In this segment Betsy and Paul Waldman of Media Matters swat away those pesky climate change myths that keep buzzing out of the mouths of Hannity, Inhofe, et al. They also address some of the mainstream media’s (including the New York Times’) favorite climate change tropes, and provide us with the tools to deconstruct them, for the benefit of your dear old uncle in denial.
LISTEN (11 min)
Picture: Kyle Cassidy
Sander DeVries stops by to tell Betsy about his and his brothers’ jobs moonlighting as superheroes who are going to rid your life of junkmail. I’m getting at least 41 pounds of junkmail a year, my share of more than a hundred million trees a year. So there is no doubt that I am going to sign up with 41 Pounds and pay them 41 dollars for five years of junkmail amnesty. The fact that half of that 41 bucks is going to charity is the icing on the cake. LISTEN (7 min)
We’re getting better, but we still need to learn how best to market the product Earth. Chip Heath and his brother Dan have written Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, a book that surveys the whole spectrum of ideas that successfully lodged themselves in the collective imagination, from Kennedy’s Moon Mission to Bill McKibben’s notion of "Cradle to Cradle" Architecture, and finds out what made them stick: "We talk in these abstract ways that mean things to people inside the movement, but that don’t necessarily mean things to outsiders." LISTEN (11 min)
Watershed Media Director Dan Imhoff (and author of Paper or Plastic: Searching for Solutions to an Overpackaged World) joins Betsy to talk about his crucial (and quite colorful and handy) new book Food Fight: A Citizen’s Guide to the Farm Bill. The US Farm Bill wields enormous leverage over our food and our health, and the extent to which we are informed of its contents is the extent to which we can avert a looming diabetes crisis among our children, and apply subsidies in a way that makes dietary and economic sense. Want to help the family farmer? The first thing you can do is stop assuming that the US Farm Bill is only relevant to the family farmer. LISTEN (9 min)
On day thirty-two of his trek through Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, renowned explorer Will Steger takes a break to tell Betsy how climate change is effecting the livelihoods of the people who have lived there for centuries: "This is ground zero of global warming." This is also Global Warming 101, Will’s initiative to share with us the cultural face of the lands that, through no fault of their own, are the first to experience a man-made climate. LISTEN (11 min)