Filed under: Celebrities , Movies, TV and Books , Climate Change In case you had missed it, back in 2006, Tom Brokaw entered the global warming discussion with his own two-hour, Emmy-award winning, ode to climate change, appropriately titled Global Warming: What You Need to Know . Three years later, Brokaw has decided that it’s time for a progress report on just how much ground humanity has gained/lost in the battle against greenhouse gases, rising temperatures, and the like. The program is named Global Warming: The New Challenge , and it will debut Wednesday, March 18th on the Discovery Channel at 10PM. I got a chance to catch up with Mr. Brokaw last Friday (on the phone) to pick his brain on the subject of climate change and his upcoming show. THE INTERVIEW ( recorded frantically on my keyboard ): Can you give the readers at Green Daily a bit of an overview of what this The New Challenge is about and what you hope to achieve with it? It’s really an update. We hope to provide some benchmarks, where progress is being made and where it not being made. There are a lot of distractions, healthcare, a new administration, the economy, and global warming is at all those intersections. The topic of global warming is being approached with a new sense of urgency … We covered some of the debate on can you have clean coal or not, and the merits of cap and trade. We covered China, a bit about Australia, meteorology, the breakup of sea ice in the Northwest Passage. You mentioned a sense of urgency, do you think this sense of urgency is being sparked by the fact that there’s a new administration in the White House? I think this issue transcends partisanship. Perhaps, the Republican party was a bit slower to approach the issue, but this is growing from the ground up. John McCain, the Republican nominee, came back from a conference in Norway in 2006 and said that there is evidence and that something must be done. There seem to be a kind of polarization in the environmental movement. Those in one camp believe that we can avert disaster with technology and making changes to our daily lives. Then, in the other camp are those who think we’re all doomed unless we take drastic action. After delving into some of these issues personally, what side do you find yourself gravitating towards? It’s hard for me to calibrate my optimism. I was on Letterman’s show a few nights ago, and he seemed interested in the same thing. The question right now is not can we stop it, but are we slowing it down. That’s a real goal, slowing it. What worries me is places like China and India, who have enormous populations that are now looking for an urban lifestyle. We have a great opportunity to influence that development. If you could give all Americans one thing that they could work on individually to combat climate change, what would it be? As individuals, put pressure on companies that are not responding. In our own lives, I think this economy will put a dent in mcmansions. Your going to see a lot more focus on green building, smaller rooms, and perhaps even more shared-wall development. A friend of mine puts it this way, and I think it’s a good way to look at it from. He says, ‘it’s not what you want, it’s what you need that counts.’ People in other nations, the EU for example, seem to focus almost obsessively on climate change. Here in the US, as a whole, it seems that we’ve taken a much more skeptical approach. Who’s crazier? This is a big, complex subject, with many opinions and points of view surrounding it. It’s not easy to achieve politically or economically, but what we need to do is have a real dialog about it in the country, and that’s what I hope this program will help us to do. On Letterman the other night, you mentioned that you had converted part of your ranch in Montana to run on solar power, do you think renewable energy is the future? Oil companies don’t what to be left in the horse and buggy business. T. Boone Pickens for example, though he’s not doing it because of global warming, is saying that we need to expand the grid. What he’s doing with wind is advantageous. Do you have a feel yet as to whether the current economic situation is helping or hurting the environmental cause? That fact is, that a lot of the questions about the economy are interrelated with the environment. Every company is looking in building more efficiently. Look at what GE is doing with ecomagination, with wind power and more efficient airline engines. On a micro scale, your now very conscious of what’s going on in the consumer world. I’ve been very impressed with what Wal-Mart is doing with packaging and transport, aside from issues some may have with labor practices, they’ve taken important steps. Green Daily Exclusive: An Interview With Tom Brokaw originally appeared on Green Daily on Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:00:00 EST . Please see our terms for use of feeds .   Permalink  |  Email this  |  Linking Blogs  |  Comments

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Green Daily Exclusive: An Interview With Tom Brokaw

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