Sustainable Energy and Economy Network

John Cavanagh discusses the IPS report "America Isn't Broke" and the budget supercommittee failure on KPFK's "Sojourner Truth" show with Margaret Prescod. "Sojourner Truth" airs mornings on KPFK Los Angeles.

The bipartisan so-called "supercommittee" has failed to reach an agreement on reducing the federal deficit after three months of negotiations over taxes and spending. The full Congress will now have a little over a year to come up with an alternative. A trigger of $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts over 10 years to military and domestic programs takes effect in 2013. “What people need to remember is that we are a rich country and that this crisis is actually an opportunity to harness our abundant resources in ways that will position us better for the future,” says Sarah Anderson, co-author of a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, “America Isn’t Broke: “How to Pay for the Crisis While Making the Country More Equitable, Green, and Secure.”

Anthony McCarthy, host of the Anthony McCarthy Show, joins Marc for a look at the failure of the debt supercommittee, with its members failing to to reach agreement on deficit savings.  We're also joined by Deneen Borelli, Project 21 Fellow, and Sarah Anderson, Director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and co-author of the report America Is Not Broke.

Though she spends her career worrying about the ruination of the planet, she has always tried to shield her 11-year-old son from the worst of her fears. “It’s more important to let a child be a child,” she writes. “Let them experience the wonder and beauty of nature, not fear it.”

"Climate change has begun," Wysham said. "And yet our press is not discussing extreme weather events - droughts, fires, flooding - in the context of climate change, so the populace is ill-informed. And our politicians are not connecting the dots between our continued reliance on carbon-intensive fuels - like tar sands - and the crazy weather that threatens us all. Both need to change."

"From computer models, we know that this part of the continent is hit by more extreme events than other regions," says Daphne Wysham, a climate analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. She calls the Horn of Africa the "epicenter of global warming." She says that additional periods of extreme drought are to be expected in coming years.