California Drought: Is this the big one?

RADIO ECOSHOCK SPECIAL ON CALIFORNIA DROUGHT Despite recent rains, California's reservoirs are near empty, snow-pack light, and groundwater depleted. Four experts on a drought that really started in 2006, impacts on economy, food, farming, and nature. Guests: Dr. Peter Gleick, Dr. Jay Famiglietti, David Schroeder, Dr. Reagan Waskom

http://tinyurl.com/lrqaxqe

THE CALIFORNIA DROUGHT IS NOT OVER!

Rainstorms finally arrived in California, after a 14 month drought with no significant rain. But the big reservoirs are still pitifully low, and snow pack is less than a quarter of normal. Hundreds of thousands of acres will not be planted, and food bills will likely go up in North America, and possibly around the world.

This is the Radio Ecoshock special on the California drought, as a case study of what we can expect in many parts of the Earth. I've lined up 4 experts all with something new for you.

Dr. Peter Gleick is a climate and water specialist who has been warning this could happen for years.

Dr. Reagan Waskom is another water and agriculture expert from Colorado.

We connect with boots-on-the ground water conservation specialist David Schroeder in Montclair, right on the edge of thirsty Los Angeles.

Finally, we get back to the big picture, as Professor Jay Famiglietti at University of California Irvine warns of depletion of the ground water under one of the world's biggest food producing areas. That's a trend all over the world, as we race toward peak water.

Download/listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

PETER GLEICK: Is the drought climate change?

Our first guest is Dr. Peter Gleick. He's president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California, one of the world's leading independent think tanks on water issues. Peter is also a scientist known around the world.

Peter introduced the term "Bellwether Drought" for this event. We know climate change threatens the water cycle. Scientists believe the wet areas (like the UK!) will get wetter, and the dry areas like California, will get dryer. So the dice are loaded for more droughts to occur in this major food producing area.

Dr. Gleick points out we could say this drought started in at least 2006. There have been several drier-than-normal years since then. Scientists have found records showing California has experienced droughts lasting more than a hundred years in the past, in the 1100's for example.

So we may be asking if human-induced climate change has triggered this drought cycle. The causes of regional weather events are complex. We have ocean currents, natural cycles like El Nino and El Nina, and changes to the Jet Stream. All of those, especially the Jet Stream (as shown by the work of Jennifer Francis et al at Rutgers) can be influenced by climate change.

It's a Bellwether event because whether or not we can nail down direct causation by climate disruption - it's a sure test of what is likely during the coming decades. As in Australia, it is possible Euro-humans arrived in California during a cyclical wet spell that was bound to end. But have we hastened that process?

I also talk with Peter about desalination, it's promises and obstacles. A new desalination plant has been build to feed the San Diego water system. But really, it's so energy intensive and expensive that desalination cannot save the whole California agricultural system.

Peter Gleick is an influential scientist in many places. He talks about the global work his institute is involved in, and it's heavy-duty stuff. It's cool he Tweeted this program link out to his 11,000 plus followers.

You can download or listen to this 18 minute interview with Dr. Peter Gleick in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

DR. JAY FAMIGLIETTI: Looking at the drought from space.

When the rains don't fall in California, every one checks their wallet for rising food prices. But rain or not, cities and farmers are pumping out California groundwater at an alarming rate. Thanks to new satellite science, now we know how much of that unseen wealth has been depleted. It's a problem for farmers and all humans all over the world, as we grab water stored over the ages, to keep us alive right now. At some point, the water runs out.

Dr. Jay Famiglietti is a Professor of Earth System Science, and Director of the Center for Hydrologic Modeling at the University of California, Irvine. He's an expert's expert.

When the federal government, and state agencies cut off water supplies, as they did just this past month, farmers don't just roll over and die. All those who can start pumping up groundwater furiously. They've been doing that for decades, always at an increasing level. You may think ground water gets replenished with rains, but some of it was captured and contained over millions of years. When I have a glass of water in my village, that water is 100,000 years old.

