Author Archives: Kert Davies

About Kert Davies

Kert Davies Kert directs Greenpeace's research team, and is also host of Greenpeace Radio. He is a regular source for national and international reporters in his areas of expertise, which include global warming, clean energy, corporate environmental policy and lobbying, and toxics issues.

Greenfreeze F-Gas Victory! Greener Refrigerators Finally Legal in the U.S.

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After some twenty years, American consumers will finally be able to buy the energy efficient climate-friendly refrigerators that Europeans and people all over the world have had in their kitchens for decades.  The Environmental Protection Agency today inked final approval under its Significant New Alternatives Program to legalize the us of simple hydrocarbon gases like propane and isobutane to replace polluting F-gases like HFCs in household refrigerators, freezers and some similar gear like point-of-sale ice cream freezers.

Until now, this refrigerator technology has been illegal in the U.S. while sold worldwide by major appliance manufacturers.  Greenpeace has been pushing to open the North American market since the early 1990s when Greenpeace Germany successfully introduced the Greenfreeze refrigerator into the German market as an alternative to continued use F-gases, specifically HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons), which were then promoted as the alternative to CFCs (chlorofuorocarbons). 

Remember CFCs, or Freon?…the gases in spray cans and refrigerators that were discovered to be eating a hole in the ozone layer and then thankfully phased out by the Montreal Protocol starting in the 1980s.  When CFCs went out, EPA approved HFCs as the alternative.  Now we have to fix that problem.

HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons), which are thousands of times more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide, pound for pound, are responsible for a significant and growing portion of global warming.   Used worldwide for refrigeration, cooling and air conditioning, HFCs are what is in your car AC and in your fridge at home.  These chemicals are built to trap heat, and they do the same thing in the atmosphere.

“Opening the U.S. market is a significant milestone that we’ve been working towards for years,” according to Amy Larkin, Greenpeace Solutions Director,  “Greenpeace has collaborated globally with multinational corporations and governments for two decades to make green refrigeration a reality.  EPA’s new rule will open the North American market and enable the entire industry to transform manufacturing over to the GreenFreeze-style models. Now it’s time to eliminate HFCs from all refrigeration and cooling applications across all industries.”

Since 1993, over 600 million Greenfreeze type refrigerators have been sold worldwide by leading major appliance manufacturers, except in the United States and Canadian markets where they were not legal until the EPA’s new rule.  At least 40 percent of global household refrigerator production now employs hydrocarbons instead of HFCs. Companies that manufacture hydrocarbon-cooled refrigerators worldwide include: Bosch, Haier, Panasonic, LG, Miele, Electrolux, Whirlpool, and Siemens.

The EPA SNAP announced today was motivated by the efforts of three main applicants:

  • AS Trust & Holdings developed the approved alternative R-441A, a blend of hydrocarbon gases said to increase energy efficiency.
  • General Electric is introducing a household refrigerator to the U.S. market using isobutane gas as the refrigerant.
  • Ben and Jerry’s submitted its application and testing data to deploy propane cooled ice cream freezers like the ones Unilever already uses in Europe and elsewhere.

Multiple natural refrigeration solutions exist today, using hydrocarbons, ammonia and carbon dioxide. Some natural refrigeration options are in widespread use, others nascent in the marketplace. As countries around the world begin to ban HFCs, these newer technologies are expected to become the standard for cooling.

Greenpeace has worked with numerous multinational corporations and small businesses for years to push for the EPA to legalize green refrigeration alternatives in the United States.  Last year, at the urging of Greenpeace, the Consumer Goods Forum, a consortium of 400 consumer brands and retailers, resolved to eliminate HFCs from their refrigeration and cooling systems starting in 2015.   When implemented, this action will eliminate 2 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions over the next 40 years. 

