Podcasts

Every week, my cohost Rick Habgood and I interview some of the leading thinkers and doers in the field of climate change on Breakin’ Ice: The Climate Change Reality show on CFUV. The show airs every Tuesday from 4:00-5:00 PST on CFUV, available on the web or, if you live in the Victoria area, on 101.9 FM.

Here are some of our top shows as podcasts:

• Prof. Michael M’Gonigle – On sustainability and climate justice
• Guy Dauncey – On the myriad of solutions to peak oil and climate change
• David Holmgren – On peak oil and transitioning to a post-peak world
• Jim Harris - National Post green energy columnist, former Green Party of Canada leader, author and consultant on greening business. In this interview, Jim was full of impressive figures about how large corporations had saved billions of dollars and tons of carbon by greening their manufacturing and processes. Jim also delved a bit into peak oil, which he believes has begun.
• Jim Hoggan – Author of Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, which “documents one of the most disgusting stories ever hidden about corporate disinformation. What you’ll discover in this book amounts to proof of an intergenerational crime.” according to David Suzuki. Jim also runs desmogblog.com, a site devoted to exposing climate deniers and their lies.
• Elizabeth May – Leader of the Green Party of Canada, Member of the Order of Canada, environmental advisor to former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and author of numerous books, including Global Warming For Dummies. May discusses bringing a child into a world where collapse seems inevitable, the COP15 talks in Copenhagen, and more.
• James Howard Kunstler - Kunstler initially came to widespread attention with The Geography of Nowhere and related books on the topic of American suburban sprawl and how ugly and unsustainable it was. The Long Emergency delved into peak oil, and of course sprawl and the entire economy of the US and developed world is critically dependent upon oil. Kunstler has predicted a long and painful decline as oil supplies peak, and that the current population of the US (and world) will be drastically reduced as a result. His recent novel, World Made by Hand, explores what the United States might be like post-peak oil.
• Dr. Gavin Schmidt - Dr. Gavin Schmidt is a climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, recent author of Climate Change: Picturing the Science, and co-founder of realclimate.org, a site run by real climate scientists devoted to getting out the truth about climate change. In this interview, we talked about his recent book, and about climate change in general. Dr. Schmidt believes there is not yet “reason to despair from the scientific point-of-view,” but that political will is lacking to get serious about the climate crisis.
• Professor Avi Friedman - Professor Avi Friedman is a world-renowned sustainable housing guru, author of Sustainable Residential Development: Planning and Design for Green Neighborhoods and other books, and co-developer of the Grow Home, now widely duplicated around the world. Friedman regards the Grow Home and its next-generation successor the Next Home as part of the solution to the climate crisis. In this interview, Professor Friedman talks about sustainable housing and the climate crisis, and while he remains optimistic, the prognosis is not currently promising.
• Dr. Gordon McBean - Dr. Gordon McBean holds many titles, but the primary focus of this fascinating interview was the Adaptation to Climate Change Team (ACT) finding on climate change impacts for Canada and BC. Dr. McBean is also the Director of Policy Studies of the Institute of Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) and a Professor of Geography and Political Science at The University of Western Ontario. From ACT: Canadians face major impacts of climate change over the coming years, such as violent storms, sea-level rise, compromised water supply, energy challenges and health risks. To date, the climate change debate in North America has focused on emissions reduction; however, there is a clear need for a parallel emphasis on adaptation measures. Without this planning, the damage and costs caused by climate change effects will be unsustainably severe, and it is vital that we equip our decision-makers now with resources to guide them through the challenges.

All interviews