So just like oil, ground water is a limited resource. When you run out, that's it.

Amazing to tell, scientists can measure the rate of groundwater depletion in California from space. The twin GRACE satellites have shown the loss of mass in Greenland as the glaciers melt. Now scientists at the University of California Irvine report that California is setting new records for groundwater loss. The state is literally getting lighter.

Find out about the GRACE satellites here. Oh, and by the way, one of their top stories is the discovery that climate change is causing the Earth's poles to migrate. Don't believe that? Read about it here.

One result is the land starts to sink, once the water below is removed. That's serious in the Sacramento delta, where so much of North America's fruits and vegetables are grown. Once it goes too low, a rush of salt water, say from a storm surge, can take thousands and thousands of prime acres out of production.

Jay Familietti describes what we know. He says the average of prediction of when California will run out of groundwater at current rates is 60 years from now. After that, the glory days of big populations and big cities may be done. Some experts say it will come sooner than that.

That same story is being repeated, even worse, in countries like China and India. India is pumping out the water tables at an alarming rate. In both countries, as thousands of wells go dry, they drill deeper, and burn even more energy with bigger pumps, just to keep up. Some places are already out of water, and out of production.

Keep this story in mind as you build the big picture: peak groundwater. It's coming.

By the way, I ask Dr. Famiglietti what happens to all the water we pump out for our fields and cities. Some of it goes into the ocean, to become salt water. The warmer atmosphere can hold 4% more water vapor already, since 1970, and that's a huge amount. Other water ends up falling in those places that are already wet.

Don't miss this 12 minute interview with Jay Famiglietti. It's short but powerful. Listen or download in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Read a key article by Dr. Famiglietti "Epic California Drought and Groundwater: Where Do We Go From Here?". And check out his LA Times Op-Ed from 2013, "California's water house of cards".

DR. REAGAN WASKOM - Feeding the western food supply

I was referred to Dr. Waskom by Michael Cohen of the Pacific Institute. Even though Waskom is the University of Colorado in Fort Collins, he's one of the country's wisemen when it comes to water supplies and our food system.

Reagan Waskom is the Director of the Colorado Water Institute, and Chair of the Colorado State University Water Center.

It turns out Colorado supplies much of the water to Southern California. We are not talking about the big food production areas, but more the heavy populations in places like Los Anglees. So what happens in Colorado matters a lot to California.

The good news is there is a heavy snow pack this year in Colorado. How useful that is depends on how fast the snow melt is, among other factors.

I ask Dr. Waskom what happens if California really is in a long-term drought. Could we replace all that food with farming somewhere else in the country?

Dr. Waskom has also been studying the big use of water by the fracking industry. We touch on that.

My final question is more personal: "You've taught a lot of students, and graduate students. Do you think young people are more disconnected from natural reality than when you were growing up?"

I learned a lot just talking with the man. You probably will too. Download this 17 minute interview in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

DAVID SCHROEDER on the ground outside of LA

I wanted to get you some reporting from right on the ground in southern California. Acting on a tip from a Radio Ecoshock listener, we've reached David Schroeder. He's a Water Conservation Specialist with the Chino Basin Water District. That's based in Montclair California, right on the edge of one of America's biggest cities, Los Angeles.

We talk about where water for southern California comes from, and what to do when it doesn't. Dave specializes in getting the public involved in tearing up grass to install natural vegetation, to use less water in the home, and so on. There isn't much farming left in the south of the state. Now the challenge is huge cities and endless suburbs.

Dave lives in the mountains that used to be white with snow in winter, when I lived in L.A. many moons ago. No snow there this year he reports. That's not good news for the coming fire season, for anything.

Download/listen to this 10 minute interview with David Schroeder in CD Quality

WRAP UP

That wraps up my Radio Ecoshock special on the California drought, 2014. I hope you learned, as I did, about where our water comes from, where it's going, and the dangerous tightrope we walk trying to feed a growing world population during climate disruption.