Although Greenpeace is best known as a fierce opponent to corporate polluters, the organization also works in cooperation with big business when corporate leadership is ready to transform its actions on behalf of the environment. On the problem of HFCs, Greenpeace has collaborated with CocaCola, Unilever (Ben and Jerry’s), PepsiCo and McDonalds in the Refrigerants Naturally project, which won the 2011 Roy Family Environment Award from Harvard’s Kennedy School

Greg Palast, author of Vulture’s Picnic interviewed on Greenpeace Radio

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This week’s Greenpeace Radio show features Greg Palast, investigative reporter for BBC Television’s Newsnight.  Palast is a Puffin Foundation fellow in investigative reporting and is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.  The Greenpeace Research Team met up with Greg about a year ago on the Gulf Coast while investigating the impacts of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.  We showed Greg and his team where to find the oil that BP wanted to hide.

Listen to the podcast interview with Greg Palast on Greenpeace Radio

Greg gave us this Greenpeace excerpt from new book Vulture’s Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores:

Greenpeace poisoned me and I’m forever grateful.  In my investigation of the BP Deepwater Horizon horror for British TV, I got nothing but jive from British Petroleum.  Nature’s a happy toilet:  she cleaned herself up, BP told me and told NPR:  bacteria ate the oil. 

Then Greenpeace showed up with a shrieking fast Zodiac boat, loaded up with the brilliant professor of biology, Rick Steiner … and got dumped right into the goo and the scum and toxic oil sludge that BP said didn’t exist. 

As a journalist reporting for BBC and The Guardian, I rely on Greenpeace to cut through the fact pollution contained in industry press releases.  When Greenpeace says there’s oil out there, Greenpeace SHOWS me the oil (or, in this case, dumps me into it).  Hard, gooey facts.   And here’s part of the story that could not have been written without the persistence and cussedness of Greenpeace.

Thanks Greg and now everyone buy and read this book!

Listen to all the Greenpeace Radio shows here.

Please subscribe to GreenpeaceRadio on iTunes and comment on the shows.

Greg Palast, author of Vulture’s Picnic interviewed on Greenpeace Radio

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By: Kert Davies

This week’s Greenpeace Radio show features Greg Palast, investigative reporter for BBC Television’s Newsnight.  Palast is a Puffin Foundation fellow in investigative reporting and is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.  The Greenpeace Research Team met up with Greg about a year ago on the Gulf Coast while investigating the impacts of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.  We showed Greg and his team where to find the oil that BP wanted to hide.

 Listen to the podcast interview with Greg Palast on Greenpeace Radio

Greg gave us this Greenpeace excerpt from new book Vulture’s Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores:

Greenpeace poisoned me and I’m forever grateful.  In my investigation of the BP Deepwater Horizon horror for British TV, I got nothing but jive from British Petroleum.  Nature’s a happy toilet:  she cleaned herself up, BP told me and told NPR:  bacteria ate the oil.

Then Greenpeace showed up with a shrieking fast Zodiac boat, loaded up with the brilliant professor of biology, Rick Steiner … and got dumped right into the goo and the scum and toxic oil sludge that BP said didn’t exist.

As a journalist reporting for BBC and The Guardian, I rely on Greenpeace to cut through the fact pollution contained in industry press releases.  When Greenpeace says there’s oil out there, Greenpeace SHOWS me the oil (or, in this case, dumps me into it).  Hard, gooey facts.   And here’s part of the story that could not have been written without the persistence and cussedness of Greenpeace.

Thanks Greg and now everyone buy and read this book!

Listen to all the Greenpeace Radio shows here.

Please subscribe to GreenpeaceRadio on iTunes and comment on the shows.

Best Koch Brothers TV Expose Yet: Al Jazeera – People and Power

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Amazing what a half hour of good television can do…

One forgets with all the crap on TV, the power of investigative journalism on the small screen.

The program PEOPLE AND POWER on Al Jazeera has been working for months on the Koch Brothers expose.

Featured in the piece are Jane Meyer of the New Yorker, Lee Fang of ThinkProgress, Lisa Graves of Center for Media and Democracy and myself, along with activists and union leaders in Wisconsin.

Al Jazeera reporter Bob Abeshouse and team went to the American Legislative Exchange Council meeting this August in New Orleans and got thrown out for asking questions you would expect actual journalists to ask.

