On today’s Your Call Media Roundtable, we’ll discuss the plight of Venezuelan immigrants deported from the US to a notorious maximum-security prison in El Salvador. The Trump administration will pay El Salvador’s government $6 million for detaining undocumented immigrants.
Joining us to discuss will be Roman Gressier, editor of El Faro English and host of the Central America in Minutes podcast.
Then later in the show, we discuss The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram, a Frontline/ProPublica documentary that investigates the Terrorgram Collective, a transnational network of extremists accused of inciting acts of white supremacist terrorism on the messaging platform Telegram. Joining us will be AC Thompson, senior reporter with ProPublica and correspondent for Frontline.
Tune in at 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live at 10am PT. What comments or questions do you have for our guests? Call 866-798-TALK to join the conversation!
Back in 2012, Berkeley Law’s CLEE and UCLA Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment released a report called “Electric Drive by ’25,” with the bold subtitle “How California Can Catalyze Mass Adoption of Electric Vehicles by 2025.”
The report cited 2011-12 EV sales as reason for optimism on achieving mass adoption by 2025:
Early results from the introduction of new electric vehicles to the U.S. market have been promising, with sales of both Nissan LEAFs and Chevy Volts outselling the popular hybrid Toyota Prius in its first year of sales, 9,674 (LEAF) and 7,671 (Volt) to 5,562 (first-year Prius sales). As of May 2012, plug-in electric vehicles comprised approximately 30,000 of the cars in the United States, more than four times as many as the year before.
13 years later, the plug-in hybrid Volt is no more and the LEAF is revamped and a relatively minor player, while the Tesla Model Y was the best-selling vehicle in the world in 2024, outselling the Toyota Corolla.
And what would “mass adoption” look like for the then relatively distant year of 2025 in California? The California Air Resources Board at the time:
…predicted that the new [Advanced Clean Cars] program and ZEV regulations would result in over 1.4 million ZEVs on the road by 2025, comprising over 15 percent of vehicles sales that year.
And now that it’s actually 2025, how is the state doing? Did it live up to its goal?
Turns out the state was way too pessimistic. According to the nonprofit Veloz that tracks EV sales, California in fact had 2,213,296 electric vehicles on the road by the end of 2024:
So what lessons can we draw from this 2012 time capsule report review? First, and most obviously, electric vehicles have taken off better than a lot of people thought. Second, regulators in California, at least at the time, were clearly aiming too low with their goals!
There’s a ways to go to get EVs to 100% of new vehicles sales (the new goal is to achieve that percentage by 2035 in the state). But the market has reached critical tipping points. And while action on climate change is urgent and we still need faster deployment of EVs, it’s important to celebrate wins where we can, especially on something as monumentally important as reducing emissions from transportation.
I’ll be double-hosting on KALW today. First, on Your Call’s One Planet Series at 10am PT, we discuss the Trump administration’s attack on environmental protections.
Donald Trump’s EPA chief, Lee Zeldin, plans to roll back more than two dozen regulations that protect our health, air, water, and climate, eliminate the Office of Research and Development, and fire hundreds of scientists. Joining us to discuss will be:
- Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, & Environment
- Marianne Lavelle, award-winning reporter for Inside Climate News
Later in the program, we’ll examine the Trump administration’s decision to drop a landmark environmental justice case in Louisiana’s cancer alley, with Robert Taylor, executive director of Concerned Citizens for St. John.
Then at 6pm PT, I’ll be hosting State of the Bay. First, we’ll talk to San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie about his new plan on homelessness.
Then we’ll talk about the suffering endured by millions of people due to Long Covid, with Dr. Linda Geng, co-director of the Stanford Long Covid Collaborative, and Philip Hoover, a screenwriter and North Bay resident who has firsthand experience navigating life with Long COVID.
Finally, we’ll talk to Ramon Ramos Alayo of the dance festival CubaCaribe.
Tune in at 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live at 10am PT for Your Call and then again at 6pm PT for State of the Bay. What comments or questions do you have for our guests? Call 866-798-TALK to join the conversation!
I’m double-hosting today on KALW. First, on Your Call’s One Planet Series at 10am PT, investigative journalist Antonia Juhasz discusses her new piece Is Trump’s “Minerals Deal” a Fossil Fuel Shakedown?. A significant portion of Ukraine’s natural resources, including fossil fuels and minerals, is in territory controlled and occupied by Russia.
Later in the show, Los Angeles Times reporter Liam Dillon discusses the debate over affordable and multifamily housing in the Pacific Palisades following the recent LA fires.
Then at 6pm PT, I’ll host State of the Bay, which we’ll kick off with an interview with newly elected District 11 Supervisor Chyanne Chen.
Then, I’ll talk to two award-winning journalists – Katey Rusch and Casey Smith – who spent five years exposing a widespread practice of “clean record” agreements —loopholes that let police officers erase misconduct from their records and land new jobs in law enforcement.
Finally, we hear from the director of a new documentary for diehard Oakland A’s fans called The Last Game.
Tune in at 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live at 10am PT for Your Call and then again at 6pm PT for State of the Bay. What comments or questions do you have for our guests? Call 866-798-TALK to join the conversation!
On today’s Your Call Media Roundtable, we discuss the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a human rights advocate and lead negotiator for the 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University. He is being held at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana.
