Producer Daryn Caister speaks with National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy CEO David McLaughlin on their recent report: “Parallel Paths: Canada-US Climate Policy Choices”.

Daryn speaks with Helena Norberg-Hodge on her new film “The Economics of Happiness” which deals with the entangles issues surrounding environment, poverty and globalism.

Toronto spoken word artist Ian Kamau to recites one of his pieces, The Pessimist.

A small item in the most recent Water issue of Alternatives Journal makes the point that beer brewing is a surprisingly water intensive process. Some breweries use as much as 10L of water to run their operations for each litre of beer produced. One brewery though – Steam Whistle in Toronto – has taken extraordinary measures to reduce their water use by 14%, or 5 million litres per year.

Producer Peter Stock was curious to see what environmental altruism looked like first hand so he visited the Steam Whistle brewery at the Roundhouse in Toronto.

According to documents released by an access to information request by the Pembina Institute, Canadian diplomats may be actively campaigning against American environmental policies that might affect Canadian Tar Sands development. While this might not surprise the cynics out there it does contradict the Harper government stated position that it is waiting to update a variety of environmentally related policies here in Canada so that they can “harmonize” them with the Americans. The Obama administration, while slowly in some people’s opinions, has been moving ahead with a variety of environmental bills, bills which it seems the Canadian diplomatic team are attempting to resist, lest we have to mimic them here in Canada. Mark Brooks author of the Earthgauge blog and Montreal Journalist tracked down Danielle Droitch from Pembina to investigate the issue.

Daryn Caister is joined by TGM founder Jordan Poppenk and Vanessa Purdy to talk about the best and worst of 2010 in from the world of environmental news.

In our second segment Daryn is joined by Peter Stock, Martín Waldman and long time TGM pundit Kevin Farmer.

This week, in an attempt to stave off undue vanity, we will be featuring some content from another great Canadian environmental programmer. Mark Brooks is the author behind the blog Earthgauge. Mark is an environmental journalist, consultant and educator based out of Quebec who produces some content for CKUT in Montreal. We liked his stuff and thought we should share his good work with our listeners so this week we will be featuring a two part piece he did interviewing Dr. John O’Connor about increases in cancers attributed to Tar Sands projects in Alberta.