They interviewed Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity and Patrick Micheals, career climate denier, once of University of Virginia, once Virginia State Climatologist and now just a grumpy fellow with flashy shoes at the Koch-funded Cato Institute.

 

Stitching together their own field research with the best Koch footage out there from Taki Oldham’s documentary Astroturf Wars and Lee Fang’s great jump interview of David Koch (with Tim Phillips trying desperately to cut it off), this story provides a great picture of the Koch Brothers campaign to dominate the American political arena.

The Greenpeace Research file on the Kochs continues to be updated with more and more case studies. You can hear more about the Kochs on Greenpeace Radio.

Hopefully this People and Power show will educate another couple million folks on the truth about the Koch Brothers. The show is airing another half dozen times if you are lucky enough to get Al Jazeera, or just watch it online, a couple times.

Spread the word!

Our Thin Sky: Arctic Ozone Hole Discovered

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An ozone hole opened up this past spring over the Arctic. Not good. While we have had thinning before, this is new.  This isn’t breaking news – it was in April – but an international team of scientists just had their study published in the journal Nature yesterday.  I was on Al Jazeera English news last night trying to explain it.

That’s a complicated task; aside from the fact that some people are confused that the ozone hole is what lets in all that global warming, and that the ongoing melt down of the Arctic sea ice gets a lot of attention, this discovery of an ozone hole at the north pole is disturbing and the science is complex.

We all remember the ozone hole in Antarctica, (which by the way still exists and is having a really bad year in 2011)  linked to the emissions of chlorine in CFCs by research from Rowland and Molina, who won the Nobel Prize for their work in the 1970s revealing this threat.  That’s almost 40 years ago and it will take another 40 years to heal the ozone layer if all goes well… 80 years.

Bottom line is about six companies, including Dupont, Honeywell, Arkema and Solvay are responsible for manufacturing the majority of the chlorine-contaning CFCs (FREON was the most common brand name) that have loaded the stratosphere with chlorine, continuing to erode the ozone layer today and for decades to come.

In fact, ozone depleting chemicals are still being emitted in spite of the success of the Montreal Protocol and the whole mess of F-gases the CFCs and the HFCs and HCFCs that replaced them are now causing a large slice of the global warming we are feeling.  Methyl bromide, an ozone depleting pesticide is used under a ‘critical use exemption’ filed annually by the US Government for tomatoes and strawberries… critical to certain farmers wallets.

CFCs were used in everything from hair spray to foam to refrigerators and air conditioners.  These chemicals were built to be tough and when they leaked or were sprayed into the atmosphere they last a long time… so long that they are able to drift 15 miles (25 km) up in the sky to the thick of the ozone layer.  That layer has the same effect as wearing 70 SPF sun block – when its not there, we burn badly.

Think about that for a minute… that thin delicate atmosphere that keeps us warm from the cold of space and the ozone layer protects us from the suns radiation, the crucial part is only 15 miles up…from you to the next town, straight up, thin as the skin on an apple.

What happened this spring in the Arctic is an unprecedented cold spot caused by a vortex over the north pole. When it’s really cold, like minus 70C, ice crystals and particles provide the surface for the ozone destroying chlorine to do its nasty work on the O3 Ozone and break it apart.

Scientists are wondering if this Arctic ozone hole will become more common. They are worried that the ozone hole travelled over inhabited regions by late March – Scandanavia, northern Europe was receiving big doses of UV rays at that time. There have been papers in the past about the warming of the lower atmosphere trapping heat that should get back to the stratosphere and keep it too warm for ozone destruction to happen.

The health impacts of such events are not known, but exposure can cause skin cancer and cataracts.

The dangerous experiments with our atmosphere and the polar ecosystems continue.

Thanks for nothing Dupont.

Mother Jones Secret Koch Brothers Tapes

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Mother Jones broke news today and opened a big window into the Koch brothers secret world.

