Forty years of environmental neglect and degradation resulted in a $63 million jury verdict against Chevron in a case brought by a Santa Maria man stricken with blood cancer while living above an abandoned oil waste sump
On this week’s edition of Newsmakers TV, Nick Welsh recounts the sad story of consultant Kevin Wright, poisoned by benzene after building his dream house on the site or a 1960s-era oil field the company sold for development without conducting legally-required toxic pollution cleanup and mitigation measures.
Elsewhere on the Menace of Fossil Fuels beat, Josh Molina details his podcast interview with Eliot Jacobson, a retired UCSB math and computer science professor, whose new calculations about a sudden spike in temperatures in the North Atlantic not only drew international attention but also buttressed his “doomer” belief that we are living through a human extinction event because it’s too late to abate climate change.
So there’s that.
In other local matters, the three amigos dissect the latest from the housing beat (and discuss a last-ditch state initiative campaign to regain local control over planning and development from our overlords in Sacramento); parse the likely impacts of the county’s new contract policy for ambulance services (while chewing over the latest, grim statistics of unintentional, fatal opioid overdoses involving fentanyl); break down the parking wars on the Westside and the illegal food truck breaches on the Eastside (as Nick and Josh struggle to explain how they both ended up with in-depth interviews with SB council member Oscar Gutierrez in the same week).
All this and more, right here, right now on Newsmakers TV.
JR
Check out the new show via YouTube below or by clicking through this link. The podcast version is here. Newsmakers airs on TVSB, Cox Channel 17, at 8 p.m. every weekday and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9-FM, broadcasts the program on Mondays at 5:30 p.m.
New Yorker cartoon by Paul Noth.
Commentaires