Radio Ecoshock is provided free to more than 75 non-profit radio stations. I depend on your financial help to keep going. Find ways to support this program in this blog, and at the show archive and web site, ecoshock.org

I'm Alex Smith. As always, thank you for listening, and caring about your world.

UNCIVILIZED

Coming up on Radio Ecoshock - hot from Copenhagen, American energy - and the destruction of Africa. Two continents adrift in hard choices. We know climate change is upon us. It's just a matter of how fast, and how bad. The struggle stretches from Washington to Denmark to Kenya, where the President's family live, among the growing millions of climate refugees.

RADIO STATIONS: Background music for our feature on Africa is: "Talking Timbuktu" Ali Farka Toure with Ry Cooder. Note, each half of the program can be run as separate half hour features. Paul Kingsnorth interview is 27:24; Copenhagen Digest is 29:30. Links below.

Stick around, in our second half hour, we're off to Copenhagen, with voices you've never heard from the mainstream media. What Obama can do - no matter what watered down roadblocks Congress puts in the way. And why the fragile culture of Africa will boil away, with just 2 degrees of global temperature rise. Guess what! People there are not willing to die for our energy economy. From out of the darkness, Radio Ecoshock, with a digest of the best of independent radio coming from the Copenhagen convention center - courtesy of Phil England of climateradio.org.

Radio Ecoshock Show "Uncivilized" 1 hour CD quality (55 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)



But we open with the question: when does doubt become realism?

"...civilization as we have known it, is coming to an end; brought down by a rapidly changing climate, a cancerous economic system, and the ongoing mass destruction of the non-human world."

That's the starting point for our next guest, Paul Kingsnorth, a founder of The Dark Mountain Project. Paul is a well-educated, well-published environmentalist in England. He's been arrested at a protest, helped edit the Ecologist magazine, and Greenpeace publications. He appears regularly in British newspapers, radio, and television.

ALEX SMITH: Let's start with current events: was there ever any hope that climate change could be stopped, by our current political leaders, at Copenhagen?

PAUL KINGSNORTH: I don't think so, no, not at all. The conclusion was pretty foregone from the beginning. I think that the ways we look at climate change are probably the wrong ways.

If we look at climate change as a "problem" that we can solve within a certain amount of time, if we can just get the technology right, and if we can get the political will, and if we can build a big mass movement of people.

I don't think that's really what it is. I think climate change is almost an existential problem for us. It's a predicament we have to live with, rather than a problem we have to solve.

And I think the root of that is the fact that we treat climate change as if it's something that's external. It's a sort of problem we've created that we can solve with human genius. But climate change is our society, climate change is who we are.

Climate change is our computers, our televisions. It's our flights. And we're all complicit in it, those of us living in the rich world.

And the system that the political leaders who gathered in Copenhagen have to promote, because it's what their voters want them to promote, and it's what global corporations and the global economy wants them to promote, is the system that creates climate change.

So it's almost impossible to believe, I think, that they can turn around and suddenly flick a switch and turn it off again.

And I think we're having real trouble understanding that. I think that applies to environmentalists as well as the public as a whole. We still see climate change as a kind of challenge that we can tackle with the old fashioned methods of protesting, and marching, and letter writing, and campaigning. And I don't think it's responding to that at all.

ALEX: One thing brought home to me, by the alleged "leak" of the Danish text, - we in the West are committed to the expediency of atmospheric imperialism. We'll keep polluting, even if we lose whole countries and continents in the less developed world. Am I being pessimistic, or realistic?

PAUL KINGSNORTH: This is one of the things the Dark Mountain Project was set up: to try to distinguish between pessimism and realism.

I think that the whole of the environmental movement, in which I've been involved for a long time, is built on this edifice of hope. And hope can be a very good thing. But if it's false hope, it's a very dangerous thing.