MoJo received covert tape recordings from inside the Koch’s private rah rah meeting held in Colorado in June 2011.  These tapes confirm what we have known for sometime, the Koch brothers are zealous extremist political activists working to limit the power of the US Government.  Texas Governor Rick Perry was there, as was Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell.

The headline grabbing line comes from Charles Koch, who is a man of few words in public, but quite a chatterbox in these private sessions with his fellow libertarian millionaire and billionaire buddies.  Charles compares President Obama to Saddam Hussein.

“We have Saddam Hussein,” declared billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, apparently referring to President Barack Obama as he welcomed hundreds of wealthy guests to the latest of the secret fundraising and strategy seminars he and his brother host twice a year. The 2012 elections, he warned, will be “the mother of all wars.”

Overall the tapes show a paranoid bunch of very wealthy Americans, with a lot of anger and resentment at President Obama and the people who elected him.  They want to raise a ton of money to take Obama out of office and replace him presumably with someone like Gov.Perry to run our country.

Hmmm. Perry who believes global warming is a hoax and that scientists are faking data. Meanwhile he calls for statewide prayer for rain to end the DustBowl-like critical drought that is crippling his state and the rest of the Southwest.  Hmm…Rain Prayer – Rain Dance? That sounds like a good science based strategy, Mr. wannabe President Perry… There is more to come from Mother Jones tomorrow they say…Rick Perry’s speech?

Could be interesting.  Hope he gives us more of his inciteful analysis about global warming…and how $116,000 from the Kochs in recent years helped Gov. Perry reach his conclusions — See page 22 of our most recent Koch report.

Our Koch files are a good backdrop primer for these tapes.  Greenpeace has released two major reports in the past 18 months on the Kochs and their financing of attacks on global warming science and policy. All of our work on Koch Industries and Charles David and Bill can be found on this Greenpeace webpage – Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine

On the secret tapes, the Kochs whine about the left wing domination of the media. Greenpeace did a case study of the media connected people known to attend secret Koch meetings including Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who later thanked Charles Koch on the air.

Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones did a deeper narrative treatment of this research

Mother Jones has done a new expose of the Koch Million Dollar Donor Club detailing the people now known to be attending or mentioned at the secret Colorado Koch meeting in June 2011.

Also check out our PolluterWatch.org files on Charles Koch, David Koch and Bill Koch.

We wait with anxious ears for more of these Koch meeting tapes…

ALEC EXPOSED: Polluter Front Group’s Dirty Secrets Revealed

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As revealed by The Nation and hosted by the Center for Media and Democracy’s new ALEC Exposed website, today marks a breakthrough in democratic transparency with the release of over 800 internal documents created by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.

Who is ALEC?

Greenpeace has tracked the American Legislative Exchange Council and its role in the climate denial machine, along with the money it receives from polluters including Koch Industries and ExxonMobil to peddle doubt over established conclusions of climate scientists. Check out some of ALEC’s climate denier deeds at ExxonSecrets.

ALEC links state legislators with some of corporate America’s largest and most dubious players—Exxon, Koch, coal giant Peabody Energy, and Reynolds Tobacco for example—to create model state legislation. State legislators who pay a small fee to become ALEC members are granted access to a large pool of draft bills and resolutions created by representatives of the corporate giants who finance ALEC, some of which also help govern the organization. ALEC creates a cover for state legislators who ultimately benefit from ALEC’s corporate supporters without having to disclose who pays for the corporate-handout policies they push in state houses across the country.

The Nation’s John Nichols explains the ALEC agenda:

“ALEC’s model legislation reflects long-term goals: downsizing government, removing regulations on corporations and making it harder to hold the economically and politically powerful to account. Corporate donors retain veto power over the language, which is developed by the secretive task forces. The task forces cover issues from education to health policy. ALEC’s priorities for the 2011 session included bills to privatize education, break unions, deregulate major industries, pass voter ID laws and more. In states across the country they succeeded, with stacks of new laws signed by GOP governors like Ohio’s John Kasich and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, both ALEC alums.”

