A large cooling tower and other buildings at the Salem nuclear power plant, known as Artificial Island, near a farm in Lower Alloways Creek Township, New Jersey, in 2007. (AP)

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The Obama administration has proposed billions in loan guarantees to restart the nuclear power industry. This week, the President said it’s a “necessary step” in creating a new low-carbon economy.

Republicans may give the White House some bipartisan support on this one. But critics are already saying that the economics — not to mention the perpetual safety and storage concerns — make this a bad deal.

The debate is now live — and it may affect America’s energy landscape, economy, and environment for decades to come.

This hour, On Point: Debating an American nuclear renaissance.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation this week.

Guests:

Joining us from Washington is Stephen Power, reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering energy and environmental issues. He’s written recently about the Obama administration’s energy priorities as reflected in the new budget.

Also from Washington, we’re joined by Edwin Lyman, senior scientist in the Global Security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists and former president of the Nuclear Control Institute. 

And from Madison, Wisconsin, is Paul Wilson, professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He chairs the Energy Analysis and Policy Program of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin.

Whales thrill humans, and they always have.

The easy day-trip thrill of watching whales. The terrifying thrill of hunting whales. The ancient thrill of contemplating a creature of size beyond imagining. Even of being swallowed whole.

Philip Hoare caught whale fever in the pages of “Moby Dick,” the giant skeletons of museum display and the sight of giant humpbacks breaching.

He ended up mid-Atlantic, swimming face to face with a sperm whale, overwhelmed by all the leviathan has meant and means today.

This hour, On Point: A tale of whales.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Philip Hoare joins us from New York. He’s author of “The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea” and writer and presenter of the BBC documentary “The Hunt for Moby-Dick.” He’s also the author of five previous works of nonfiction, including “Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant,” “Noel Coward: A Biography,” and “England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia.”

You can read an excerpt from “The Whale” at HarperCollins.com.

We’re in a century that biologists fear will bring a “great extinction.” Half of all species on Earth, gone, by this century’s end. Wildlife populations cut so deeply that the process of evolution itself could be stopped.

But around the world, committed conservationists are girding to battle that on a scale and with a vision bigger than ever before. They call it “rewilding.” Bringing back and reconnecting swaths of wild Earth and animals on a grand scale.

Our guest, Caroline Fraser, has been out tracking their progress.

This hour, On Point: on the front lines of “rewilding” the Earth.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Caroline Fraser joins us from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She’s the author of “Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution.”  For the past several years, she’s traveled all seven continents reporting on large-scale and transborder conservation projects. 

Read an excerpt (pdf) from “Rewilding the World.”

Joining us from Albany, Australia, is Keith Bradby, coordinator of Gondwana Link, a rewilding project that aims to protect a large swath of land in southwest Australia – from the wet karri forests of the far south west to the woodlands bordering the Nullarbor Plain.

More links: 

See a slideshow of Caroline’s photos from the conservation frontlines at Scientific American.

Connect with conservation organizations that work on “rewilding.”

Demonstrators hold a picture of U.S. President Barack Obama during a demonstration outside the Bella Center, the venue of the U.N. Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, early Saturday, Dec. 19, 2009. (AP)

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For 2009 anyway, the huge conference in Copenhagen was framed as the be-all and end-all of climate change intervention. The glorious moment when the world would rise and commit to act to stave off the worst of global warming.

In the event, Copenhagen almost collapsed. It took a U.S. president and a handful of other leaders to eke out a couple pages of accord.

Some now describe Copenhagen as a nearly apocalyptic failure. Others as the “get real” beginning of something good.

This hour, On Point: top environmentalists, home from Copenhagen, weighing what just happened.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Bill McKibben, writer, environmentalist, and founder of 350.org, an international climate activism campaign.  He’s scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and author of a dozen books, most recently “The Bill McKibben Reader.” He led a rally at Klimaforum in Copenhagen with Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed. His dispatches from Copenhagen were published at Grist.

David Doniger, policy director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate center. He served as director of climate change policy at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton Administration. He was part of the US delegation that negotiated the Kyoto Protocol. He attended the climate talks in Copenhagen as an official observer for the NRDC.  He wrote about it for the NRDC’s Switchboard blog.

