuclear strike jet—with a planned target the Soviet Union—and then helicopters armed with nuclear depth charges to be used against Soviet submarines. Then he worked in the Ministry of Defense and was staff officer for intelligence to the Commander-in-Chief Fleet during the 1982 Falklands War. That war was a turning point for Green. “The Falklands War raised major concerns relating to nuclear weapons,” he says. During the war there was “a very secret contingency plan” to “move a Polaris submarine…within range of Buenos Aires” and the possibility of it conducting a “nuclear strike” on Argentina. “Fortunately there was no need for that plan to be implemented because we won,” says Green. He retired from the Navy in 1982 and became an opponent of nuclear warfare. He chaired the U.K.’s affiliate in the World Court Project, a campaign that led the International Court of Justice in 1996 to rule the threat and use of nuclear weapons were illegal. He authored the book “Security without Nuclear Deterrence.” He is co-director of the Disarmament and Security Centre in New Zealand. He says there has been a “systematic effort to play down the appalling side effects and ‘overkill’…with even the smallest modern nuclear weapons,” how they are “not weapons at all. They are utterly indiscriminate devices that combine the poisoning horrors of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, plus effects…of radioactivity, with almost unimaginable explosive violence.” Green is devoted to working for a “nuclear-free world.”
Enviro Close-Up #683 Author, Historian, Professor Naomi Oreskes
Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University, authored “Merchants of Doubt” and also “The Big Myth” with Erik Conway, historian of science and technology at the California Institute of Technology. She also wrote “Why Trust Science?” The subtitle of “Merchants of Doubt” is “How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change.” And in this Enviro Close-Up, Dr. Oreskes details how the fossil fuel industry followed “The Tobacco Strategy” of the tobacco industry in which it denied a connection between smoking and cancer by claiming there was “doubt” about the link. The strategy was developed for the tobacco industry by the PR company Hill & Knowlton. Likewise the fossil fuel industry and a “small handful” of scientists have sought to deny that climate change is happening and largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels by claiming there is doubt. In both situations, Dr. Oreskes emphasizes, the industries have been “well-aware” of the truth. This industry program of inculcating doubt, of “misdirection,” has its parallel, says Dr. Oreskes, in the way magicians do tricks in which they “distract attention.” She also discusses her book “Why Trust Science?” and its focus on “when to trust and when not to trust science.” And she speaks about “The Big Myth” and how it exposes the “100-year program” of claiming “government action…threatens our freedom” when such action is critical to “protect us against deadly products” and “ruthless monopolies.”
Enviro Close-Up #682 Food & Water Watch
Food & Water Watch is a Washington, D.C.-based organization that focuses on corporate and government accountability. Guests from Food & Water Watch are Senior New York Organizer Eric Weltman and California Director Chirag Bhakta. Eric speaks about the successful drive to ban fracking in New York State and the also successful effort to block the dumping of more than a million gallons of radioactive wastewater from the closed Indian Point nuclear power plants into the Hudson River. He talks, too, about the banning of the use of fossil fuels in new buildings in New York City and New York State. And he speaks about the recent 75,000-person “March to End Fossil Fuels” that happened in Manhattan. Food & Water Watch was in the middle of all these actions. Chirag talks about how what Food & Water Watch terms Big Oil and Big Ag have put California’s climate and water at risk. He details their “delay tactics” and “boondoggles.” Chirag points to the central importance of “people power” and “organizing people at the grassroots level.” Both also speak about their personal backgrounds—how they became environmental organizers. View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #681 “Putting Out the Planetary Fire” with Mark Dunlea Mark Dunlea has written a veritable handbook for challenging climate change. And a download of the book is free by going to GELFNY.org That’s the Green Education and Legal Fund of which Dunlea is chairperson. Teaching a course in Climate Change and Advocacy at Bennington College, Dunlea sought a “basic 101 climate book” and was told by Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, that there was none. So, Dunlea, a long-time environmental activist wrote—as the book is subtitled—“An Introduction to Climate Change and Advocacy.” The central message of the book, as Dunlea explains in this Enviro Close-Up, is: “Fossil fuels are destroying the world.” Damages the burning of fossil fuels are causing include “extreme weather…becoming more common, more expensive and more destructive.” Says Dunlea: “We have to stop burning fossil fuels.” He spotlights the work of Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson, his most recent book “No Miracles Needed,” and how “100% of our energy needs” can be provided “with today’s technology” and “without fossil fuels.” Jacobson heads the Atmosphere/Energy Program and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. Dunlea emphasizes the urgency of the transition to green, carbon-free energy. “It’s now or never,” he says. He also discusses “false climate solutions” including nuclear power. Dunlea co-founded the Ralph Nader-inspired New York Public Interest Research Group and was first chairperson of national PIRG. View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #680 -- “The Fukushima Disaster, The Hidden Side of the Story” We focus on this powerful, moving, information-full film documentary superbly made and just-released and interview its director, Philippe Carillo. He details how, in addition to the enormous damage the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster—in which three nuclear power plants exploded at the six-plant site—has already caused, the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company, owner of the plants, are planning to dump 1.3 million tons of wastewater contaminated with radioactive tritium from the plants into the Pacific Ocean. Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen, a principal of Fairewinds Energy Education, says in the documentary: “At Fukushima Daiichi, the world is already seeing deaths from cancer related to the disaster…There’ll be many more over time.” Carillo tells of the involvement of Japanese government agencies in a cover-up of the catastrophe, and the conflict of interest of the International Atomic Energy Agency with its mission to both promote and regulate nuclear power. The film exposes a series of hidden aspects of the Fukushima disaster. And, in it, Dr. Helen Caldicott, former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, explains how radiation causes cancer. She says: “There is no safe level of radiation. I repeat, there is no safe level of radiation. Each dose of radiation is cumulative and adds to your risk of getting cancer and that’s absolutely documented in the medical literature.” Carillo, from France, now lives in Vanuatu, an island nation which with other countries in the Pacific is challenging the planned Fukushima radioactive wastewater dumping. Carillo is an award-winning director who has worked on major TV documentary projects for the BBC, 20th Century Fox and French National TV as well as doing independent productions. He is interviewed from Vanuatu.
