Unprecedented seems too trite a term to describe Washington’s new normal. Last week, perched atop the steps of the Environmental Protection Agency, and flanked by a phalanx of coal workers, President Trump signed the death warrant of Obama’s Clean Power Plan.
In an apparent continuation of his unheard of grudge match with the former president, Trump claimed to be taking “historic steps” to “cancel job-killing regulations.” But, Trump’s executive order is actually more than petty spite, or even populist grandstanding, it’s actually just one part of a larger plan determined to annihilate all Obama administration efforts to curb carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, reports from media fringe outfits like the World Meteorlogical Organization announce, after consecutive years of highest-ever mean temperatures, and record low Arctic ice levels, Planet Earth has entered “truly uncharted territory.”
Dahr Jamail is a journalist and author whose books, ‘The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan and, ‘Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq,’ chronicle his intrepid dispatches from America’s war zones, where he spent more than a year in Iraq, as well as filing reports from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over a 10 year’s span. The Martha Gellhorn Investigative Journalism awardee currently serves as staff reporter at Truthout.org, where his monthly column Climate Disruption Dispatches accompanies his regular articles.
Dahr’s third book, ‘The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible’ is co-authored with Truthout editor, William Rivers Pitt, and his latest is the soon to be released, ‘The End of Ice’.
Dahr Jamail in the first half.
And; while climate disruption, terrorism, war, and rumours of it compete for space in our nightmares, the preeminent global horror is being overlooked. ‘Sleepwalking to Armageddon‘ is pioneering antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott’s latest attempt to bring some semblance of sanity to the political stage. In the book, she assembles contributions from the world’s leading nuclear scientists and thought leaders to “assess the political and scientific dimensions of the threat of nuclear war today.”
Dr. Helen Caldicott is a physician, author, and lecturer who has for more than thirty years studied, written, and campaigned against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and their derivatives, delivering impassioned speeches and making imprecations to both the politicians and power-brokers overseeing the precarious atomic tinderbox.
Dr. Caldicott’s book titles include: ‘If You Love This Planet,’ ‘Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer,’The New Nuclear Danger,’ ‘Depleted Uranium: Metal of Dishonour,’ and ‘If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Heal the Earth.’
Dr. Helen Caldicott on rousing a somnambulant polity in the second half.
And; CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour, in a rare in-studio appearance to bring us up to speed with a Left Coast Events update of some of the good things planned in the coming week around here, and beyond too. But first, Dahr Jamail and the Trump denialists going into overdrive, as climate change accelerates 170 times faster than predicted.