Read the text of the Copenhagen Accord at the Washington Post.

 

Tens of thousands demonstrators took part in a march in the center of Copenhagen on Saturday, Dec. 12, 2009. (AP)

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It’s “get real” week in Copenhagen on climate change.

Last week was posturing and pronouncement. The weekend was protest, with maybe a hundred thousand in the streets demanding action.

This week, the heads of state show up — more than 110 of them. And they either will or will not have an agreement to bless on next steps.

Already, poor and developing nations have staged a walkout. The U.S. says it won’t take the plunge without China. And China points back at the U.S.

Everyone wants to know who’s going to pay. It’s a showdown.

This hour, On Point: the hard homestretch in Copenhagen.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Jeffrey Ball, energy and environment columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

Michael Levi, senior fellow for Energy and Environment and director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been writing extensively about the developments in Copenhagen.

Feng An, executive director of the climate change think tank Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation, based in Los Angeles and Beijing. He was a leading architect of China’s existing fuel economy regulations for passenger and commercial vehicles.

Kim Carstensen, leader of the global climate initiative of the World Wildlife Fund.

A drilling rig used to bore thousands of feet into the earth to extract natural gas from the Marcellus shale deep underground is seen on a farm in Houston, Penn., in October 2008.

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It’s not the Copenhagen dream of carbon-free energy.

But its promoters say it could be a far-cleaner-than-coal bridge to that future: a vast ocean of natural gas, deep underground, trapped in shale — in this country.

America could be the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, they say. New technology — hydraulic fracturing — makes it possible, accessible. But it also means shooting a river of chemicals up and down through our water table. The water we drink.

This hour, On Point: American energy, and the rewards and costs of getting at the gas trapped in shale.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Houston, Texas, is Kenneth Medlock, professor of economics at Rice University and fellow in energy and resource economics at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. Formerly he was consultant at El Paso Energy Corporation, where he was responsible for analysis of North American natural gas, petroleum, and power markets.

From Austin, Texas, we’re joined by Amy Mall, senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Land Programs. Lately she’s focused on protecting sensitive western lands from oil and gas operations, and on advancing public policies to require more environmentally friendly oil and gas operations where the industry does drill.

From Youngsville, N.Y., we’re joined by Ramsay Adams, executive director of Catskill Mountainkeeper.

And from Hancock, N.Y., we’re joined by Lisa Wujnovich, organic farmer and poet. She’s lived on her farm in Hancock for nearly 25 years. She and her husband will not sell the gas rights to their land, but they’ve watched many in the town of Hancock sign over their rights.  Read one of her poems, “Gas Drilling–It’s Like This” (pdf).

A sign reads "Hopenhagen Earth Body Guard" on a building in the center of Copenhagen, Denmark, on Sunday Dec. 6, 2009, one day before the U.N. Climate Summit begins. (AP)

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And so, Copenhagen has begun. Nearly 200 nations — and 110 heads of state. The biggest climate change summit anywhere, ever. All focused on trying to save the planet from frying in its own human-generated carbon emissions.

One wrinkle: the latest U.S. polls show Americans less persuaded than in years of the human role — even as scientists warn more urgently of the danger. And as climate scientists’ own e-mails have opened them to attack.

This hour, On Point: Global warming, public opinion, and stolen e-mails, as the curtain goes up in Copenhagen.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Juliet Eilperin, environmental reporter at The Washington Post. She is flying to Copenhagen this morning to attend the Climate Summit. Her most recent article on the stolen e-mail story is “Scientist Steps Down During e-mail Probe“.

Michael Mann, director of the Earth Systems Science Center and a professor in the department of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University. His email exchanges were included in the stolen files.

Carroll Doherty, associate editorial director at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. Pew recently conducted a poll on public opinion about global warming.

More links:

The e-mails stolen from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia have been posted here.

“In Face of Skeptics, Experts Affirm Climate Peril” — a front-page story in today’s New York Times by Andrew Revkin and John Broder reports on reactions to the stolen climate e-mails on the eve of the Copenhagen summit.

A solar energy field under construction for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District in Rancho Cordova, Calif., Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2009. (AP)

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California has always been a mainspring of American economic growth. In wave after wave of discovery and innovation, from gold to the Internet, California has cracked open new frontiers for itself and the country.