Enviro Close-Up #679 – Seth Shelden of ICAN and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017. That year, much due to the work of ICAN, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, was passed at the United Nations. Shelden is UN liaison for ICAN, an attorney and professor of law. In this Enviro Close-Up he details the provisions of the treaty termed by the UN as “a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination.” It declares that because of the “catastrophic humanitarian consequences that would result from any use of nuclear weapons, and recognizing the consequent need to completely eliminate such weapons, which remains the only way to guarantee that nuclear weapons are never used again under any circumstances,” nations agree not to “develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons.” Further, notes Shelden, no country may “threaten to use” them. Asked about the lack of coverage by media of the treaty creating a nuclear weapons-free world, and so few people are aware of it, Shelden points to “myopic framing” by media. He cites how long it took “for journalists to accept that there were not two sides to the climate crisis.” The horrendous impacts of nuclear weapons, “like the climate crisis, even more so, is a very black-and-white issue,” he says. The abolition of nuclear weapons, Shelden notes, has been a focus of the UN since its formation, the subject of its first resolution. He discusses the years of work that have led to the treaty. View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #678 Enhanced Geothermal Energy Systems
Three decades ago, we did a program on what was then called Hot Dry Rock Geothermal Energy. The process is now called the Enhanced Geothermal Energy Systems. With us then and now: Dr. Jefferson Tester, today a professor of sustainable energy systems at Cornell University and principal scientist for Cornell’s work on an Enhanced Geothermal Energy System, its Earth Source Heat Project. Dr. Tester relates how Cornell has drilled a two-mile hole in the ground at its campus in Ithaca, New York in it work to use heat from below the Earth to provide heat at university buildings. And, he discusses the history of what started at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hot Dry Rock pilot operation at Fenton Hill in New Mexico, featured in our earlier program. Dr. Tester has been a pioneer in geothermal energy, after beginning at the Fenton Hill project, as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He cites in this Enviro Close-Up a study done when he was at MIT stating that “in spite of its enormous potential, the geothermal option for the United States has been largely ignored.” The MIT team concluded that “while further advances are needed, none of the known technical and economic barriers…are considered insurmountable.” View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #677 “No Miracles Needed” with Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson
Renowned energy expert Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson’s just-out book is titled “No Miracles Needed” with the subtitle “How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air.” It is a follow-up to his 2021 book “100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything”—and as absolutely brilliant. He provides the very much needed information for a clean, renewable energy future. Dr. Jacobson, Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, says: “The world needs to switch away from using fossil fuels to using clean, renewable sources of energy as soon as possible. Failure to do so will lead to accelerated and catastrophic climate damage, loss of biodiversity, and economic, social, and political stability.” He explains how we can “solve the climate crisis, and at the same time eliminate air pollution and safely secure energy supplies for all — without using ‘miracle’ technology.” Dr. Jacobson details the use of “existing technologies to harness, store and transmit energy from wind, water, and solar sources to ensure reliable electricity and heat supplies.” And he discusses “which technologies are not needed”—including natural gas, carbon capture and nuclear energy. As Michael Mann, climatologist and geophysicist and the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania says of “Jacobson’s amazing new book,” his work enables people to “be informed and engaged to help tackle the defining challenge of our time.” View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #676 Severn Cullis-Suzuki
Severn Cullis-Suzuki burst onto the world stage in 1992 when at 12 years old she addressed the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with a presentation that has been described as “minutes that silenced the world.” A segment of that presentation begins this Enviro Close-Up with Severn who is now executive director of the David Suzuki Foundation. She has also gone on to receive a bachelor’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University and is a doctoral candidate at the University of British Columbia. The Canadian-based David Suzuki Foundation is named for Severn’s father, the renowned Canadian science broadcaster, author and environmental activist Dr. David Suzuki. He co-founded the organization in 1990 with Severn’s mother, Tara Cullis, an organizer, writer and former member of the faculty at Harvard University. Severn explains the roots of her own environmental activism learning from her parents. And, as Severn says: “Nature is the bottom line, science and expertise are crucial to our survival, that we are all connected and our actions matter.And this organization will play a critical role in advancing our transformation to an economy characterized by clean energy, justice and strong ecosystems. Shifting humanity toward survival will require all of us stepping up. I’m here to do all I can.” She discusses the many activities of the David Suzuki Foundation including research and action on: climate change, clean energy, biodiversity loss, pesticide risks, learning from indigenous people, terrestrial conservation, fracking, sustainable transit. Severn is as extraordinarily eloquent now as she was at 12.
Enviro Close-Up #675 David Fenton and “The Activist’s Media Handbook”
David Fenton discusses his brilliant, just-published and much-needed book in this Enviro Close-Up. As environmentalist and actor Mark Ruffalo says of the book: “Activists need to be communicators and story tellers. David Fenton knows that at his core and has helped the environmental and climate movement reach the public for decades.” From the fights against fracking and Alar and global warming to the “No Nukes” concerts, there has been David. In the book, subtitled “Lessons From Fifty Years As A Progressive Agitator,” Fenton presents “Communications Rules For Activists,” which he discusses in the Enviro Close-Up. These include “Craft Simple Messages Everyone Can Understand” and in them “avoid jargon…and above all avoid rhetoric.” As David says: “We have the knowledge and tools to create a lasting, better world….To win, we must use effective messages that touch people’s hearts and reach them.” The book also has a section titled “Organize To Win” in which David recommends “Avoid Sectarianism” and “Beware Endless Meetings And Processes.” Professor George Lakoff of the University of California at Berkeley, who wrote the foreword to “The Activist’s Media Handbook,” writes that: “If progressives lose the future, it will not be due to a lack of good policy ideas. If we lose the future, ceding democracy to authoritarians or bad corporate actors, it will be due mostly to a stunning failure to communicate with people in simple language that connects with them on the level of their moral values.” Lakoff explains that David “understands the importance of presenting issues in a way that taps into the most deeply held values of an audience.” In his book and this Enviro Close-Up, Fenton passes that knowledge on.
Enviro Close-Up #674 Gordon Edwards, president, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
Dr. Edwards, an expert on nuclear technology, refutes the claims of the nuclear industry as it pushes purportedly “new and improved” nuclear power plants, so-called “advanced” nuclear power plants, and particularly small modular reactors. He explains that these smaller nuclear power plants are not new and not improved, but were “things that were tried 50 and 60 years ago” and didn’t succeed then. Now, he says, with governments prepared to spend “bundles of money…trillions of dollars” to combat climate change, the nuclear industry is wheeling out these old designs to “try to rescue itself from a very rapid decline.” These smaller nuclear power plants are not safer than large nuclear power plants. They “are just as prone to failure as large reactors.” Any nuclear power plant is “a warehouse of radioactive poisons,” says Dr. Edwards “and anything that blows these poisons out into the environment constitutes a disastrous accident.” That can happen “if you’re small, that can happen when you’re big.” Furthermore, the small plants produce more nuclear poisons, more nuclear waste, than large nuclear reactors. Meanwhile, safe, clean, green renewable energy is here with its costs having plummeted. “Renewables are now about four times cheaper than nuclear” with solar and wind systems far quicker to build, thus having a “rapid payback” to challenge climate change and swiftly. The Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility was founded in 1970 because “we were not being told the truth about nuclear energy” and it has been working ever since to get the truth out—now especially about the falsehoods the nuclear industry is pushing about “new and improved” nuclear power plants.
Enviro Close-Up #673 John Turner and Water Reuse
Following up the previous Enviro Close-Up, with Patricia Sinicropi, executive director of the Water ReUse Association, this Enviro Close Up focuses on Long Island, New York, an area—one of several around the U.S. and world – dependent on a sole source aquifer for its potable water supply. John Turner, senior conservation policy advocate at the Seatuck Environmental Association on Long Island, has long challenged the practice on the island of sending wastewater through pipes out into the Atlantic Ocean and surrounding bays. Instead, he has championed water reuse “or water recycling or water reclamation.” With the current system, the water table below Long Island, especially in its Nassau County, has lowered. Lakes and streams have been impacted reflecting what has been happening. Turner notes how Hempstead Lake is now “Hempstead Puddles” and Valley Stream is now “Valley No-Stream.” On western Long Island, Brooklyn lost its use of the aquifer below more than a century ago and had to get water from reservoirs in upstate New York. But they have reached “capacity,” says Turner. “We have to be better stewards of freshwater resources.” The Seatuck Environmental Association is now embarked on plans for an islandwide “blueprint or roadmap” for water reuse.
