Sustainability : Audio

Each generation reinvents the world inherited from the previous generation. A new generation is inheriting a wounded planet and a dysfunctional economy. Youthful energy seeks to heal our world and revitalize our economy using new strategies and adapting existing tools. Today, we focus on new generations in sustainability. First, we hear from Tim Cohen-Mitchell of the Young Entrepreneurs Society in Orange, Massachusetts, from a presentation he made at the recent Pioneer Valley Sustainable Investing Summit that Corporate Watchdog Radio helped organize.

The ExxonMobil annual shareholder meeting this year carried high expectations from shareholder activists. Members of the Rockefeller family, descending from the founder of the Standard Oil monopoly that splintered into Exxon and Mobil, attended the meeting to support four different shareholder resolutions on corporate governance and climate change. Of these four, the resolution supported by most Rockefellers asked the company to split the CEO and Board Chair positions. Today's CWR guest, Bob Monks, has filed this resolution at ExxonMobil since the early 2000s.

Bill McKibben speaks with CWR co-hosts Bill Baue and Francesca Rheannon about his new book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He discusses localism as an answer to the problems created by globalism. In other words, the "durable" economies of farmers markets, distributed energy, and community radio to replace the unsustainable premise of perpetual growth that capitalism promises, but has led to climate change and peak oil

“If alternative energy sources can be made as cheap as fossil fuels, then people will use them. The point where it becomes unarguable is where they are cheaper than coal. That hasn't happened yet, but it is quite possible to envisage a situation where it does.” Geoffrey Carr

Wynn has helped Austin become a national leader in wind power, biodiesel, plug-in hybrid cars, and more.

In a 2006 Rolling Stone interview, Al Gore infamously likened the practice of extracting oil from tar sands to "junkies find[ing] veins in their toes" to inject heroin. Gore's image simply extends to its logical conclusion George Bush's 2006 State of the Union "addicted to oil" metaphor. Clean, renewable energy represents a healthy cure for petro-addiction. Tar sands, which increase the carbon intensity of petroleum extraction, represent an exacerbation of the climate-changing addiction--kind of like trying to cure heroin addiction by injecting arsenic.

Today CWR takes you to a conference at the intersection between climate change and transportation held last week at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. There, climate scientists, engineers, government officials and activists gathered for a “Climate Change Think Tank” to brainstorm solutions to the problem of transport accounting for some 30 percent of carbon emissions.

CWR co-hosts Bill Baue and Francesca Rheannon speak with Gary Hirshberg, CEO of organic yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm, and author of Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the World.

Klaus Harvey of Transition Town Kinsale (TTK) shares with Global Public Media's Andi Hazelwood the benefit of two years of experience in striving for sustainability in Kinsale, Cork, Ireland since the town's local council adopted the world's first Energy Descent Action Plan.

Andrew Ruben and Jib Ellison of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. share their experience of transforming the largest company in the world into an environmentally sustainable business.