A New Green Podcast

As many of you know I have conversations from time to time with people who blog about environmental issues. Three of my favorites are Tim Hurst, Maria Surma Manka, and Jeff McIntire-Strassburg.

They're also three of the busiest people I know. Like me, Maria is in the PR industry. She leverages her considerable expertise on environmental issues for her company's green marketing blog, EcoLogic. She's contributed to some of the biggest green blogs out there.

I interviewed Tim a while back for this blog, and I've followed him quite a bit - he contributes to Red Green and Blue, Web Ecoist and and he's the managing editor for a relatively new blog I'm high on called Earth and Industry.

Jeff is the granddaddy of 'em all - a former English professor, he's a co-founder of Green Options, he's blogging for the Sundance Channel's Sunfiltered (yes, with co-contributor Robert Redford), and he's contributing to Tim's Earth and Industry blog.

Just for kicks, I asked the three of them to join me for a new semi-regular podcast I'd like to start on environmental issues. I wanted to keep it very simple - we come up with one question, and each of us answer it. I also wanted to keep it under half an hour. Tim came up with the first question. He told the group, "There seems to be a lot of discussion about whether the Waxman-Markey climate bill should be passed because it's a good start or whether it should be scrapped entirely in favor of something tougher or completely different. This could go lots of different ways, but it seems salient." I think we were all pleased with the discussion.

I know there's a large and growing number of green podcasts out there, but I wanted to do this for a few reasons. First, I like these folks and wanted to talk about environmental and economic policy with some smart people.

Second, I wanted to learn podcasting. Finally, I wanted to demonstrate how people can publish smart content (if not the most polished) without spending a dime - I'm using Skype to create a conference call, Call Graph to record it, Audacity to edit it, and The Internet Archive to store it. I'd like to do more of these and publish a series of green policy conversations to iTunes. I may try to do this with other topics as well.

The audio quality is so-so - I've heard worse, I've heard better. I'm still learning. So many thanks to Tim, Maria and Jeff for their participation in this - I'm looking forward to more.

Here's the discussion - it's about 26 minutes. Details and downloads can be found here.