Enviro Close-Up #672 WateReuse
“Water is Life,” as Native Americans have declared. But today, much of water is wasted—dumped into the ocean and other waterways after use. The WateReuse Association is a leading organization supporting recycled water. Patricia Sinicropi, executive director the Washington D.C.-based association, discusses in this Enviro Close-Up how “the fundamental principle of water reuse is using the right water for the right purpose, everywhere and all the time. That means aiding and accelerating the natural process of cleaning the water to make it suitable for its intended purpose, from irrigation to industrial uses to drinking.” The association’s “efforts touch on every aspect of promoting water reuse to make it fit for purpose.” Since its founding in California in 1990, the WateReuse Association has advocated for policies, laws and funding to increase the practice of recycling water. Its membership of water utilities, businesses, government agencies and not-for-profit organizations “is dedicated to recycling water to ensure communities have a safe, reliable and cost-effective supply of water.” WateReuse Association now has members in 38 states and 11 countries. It emphasizes: “Transforming Water, Sustaining Our Future.” View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #671 Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance
This Enviro Close-Up focuses on the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA)—especially it being a leader in getting action on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This visionary pact was passed at the UN in 2017. In the words of the UN, the treaty is “a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination.” It’s a nuclear counterpart to the treaties enacted in the 1920s that outlawed chemical weapons in the wake of their horrific use during World War I. It could put the nuclear genie back in the bottle. But nations with nuclear weapons—including the U.S., Russia and China—have refused to ratify it. Moreover, communications media have almost totally not been mentioning the treaty’s existence in the huge number of reports on the threats by Russian President Putin to use nuclear weapons since his invasion of Ukraine. OREPA is active in the Nuclear Ban Treaty Collaborative which is calling for media to “pay attention” to the treaty, explains OREPA’s coordinator, Ralph Hutchison. Cody Dishner, community organizer for OREPA, says many people are now “for the first time in their lives” faced with “nuclear annihilation.” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved forward its “Doomsday Clock” to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has been since set up in 1947. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says “we must eliminate nuclear weapons before they eliminate us.” OREPA is calling for “educating, mobilizing, organizing” for a world free of nuclear weapons. View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #670 Atomic Days Joshua Frank
Joshua Frank has written a powerful, extraordinary, must-read book, “Atomic Days, The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America.” In it, he exposes how the Hanford Site, a nuclear production complex set up along the Columbia River in the State of Washington by the Manhattan Project, and “has produced nearly all the radioactive fuel used in the nuclear arsenal of the United States,” is “laced with huge amounts of radioactive gunk” and “is a ticking time bomb that could erupt at any given moment, creating a nuclear Chernobyl-like explosion, resulting in a singular tragedy that would be unlike anything the United States has ever experienced.” The costs of cleaning up Hanford “keep escalating” with the U.S. Department of Energy currently estimating “the job could run between $316 billion and $662 billion. Today, $2.6 billion are being spent annually.” Frank declares: “If the U.S. public were made aware of the risks Hanford radioactive waste posed, we would surely question the validity of resurrecting the noxious nuclear power industry which is now being heralded as a key weapon…in the fight against climate change.” Frank, managing editor of the investigative website CounterPunch, is “hopeful that with a bit of knowledge about what is really going on at Hanford—which involves a true reckoning with its dreadful past” a movement can arise “to demand transparency, accountability, and radical change. The matter is vitally important to the future of the planet, to Hanford’s Indigenous population, and to every U.S. citizen who is paying for it. Because its radioactive threat is not only immediate: it’s long-lasting and of atomic proportions.” View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #669 Environmental Working Group, PT 2 Ken Cook, president and co-founder of the Environmental Working Group, explains in this second Enviro Close-Up program how the organization got started 30 years ago next year” and now “we have a staff of about 70 people.” He speaks of people being “hungry for the information” EWG provides: “practical advice on what they can do to protect themselves.” Further, it has aimed to expose “what the government was doing” and which “companies were doing the right thing and, unfortunately, which companies. too many of them, not doing the right thing.” EWG takes on the government. The organization, says Cook, “has the ability to throw a punch in policy fights” while “also empowering citizens to live healthier lives in a healthier environment.” The EWG website is now getting “125 million page views a year.” Says Cook: “We’ve over the years been able to build a following that trusts us.” Cook talks about the attack by industry against the “dozens of laws” on the environment enacted between the 1970s and 1990s, the “pushback from industry.” With Cook on the program is Grant Smith, EWG’s senior energy policy advisor. Smith discusses, among other energy issues, the drive by the nuclear industry for so-called small modular reactors and describes this as being “all about profit and nothing to do with carbon neutrality.” EWG is “intervening” in this effort to have government allow these nuclear reactors.
