StateImpact Podcast

Recent reports stress the urgency of reducing carbon emissions to check the worst effects of climate change. At a public event In Pittsburgh, a distinguished panel waded into the possibilites, obstacles and potential solutions. The panelists: Paulina Jaramillo, associate professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and co-director of the Green Design Institute; Ivonne Peña, an energy analyst who has worked for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the U.S. and the Colombia’s Energy and Gas Regulatory Commission; and Greg Reed, a professor of electric power engineering at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, and director of Pitt’s Center for Energy and the Energy GRID Institute.

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NPR reporter Howard Berkes joins StateImpact Pennsylvania’s Reid Frazier to discuss regulatory failures — and the human cost, including to Pennsylvania miners — of a disease that has been described as “suffocating while alive.” Berkes’ reporting has revealed that regulators could have prevented increasing cases of the fatal disease among miners in Appalachia.

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How should journalists go about covering research, so that they add to the public discourse rather than inflame it? StateImpact Pennsylvania’s Amy Sisk talks to two reporters who’ve covered studies tied to fracking and health for this episode of the “energy explained” podcast. StateImpact’s Susan Phillips is based at WHYY in Philadelphia, and Elana Gordon is a Knight science journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who reported on health for WHYY’s health and science show “The Pulse.”

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Bethany McLean, contributing editor at Vanity Fair, peers into the business side of fracking and finds an industry that is moving ‘astonishing’ amounts of money but isn’t as financially strong as it might seem. She discusses why there is ‘no such thing’ as American energy independence, and how that concept could pose a long-term threat to U.S. energy leadership.

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Pennsylvania was among the first governments in the world to guarantee its citizens the right to a clean environment. In practice, that didn’t mean much — until now. As fracking transformed the state’s rural landscapes, it’s unexpectedly led to a shift in the legal landscape, too.

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The Holleran family stood firm against a natural gas pipeline that threatened their dream of a maple syrup farm. They navigated the twisting turns of an inscrutable federal bureaucracy. They stood between the trees and chainsaws. But when they were threatened with arrests and fines, close knit ties began to fray. Men with chainsaws, guarded by men with assault rifles, felled 558 trees. And then something happened that took everyone by surprise.

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Pennsylvania’s most polarizing pipeline brings the fracking boom through Philadelphia’s suburbs. The neighbors aren’t happy. We explain.

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The reporters at StateImpact Pennsylvania, a public media reporting collaboration among WITF, WHYY, WESA and The Allegheny Front, bring you a podcast that goes behind the headlines about how we find and use energy in Pennsylvania.

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