And we've almost come to believe that anything's possible if we just hope for it enough. And I think we need to take a cold, and a hard, and a realistic look at the way the world is, and the way that human society is. And the way that human society is rubbing up against the ecological reality.

It's all very well, taking to the streets to kind of urge our leaders to act at Copenhagen. But our leaders are running this enormous machine, and this machine IS about cannibalizing resources from the rest of the world. It's about keeping the consumer economy going. You can't just turn that around, however much mass action you have.

And the problem is with climate change, is that actually you're never going to get millions of people on the streets to campaign against climate change. Because they'll be campaigning against their own way of life. They'll be campaigning against their own comfort, in the West at least.

And so we're all complicit in that system. The voters are complicit, the corporations are complicit, the politicians are complicit. We might want to stop climate change, but actually I don't think that we can, at least within the time scale that's apparently available to us.

I think we need to be honest about that. Because only when we're honest about that, can we start to think about what we do next....

Hear this interview with Paul Kingsnorth. (27 min, 6 MB)

Find out more about The Dark Mountain Project

or Paul Kingsnorth

COPENHAGEN: AMERICA VS. AFRICA

There is no single story coming out of the Copenhagen climate talks in December 09. There are hundreds. Today we'll cover the struggle of two continents: North America, the great wealthy polluter, and Africa, the poorest victim of global climate change.



We'll do it as only radio can. On a shoestring, a band of radio activists found the voices we never hear in mainstream media. They broadcast it daily to London, to Resonance FM, and to the States through Democracy Now! You'll hear Amy Goodman, Phil England, and Frederika Whitehead, plus audio from 350.org. More importantly, you'll get first hand the voices of the dispossessed, the representatives of Africa.

In spite of my years of studying climate change, my many interviews with top climate scientists, I never understood until now the real impact of climate disruption on Africa. Where hundreds of millions depend upon simple rain-fed agriculture, the rains are not coming, or flood everything out when they do. Wealth measured in cattle is now mile upon mile of skulls strewn across the widest part of the continent. Lake Chad, Africa's largest lake, has almost disappeared, drying out into a few marshes. Even farming rich South Africa is drying out, with worse to come in the next decades. We all need to wake up and listen to the distress calls from Africa.

Here is a map of some climate change impacts on Africa.

Meanwhile, the oil empire of America is trying to decide what to do. We'll begin there, with a quick news bite from Amy Goodman, an interview with Cassie Siegel on the legal moves, and then Naomi Klein on Obama's damage.

Does America have to gut the Clean Air Act to make new climate legislation? Hear Phil England of climateradio.org with Cassie Siegel, of the Center for Biological Diversity....

Incredibly, in oil-dependent Nigeria, there has been a major conference calling for a halt to further oil exploration. Leave it in the soil, to develop a real economy, and to save the climate of Africa. Listen to Phil England of climateradio with Nnimmo Bassey, head of Friends of the Earth, Nigeria.

But African representatives at Copenhagen were aggrieved and angry to discover their Danish hosts colluded with the biggest countries to write a polluters treaty, called the Danish Accord. We play a clip from the spontaneous protest that broke out in the main conference hall. It's heart-breaking - a deal that condemns millions of Africans to drought, more diseases, and heat deaths.

And it all links back to the United States, historically the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. We wrap up with a passionate letter to Obama, written by the African delegates. Really, it's a letter to Americans as they decide about their energy future - and the right to go on polluting the atmosphere.

Listen to this digest of alternative radio. (29 min 30 sec, 7 MB)
http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/climate09/ES_Copenhagen_Digest_1_LoFi.mp3

It's official, this past decade was the warmest ever recorded. Doubt and despair, as the world hurtles into more decades of climate change.

Alex Smith

SAFE CLIMATE - OR ENDLESS WAR?

Those are the choices.