Enviro Close-Up #668 Environmental Working Group PT 1
ECU #668 Environmental Working Group, Part 1 “Our mission is simple: To empower you with breakthrough research to make informed choices and live a healthy life in a healthy environment,” declares the Environmental Working Group. Ken Cook, president and co-founder of the organization, and Grant Smith, its senior energy policy advisor, explain how since 1993 it has worked to protect public health. “Whether it’s by spotlighting harmful industry standards, speaking out against outdated government legislation or empowering consumers with breakthrough education and research, we're in this fight,” states the Environmental Working Group. Ken tells of how the organization works “very hard to come up with science-based but plausible, actionable things people can do.” A major “area of focus” is clean energy and Ken and Grant discuss the organization’s efforts to “put an end to coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power.” View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #667 David Phillips of Earth Island Institute
Earth Island Institute, a highly effective, major environmental organization, was founded in 1982 by the late David Brower. In this Enviro Close-Up, its executive director, David Phillips, relates the history and wide range of activities—and many successes—of the group. As “Our Mission,” Earth Island Institute declares: “Life on Earth is imperiled by human degradation of the biosphere. Earth Island Institute develops and supports projects that counteract threats to the biological and cultural diversity that sustain the environment. Through education and activism, these projects promote the conservation, preservation, and restoration of the Earth.” Further, it notes, “For the last four decades, Earth Island Institute has been at the forefront in the fight for the environment. This experience has prepared us as our planet reaches a crossroads.” Phillips, a biologist, details the many ways this is being done by Earth Island Institute. View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #644 “May We Choose Life” In this program, “May We Choose Life,” Karl Grossman talks about his spending decades combining investigative reporting and environmental journalism, and seven major points he’s learned. It began in 1962 with his first major story the scheme of public works czar Robert Moses to construct a four-lane highway on Fire Island which would have caused havoc to the communities and nature of this environmentally-important roadless barrier beach east of New York City. After two years and a grassroots effort, the highway was stopped and a Fire Island National Seashore created. He has written books, articles in newspapers, magazines and on the Internet, done radio and TV including, for 31 years, hostingEnviro Close-Up. The main points he speaks of having learned are: environmental issues are regularly life-and-death matters; people aren’t being protected; vested interests are the key problem; we must be ecocentric; people of color are the biggest victims of pollution; there’s no conflict between religion and environment; and there’s no need for the destruction—there are green alternatives to virtually all polluting products and processes. Enviro Close-Up # 644 View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #666 Don’t Look Up Part 2
The discussion continues about the blockbuster movie Don’t Look Up and the parallel to climate change and nuclear power in how the film depicts government and media not taking seriously the threat of a planet-killing comet heading to the Earth. Peter Hart, national communications manager of Food & Water Watch, speaks of “established power” continually advancing schemes “based on a techno-fantasy” instead of coming to grips with “what kind of energy is truly clean, truly renewable, and achievable.” Scenes in Don’t Look Up are “all too real,” he says. About mainstream media sensitivity to failures reporting on nuclear power, Wasserman tells of Walter Cronkite exploding at a party when Wasserman commented to the CBS Nightly News anchor that “I thought media did a poor job of covering” the Three Mile Island accident. Cronkite “started yelling at me.” He “couldn’t handle” the criticism. And, says Wasserman, when interviewed by anchor Bryant Gumbel on NBC’s Today program about the book he co-authored, “Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation,” which documents people dying as a result of the Three Mile Island accident, Gumbel said, “that’s interesting.” This led to a two-page nuclear industry blast demanding Gumbel issue a “retraction” and an accusation that Gumbel was “anti-nuclear.” Libbe HaLevy, producer and host of the podcast Nuclear Hotseat, details how the dangers of nuclear power are “minimized” and refutes the claim of it being carbon-free. The nuclear power cycle is “hugely carbon-intensive,” she says. And now, billions of dollars going to the development of “small nuclear modular reactors” are “siphoning off” funds. With “all those billions…we could have solar on every rooftop in America…” View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #665 Don’t Look Up Part 1
The ramifications of the blockbuster movie Don’t Look Up—especially as they concern the climate change crisis and the dangers of nuclear power—are focused upon in this Enviro Close-Up. Discussing the movie, which host Karl Grossman calls the “Dr. Strangelove film of our time,” is a panel that includes Harvey Wasserman, Peter Hart and Libbe HaLevy. Wasserman has for decades challenged nuclear power; he coined the term “No Nukes.” He wrote the book and hosts the podcast both titled Solartopia. Hart is the national communications manager of Food & Water Watch and previously was activist director of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. Libbe HaLevy is author of Yes, I Glow in the Dark and producer and host of the podcast Nuclear Hotseat. Adam McKay’s superb film, about a comet heading to Earth and people in government and media not taking the deadly threat seriously, has its parallels, say Grossman and members of the panel, with climate change and nuclear power. Numerous examples are provided.
Enviro Close-Up #664 -- Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali, Part 2
In Part 2 of Enviro Close-Up with Mustafa Santiago Ali, Vice President of Environmental Justice, Climate, and Community Revitalization for the National Wildlife Federation, he speaks of his college students. “Young people are hungry not just for information but also for change and being part of that change,” he says. Dr. Ali adds, “they also understand that the climate crisis is something that they will have to deal with through their entire lives.” They are “hungry to bring their innovation and ingenuity” to the struggle. He speaks of projects of the NWF including its Eco-Schools program and how “millions and millions” of young people “participate in it every year.” As to whether he is optimistic in the long-term about environment success, he says “I am” because “usually when are faced with a serious challenge, we find ways to come together.” Still, “I also understand that tied to that optimism is a huge amount of hard work.” Dr. Ali says “there’s a brighter day—if we determine to make it that way.” He details the many leaders of “frontline organizations” and the “transformative work” of their initiatives and groups “moving forward” and making change. As to racism being pivotal to environmental justice, Dr. Ali says this is “not only true but apparent.” View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #663 -- Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali, Part 1
Mustafa Santiago Ali is Vice President of Environmental Justice, Climate, and Community Revitalization for the National Wildlife Federation. Highly articulate, enormously knowledgeable and thoroughly committed, Dr. Ali is a giant in the campaign for environmental justice. For 24 years he worked at the U.S Environmental Protection Agency joining the agency at 16 as a student. He became a founding member of its Office of Environmental Justice. He served as EPA’s senior advisor for environmental justice and community revitalization, and assistant associate administrator. He resigned from the EPA when, as he describes in this Enviro Close-Up, there was a major “roll back” of EPA’s mission and activities under the Trump administration. He then became senior vice president for the Hip Hop Caucus, a national non-profit and non-partisan organization. And he founded Revitalization Strategies, a business focusing on moving “our most vulnerable communities” from “surviving to thriving.” As a vice president of the National Wildlife Federation, he is a leader of a green organization with six million members.
Enviro Close-Up #662 -- Nuclear Power Is Not Carbon-Free
Michel Lee, an attorney and senior analyst for Promoting Health and Sustainable Energy (PHASE), shatters the current pitch of the nuclear industry that nuclear power is carbon-free. “It’s flat-out false,” says Lee. The nuclear fuel cycle—which includes mining, milling and enrichment of uranium—is carbon intensive, she notes. And nuclear plants emit Carbon-14, a radioactive form of carbon with a half-life of 5,700 years. Nuclear power “is an extremely ineffective way to deal with climate change,” says Lee. She says media accepting it as carbon-free and an answer to climate change are doing “reporting of press releases.” Further, she tells of how the nuclear industry “would shrivel up and die without subsidies” from government.” She speaks of environmental justice and how nuclear power “has left an astonishingly horrific legacy on uranium-mining communities, in the United States mostly Native American communities,” and minority communities are being “targeted” for nuclear waste. She states: “Nuclear is particularly poorly suited to democracy.” View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #661 Bruce Gagnon and Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space
The Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space is the leading group internationally working to keep space for peace. In this Enviro Close-Up, Bruce Gagnon, its coordinator since it was established in 1992, details his impetus in challenging the turning of space into a war zone. He tells of hearing Lt. General Daniel O. Graham, head of the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars,” declaring as nearly a million people protested in New York City against nuclear weapons, “we are moving into space. They don’t have a clue.” With now the U.S. Space Force having been formed, the push by the U.S. to “control space and dominate space” continues intensely, says Gagnon. And this despite the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, put together by the U.S., the former Soviet Union and Great Britain, setting aside space for peaceful purposes. Gagnon speaks of the aerospace industry seeking to get the money to pay for the U.S. moving into space militarily by taking it from “entitlement programs—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and what’s left of the social safety net.” He speaks of the links between space weaponization and the use of nuclear power in space. He discusses the many activities of the Global Network and how people can join in. And although from a military family, he tells of how he became an organizer for the United Farm Workers Union under Cesar Chavez leading to his decades as a peace advocate and organizer. View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #660 Mark Jacobson and “100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything”
Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson is a renowned energy expert, a major figure in clean, renewable energy. “100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything,” his new book, “is absolutely brilliant. It is a handbook for a global green energy future,” declares host Karl Grossman in this Enviro Closeup. “It is a handbook for a global green energy future.” Jacobson is Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. The book begins: “Transitioning the world from fossil fuels to 100 percent clean, renewable energy and storage for everything is seen internationally as necessary to address global warming, air pollution and energy insecurity.” The book “lays out the science, technology, economics, policy, and social aspects of transitioning from fossil fuels to 100 percent clean, renewable energy sources for all energy purposes.” Jacobson details the huge potentials of “WWS”—"Wind-Water-Solar”—through onshore and offshore wind, wave and tidal power, solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar power and other green energy sources. He discusses the emergence of many energy storage technologies. A co-founder of The Solutions Project, Jacobson describes how it is leading a move worldwide to 100% clean, renewable energy. He dismisses with facts the claim in regard to climate change that nuclear power is “carbon-free” detailing how “it’s not carbon-free at all,” and “it just costs so much, four to give times per unit of energy compared to wind-water-solar.” View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #639 Maya van Rossum and The Green Amendment Maya K. van Rossum is the author of the book The Green Amendment: Securing Our Right to a Healthy Environment. She is the Delaware Riverkeeper, an attorney and founder and leader of the initiative the Green Amendment For The Generations. She is committed to having a Green Amendment in the U.S. and state constitutions. She says: “Let’s take our country back from the industrial interests that seek to exploit our natural world for their own profit. Let’s rise up together and demand our environmental rights. Let’s change our constitutions to recognize that our right to life, liberty, happiness, and a clean and healthy environment far overshadows the rights of others to pollute for profit.” The Green Amendment campaign is gaining traction. In New York State, a referendum to add it to that state’s constitution will be held this November 2, 2021, and it’s moving ahead in many other states. A Green Amendment, she explains, “is an amendment that gets placed in the Bill of Rights section of our state and federal constitutions and recognizes and protects the rights to clean water, clean air, a stable climate and healthy environment in the same most powerful legal and constitutional way that we recognize and protect the other human civil and political rights we hold dear." View Full Program Here
Cindy Folkers and the Heightened Impact of Radiation on Women & Children.
Enviro Close-Up #658
Cindy Folkers is the radiation and health hazard specialist at Beyond Nuclear. Her special focus has been the increased impact of radiation on women and children—and fetuses. It is worse than on men. Radiation exposure standards are based, explains Folkers, on what they define as “Reference Man.”
And this, although women, children and fetuses suffer a “disproportionate impact.” She says the “Reference Man” is defined as a man weighing 150 pounds, 25 to 30 years old and, the standards say, “western European in culture and habit.” She speaks of the bias of those who have set radiation standards. They have sought, she says, to “downplay” the impacts of radioactivity in order to promote nuclear technology. Thus “women have been marginalized, their concerns marginalized.” Beyond Nuclear has been working to have exposure standards changed to reflect the real effects of radiation. - View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #657 Alfred Meyer of Physicians for Social Responsibility
Alfred Meyer is a member of the board of directors of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Founded in 1961 in response to the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, PSR has since expanded its scope to address other health and environmental dangers including climate change. PSR regards nuclear weapons and climate change, says Meyer, as two “existential threats to human beings on the face of the earth.”
He discusses the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations and cites it as “a very thrilling example of how democratic action, activism and organizing by so many people around the world can actually make a difference.” He speaks about the “new nuclear arms race" underway and the U.S. program for the “modernization” of nuclear weaponry. “We don’t need money for new nuclear systems,” says Meyer. “We need money for vaccines and public health.” He speaks of countering climate change with clean, green energy and dismisses any role for nuclear power. He describes nuclear power as “always” being “a cover story for nuclear weapons” and “inextricably linked” to nuclear weaponry. View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up #656 Scott Sklar Solar Energy Pioneer (EXTENDED VERSION)
For nearly 50 years, Scott Sklar has been involved in solar energy. As an aide to U.S. Senator Jacob Javits, he co-founded the Congressional Solar Caucus in 1974. He went on to become the executive director of the Solar Energy Industries Association and political director of The Solar Lobby. He’s now director of the George Washington University Solar Institute. He’s co-author of Consumer Guide to Solar Energy.
In this Enviro Close-Up, Scott tells of how the cost of solar energy has gone down dramatically—by 89%—over the last 10 years and continues to descend. Solar energy is “growing exponentially,” says Scott. He describes its many applications. For a homeowner now, says Scott, a solar photovoltaic system has a six-year “payback” and it’s four years for a solar hot water system. “Rooftop solar is definitely going to be the lowest cost electric production in the world,” says Scott. “How exciting,” he says, and he is “shocked to be alive to see” the great advances in solar energy. Scott has been described as “a legend in the solar industry.” View Full Program Here
ECU 655 Dr. Devra Davis Pt. 2
Dr. Devra Davis, founder and president of Environmental Health Trust, is interviewed in Part 2 of a two-part Enviro Close-Up series. We start with her book Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry is Doing to Hide It, and How To Protect Your Family. It received the Sonoma State University’s Project Censored Award for “the news that didn’t make the news.” She describes the “inadequacy of current tests” for cell phones, and the health impact of radiation from them—notably on sperm counts and brain cells. “We need a program to warn people. The industry does not want you to know they know,” says Dr. Davis. Meanwhile, “the cell phone industry is the largest advertiser across media in the world today.” Its push is based on the “tobacco industry” disinformation model. Also, cell phone towers impact on health. Moreover, the push underway now for 5G is a “huge marketing ploy” to sell “50 billion new devices” and it’s an “energy vampire.” Says Dr. Davis: “We are in the middle of the largest experiment ever conducted on our children and grandchildren. There are no controls. We are exposing every living thing on this planet to microwave radiation from towers to routers and phones and we know it is having an effect.” Dr. Davis has been also active for decades in challenging climate change, lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations. Although the U.S. no longer has a president “denying climate change,” dealing with it is “going to require big institutional change.” View Full Program Here
