It's Hot in Here

Audio

A special Martin Luther King day and pre-inauguration show… We started live with both our It’s Hot In Here co-host Gina Gettum as well as our Washington correspondent Kerry Duggan on the line from Washington DC. They joined us from a League of Conservation Voters sponsored National Day of Service event at John Phillips Sousa junior high school in DC where solar photovoltaics were being installed on the roof among other things. Future Energy Secretary Steven Chu was even onsite and our intrepid remote reporters were going to try and talk with him offline and report back on future shows. Gina and Kerry told us additionally of the pre-inaugural festivities they’ve already attended on Sunday as well as all the energy surrounding the main event tomorrow where apparently over 4 million people are expected to flood into DC.

Our other remote correspondent Hugh was going to provide a perspective from Canada regarding the US changing of the guard, but was unable to join us, so we’ll check in with him at a future date.

We talked next with Lara Peterson who normally hails from inside the beltway where she serves as the Coordinator for the Russia, Europe and Near Asia Program within the International Programs of the United States Forest Service. She gave us some perspective from inside a federal agency during a transition from one administration to another, and told us all about the USFS International Programs.

Finally, switching gears, we spent the last 15 minutes talking trash with Tiffany Threadgould from Brooklyn, New York. Tiffany told us all about the history and motivation behind her business RePlayGround: “where discarded materials take on new life!” With way more energy than your average person would have discussing garbage, Tiffany told us all about her mission to re-brand garbage, giving examples of her products and designs – including a refocus room divider that she described made out of 1000 used film canisters. Her website RePlayGround.com also details various do-it-yourself (DIY) projects and how RePlayGround likes to support other organizations that share similar beliefs. You can get a sense of those core values by reading the RePlayGround Blog and the FAQ page… who doesn’t love FAQs… my favorite part from the FAQ page:

Q: What will you do when there’s no more waste in the world? Like when we reduce our waste to 0%?

Happy Martin Luther King Day!

Enjoy the Music Playlist for 19 Jan 2009, with a couple of extra songs we didn’t get to of course.

Audio [audio:http://archive.org/download/hotinhere/itshotinhere05jan2009.mp3]

Please share your eco-resolutions below in the comments! AND if you have a name for a person who eats meat once a week, post that too!

In the audio above which starts a couple minutes in we had the news, food news, and eco-resolutions for the new year discussions including 10 easy ways to go green in the kitchen and some suggestions from callers and over the interwebs.

COAL is NEVER CLEAN: Sign Here to tell your Congressfolk to ban new coal plants and to invest in genuinely, CLEAN, RENEWABLE energy technology.

Promised links to the following are forthcoming:

Music playlist coming soon.

Audio [audio:http://archive.org/download/hotinhere/itshotinhere29dec2008.mp3]

We had our usual news roundup… but we had a not so usual special guest in the studio with us the whole time: Homeless Dave. Dave shared with us: the premise for his blog Teeter Talk (voted best local blog 3 years in a row by readers of the Current), what’s up with his nickname, his bicycle delivery and hauling business, and his pedal-powered clothes washing/wringing, among other things!!! You may know Homeless Dave under his shall we say pen name Dave Askins… you can see some of his local reporting, photography, and illustrations at a new local news source called The Ann Arbor Chronicle which he helped his wife Mary Morgan start recently.

We had a weather, power outage, and climate discussion. Link to hand-crank/solar radios. Link to University of Michigan professor Ricky Rood’s Weather Underground blog and his recent climate post.

Towards the end we shared a 2008 Top Ten List from TreeHugger.com. Since everyone loves Top Ten Lists here’s another one: top ten green stories from 2008 from grist.org.

Music playlist: