Between The Lines - Bruce Nilles: Bloomberg Gift to Sierra Beyond Coal Campaign (Week Ending Aug. 12, 2011)

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Between The Lines on Stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

You can also listen to full unedited interview segments from Counterpoint, which are generally available some time the day following broadcast.

Subscribe to Counterpoint bulletins via our subscriptions page.

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Bloomberg Philanthropies' $50 Million Gift to Sierra Club Expands Group's "Beyond Coal" Campaign

RealAudio MP3

Posted Aug. 3, 2011

Interview with Bruce Nilles, deputy conservation director at Sierra Club, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

On July 21, Bloomberg Philanthropies, funded by New York City mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, announced a gift of $50 million to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, an effort which has succesfully blocked the building of 153 proposed coal-fired power plants in the U.S. since 2002. With Bloomberg’s gift, the Sierra Club will be able to double their staff to almost 200 employees – and expand their campaign from 15 to 45 states, including the District of Columbia.

The environmental group’s next phase in their campaign will focus on shutting down existing coal plants while proposing cleaner alternatives. The main thrust of the Sierra Club’s drive is to reduce the impact on climate change from burning coal, which produces large amounts of carbon dioxide. The campaign will also focus on public education on how coal is destroying the communities where it's mined as well as the health hazards to those living downwind of operating coal plants. Coal currently provides 45 percent of the electricity used in the U.S., and produces more than a third of the greenhouse gases.

Like many environmental groups, the Sierra Club is targeting their grassroots organizing on local state campaigns, given the fact that the GOP-controlled House of Representatives’ is staunchly opposed to federal legislation limiting greenhouse gases. Between the Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Bruce Nilles, deputy conservation director of the Sierra Club, who talks about how the campaign will put Bloomberg's gift to work.

BRUCE NILLES: The work really began in 2002, 2003, responding to a rush to build new coal-fired power plants. That work is largely over, and we've stopped to date 153 proposed – i.e., new coal plants. Only one new plant has broken ground since November 2008, and we're basically down to a handful of states where there's any new (coal plants) proposed. Beginning in 2010, we began switching our efforts to retiring existing coal plants – there's about 520 existing coal plants – and really digging into and supporting at the community level folks who've been suffering from the consequences of these old coal plants, whether it's air pollution, or families in Kentucky who are getting coal ash blowing all over their houses and their kids having acute asthma problems, and helping, community by community, plant by plant, retire and replace those coal plants with clean energy. So with Bloomberg Philanthropies' major gift, we'll be able to expand this work from Washington to Florida and California to Maine. We get regular requests from local community members who are suffering from their neighboring coal plant or their neighboring coal ash plant or nearby coal mining projects. This gift allows us to support them, to help empower them and elevate and demand something be done to address the problems they're facing from coal. And that allows us to have the discussion about it's time to get these coal plants retired. And we have a very aggressive goal over the next ten years of retiring one-third of the coal fleet.

BETWEEN THE LINES: When you say replace them with clean energy, what does that mean? Is part of your project to get clean energy sources up and running?

BRUCE NILLES: Exactly. And it's in large part a recognition that these coal plants are not going to be able to retire unless we actually have enough electricity coming from alternate sources. And so that requires us to make sure and be advocating for secure major investments in clean energy. We'd like the bulk of it to be wind and solar, with some geothermal, and large amounts of energy efficiency.

BETWEEN THE LINES: You didn't mention natural gas. Does that mean that's not part of the mix that you're promoting?

BRUCE NILLES: We are cognizant that natural gas needs around at least for the next ten or 20 years while we're scaling up, renewables will be a part of the picture. Our goal is to minimize natural gas as much as possible.

BETWEEN THE LINES: What about gas from horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which is more problematic than the old vertical gas wells?

BRUCE NILLES: That's exactly why we want to see as little natural gas as possible.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Bruce Nilles, can you say more about how your campaign actually promotes clean energy?

BRUCE NILLES: They're actually two sides of the same coin, because the regulators who are charged with ensuring reliability of our electricity grid are not going to allow coal plants to go offline unless we have something else producing electricity. And so there are a variety of venues and ways to secure large amounts of clean energy. There's been a lot of work in the past with dozens of states that have renewable energy standards, which mandate clean energy getting to scale. You have states like California, with a 33 percent requirement; Colorado, 30 percent, Minnesota, 25 percent, aggressive standards up and down the East Coast. So pushing and getting in place policies requiring a certain percentage come from clean energy is one way. The other is, as we are engaged in the various regulatory proceedings around retiring a coal plant, there is the opportunity to both engage with the regulative and the owner of an old coal plant to talk about what the alternatives could be and to shape what those alternatives will be so they don't turn around and propose a new coal plant, but they in fact are proposing something we like.

So there's a variety of different venues, whether it's new state policies; it can be at the city, as you saw, San Antonio just announced it was shutting down its coal plant and building 400 megawatts of solar. That was part of advocacy by a local activist.

BETWEEN THE LINES: They could do it. San Antonio has a lot of sun. And Texas also has a lot of wind.

BRUCE NILLES: Texas has a lot of wind. Every state in the union except for Alaska has huge solar potential. Germany last year installed 9,000 megawatts, which is nine times more than the U.S. installed last year. Germany has less solar potential than any state except in the union except Alaska. So this is not because the technology doesn't work, even in the most northern states, again, Alaska excepted. And so if you look at where we're seeing solar development – obvious place, California. But you're also seeing significant development in N.J., and we're beginning to see some progress in N.Y. Why N.J. and N.Y.? Because N.J. has good solar policies. And so getting the right policies in place, we think is critical. And the other great thing about solar and wind is that the prices continue to come down at the same time the cost of coal continues to skyrocket.

Learn more about the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign at www.beyondcoal.org.