Now California’s in trouble – with debt, foreclosure, layoffs, unemployment worse than the nation’s.

But once again it’s got a great, bright hope — this time, clean tech and the green economy. It’s on fire, but is it enough?

This hour, On Point: in a special broadcast from outside Los Angeles, can California’s green economy save California? Can it save the country?

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Mary Nichols, Chair of the California Air Resources Board (appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in July 2007). She was assistant administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Air and Radiation program under the Clinton Administration.

Bill Gross, a lifelong entrepreneur and founder of Idealab, a business incubator which seeks to help fledging companies with new innovations. Idealab is invested in Aptera Motors, Energy Innovations, eSolar (where Gross is CEO), Distributed World Power, RayTracker, and Infinia. Energy Innovations completed the world’s largest corporate solar installation at Google headquarters in 2006.

Gary Polakovic, former lead environmental writer at the Los Angeles Times, where he shared in a Pulitzer Prize. He’s now president of Make Over Earth, Inc., a public affairs firm specializing in environment and energy issues. He’s covered environmental issues in California and across the nation for 23 years.

The Republican side remains empty during the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee markup on climate change legislation in Washington on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2009. All Republicans except one boycotted the start of committee debate, protesting that the bill's economic costs have not been fully examined. (AP)

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The global climate conference next month in Copenhagen has had a long drum roll of sky-high expectations.

This is it, the world has been told as recently as last month by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The make-or-break moment on reining in climate change.

Apparently the U.S. Senate did not get that memo. A comprehensive climate change bill has faced tough going there. Republicans boycotting the whole process. Democrats divided and afraid of economic fallout. The clock ticking.

This hour, On Point: One month before Copenhagen, where the U.S. stands.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Margaret Kriz Hobson, energy and environment correspondent for National Journal. She wrote recently about “the Senate’s climate-change dealmakers.”  She also writes a federal column for the Environmental Law Institute’s Environmental Forum magazine.

Dave Hamilton, director of the Sierra Club’s global warming and energy program.

Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat from Ohio. He wants Congress to provide free allowances under the cap and trade program to companies that need to transition to using cleaner burning fuels and manufacturing green energy products. He is also pushing Senate Democrats to require that importers pay a carbon dioxide fee for products made in countries that don’t control their greenhouse gases.

Maya Lin, "What Is Missing?" Listening Cone, 2009, installed at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. (Photo: Bruce Damonte Photography, Inc. © Maya Lin Studio, Inc., courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York.)

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Architect, designer, and environmental artist Maya Lin carved a permanent, powerful place in the American heart with her Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC.

She was 21 when she drew that black granite line in history, and she went on to a wide-ranging life in design.

Ten years ago, Maya Lin announced she was out of the memorial business entirely. But now, she’s done one more: to all the species vanished or vanishing from the Earth. A king-sized listening cone, filled with the sounds of birds and frogs and primates slipping away.

This hour, On Point: Maya Lin and “What Is Missing?”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Maya Lin joins us from New York. An award-winning architect, designer and environmental artist, she’s best known for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC.  Her  latest work, which she calls her final memorial, is “What Is Missing?” It focuses on extinct and vanishing species, and incorporates sculpture, video, sound, hand-held electronics, printed material and an interactive website.

More links:

Maya Lin’s official website offers a rich visual experience. Covering the full scope of her work, it includes a wealth of beautiful images and provides detailed background information on the art and the artist.

“The Missing Piece” — Susan Morgan reported on Maya Lin’s “What Is Missing?” in a multimedia feature for The New York Times Style Magazine that includes a photo gallery.

You can also browse a slideshow of her work below, or show/" target="_blank">view the slideshow at full size. Click on the images to view descriptions.

Stewart Brand

In today’s first hour, Whole Earth guru Stewart Brand and energy expert Amory Lovins debated whether the U.S. should build more nuclear power plants in the effort to reduce carbon emissions.

Brand’s new book, “Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto,” takes on a number of what he calls environmental “pieties,” including opposition to nuclear power. He says nuclear is now “green” — and that we can’t afford to oppose it any longer on the old grounds, given the urgent need to address climate change.