ALEC’s Dirty Assault on Environmental Causes

ALEC has long served corporate polluters in attacking or preempting environmental protections through state laws. A revealing article in Grist linked legislative repeals from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) to ALEC’s draft legislation, offering polluters like Koch Industries another avenue of attack to bolster the work of other front groups, including Americans for Prosperity’s pressure on states participating in RGGI. Center for Media and Democracy Executive Director Lisa Graves and The Nation have more details on the connection between Koch Industries and ALEC.

The over 800 internal documents revealed at ALEC Exposed brings other laws drafted by and for corporate polluters to light. Examples include:

 

• A 2010 resolution [PDF] resisting long-overdue EPA classification of coal ash as hazardous material. Coal ash is a leftover product from burning coal containing neurotoxins, carcinogens and radioactive elements—not the type of material that should be less regulated than household garbage (as it currently is).

 

• A 2009 resolution to dodge federal oversight of hydraulic fracturing [PDF] for natural gas by promoting state-level regulation of hydrofracking. New York Times reporting has shown state fracking regulations are notably insufficient. Currently, the private sector chairs of ALEC’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force are Tom Moskitis of the American Gas Association and Martin Schultz, a lobbyist for a large firm representing dozens of corporate heavyweights including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway and oil supermajor ConocoPhillips.

 

• A 2008 resolution [PDF] to challenge the federal offshore drilling moratorium, which ignores the reality that offshore drilling won’t reduce gas prices. ALEC’s [Exxon-funded] language uses the American taxpayer as an excuse to push for more dangerous offshore drilling even as giant oil companies like Exxon take billions in taxpayer subsidies and make record profits. Currently, the private sector chair of ALEC’s Civil Justice task force (which adopted the resolution) is Victor Schwartz of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, a law firm representing Peabody and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

 

The range of ALEC’s model legislation provides a historical record of the most aggressive efforts to combat environmental protection. A resolution from 1998 getting states to oppose the Kyoto protocol [PDF] apparently passed in ten states and was introduced or passed by one legislative chamber in another ten states, according to an ALEC speech transcript. A resolution from 2002 shows ALEC’s role in early efforts to hijack chemical security legislation. After the U.S. Senate adopted a bill (S.1602) in July, 2002 that would have conditionally required the use of safer processes at high risk chemical plants, ALEC fought back, approving a Resolution in Opposition to S. 1602 [PDF] a month later. That fall, the chemical security bill fell on its face.

More to Come…

Greenpeace is continuing to research the contents of ALEC’s documents. ALEC’s template environmental bills repeatedly attack clean energy, push the most dangerous and dirty fossil fuel developments and try to roll back safeguards that reduce pollution. We will continue to update you on what we find.

Dr. Willie Soon: a Career Fueled by Koch, Big Oil and Coal

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When climate denier and astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon wrote a controversial paper in 2003 that attempted to challenge the historical temperature records, we all raised eyebrows at revelations that the American Petroleum Institute funded it.

When he co-wrote a (non-peer reviewed) paper in 2007  arguing that Arctic warming wasn’t happening and polar bears were not threatened by the effects of it, we found that ExxonMobil and the billionaire Koch brothers had paid for it.

So we went digging and came up with more – a whole lot more, released today in the new case study: Dr. Willie Soon, a Career Fueled by Big Oil and Coal. Not only did Big Oil punt hundreds of thousands of dollars to Soon, but Big Coal as well – specifically, the Southern Company, one of the largest coal burning electric utilities in the U.S. and in the world.

Could this be why Soon (an astrophysicist) has been recently writing op-eds on how mercury is harmless and the mercury emissions from coal are minimal, with a byline saying that he has a strong expertise in mercury and public health.

Southern Company says no in this morning’s Reuters story.

Soon has been relying on the fossil fuel industry for most of his career.  Documents obtained from his employer, the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory (SAO), show that he has received no new funding from conventional, university sources since 2002.

Since then, it’s been all about the Southern Company, a Koch brothers’ foundation, ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute – totalling over $1 million since 2001.  Together with his colleague at the SAO, Sallie Baliunas, they brought in $1,153,000 since 2001 and only $842,000 from conventional sources.