Dr. Devra Davis, founder and president of Environmental Health Trust, is interviewed in Part 1 of a two-part Enviro Close-Up series. She is the author of the classic book, The Secret History of the War on Cancer. She says of cancer-causing substances, “whether it’s asbestos, vinyl chloride or a number of pesticides, most recently Roundup, what the companies have done is to attack the science and scientists and they spend more money on public relations than research.” They utilize a “new playbook to manufacture doubt” to cover up the lethality of their products, a playbook “first perfected” by the tobacco industry. She details the deadliness of Roundup pointing out that there have “already” been $12 billion in judgements meted out as a result of legal actions brought against Roundup for causing cancer. She speaks, too, of her book When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution, a finalist for the National Book Award. Dr. Davis says “there are things you can do to lead a healthier and safer life, but you have to get more informed.” She has been a professor at universities around the world. O Magazine has written about The Secret History of the War on Cancer, “Davis diagnoses two of the most lethal diseases of modern society: secrecy and self-interest.” Enviro Close-Up #654 View Full Program Here
Paul Gunter from Clamshell Alliance to Beyond Nuclear (extended version - only here on EnviroVideo)
Paul Gunter is director of the Reactor Oversight Project of the organization Beyond Nuclear which challenges nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the U.S. and the world. He is deeply involved now in fighting the plan of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to let nuclear power plants run for 100 years—although they were only originally licensed and seen to operate for 40 years. With hardly any new nuclear power plants being built in the U.S., nuclear promoters seek to “run these reactors into the ground,” says Gunter. At the same time, the NRC is allowing nuclear power plants to be “uprated,” to run hotter and harder to generate more electricity—further inviting nuclear disasters. Gunter also speaks of the drive today, with Microsoft founder Bill Gates a leader, for “advanced” nuclear power plants which, he says, is “a mirage.” He says “there’s nothing safe about the process of fissioning the atom” and these nuclear systems also “generate more and more nuclear waste that we don’t know what to do with” and present other problems. Further, nuclear power is not an answer to climate change, he emphasizes. It’s not carbon-free—mining, milling and enrichment of uranium produce greenhouse gases, and nuclear plants themselves emit Carbon-14, a radioactive form of carbon. Gunter, whose anti-nuclear activism began with his co-founding the New England-based Clamshell Alliance, tells of how “both sides of the aisle in Congress are working to resuscitate this failed…inherently dangerous industry”—and he outlines what people can do in the struggle to eliminate nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Enviro Close-Up #653 View Full Program Here
Environmental Injustice Fought and Won in Virginia
This Enviro Close-up focuses on how community activism in Virginia stopped an interstate pipeline being pushed by the powerful Dominion Energy company. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline would have carried fracked gas from West Virginia—with it and its associated compressor stations heavily impacting on African-American communities in Virginia—and ending up in a Native American community in North Carolina. Guests are Lakshmi Fjord, Ph.D., a visiting scholar with the Anthropology Department at the University of Virginia and an expert on environmental justice issues; John W. Laury, deacon of the Union Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Buckingham County, Virginia and a farmer-turned-researcher who documented how environmental racism was deeply involved in the routing of the pipeline; and Stephanie Willett, program coordinator of the AMMD Pine Grove Project. It has been fighting a proposed landfill in the historically African-American Black Pine community of neighboring Cumberland County, Virginia. They discuss strategies—among them “citizen science” and litigation—that provide a national model in the battle against environmental racism. Enviro Closeup #652 View Full Program Here
Heather Feather Environmental Educator
Heather Feather is an environmental educator who has created hands-on, experiential lessons in New York City for the National Park Service, the American Public Garden Association and now, in Florida, at the Environmental Learning Center in Vero Beach. She is the author of the enchanting book Horseshoe Crab’s Crown “written for ages 1 to 100.” A native of Washington state, she headed to New York City for college and has lived and done much of her work in the Rockaways, the oceanfront community within the city. There her teaching has including working with 100 fifth-graders on a music video about marine debris. Part of it is aired in the program. “I wish we would let nature be something that teaches us,” says Heather. And she talks about her newest book project, Going With the Flow, on the importance of plankton in the world’s oceans. Enviro Closeup #651 View Full Program Here
Tribute to Cecil Corbin-Mark
Cecil Corbin-Mark, described as “a giant of the environmental justice movement,” died of a stroke at just 51 years old in October 2020. He was deputy director and director of policy initiatives of the organization We Act for Environmental Justice. This Enviro Close-Up features presentations by speakers at a memorial for Cecil including: Peggy Shepard, co-founder and executive director of We Act; Vernice Miller-Travis, also a co-founder and a We Act board member; Marva King, former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency environmental justice senior policy advisor; Congressman Adriano Espaillat; and Ali Zaidi, former White House climate and energy advisor. It features, too, praise for Cecil from a variety of environmental groups and others. And, also in this Enviro Close-Up program are segments from an Enviro Close-Up show with Cecil, indeed a giant of the environmental justice movement. Enviro Closeup #650 View Full Program Here
Bob Musil and the Rachel Carson Council
Bob Musil is president and CEO of the Rachel Carson Council. Founded in 1965, it links environmental, health and social issues, as Rachel Carson did, into “a single, unified approach to today’s critical sustainability issues.” The Rachel Carson Council “is committed to furthering Carson’s ecological ethic which, it emphasizes, combines scientific concern for the environment and human health with a sense of wonder and reverence for all forms of life in order to build a more sustainable, just, and peaceful future.” The nationwide membership organization also sustains an active and growing campus network that includes 60 colleges and universities. Previously, Dr. Musil was executive director and CEO of Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Enviro Close-Up #649 View Full Program Here
How The U.S. Nuked Itself
Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, tells of the terrible health impacts that have continued for decades from the first detonation of a nuclear device. Although doctors in the Manhattan Project warned of large amounts of radioactivity that would be released, the test named Trinity of a plutonium-fueled atomic device proceeded anyway on July 16, 1945, she relates. Cordova herself is a cancer survivor and cancer has run through her family—and has been and is widespread among the other downwinders from the Trinity blast site in New Mexico, largely Latinx and Native-Americans. Cordova says they know it’s not a matter of “if” they’ll be hit with cancer “but when.” There’s been no federal compensation although a measure is now pending in Congress for Trinity victims. Host Grossman, a journalism professor, speaks of how the detonation was the occasion for the first official government disinformation about nuclear technology with William Laurence, a New York Times reporter on loan by the Times to the Manhattan Project, writing a press release claiming it was an ammunition dump explosion. Enviro Close-Up #648 View Full Program Here
Sane Energy Project
Kim Fraczek, director of the Sane Energy Project, is interviewed on fracking and the infrastructure for it – including pipelines, compressor stations and LNG facilities – being built to facilitate the transportation and export of fracked gas. The victory, in which the Sane Energy Project was a leader -- the fight against the massive Williams pipeline sending fracked gas from Pennsylvania -- is detailed. The Sane Energy Project declares: “We oppose the development, transport and export of fracked gas (‘natural gas’) in favor of an urgent and just transition to a renewable economy with the goal of zero fossil fuel or nuclear dependence.” Fraczek calls energy a “human right” and says “we can meet our energy needs” with safe. green, renewable energy that does not contribute to climate change. Enviro Close-Up #647 View Full Program Here
Nuclear Corruption