CONNECTIONS FOR THIS WEEK'S RADIO ECOSHOCK SHOW
Week of May 30th, 2008

Guest: Michael T. Klare (new book "Rising Powers, Shrinking World")
Listen to the Ecoshock Klare interview here.
(http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/nuclear/ES_Klare_RisingPowers_LoFi.mp3)
Read his blog at http://www.tomdispatch.com

Space For Peace activist Bruce Gagnon
Listen to the Gagnon interview separately here.
www.ecoshock.org/downloads/nuclear/ES_Gagnon_080521_LoFi.mp3
His web site is http://space4peace.org

Dimitri Orlov on "Re-inventing Collapse. The Soviet Example and American Prospects";
I read the 5 steps of collapse from Orlov's blog at
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com (look for "older posts" at bottom). Then a clip from Orlov talking with KMO on the C-Realm podcast (http://c-realm.org).

Listen to that whole Orlov segment from the Ecoshock show here www.ecoshock.org/downloads/peakoil/ES_Orlov_Collapse_LoFi.mp3

Robert Kennedy Jr. on 5 men who run almost all U.S. media.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQIkMZadApY&feature=related

Is the American empire collapsing? Where are the $$ for new transpo & energy systems, or climate adaptation?

Download this Radio Ecoshock Show 1 hour here: CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

I was in Berlin just after the Wall had fallen. A visit to East Berlin was quite instructive - they were living the low energy life - no bright street lights, no neon signs or advertising at all.

My West German hosts were still shaking their heads in disbelief. Their government discovered the only thing keeping Russian troops in East Germany was this: the Soviet government was so bankrupt, it could not afford to bring the soldiers home. There was no housing for the troops back home, soGerman workers went into the Soviet Union to build apartment buildings. Then the Russian bases were closed.

Is America headed toward the same state of bankruptcy? The United States has bases in over 100 countries. The government puts it all on Master Card, they borrow the whole cost from the countries, the ones who manufacture consumer goods, and provide the oil.

In an article titled "Portrait of an Oil-Addicted Former Superpower," Michael Klare writes: "Whether we know it or not, the energy Berlin Wall has already fallen - and the United States is an ex-superpower-in-the-making."

Michael T. Klare is a professor of Peace and World Security Studies for the Five Colleges, based in Massachusetts. He is a defense columnist for The Nation Magazine. His books "Resource Wars", and then "Blood and Oil" explained our times, just ahead of time. And his newest book is "Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy." It has just come out, published by Metropolitan Books.

We discuss how militarism, and endless war, threaten our ability to adapt and survive rapid climate change. Read more from Michael Klare at his blog:
http://tomdispatch.com

Dimitri Orlov lived through the fall of the Soviet empire. He has a new book "Re-inventing Collapse. The Soviet Example and American Prospects." After some delay, that book is finally available. The publisher is New Society.

This book on collapse emerged from a series of articles titled "Post-Soviet Lessons For A Post-American Century" appearing on the web site "From the Wilderness" hosted by Michael C. Rupert. Rupert was a former cop who dedicated himself to investigating political cover-ups. In August of 2006, Rupert mysteriously disappeared, saying he no longer felt safe in the United States, after various threats and break-ins. His archive is still on the Net at fromthewilderness.com.

Anyway, Orlov outlines 5 stages or signs of collapse which I will read from his blog. Then we'll hear a short clip of Orlov, taken from the C-Realm podcast hosted by KMO.

In his blog, Orlov writes:

"Elizabeth Kübler-Ross defined the five stages of coming to terms with grief and tragedy as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and applied it quite successfully to various forms of catastrophic personal loss, such as death of a loved one, sudden end to one's career, and so forth. Several thinkers, notably James Howard Kunstler and, more recently John Michael Greer, have pointed out that the Kübler-Ross model is also quite terrifyingly accurate in reflecting the process by which society as a whole (or at least the informed and thinking parts of it) is reconciling itself to the inevitability of a discontinuous future, with our institutions and life support systems undermined by a combination of resource depletion, catastrophic climate change, and political impotence....

Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in "business as usual" is lost. The future is no longer assumed resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.

Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that "the market shall provide" is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.

Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that "the government will take care of you" is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.

Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that "your people will take care of you" is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.

Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for "kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity" (Turnbull, The Mountain People). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes "May you die today so that I die tomorrow" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago). There may even be some cannibalism."

Orlov doesn't predict cannibalism as a future for America - he just says some societies have reached terrible stages, and give examples in his book from the dislocated African tribe described in the book "The Mountain People" by Colin M. Turnbull.

Hopefully, by learning from previous cases of collapse, we can learn how to do better, as individual, and as a society. We shouldn't wait until things drop down to the bottom of the pit of collapse.

Find out more about Dimitri Orlov from his blog at cluborlov.blogspot.com - Orlov is spelled orlov.

Let's hear just a couple of minutes from KMO's C-Realm podcast, number 96 for May 14th, 2008. KMO and Orlov are discussing whether the people of the Soviet Union were actually better situated for collapse of their system.

Is anybody sorry the old Soviet Union is gone? They kept massive millions of their own people in prisons. Interrogators used torture. The press was censored and distorted to propaganda. You wouldn't want to live in a society like that.

I run a clip of Bobby Kennedy explaining how 5 corporations control almost all of the TV, radio and print that persuade Americans. Most of the investigative journalists have been fired. The right wing dominates it all. And Kennedy explains how Bush, in exchange for millions in donations, created a new wave of illness and pollution in the United States. The link for this powerful Youtube expose it posted above. Watch it and weep.


And that is why you need alternative media, underground radio, and people like our next guest, Bruce Gagnon.

People all over the world want the United States to take a leadership role in cleaning up fossil fuel emissions, before we lose a livable climate.

Our next guest, Bruce Gagnon says America has far different plans. Instead of converting the economy, the military industrial complex will war it's way to control of the world's energy, through domination of space.

Bruce Gagnon is a Senior Fellow at the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and Co-ordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. Find that at space4peace.org.

You must watch the video "Arsenal of Hypocracy" available from that site, and on Google Video. One hour of your time, one big enlightenment about the shiny new announcements from NASA, and the real reason America wants to dominate space.

We also discuss near-space as a threatened environment in its own right. Greens worry about protecting Antarctica, and the Amazon, without realizing that the space around the planet is so infested with space junk, we may not be able to get away from Earth - ever.

Maybe that would be a good thing for the rest of the universe, consider what we are doing down here.

Alex Smith
host
Radio Ecoshock

Too Hot to Handle!

THIS WEEK: rebroadcast of interview with Canadian environmental historian Colin Duncan, by C.S. Soong of KPFA listener-supported radio (Pacifica) in Berkeley, California. This "Against the Grain" show was originally broadcast May 5th, 2008.

Must-listen radio - so we really "get it" - our strange new future, coming fast, with climate change (no matter what we do.)

Then: an interview with activist singer/songwriter David Rovics, along with samples of his songs.

Here is the blog/script for this show:

Radio Ecoshock Show script 080523 "TOO HOT TO HANDLE"

[quick opening clip from George Michael "Time to Pray"]

Yes, the wounded skies above, say it's much too late.

Pop back a few anti-depressants. This is Radio Ecoshock, I'm Alex Smith

Do we have still have time? Pop star George Michael asked the millions watching the finale of American Idol 2008. He sang of the time of guilty men, in front of a giant screen image of a red and molten world.

That was almost as close as this TV parade of geezer rock came to the real world this year. As though climate change really existed on the Fox network.

But we are all still climate deniers - aren't we? Our eyes watch video of stormy times. Dying bees mean higher berry prices. At the malls, we are still shopping until the end of the world.

