The city of Denton, Texas, is in a showdown with Big Oil after it tried to pass a ban on fracking within its city limits. Sixty percent of Denton residents support a ban on fracking in their city, but on Monday, Texas enacted new legislation to prohibit local fracking bans. Watch Democracy Now! interview Tara Linn Hunter, Denton activist and lead singer of the anti-fracking music group, the Frackettes, at demoracynow.org
Democracy Now! is an independent, daily global news hour anchored by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. We air live weekdays 8-9AM ET and rebroadcast throughout the day on nearly 1,400 TV & radio stations in 43 countries. Here we post excerpts from our interviews and key moments from our daily show.
When a BP oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, a 170 million gallons of oil were released at once to the bottom of the ocean floor. Since then, naturally occurring microbes have been feasting on that oil, but 30 million barrels remain.
Antonia Juhasz took a submarine nearly a mile below the ocean surface to explore the impacts of the oil spill. Tune in to Democracy Now! to find out what she saw.
The Obama administration has tentatively approved Shell’s plans to begin oil extraction off the Alaskan coast this summer. Federal scientists estimate the Arctic region contains up to 15 billion barrels of oil, and Shell has long fought to drill in the icy waters of the Chukchi Sea. Environmentalists warn Arctic drilling will pose a risk to local wildlife and exacerbate climate change. They fear that a drilling accident in the icy Arctic Ocean waters could prove far more devastating than the deadly 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill since any rescue operations could be delayed for months by harsh weather conditions.
Democracy Now! speaks to Subhankar Banerjee, an activist who has spent the past 15 years working for the conservation of the Arctic and raising awareness about indigenous human rights and climate change. Watch the interview at democracynow.org.
On Democracy Now! we interview leading American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton about the parallels between the threats of nuclear weapons and global warming. “They both bring forth apocalyptic images of destroying the entire human habitat and interfering with the future of the human race,” says Lifton.
Tune in to the discussion on Democracy Now! today.
According to a new report by Global Witness, at least 116 environmentalists were killed last year — more than two a week. Three-quarters of the deaths occurred in Latin America. Watch this special Earth Day coverage on Democracy Now! today.
We’re calling on the museum sector to cut ties to the fossil fuel industry.
Beka Economopoulos, co-founder and director of the Natural History Museum. She coordinated the letter sent Tuesday from Nobel laureates and other scientists to 330 science and natural history museums urging them to cut ties with the fossil fuel industry responsible for climate misinformation.
“This is what’s happening now around the world as people begin to run on a tilted treadmill trying to develop on a disintegrating planet,” says Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org. McKibben joined Democracy Now! to discuss the challenges global warming poses to development efforts in some of the world’s poorest island nations. This weekend, Cyclone Pam destroyed 90% of Vanuatu’s infrastructure.
The fact that the U.N. itself has now said we should be divesting from fossil fuel is just an indication of how powerfully people have organized around the globe.
Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, talks to Democracy Now! about the growing global movement to divest from fossil fuels. After coming under pressure from alumni, donors and students, the University of Oxford today considered a motion to divest its endowment from the top 200 companies involved in exploring or extracting fossil fuels.
Climate policy and energy policy are not usually discussed together in this country … Climate change means that we need to transition away from fossil fuels, sooner rather than later.
Stephen Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, speaks to Democracy Now! about a series of disasters seen by the fossil fuel industry in less than a week, just as extreme cold temperatures are blasting the eastern third of the United States. Watch and share the interview here.
The deniers of climate change are probably people who are afraid of change. … Too many in Congress are pushing us back into the 1950s. They’re pushing us back in time, rather than forward in time.
Robert Redford, Oscar-winning director, actor and longtime environmentalist talks to Democracy Now! about last week’s vote by nearly half of the Senate to refuse to formally acknowledge the existence of man-made climate change.