Nuclear corruption is a major element in why and how deadly nuclear power plants exist in the United States. The U.S. Attorney’s Office and FBI have just charged the speaker of the Ohio House of Representative and four others in a $61 million scheme to use $1 billion in ratepayers’ money to keep two decrepit nuclear power plants operating. And this kind of situation is not limited to Ohio. Harvey Wasserman, co-author of “Killing our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation,” and Bob Fitrakis, an attorney and editor of the Columbus Free Press early on were blowing the whistle in the Free Press about the nuclear corruption going on in Ohio. They detail the nuclear corruption—in Ohio and elsewhere—in this Enviro Close-Up. And they also in the program speak out about another form of corruption—Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election, a move which both are deeply involved in fighting. Fitrakis warns of the possibility of a “coup in the fall” involving Trump and the presidential election. Enviro Close-Up #646 View Full Program Here
Update on Trump’s Space Force Being Pushed Ahead – Hard
With the unveiling of a U.S. Space Force flag in the Oval Office of the White House in May 2020, Donald Trump declared: “Space is going to be…the future, both in terms of defense and offense.” The Space Force, established by Trump six months before as the sixth branch of U.S. armed forces, had just received its first offensive weapon. Meanwhile, the names of many U.S. Air Force bases are being changed to U.S. Space Force bases. Trump is pushing hard to open space to war. This Enviro Close-Up tells how this is being done despite the landmark Outer Space Treaty that designates space as a global commons to be used for peaceful purposes. Trump has said “it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space, so important.” Although U.S. neighbor Canada—along with Russia and China—have been leaders in pushing for an expansion of the Outer Space Treaty to prohibit all weapons in space, Trump’s Space Force—and the now admitted mission of “offense”—would cause Russia and China and other nations to meet the U.S. in kind, and space being turned into a war zone. Enviro Close-Up #645 View Full Program Here
A “Portal” to a Better World? Indian author Arundhati Roy writes that the COVID-19 pandemic is a “portal”—a “gateway”—to a new world. “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next,” she says. We can, indeed, hope that somehow this global health calamity might lead to a better world, says Karl Grossman. More importantly, after all the deaths, the profound misery—we need and must—work for a better world. Further, COVID-19 needs to be seen along with the other threats we face: nuclear war and the climate crisis. Nuclear war, with an exchange of some of the more than 14,000 hydrogen and atomic weapons existing today, many on hair trigger alert, would be an atomic COVID-19 for the people of the Earth. And as World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas says: “Whilst COVID-19 has caused a severe international health and economic crisis, failure to tackle climate change may threaten human well-being, eco-systems and economies for centuries. We need to flatten both the pandemic and climate change curves. We need to show the same determination and unity against climate change as against COVID-19. We need to act together in the interests of health and welfare of humanity not just for the coming weeks, but for many generations ahead.” Enviro Close-Up #643 View full program here
Living Downstream with Sandra Steingraber Updated
Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., biologist, author and cancer survivor, extends her discussion of her first book, Living Downstream, by detailing other writings and her acts of civil disobedience including her battle against fracking. She says: "We are all members of a great human orchestra and it is now time to play the Save the World Symphony." Steingraber has been named a Woman of the Year by Ms. Magazine, a Person of the Year by Treehugger, and one of 25 “Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” by the Utne Reader. #626 Part 1 View full program here and #627 Part 2 View full program here
(photo credit: www.laurakozlowski.com)
Trump Space Force: Turning the Heavens Into a War Zone Enviro Closeup #642
Unless it’s stopped, Donald Trump will have opened space to war. Trump’s establishment of a U.S. Space Force as the sixth branch of U.S. armed forces has come despite the landmark Outer Space Treaty that designates space as a global commons to be used for peaceful purposes. Trump and the U.S. military claim a Space Force is needed because China and Russia have been moving into space militarily. But, in fact, China and Russia—along with U.S. neighbor Canada—have for decades been seeking to expand the Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits weapons of mass destruction in space, to banning all weapons in space. The U.S. has repeatedly voted against this, the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space, or PAROS treaty, essentially vetoing it at the UN. And despite their efforts to expand the Outer Space Treaty, China and Russia—with the U.S. moving ahead to achieve what Trump calls “American dominance in space”—will meet the U.S. in kind. They’d be followed by other nations. And the heavens will be turned into a war zone. The program features Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. ECU #642 Watch show here
The Threat of Nuclear Waste with Kevin Kamps ECU #641
Radioactive Waste Specialist Kevin Kamps of the organization Beyond Nuclear details the major push by the Trump administration and nuclear industry to dump nuclear waste in Texas and New Mexico. His group with other organizations is challenging this scheme to establish a “nuclear sacrifice area for the whole country.” And because of transportation of nuclear waste from all over the U.S. to this area – “tens of thousands of shipments” by train, truck and barge -- “this is everybody’s problem.” Kamps also discusses the “insanity” planned in Canada to put nuclear waste “on the shoreline of Lake Michigan.” Kamps and Grossman speak of once nuclear proponent Admiral Hyman Rickover’s call in 1982 to “outlaw nuclear reactors.” They talk, too, about the Trump administration’s advocacy of “hormesis”—that “radioactivity is good for you.” Says Kamps: “It’s mad science…absurd, preposterous.” ECU # 641 Watch the full program here
iEat Green Enviro Closeup # 640
Bhavani Jaroff, a natural foods chef and educator, established iEat Green to “motivate individuals to work together to create lifestyles that support the wellness of one’s body, mind, spirit, community and planet.” Her work ranges from farm-to-school food programs to teaching at her own school, Cooking From the Heart, to mentoring interns on growing, cooking and eating healthy food. Her food activism includes fighting for the labeling of GMO foods. She says that by “raising the awareness of the inter-connectedness of the foods we eat and their impact on our families, our communities, our economy and our planet, iEat Green is fostering a greener way of life.” ECU #640 Watch full program here
Challenging Mountaintop Removal Enviro Close-Up # 639
Laura Chipley is an interdisciplinary artist who uses video, site-specific interventions and emerging technologies to document social and environmental impacts of energy extraction. In West Virginia, she has worked with environmental activists to use video and drones to chronicle environmental contamination—specifically the removal of mountaintops to extract coal. The Appalachian Mountaintop Patrol serve as a watchdog that has disseminated information widely about the outrage. Similarly, she has focused her pioneering approach to Newtown Creek, a polluted waterway marking the border between the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens in New York City, and on oil extraction in Ecuador. ECU #639 Watch full program here
The Ongoing Multibillion Dollar Ratepayer Bailout of Nuclear Power in the United States # 638
Dr. Mark Cooper, senior research fellow for economic analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, explains why nuclear power makes no economic sense—and slows the needed transition to economical and safe renewable energy. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and is a former Fulbright Fellow. He has provided expert testimony in over 250 cases for citizen intervenors, attorneys general and others before state and federal agencies, courts and legislators. Dr. Cooper is the author of numerous articles and books. ECU #638 View full program here
The Trump Nuclear Push #637 Guest: Kevin Kamps #637
Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear discusses how—as one headline puts it—“Trump Administration Spearheads International Push for Nuclear Power.” Kamps details how back in the U.S. the Trump administration is promoting nuclear power. He describes how the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, long a rubber stamp for the nuclear industry, is now even more a rubber stamp. He speaks of the combination of the nuclear industry and the federal government’s national laboratories. He blasts the scheme by the Trump administration to enable Saudi Arabia to have nuclear power explaining that this will lead to Saudi Arabia having atomic weapons. ECU #637 View full program here
The Hoax That Nuclear Power Is Green - Enviro Close-Up #636
This “Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman” demolishes the hoax that nuclear power is green. The program features actor Alec Baldwin who has long challenged nuclear power; former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Gregory Jaczko who declares that nuclear power “is not the right way forward” and not “a solution to climate change;” Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, who tells of releases to the environment by nuclear power; attorney Susan H. Shapiro now in court taking on the $7.6 billion New York State bail-out of nuclear plants based on the no-emissions claim—a bail-out being imitated by other states; Dr. Mark Cooper of the Vermont School of Law who says continuing with nuclear power “will delay the transition to a clean energy future:’ New York State Assemblywoman Ellen Jaffee who blasts the $7.6 billion bail-out; and Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson, energy analyst at Stanford University who emphasizes how “nuclear is not zero carbon at all." The program was filmed at a New York City conference organized by the Radiation and Public Health Project. Watch program here.
