The Climate Minute - Natural Gas, the gangplank fuel...

It's a beautiful August friday, and Ted and Rob are back together again after a bit of vacationing. Well, we were full of natural gas (talk) today.  There's a crude joke in there, but we will refrain, this is after all a serious podcast.  So as you listen to today's podcast, here are some links to enrich your knowledge and understanding, and hopefully mine a couple of nuggets of information to provide your family and friends. Anthony Ingraffia, a professor of civil engineering at Cornell who also helped develop fracking techniques for the Department of Energy, wrote the article which inspired our title, "Gangplank to a Warm Future," for the New York Times.  It's an eye-opener of a read. We discussed the dramatically increased output of the Marcellus Shale gas fields.  You can read more about that here. You can listen to the conversation with Jeremy Rifkin where he talks about the next industrial revolution which will be powered with distributed renewable energy.  (Just make sure to go there after you finish listening to our podcast!) Here are some of the stories about the "Green Tea Party," (here, and here) the alliance of Tea Party and environmentalist groups in George fighting the large power monopoly keeping distributed renewable energy from the people. Kudos to the five institutions receiving Clean Energy Education grants which were awarded by the Mass Clean Energy Center this week.  You can learn more about them here. Finally, the Falmouth turbines are in the news again, this time due to discussions at the Board of Selectmen about how long they should run.  You can read more about this at the Southcoast Today site. Chris Hayes's "The Politics of Power" runs on MSNBC tonight at 8pm.  You can catch a sneak peak of it here. Boston's Greenfest is going through Saturday.  Find out more about what you can do and see there at their website. For more information on the film "Elemental" playing at Boston Common AMC Loews this Wednesday night, you can read more and sign up for tickets here. Iowa State Senator is doing a book tour supporting his new book, "America's Climate Century," and will be in Brookline the evening of the 26th.  Here's our calendar entry with all of his New England stops. Remember, for climate activities near you check out our MCAN climate action calendar.  You can enter events as well as browse for interesting things to do. We're just a week and a half away from the Energy Exodus march from coal (Brayton) to wind (the shores of Cape Cod). The march will start on August 28th and go through the weekend to September 2nd and will cover about 60 miles across southcoast Massachusetts.  Walkers will be doing 10-12 miles a day, with stops along the way.  For more info and to sign-up go to their website here. As always, it's been a pleasure sharing climate news and views with you.  You know, you can subscribe to our iTunes feed and get our podcasts automatically here.  Feel free to give us your thoughts on our Facebook page, or through old-fashioned email.  You can even follow us on twitter @MassClimate , so there are lots of ways for you to listen and participate in the dialog. When you are on the website, please contribute to MCAN. Every dollar you give will be doubled by a generous backer, so long we reach our fundraising goal.  We're three quarters of the way there, can you help? So we will close the way we always close, by saying that because we recognize the necessity of personal accountability for our actions,  because we accept responsibility for building a durable future and because we believe it is a patriotic duty as citizens, we insist that the US put a price on carbon. Good bye and see you next week…