Peter Dykstra and Living on Earth's Jenni Doering take a look at nurdles, tiny pellets of plastic that are turning up on coasts around the world. Then, the pair travel to the South African town of Ermelo, where coal miners are trying to switch to solar farms.
In this week's look beyond the headlines, Environmental Health News Editor Peter Dykstra and Host Steve Curwood take a deeper look at the climate costs of plastic manufacturing.
Peter Dykstra joins Bobby Bascomb to discuss calls for climate change to be a centerpiece topic in the upcoming Presidential debates. This week's segment also covers the EPA announcement that the agency would shift focus away from climate change, and towards "community cleanups".
The 2020 republican national Convention featured testimonies from people across the country. Climate change was rarely mentioned in the convention with a few exceptions where curbing carbon emissions where represented as a menace to the American economy.
Peter Dykstra and Host Steve Curwood discuss major tobacco companies' pursuit of a tobacco-based vaccine for COVID-19, then move on to discuss the flooding of the last functioning coal mine in Norway by meltwater from a nearby glacier.
Peter Dykstra talks with Host Steve Curwood about how Costa Rica brought its forests back to life with aggressive measures to protect public lands, and incentives for landowners to convert from logging to participating in ecotourism.
Peter Dykstra and Bobby Bascomb go Beyond the Headlines to talk about how resource extraction is impacting Indigenous communities from the Amazon rainforest to the Sámi in Finland. And in the history calendar, Peter and Bobby remember two Brazilian environmental activists who were murdered in retaliation for their efforts to protect the Amazon rainforest.
Peter Dykstra and Steve Curwood cover the fall of a major fracking company, the end of the road for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and the shutdown of the contentious Dakota Access Pipeline pending more environmental review. They discuss President Trump's downplaying the lethality of COVID-19, which has hit close to home. And they take a trip back to the 1995 Midwest heat wave that previewed the growing health risks of climate disruption.
Experts across the spectrum agree that the Trump administration's Affordable Clean Energy Rule, which replaced the Clean Power Plan, doesn't pass the test on the basis of critical science, industry experience, or technological feasibility.
COVID-19 has all of us cleaning more—but the products designed to kill viruses and bacteria can have dangerous health impacts. Here's how to scrub safely.
Researchers say that more microplastics pollution is getting into farm soil than oceans—and these tiny bits are showing up in our fruits, veggies, and bodies.