Lovins has recently argued against Brand’s view, in a posting at Grist.org, and he layed out his case for us on the air today.

It all mirrors a debate in Washington about whether more nuclear power should be a serious component of a new energy-climate bill.

You can listen to the exchange here:

And here’s a transcript:

TOM ASHBROOK: Amory Lovins, you’ve pushed back fairly hard and quite publicly on Stewart Brand’s embrace here of nuclear power. Why?
AMORY LOVINS: Although Stewart and I share a great sense of urgency about climate change, I think the more urgent you think that problem is, the more important it is to invest judiciously to get the most solution per dollar and the most solution per year. And nuclear flunks both those tests. It gives about two to twenty times less carbon savings per dollar and about twenty to forty times less carbon savings per year than if you brought instead the things that are walloping it in the market, namely micropower and energy efficiency.
TOM ASHBROOK: What is micropower?
AMORY LOVINS: Micropower has two parts. One is renewables other than big hydro. So it’s sun, wind, geothermal, small hydro, and so on. And the other part is co-generating electricity and useful heat together in factories or buildings, which saves at least half of the fuel money in carbon.
TOM ASHBROOK: So your core argument is not the nuclear waste argument, but a cost-effectiveness argument around nuclear?
AMORY LOVINS: Correct. Nuclear is about the most expensive and slowest thing you can build. And I don’t think it’s true you need to build everything. You can’t afford to build everything. You need to choose the best buys for your goal, just as in assembling a financial portfolio you don’t stuff it full of one of everything on the market. You figure out the diversified set of assets that will best meet your investment objectives. If you buy something really expensive and risky, that actually makes your portfolio perform worse because you didn’t get to buy stuff that would have performed better.
TOM ASHBROOK: Stewart Brand, what about the argument? You’re arguing a big push in nuclear. Amory Lovins says it’s not the most cost-effective way forward and it really matters what we pull the trigger on here.
STEWART BRAND: I was surprised that in Amory’s good and thorough response to the chapter [on nuclear energy], which I’m glad to see is out there, and it’s downloadable from Rocky Mountain Institute. One of the things, Amory, you didn’t address in that was [nuclear] microreactors, and I’m delighted you’re talking about micropower because it looks like the new generation of those small reactors down around 100 to 125 megawatts coming from half a dozen manufacturers are right in there. And [they] could do co-generation and local adaptivity and all the things you’d like to see distributed micropower do.
AMORY LOVINS: It might have been a good idea to look at 50 years ago, but it’s way too late. Actually, I did describe it… I wrote a special paper on this called “New Nuclear Reactor, Same Old Story” last spring, because I got really curious about these arguments and dug into them. There are two basic issues, that again are economic, that I get to before the other attributes. I think the Gen 4 reactor types are broadly comparable to today’s reactors in waste production. They might in some respects be safer. They’re generally as proliferative or more proliferative. But their economics are not sufficiently better to make any difference, for two reasons. One is that of course what makes a reactor work is that you have a very concentrated source of heat and also of radioactivity, and the physical devices you need to harness the heat and manage the heat and radioactivity do not scale down very well. It’s just a matter of physical scaling laws. Secondly…
STEWART BRAND: Wait, wait, wait. Isn’t that the case also with solar thermal? They’re using the same thing. They’re using smaller steam turbines.
AMORY LOVINS: To some degree, it’s true of the steam turbine, except that there you don’t have a concentrated source and you don’t need shielding. And the mirrors—or troughs or whatever – are very well suited to scaling down and to mass production. The more serious problem, though, is one of timing. The things you’re competing with, or the things that all nuclear fails to compete with by large margins, are already getting their economies from mass production. They’re things like photovoltaics and wind turbines. And they are decades further along in getting their scale economies. And then by the time you’ve got some kind of new reactor that’s usually been on the books for forty or fifty years to be actually licensed, financed, built, tested – and then you’ve scaled up production of it – you’d be more decades behind, at least one or two, the things that are already several times cheaper. In fact, if you were to take today’s nuclear plants and make the nuclear part free, the other roughly two-thirds of the investment would still be grossly uncompetitive with efficiency and micropower.