The Terrible Racket of Gas-Powered Leaf Blowers - Enviro Close-Up #635 Broadcasts July 27th at 4:30pm on FSTV
"No matter where you go you're subjected to the noise and toxic fumes caused by gas-powered leaf blowers," says Dr. Bonnie Sager, co-founder of Huntington CALM (Clean Alternative Landscaping Methods). Dr. Sager details the health impacts of these machines which have become ubiquitous in recent years. She discusses alternatives. She speaks of the social justice dimension And she discusses actions taken by "several hundred municipalities" in the United States to outlaw or restrict these extremely noisy, highly polluting machines -- and the banning of them by the nation of Israel. Watch the broadcast version 28:00
“Saving Fire Island From Robert Moses, The Fight For A National Seashore” Enviro Close-Up #634
Christopher Verga, author of the new book with this title, tells of the successful fight to stop New York public works czar Robert Moses from building a four-lane highway the length of the roadless beach paradise of Fire Island and creation instead of a Fire Island National Seashore. The battle was a “blueprint for grassroots organizing,” says Verga, professor at Suffolk County Community College. He describes Moses as “undemocratic” and having held “unchecked power.” And even though he never drove an automobile – Moses was chauffeured -- obsessed with cars and warping the area transportation system to make it auto-dependent. Moreover, he tells of Moses being a racist who had the bridges on his Northern State and Southern State Parkways built low to prevent buses from New York City carrying African-Americans and Latinos from traveling under them. Watch the broadcast verion here 28:00 Watch the extended version here 31:52
The Fight Against Monsanto’s Roundup, The Politics of Pesticides Mitchel Cohen #633
This new new—and powerful book—by long-time Green activist Mitchel Cohen with chapters by scientists and activists is the subject of this Enviro Close-Up. Cohen details the case against cancer-causing Roundup, the world’s most-used pesticide. And he discusses “the worldwide battle to defend ourselves and our environment against the peddlers of chemical poisons.” As best-selling author Eve Ensler says, “This may be one of the most important books you read this year. We are being poisoned and this book is sounding a well-informed alarm.” ECU #633 broadcast version program here 28:00 - Watch the extended version here 31:37
Defend H2O #632 Guest: Kevin McAllister
Kevin McAllister, founding president of Defend H20, discusses the organization's mission of "defending clean water and the coastal zone through science, education and law." He details the impacts of climate change, the consequent rise of sea level and what needs to be done. He criticizes the expensive and unsuccessful "folly" of dumping sand on beaches and the "armoring" of coastlines with hard structures. And he scores the lethality to marine life by use of the pesticide methoprene. ECU #632 View full program here
Grassroots Environmental Education #631 Guest: Patti Wood
Patti Wood, executive director of Grassroots Environmental Education, speaks about the threats to life of fracking, artificial turf and wireless radiation—including cell phones and now of 5G networks. She details what people can do to challenge these dangers and what her organization is doing. She speaks about how in breaking apart underground shale deposits in fracking to extract gas and oil, radioactive materials are released—and some 600 chemicals are utilized many of them cancer causing. She tells of the health toll of artificial turf. She discusses the health impacts of cell phones and 5G wireless networks. She says: “We think that educating the public is the most important thing because the only thing more powerful than money is public opinion.” And with that education are plans for action. ECU #631 View full program here
Maglev Trains Ep. 630 Guest: Ernest Fazio
Ernest Fazio, communications director of Maglev 2000 and co-author of the book Maglev America: How Maglev Will Transform the World Economy, emphasizes in this Enviro Close-Up how maglev (for magnetic levitation) trains are environmentally friendly, using magnetism not fossil fuel. He describes the pressure by vested interests including the airline and trucking industries to suppress the introduction of maglev trains in the U.S. He tells of how they run at speeds of several hundreds of miles an hour and now operate in Japan and China. As The Guardian describes the maglev train: “Clean, green, quick and quiet, no wheels, no engines to fail, able to stop quickly and guide off noiselessly.” ECU #630 View full program here (28:00)
WeAct for Environmental Justice
Cecil Corbin-Mark, deputy director of We Act for Environmental Justice, speaks on how hazardous waste facilities and other sources of toxic pollution have been routinely sited in minority communities in the United States. He tells of how his Harlem-based organization was started to challenge this form of racism -- and how it is in the forefront in New York City, and now nationally, in fighting for environmental justice. #620 View Full Program Here
Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman: Nuclear Power Today (Airing on Free Speech TV Sat. Oct. 27th, 2018 4PM EST)
Alec Baldwin kicks off the latest “Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman” program blasting the nuclear power industry as “criminal” and being like the tobacco and gun industries in not caring about killing people. They “want to walk over a pile of dead bodies,” declares Baldwin.
View full program here "Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman: Nuclear Power Today" ECU #629 (28:45)
TURNING THE HEAVENS INTO A WAR ZONE (Airing on Free Speech TV Friday September 28th, 2018 at 11PM EST)
This "Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman" spotlights how if Trump gets his way on formation of a U.S. Space Force, the heavens would become a war zone. Inevitably, there would be military conflict in space. The Space Force scheme flies in the face of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 that designates space as the global commons to be used for peaceful purposes. Space weaponry would be nuclear-powered—as Reagan's “Star Wars” scheme was to be, with nuclear reactors and plutonium systems on orbiting battle platforms providing the power for hypervelocity guns, particle beams and laser weapons. Amid the many horrible things being done by the Trump administration, turning the heavens into a war zone would be the most terribly destructive. The coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, Bruce Gagnon, is featured in the program. View full program here Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman #628 28:00)
Deepwater Wind with Clint Plummer
Deepwater Wind is the leading offshore wind developer in the U.S. The company's innoovative Block Island Wind Farm, its placement now underway, will be the first offshore wind farm for the nation. It is to be followed by Deepwater ONE, also east of Long Island, providing power to Long Island and southern New England. And then Garden State Offshore Energy off New Jersey. Clint Plummer, vice president for development of Deepwater Wind, discusses how offshore wind -- an energy source well advanced in Europe, led by the U.K., Germany and Denmark, provides abundant, clean and cost-effective power.
Center for Environmental Health with Ansje Miller
The Center for Environmental Health is the leading nonprofit organization in the U.S. protecting children and families from disease-causing chemicals in consumer products and in the air, water and food. CEH Eastern States Director Ansje Miller explains how every day Americans are exposed to hundreds of harmful chemicals without their knowledge and consent and how her organization works to change the way business does business -- and has had major successes.
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