Even the experts have trouble internalizing the climbing data of warning, the models of fire, flood, and extinctions. That is one reason I find our next interview so important. A quiet Canadian environmental historian wakes up at his desk. He smells the smoke. The planet really is a tinderbox. Now it is real. Where do we run? What can we do?

Called "Too Hot to Handle" we'll hear veteran Pacifica Radio host C.S. Soong interview Dr. Colin Campbell. The weekly program, called "Against The Grain" is fairly famous in California, and downloaded heavily across the United States. In it, C.S. Soong and his co-host Sasha Lilley take on all kinds of issues, from social justice to peace activism - and the environment.

A Colorado listener suggested this program for Radio Ecoshock. I listened, and realized even after my own work on climate, I still hadn't really grasped the enormity of the social change we are about to experience. Should I call up Colin Campbell and ask him all the same questions?

I don't think so. When someone does it right, it is time for me to step aside, and deliver the straight news you need to know. Colin Duncan doesn't shout. He just cuts the old oil world out from under you, and shows you the tough new future underneath.

With the kind permission of C.S. Soong and his co-producer H.N. Youan, here is "Too Hot to Handle" as broadcast on KPFA Berkeley, May5th, 2008.
-----------
That was a rebroadcast of the program "Against The Grain" with host C.S. Soong. It was originally heard on KPFA listener-supported radio in Berkeley, California on May 5th, 2008. Find the program archives at againstthegrain.org.

While academics help us re-arrange our mental furniture, radio music can reach the whole person. We've featured music from activist song-writer David Rovics on Radio Ecoshock several times. Now we'll talk to the dude himself.

[interview with singer/songwriter David Rovics, from Oregon]

Find a lot of free music and albums for sale at davidrovics.com. David is appearing in Victoria, B.C. on June 5th - and in Vancouver the next night, June 6th at the Maritime Labour Centre. It's all part of a benefit for Iraq war resisters. Many musicians and artists will join David that night.

I chatted with David Rovics for a bit. He was a puzzled that youth activism seems to have fallen asleep, compared with the 1990's - and his audience is getting older. We talked about Barack Obama, as you heard - because the recent crowd of 70,000 plus that showed up to Obama's rally was the first sign the Nation has not really fallen asleep in front of the TV.

After 6 years of grinding war, peace organizers are having a harder time getting crowds out to protest. Is it because everybody knows the next President will have to end it, before America goes completely broke? Or have the corporate spinners really won...I doubt it. There is a time when people feel like beaten slaves, and a time when slaves rebel.

But as the machine puffs out more deadly greenhouse gases, do we really have the time to wait? No time to waste.

Next week, we are going back after the money. Where will America find the balls and the bucks to create a new fossil-free economy? Can a corrupt system make the change? Or will the boys for war toys grab the last of the cash for their mad dream of global domination.

The oil cost of the Iraq war, and the master plan to control planet Earth from space, next week with special guest Bruce Gagnon. If you want to do your homework first, watch the video "Arsenal of Hypocracy" on Google Video (or in pieces on You Tube.) Then join us next week, on Radio Ecoshock, as we fall into the next vat of toxic truth.

[Blog only:]
By the way, I love the email from listeners. Email me at: radio at ecoshock.org. One beloved listener said he like the show, but found it a little depressing. A little depressing! Where have I failed you! This is the most depressing show on radio!

Seriously though, I love life a lot. Every day, I take time to notice the beauty, the irony, the people and things that make me glad to be alive. Fear and reality are important, but inner gratitude to be alive is what motivates me to make every show.

We know that the love of nature, and our inner power, feed each other. This goodness, implanted into each of us, will finally make us better.

Because I experience that process, every day. I despair but never give up.

arrrgh. I'm sounding like Hilary Clinton!

Tune in next week for Star Wars, oil wars, climate conversion, and corporate conspiracy on Radio Ecoshock. And check out our web site at www.ecoshock.org.

Alex