According to the Intercept, since his arrest, his attorneys have fought any suggestion that this case is about whether their client committed a crime or is a threat to national security. Instead, they say, it’s about the US government stifling Khalil’s advocacy for Palestine. Joining us will be:
- Laura Jedeed, freelance journalist based in New York City
- Jonah Valdez, reporter for The Intercept
Later in the show, we’ll examine the fallout from Senate democrats agreeing not to filibuster the Republican budget as well as the GOP’s deep cuts to social and health services. To help us unpack it:
- Michael Mechanic, senior editor at Mother Jones and author of Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All
- Arthur Delaney, senior reporter for HuffPost
Tune in at 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live at 10am PT. What comments or questions do you have for our guests? Call 866-798-TALK to join the conversation!
Aviation is a significant and growing source of greenhouse gas emissions. But the federal government in the United States has failed to address it so far. In response, some state policy makers and advocates are now considering legal avenues to effectively require the use of sustainable aviation fuels, which emit less carbon than traditional jet fuel when burned — and in some cases can eliminate these emissions altogether.
Opponents will undoubtedly argue that such state-based initiatives conflict with federal law. A new report from UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE), State of Aviation Decarbonization: State Policy Options to Regulate Carbon Emissions from Aviation and Federal Preemption Risk, provides an in-depth analysis of these legal issues with respect to three potential state policy approaches:
- regulation via a low carbon or clean fuel standard, which creates a carbon intensity target for all fuels – including aviation – with low-carbon fuels that fall below the threshold generating credits that can be sold, while those above the benchmark create deficits;
- state and local plans that implement the federal Clean Air Act; specifically, indirect source rules on airports that would require reduction of co-pollutants from airport mobile sources, including aircraft emissions due to burning high-carbon fuels; and
- state authority to tax and impose fees on high-carbon aviation fuel, in order to discourage their consumption and instead provide revenue that can fund use and deployment of lower-carbon alternatives.
The report ultimately concludes that a low carbon fuel standard regulation would provide the greatest potential impact on sustainable aviation but entails the most legal risk among the three approaches, while increased taxation or fees on high-carbon jet fuel could have a potentially significant impact on sustainable aviation fuel if revenues support deployment of low-carbon alternatives, with a moderate risk of federal preemption.
Overall, State of Aviation Decarbonization finds that well-designed state initiatives have a good chance of surviving legal challenges, and it offers strategies to reduce the likelihood of successful challenges.
Download the report here.
On today’s Your Call One Planet Series, Harvard university anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh joins us to discuss her new book, Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola. Greenhalgh tells the story tells the story of how, in the midst of an explosive epidemic of obesity, Big Soda mobilized academic allies to create a science that would protect profits on sugary drinks by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the primary solution to obesity — a view few experts accept.
The 1990s was a rough decade for the soda industry. In the US, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics began fingering sugary soda as a main culprit and calling for taxes on soft drinks. With profits on sugary drinks threatened as never before, Big Soda had to be defended. Coca-Cola would take the lead. The book draws concepts from the social studies of science and anthropology to track a largely hidden project of the food industry that was global in scope. That project sought to create an industry-friendly science of obesity, spread it to key markets abroad, and get it embedded in official policies on diet-related chronic disease.
Tune in at 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live at 10am PT. What comments or questions do you have for our guest? Call 866-798-TALK to join the conversation!
On today’s Your Call Media Roundtable, we’ll discuss Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink, a documentary that tells the story of Alden Global Capitol, a secretive hedge fund that is plundering what is left of US newspapers, and the journalists who are fighting back.
In 2011, Alden began buying up newspapers across the country. In 2015, reporter Julie Reynolds began investigating Alden, which bought her small-town daily, the Monterey County Herald, along with more than 100 other newspapers nationwide.
She exposed how these self-described “vulture capitalists” would strip newspapers of their real estate, gut their newsrooms, and run away with the profits. Her reporting sparked a movement of journalists who took to the streets to tell vulture capitalists to “get the hell out of the news business.”
What is lost when billionaires take over our news organizations? What can we do about it? Joining us will be:
- Rick Goldsmith, veteran documentary filmmaker and director of “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink”
- Julie Reynolds, freelance investigative reporter, co-founder of Voices of Monterey Bay, and former investigative reporter with the Monterey County Herald
Tune in at 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live at 10am PT. What comments or questions do you have for our guests? Call 866-798-TALK to join the conversation!
On today’s Your Call’s One Planet Series, we’ll discuss the importance of environmental journalism with:
- Mark Hertsgaard, executive director of Covering Climate Now, environment correspondent for The Nation, and author of Big Red’s Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton and A Story of Race in America.
- Sammy Roth, climate columnist for the Los Angeles Times and author of the paper’s Boiling Point newsletter
How should journalists cover the Trump administration’s moves to stop climate action?
Tune in at 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live at 10am PT. What comments or questions do you have for our guests? Call 866-798-TALK to join the conversation!
On today’s Your Call Media Roundtable, we’ll discuss ‘Battle for Tibet,’ a new Frontline documentary that examines how the Chinese government controls Tibet’s Buddhist population. Joining us will be Gesbeen Mohammad, BAFTA and Emmy-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker, and the director of the film.
Then we’ll look at the budget resolution passed by House Republicans this week that calls for a massive tax cut for the wealthy, and billions of dollars of cuts in Medicaid, a program that provides coverage of health and long-term care to 83 million low-income people.
David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter, co-founder of DCReport, and author of many books, including “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America”, will join us to unpack what’s in the bill.
Tune in at 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live at 10am PT. What comments or questions do you have for our guests? Call 866-798-TALK to join the conversation!
