CLAUSSEN: Well, let me say that one and a half percent is an EPA estimate and we don’t actually know whether that’s the right number or not. But there are many sources of methane. I mean, natural gas leaks is a relatively small amount compared to livestock or landfills or other ways t...
ALDY: Well, I think it’s important to illustrate again, and we’ve seen this over the course of a number of these reports that have been issued in the past decade, that EPA’s been promulgating regulations that make us as a society better off, that deliver public health benefits - when ...
CURWOOD: It's Living On Earth, I'm Steve Curwood. They call it “wonderful Copenhagen,” and the Danish city has now determined that on a net basis it will stop adding climate changing gases to the atmosphere by 2025. The decision came in an August 2012 city council vote that orders a s...
CURWOOD: The food and agricultural biotechnology companies that develop genetically modified crops recently won a victory in the US Congress. In a last minute crush to enact a stop-gap Continuing Resolution to avoid a US government shutdown, a little known amendment or rider was tucke...
SOMMERS: The topics where they’re seems to be more protection are the politically sensitive ones. So things like climate change, like salmon fisheries, resource extraction. But these aren’t communications policies that apply to all federal government scientists that were able to find ...
SELIGSOHN: Well, China is taking it seriously. They have a commitment, starting in Copenhagen, to actually reduce the carbon intensity of their economy. And they take this international commitment quite seriously. China is also in the process of implementing pilot cap and trade progra...
The most important issue before we worry about every line of any legislation is, is the Congress of the United States going to wake up and say we have a planetary crisis here and we have got to address it. And if you ask me, and I already deal with a lot of issues out there, my greate...
HOLMAN: Yes. You’re exactly right. He was actually killed in a village called Progreso, known as a coal mining village. And from that people have inferred the link between him and mining, and several people have said that saying he was sort of making the change to becoming a miner fro...
GOLDENBERG: You're talking about a range of groups here. You're talking about think tanks, organizations like the Heartland Institute in Chicago which over the years has organized annual conferences which are kind of an alternative to the UN climate conference where gather scientists ...
DEROCHER: None of the options we outlined in this paper really do much good in the longer term if we don't deal with greenhouse gas emissions. The whole field of conservation biology hinges on the idea that you have the habitat of the species in place, so that you can actually keep th...
BIALIC: I’m glad you brought up the voluntary labels. And you’re right about milk. Voluntary labeling puts the responsibility on the wrong party. And the problem is, most supermarkets in this country and most consumers do not have access to the products, that say, produced without GMO...
And the really unusual thing about the Fern Lake fire in Forest Canyon is that there's really no evidence of past fires. When we core trees there are a lot of very old trees, and when I say very old trees, I mean 600, 700-year-old trees are abundant in this valley. None of them are in...
CHAMEIDES: Well I think it's such a wonderful wonderful concept. First of all we want people to get out and bike and it’s good for their health and good for the environment, but riding a bicycle's problematic, you're out in the open, you don't have protection from the sun and this won...
[ARCHIVE TAPE: William Ruckelshaus, President Nixon’s head man on environment was on the stand today before Senator Muskie of Maine who has dwelled on this issue himself. They were taking about clean water. How long is it going to take? I’m going to have to acquire some kind of nation...
CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth, I'm Steve Curwood. In Hermann Melville's classic tale of a whale, the narrator – called Ishmael – boards a schooner in the port at the heart of the whaling industry, New Bedford, Massachusetts. New Bedford was "the city that lit the world," back when wha...
ALDY: Well, let’s be clear, though, that person who is working minimum wage, might not be paying income taxes, but that person is paying payroll taxes. One could actually look at using a carbon tax, in part, to reduce the tax on labor, which a lot of economist would say: ‘Hey, that co...
Americans have voted to give President Obama a second term. Now he has four more years to make progress on environmental issues, such as climate change. Host Steve Curwood discusses the possible environmental priorities with ConservAmerica’s Vice President for Government and Political...
JACOB: I would say – enough of this talk, let’s get to action. First of all, you have to have good engineering plans, which hasn’t happened, we have general ideas of how we might go about. But, for instance, there are engineers within the MTA, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority...
MAXMIN: I’m here because I believe that climate change is the defining issue of our generation, and for a long time environmentalists have been trying to fight global warming by promoting individual action and changing light bulbs, and all that’s important and it brings those issues i...
CZEBINIAK: Sure. Greenpeace sent a team to investigate the REDD program in Chiapas to see whether or not its delivering on its claim of emissions reductions. And what we found is a significant lack of transparency in what is being promoted. Among other things, no baseline has been est...
TEMPLE: His notes were taken in a shorthand and what he noted was the time at which he first heard each bird joining the chorus. And he then took notes on how frequently he heard each species singing. So with that information, we could actually put the birds into the proper sequence a...
Air Date: Week of September 21, 2012 stream /download this segment as an MP3 file Prospect Park Bicycle Path in New York City. (New York City Department of Transportation.) Pediatrician Richard Jackson won this year’s Heinz Environment Prize. Dr. Jackson believes our built environment...
NAYAK: I mean I think at the end of the day he is certainly one of the more extreme anti-environmental members that were on Governor Romney's short list. I think you have someone like Tim Pawlenty who used to believe in global warming, has actually been a part of passing clean energy ...
That leads to a whole cascading effect of feeding other birds that prey on these kinds of fish. Certainly allowing fishermen to get out on the river again, and fish for these species and get back out into the ocean. These fish historically were prey to cod, haddock, bluefish, tuna - a...
Air Date: Week of June 1, 2012 stream /download this segment as an MP3 file Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff recently vetoed portions of a controversial forest code and, in effect, postponed any final decisions until after Brazil hosts the Rio +20 environmental summit in June. Host ...
GELLERMAN: Now, from small-scale gold mines in Nigeria we go to the massive mines in South Africa, which has long had the Midas touch. Over the past century forty percent of all the gold that’s been mined has come from South Africa. But all that glitters is definitely not gold. The ro...
TYSON: Excellent, excellent! Thank you! What I would do is create an entire suite of launch vehicles that can be differently configured depending on the needs. So if you need to go into space, you strap it together, four rockets from column A, two from column B, that gets you to deep ...
DALY: It’s not an easy question to give a single answer to. I think it’s clear that genes by itself do not cause autism in the way that a single gene causes Huntington’s disease or cystic fibrosis. Now it’s hard at this point of our evolution of genetics, since we’ve only discovered a...
FRAZIER: What it is doing is helping people like June Chappel. Chappel and a group of her neighbors in Hopewell Township, in Washington County, leased their land for drilling. The company they leased to, Range Resources, built an impoundment behind Chappel’s house to store water produ...
DENISON: Unfortunately, the answer to that question is no. We have a very obsolete chemical safety law that hasn't been amended for 36 years. So we need to update this law, it's called the Toxic Substances Control Act, and it needs to reflect the most recent and best science that's av...