Brand and Lovins also took up the issue of nuclear safety, after one of the show’s callers raised the issue. Here’s the exchange on that:

TOM ASHBROOK: Stewart Brand, what about the safety issue when it comes to nuclear?
STEWART BRAND: It’s been very good…[t]he people around nuclear reactors, they’re polled every so often: “What do you think about nuclear, nuclear reactors, would you like to have another nuclear reactor at the plant nearby?” It’s the most positive support the industry gets, people who are closest to the industry out in the landscape. So, at least all the data from that shows it’s not so big an issue…
TOM ASHBROOK: Amory Lovins, the safety aspect of nuclear?
AMORY LOVINS: …I think we need to remember that, although there are many honest and conscientious people in this industry that know they’re dealing with serious matters, organizations are fallible, just as individuals are, and they often do things that the individuals in them would not do by themselves. Historically, whenever you get a period like we’ve been in the last eight years, where there’s a very pro-nuclear administration and that sends all the signals against dissent and rocking the boat, this turns out to be bad for the nuclear industry. Because bad things end up happening that wouldn’t have if we had been more alert. And you get capture of the regulatory apparatus by the industry being regulated and so on. So I think the issues of human fallibility remain serious in this industry. I just don’t tend to treat those first, because if the technology is unnecessary, uneconomic and actually reduces and retards climate protection, I stop there. I don’t go on to whether it’s proliferative or unsafe or whether we know what to do with the waste.
STEWART BRAND: Amory, question, what do you make of the rather pro-nuclear stance of the current administration?
AMORY LOVINS: I think there are differing views within the administration. And I think the differences between our views are mirrored there and that our discussion will be helpful in informing those internal debates. I think also a lot of the pressure comes from members of Congress more than members of the administration.
STEWART BRAND: The Democrats there, the powerful ones, are sounding more pro-nuclear every day with the climate bill.

You can listen to the whole show here.

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In the 1960s, Stewart Brand became one of the country’s first and most famous champions of a new ecological awareness. His Whole Earth Catalog spoke to a generation of hippies and back-to-nature commune dwellers.

Now, at 70, Stewart Brand is calling on environmentalists to reframe their understanding of the problem — and solutions. It’s too late for back-to-nature, he says. Global warming is beyond that.

To survive now, Brand says, we need nuclear power, genetic engineering, giant cities. We must manage nature or lose civilization.

This hour, On Point: In the face of global warming, Stewart Brand redefines green.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Stewart Brand joins us from Denver. Founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, founder of The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronric Link), and co-founder of the Global Business Network, he’s president of the Long Now Foundation. His new book is “Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.” 

Joining us from New York is Amory Lovins, co-founder, chairman, and chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute. He’s author of “Winning the Oil Endgame.” You can read his critique of Stewart Brand’s book at Grist.org.

Later this hour:

We’re joined from New York by Bill McKibben, longtime environmental journalist and founder of 350.org, an advocacy group organizing events across the world on October 24 — “International Day of Climate Action.” He’s coordinating what he says will be about 1,000 events, from the Great Barrier Reef in Australia to the streets of the U.S.

More links:

Here’s Stewart Brand speaking at a TED conference in July on rethinking “green pieties”:

Amory Lovins was on FORA.tv in August talking about energy efficiency and climate change:

And here’s Bill McKibben in Australia this summer talking about the “350″ movement:

A U.S. delegate walk past solar panels on display outside a Future House, a clean energy resident development project in Beijing, China, on July 16, 2009. (AP)

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On Capitol Hill today, the Senate introduces a bill meant to slow global warming. Meanwhile, back on the windfarm, American entrepreneurs are taking the problem seriously — as an environmental threat but also as the next great economic prize.

In China, the government says it’s determined to become a green superpower — or risk drowning in its own pollution.

Some say the next great global race is on — the clean-tech race — and that China’s entry is a “Sputnik moment.”

Has America heard the wake-up call? Is there a clean-energy race to be won or lost? This hour, On Point: China, the U.S., and the clean-energy future.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from London is Fiona Harvey, environmental reporter for The Financial Times.

Joining us from Santa Clara, Calif., is Michael Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials, a California-based company that builds the machines and the factories that make solar panels. He was recently profiled by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

From San Francisco we’re joined by Barbara Finamore, China Program Director for National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). She has worked for nearly 20 years with provincial and federal government officials in China to advise them on how to build a greener economy. She is also a founder and board member of the China-U.S. Energy Efficiency Alliance.

