This week:

• Science Correspondant Sapna Sharma recounts her experiences at the University of Toronto symposium and Al Gore lecture, Moving Canada towards sustainability.
• Jordan Poppenk speaks with Michael Lewis Johnson from Streets are for People about their new campaign, I’ll quit smoking if you quit smogging.
• Webhost Ryan Wiseman joins us in studio to speak about green web resources.

The headlines in brief:

• A group of chemicals widely used as flame retardants are so harmful Environment Canada has added them to the country’s list of toxic chemicals and wants manufacturers banned from making them;
• 1500 people and a large side-show of activists, rush-ticket seekers and scalpers came to hear Al Gore speak on Wednesday;
• The University of Toronto is the new site for the Canadian branch of the Jane Goodall Institute;
• Legislation to stop Great Lakes water from being shipped out of the region is being finalized;
• Environmental activists gathered in Montreal this week to denounce federal government inaction on climate change;
  Nicholas Stern, an economist known around the world for sounding the fiscal alarm on climate change, visited Canada to speak with Environment Minister John Baird;
• Canadian researchers have co-authored a biodiversity study on DNA bar-coding;
  The national media are waking up to environmental issues, with major new reporting efforts by the Toronto Star and the Globe & Mail;
• Nine American states sued the US Government over toxic emissions from cement plants;
• Hundreds of protesters in Poland expressed their concerns about a new highway construction that would cross a rare peat bog;
• The government of Australia has announced that it plans to phase out incandescent lightbulbs within the next three years, and Ontario may follow suit;
• Garbage carried by ocean currents is becoming a new source of friction between China and Taiwan;
• A 15-year-old British student has built a biodiesel processing system in his family’s barn;
• A new solar balloon technology might cut the cost of solar energy by 90% in the next few years.

You can download the show here (right click, save as…), or listen in the player ** Note: player will close if you surf away from the page**

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This week:

• Theological correspondant Simon Watson speaks with celebrated ecofeminist and touring professor Rosemary Radford Ruether.
• Jordan Poppenk speaks with Laura Telford, Executive Director of Canadian Organic Growers.
• Jordan uncovers a hidden cache of listener mail.

.
.

.

.

.

.

.

The headlines in brief:

• The House of Commons passed a bill on Wednesday designed to force the minority Conservative government to achieve the steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions required by the Kyoto Protocol on climate change;
• The city is being accused of turning its back on its own environmental goals after the cycling committee had its funding target for bike lanes cut in half;
• Oakville council voted overwhelmingly to pass a bylaw banning the cosmetic use of pesticides;
• A lethal fungus has colonized Canada’s temperate West Coast, which scientists indicate may have resulted from global warming;
• Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore has rebuked Conservatives for suggesting he endorsed their performance on climate change;
• The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy released its report on Capital Markets and Sustainability, calling for a set of recommendations for overcoming barriers related to fiduciary duty, materiality, and short-termism (get the report);
• Canada has refused to support a legally binding global pact to cut highly toxic mercury pollution;
• A Dutch-based oil trading company has agreed to pay $197 million to settle claims that it dumped toxic waste in the Ivory Coast city of Abijan;
• New Zealand’s Prime Minister Helen Clark has said that the country will aim to become carbon neutral;
  Researchers have discovered that atmospheric carbon dioxide is being pushed deeper into the oceans than was previously thought;
• Scientists are uncovering the strange world of lakes and rivers beneath the ice of Antarctica. Current climate models fail to take this vigorous water flow into account.

You can download the show here (right click, save as…), or listen in the player ** Note: player will close if you surf away from the page**

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This week:

• Jordan Poppenk speaks with Atmospheric Physicist and University of Toronto University Professor Dr. Richard Peltier about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Follow this link to read the summary of the document’s findings.

• Arts correspondant Letitia Henville speaks with Bruce Rosensweet from Artscape Green Arts Barns, which is redeveloping historic TTC streetcar repair barns in a $3 million provincial bid to create a convergence centre for the arts and the environment.

The headlines in brief:

• The IPCC report was released with much fanfare, marking a scientific 90 percent probability that climate change was human caused, and indicating Canada would be particularly hard hit by climate change;
• Mr Harper projected in a policy speech on Wednesday that by 2010 Canada’s emissions would be about 46 per cent above the targets it had agreed to hit by 2012;
• Provincial leaders, impatient with the Harper government, are working toward their own a national energy plan;
• Tickets for a lecture by Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore were in such demand that they crashed the ticket website by flooding it with 23,000 hits in 3 minutes;
• The International Joint Commission, or IJC, wants Canada and the U.S. to make themselves accountable for cleaning up and protecting the Great Lakes;
• The warming climate is resulting in more precipitation in Canada’s north, with increases of up to 45 percent in places;
• The American Enterprise Institute is offering scientists and economists $10,000 for essays that cast doubt on the latest IPCC report;
• 46 countries have called for a new, more powerful UN environmental body;
• The UN’s lifting of a ban on caviar has conservationists and chefs concerned;
• Sea turtles are dying in huge numbers in India and Bangladesh, and fishing may be the culprit.

You can download the show here (right click, save as…), or listen in the player ** Note: player will close if you surf away from the page**

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This week:

• We feature a lecture by John Bacher, author of PetroTyranny and researcher of the Preservation of Agricultural Lands Society, about the fossil fuel industry, public transportation, and energy efficiency.
• Jordan Poppenk speaks with Billy Parish, Coordinator of the Energy Action Coalition, a group which has united students on 584 campuses across North America.
• Kevin Farmer and Jordan Poppenk discuss the coming IPCC report, Climate Action Week, and the dismissal of Johanne Gélinas as Commissioner of the Environment in the Auditor General’s office.

The headlines in brief:

• Canada’s environment ombudsman, Johanne Gélinas, was fired on Tuesday amid reports she had irritated the Auditor General by demanding action on climate change;
• The federal and Nova Scotia governments have put forth a plan to bury the Sydney tar ponds;
• The caribou population in Canada’s Northwest Territories has fallen by between 40 and 86 percent over the last 10 years;
• 93 per cent of Canadians polled said they were willing to make some kind of sacrifice to solve global warming;
• Two NAFTA international investigations into Canada’s enforcement of its environmental laws have not been made public because, according to Sierra Legal, they would be embarrassing for the Canadian government;
• Natural Resources Canada has ordered a group of audits after its bureaucrats botched a $32-million climate-change program for the trucking industry;
• Federal liberals dug up a letter written by PM Stephen Harper while in the Canadian Alliance Party, in which Harper calls for support to defeat the Kyoto accord and expresses strong skepticism about global warming science.
• US Democrats’ first investigative hearing since they took control of Congress heard overwhelming evidence that the Bush administration has been censoring government scientists’ work on climate change;
• The State of Queensland has stated that they now have no choice but to begin drinking recycled sewage water due to severe drought in Australia;
• People around the world turned their lights off for five minutes in a symbolic gesture aimed at raising awareness about climate change.

You can download the show here (right click, save as…), or listen in the player ** Note: player will close if you surf away from the page**

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.