Were these companies working together?   The API started funding Soon’s work as far back as 1994 (he only graduated in 1991).  The API was later joined by the Mobil Foundation, then by the electricity industry’s research arm, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).  The U.S. electricity sector is dominated by coal.

In 1998, the API, ExxonMobil and the Southern Company sat round a table with other oil companies and think tanks they plotted and funded a Global Climate Science  Communications Plan  to undermine the climate science and support for the Kyoto Protocol that had just been agreed.   “Victory will be achieved when… average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science”… read the plan. “Uncertainty” was also their objective for the media.  The detail funding sources from corporate purses going to think tanks and front groups who will coach scientists with messages counter to the rising consensus on the global warming crisis.  Even though this ‘scandal’ was front page news at the New York Times, our assumption is they did it anyway.

So when they saw that Willie Soon was writing papers to try to show that it was the sun, not the increase in carbon dioxide, that was causing warming in the Arctic, did they then get together to ensure he got the funding for his work?   Did they consider Soon (and Baliunas) a good investment for their corporations?

In around 2003, Soon saw that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was beginning work on its next summary of climate science, the Fourth Assessment (AR4).  Another document obtained by Greenpeace was a letter to colleagues  hatching a plan to undermine the outcomes of the report, focusing on Working Group 1 (the science).  ”… I hope we can start discussing among ourselves to see what we can do to weaken the fourth assessment report…”  he wrote.

The letter was addressed to a range of climate deniers, but also to two people we can’t find in our database of denier “scientists”.   The only names we can find that match two of the addressees – “Walt” and “Randy” – were the two Exxon staffers who had been at the centre of funding the denial campaign. Indeed, Randy Randol was the Exxon man sitting at the table plotting with the others in 1998.

Willie Soon has been embraced by the denial industry.  This week will see him speak, again, at the Heartland Institute’s annual “Denialpalooza“.  The “sponsors” of that meeting and organizations the speakers work for have received millions in funding from ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, the Scaife Foundation and other corporate, ‘free-market’ and anti-government, anti-regulation funders.  (more on that soon)

Meanwhile, Exxon has cut funding to a large number of climate deniers.  Late yesterday, Exxon released its latest “Worldwide Giving Report”, over a month overdue.  It reveals that more career climate deniers have been dismissed by their major funder, ExxonMobil Foundation.  What was a peak Exxon funding level of $3.5Million per year to these mouthpieces of climate denial, is now below $1M per year.  Exxon IS still funding deniers like Heritage Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council,  but major deniers like the Annapolis Center, Atlas Foundation and others have now apparently been cut, as of 2010.

Funding to Dr. Soon at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory has also been cut according to responses from Exxon in news reports today:

Mother Jones: “Did ExxonMobil Break Its Promise To Stop Funding Climate Change Deniers?”  by Kate Sheppard
Reuters: “US climate skeptic Soon funded by oil, coal firms”  by Tim Gardner
ClimateWire (subscription): Power companies fund anti-climate research on ‘solar variability’ by Evan Lehmann

Greenpeace Radio Podcast on the Japan Nuclear Disaster

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Greenpeace USA’s Nuclear Policy Analyst Jim Riccio is interviewed on Greenpeace Radio about the nuclear disaster unfolding in Fukushima, Japan and important background information on what is happening and why.

You can go here to listen in your web browser: Greenpeace Radio Podcast on the Japan Nuclear Disaster.

You can go here to the Greenpeace Radio iTunes account to download the podcast and subscribe: Greenpeace Radio on iTunes.

Wisconsin Protesters Highlight Koch Attack on State Unions

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Koch Banner

Activists outside the Wisconsin Capitol displayed a 70-foot banner reading “Koch Brothers: Dirty Money”  to protest the role of David and Charles Koch in supporting Governor Scott Walker’s efforts to roll back workers’ rights.

The oil billionaires’ dirty money supported Governor Walker’s election with campaign contributions and television advertising, and Koch-funded front group Americans for Prosperity is supporting the anti-union effort.