And from Shanghai, we’re joined by Charlie McElwee, Shanghai-based partner in the American law firm of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey. He is an expert on energy and environmental issues in China and author of the blog China Environmental Law.

The Tesla Model S, slated for 2011. (teslamotors.com)

The all-electric, hot and sexy Tesla Roadster goes zero to sixty in 3.9 seconds and sits in the garages of George Clooney, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, David Letterman, and the founders of Google.

There are six hundred of them in the world, put together not in Detroit but in Silicon Valley. In 2011, backed by almost half a billion dollars in government loans, Tesla plans to roll out a high-performance sedan, the Model S.

In a decade, claims Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors, there could be a million new Teslas a year. They could revolutionize the U.S. auto industry, he says. And save the world.

Elon Musk dreams big. Is he just dreaming?

This hour, On Point: Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, on the future of electric cars – and the planet.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Los Angeles is Elon Musk, chairman, CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors. A Silicon Valley entrepeneur, he’s also CEO of Space X, a space technologies company that resupplies the Space Station and aims to colonize Mars; chairman of SolarCity, a solar power provider; and co-founder of PayPal.

From Detroit, we’re joined by Bill Vlasic, Detroit bureau chief for The New York Times.

More links:

You can see a photo gallery of Tesla’s cars at their website.

In a skeptical piece last June, BusinessWeek’s David Welch asked “Can Tesla Become a Real Automaker?” And on The New York Times’ Wheels blog, Jim Motavalli looked at some of the challenges facing Tesla’s Model S.

Here’s the Edmunds.com video review of the forthcoming Model S:

Watch a video about the forthcoming Tesla sedan, the Model S:

Isabella Rossellini, photographed at the 34th Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto, on Thursday, Sept. 10, 2009. (AP)

Actress, model, and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini has known years as one of the world’s most beautiful, most photographed women.

Five hundred magazine covers — Vogue, Elle, Vanity Fair. Famous screen roles — “Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart,” “30 Rock.” Famous parents — Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini. Famous lovers — David Lynch, Martin Scorsese.

Famous independence of mind.

Now Isabella Rossellini has taken her talents, humor, and iconoclasm to the sex lives of the animal kingdom.

This hour, On Point: Isabella Rossellini on starfish love, environmentalism, and her new series, “Green Porno.”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Isabella Rossellini joins us from Southampton, NY. An actress, model, filmmaker, author, and screenwriter, she produces, directs, and stars in “Green Porno,” a series of film shorts on sex in nature, for the Sundance Channel.  Daughter of actress Ingrid Bergman and filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, she’s starred in numerous movies, including “Blue Velvet,” “Big Night,” “Fearless,” and many more.

More links:

A “Green Porno” book and DVD set are due out Sept. 22. You can watch a number of the short films on YouTube, like this one, “Preying Mantis”:

And here she is in an unforgettable scene from “Blue Velvet”:

A rendering of Masdar City from the Masdar Initiative website (masdarcity.ae).

In Arabic, the word Masdar means “the source.” And right now, the desert outside Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, is the source of a budding green revolution.

Construction is underway for Masdar City, a high-tech metropolis that will be home to 50,000 residents – and be the world’s first city with no carbon footprint. No cars. Zero waste. A truly green metropolis.

The plans on the drawing board are very big. The challenges are big, too. Can it even work? We’re going direct to Abu Dhabi for answers, and a tour.

This hour, On Point: Masdar and the green city of the future.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation.

Guests:

Khaled Awad, director of property development for the Masdar project. He joins us from Masdar City, on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

In our studio we’re joined by Kevin Bullis, energy editor at Technology Review. His article on Masdar, “A Zero-Emissions City in the Desert,” appeared in the March/April 2009 issue.

More links:

The Masdar City website offers an extensive overview of the project, along with videos and an image gallery.

Watch a video “fly through” of Masdar City as rendered by the firm Foster & Partners:

With the whole world talking about climate change and global warming, arctic biologist Bill Streever is looking the other way. He’s thinking about the cold.

Cold ice caps, cold tundra, cold lips, cold lungs. He’s looking back at cold explorers, men who died of cold.

He’s looking around at animals that thrive and survive in the cold. Frogs that become frogsicles, and hop again in spring. All things cold.

A warming climate may make cold itself an endangered species.

This hour, On Point: Igloos, permafrost, absolute zero and one man’s relentless pursuit of the cold.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Bill Streever joins us from Anchorage, Alaska. A biologist, he chairs the North Slope Science Initiative’s Science Technical Advisory Panel. He started out as a commercial diver in harbors and oilfields in Maine, the Gulf of Mexico, and the South China Sea. His new book is “Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places.”

Browse and read excerpts from the book.

More:

You can’t build igloos with powdery snow.  But you can build a quinzhee.  Bill demonstrates how it’s done in this video on YouTube:

Songlist: Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow (Frank Zappa); Hey Ya (Outkast); Antarctica (The Weepies)

Banana Slug on Redwood tree. (Photo: eyesontheroad/flickr.com)

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The American turkey vulture is a marvel of sensory power.  It can smell the whiff of a dead mouse under leaves from 200 feet in the sky.  It sweeps dead raccoons clean off the roads.  And still, when we see it’s bald, wrinkled red head at work, we say “ick.”

Gardner-journalist Constance Casey has made a specialty of “icky” creatures.  She can tell you all about vultures and slugs, ticks and jellyfish. The love life and dead fish consumption of snapping turtles.

Yes, they look bad, she concedes.  But they have their place in the world. 

This hour, On Point: icky creatures up close, with Constance Casey.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Constance Casey is a former newspaper editor and New York City Parks Department gardener.  Last summer, she started an ongoing series on revolting creatures for Slate.  She’s covered ticks, jellyfish, vultures, and slugs.  Her next article is about snapping turtles. She writes at The Observant Gardener.

James Harding is a naturalist and a wildlife specialist at Michigan State University.  He’s the “critter guy” for MSU Museum’s Wildlife and Natural History Question Line.  His specializes in amphibians and reptiles, especially turtles.

More links:

Watch Isabella Rossellini act out the bizarre mating rituals of bees, spiders,  and limpets in Green Porno.

A plastic 55 gallon barrel is seen among piles of driftwood and mud along the Potomac River in Cropley, Md., Feb. 8, 2006. (AP)

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For years now, the stories have been piling up. Frogs and salamanders with extra legs. “Intersex fish,” neither male or female. Eighty percent of male smallmouth bass in the Potomac producing eggs.

And the apparent culprit: chemicals in the water — endocrine disruptors — that are also in our water and everyday household items.

Now scientists are tracking large increases in genital deformities in newborn boys, early-onset puberty in girls, obesity and diabetes in animals and humans, and warning that these, too, could have a chemical cause.

This hour, On Point: Danger in the water — endocrine disruptors, and their long reach.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Amherst, Mass., is R. Thomas Zoeller, professor and chair of biology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is one of the authors a 50-page scientific statement by the Endocrine Society, “Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals,” which was cited by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in his column for Sunday, June 28. (Also see Kristof’s followup blog post on the topic.)

Joining us from Washington is Lynn Goldman, a pediatrician and epidemiologist. She is a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 1993 she was appointed by President Clinton to serve as Assistant Administrator for the EPA’s Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances, where she served for five years.

Author Rick Bass at his home in Montana. (Photo by Nicole Blaisdell)

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Rick Bass, award-winning author and environmental activist, has lived in the Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana for over 20 years.

Well known as a chronicler of the western wilderness, the Yaak Valley in particular, his newest book is something of a modern-day “Walden.” Like Thoreau, Bass records in lush detail the passage of seasons and the natural world.

But while Thoreau went into the woods alone, Bass is a family man — and he reflects on raising young children immersed in the wild.

This hour, On Point: Rick Bass and a year in the Montana wilderness.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guest:

Rick Bass joins us from Spokane, Wash.  An award-winning chronicler of the American western wilderness and an environmental activist, his new book is “The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana.” Among his many other works of fiction and nonfiction are “The Book of Yaak,” “The Ninemile Wolves,” “The Hermit’s Story,” “The Lives of Rocks,” and “Why I Came West.”

Read an excerpt from “The Wild Marsh.”