2.10.12: In the latest installment of Ask The Expert, producer Ben Pomeroy visited with Emily Landsburg, CEO of Black Gold Biofuels to learn about the infrastructure scourge and energy potential of used cooking oil’s less glamorous cousin, restaurant grease trap waste. Unlike yellow grease from cooking oil, grease trap waste had no practical applications until Landsburg and her company created one that’s now adding value for towns and cities.

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10.28.11: Last year the Gowanus Canal was designated a Super Fund site by the Environmental Protection Agency in order to remove the chemicals, heavy metals and volatile organics from what that agency called, “one of the most extensively contaminated waterways in the nation”.

Producer Ben Pomeroy visited the Gowanus and the surrounding neighborhood to learn some of it’s history and the people who live and work around it’s banks.

He discovered that behind it’s somewhat mistaken reputation as a fetid body dump- is a Revolutionary War battle site, a tree from China, a third generation family company and a foster home for the set pieces of the next blockbuster movie.

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1.27.12: NNR’s Ben Pomeroy talks in depth with energy policy blogger and NNR contributor Andrew Schenkel about the election-friendly energy agenda laid down by the President in the State of the Union.

1.18.12: Film director Larry Fessenden (pictured above) boasts a prolific career scaring people. Of all the horrors he been part of, Larry may be most frightened by what’s happening in real life on planet earth. Many of his films find their terror from present day ecological and resource crises, like climate change or water shortages.

When he’s not grave robbing on the screen, Larry runs the website Running Out of Road to give voice to the environmental issues and personalities that motivate (read enrage) him.

Producer Ben Pomeroy talks with Larry about horror movies as cautionary tales and how a good Hollywood scare flick can help carve some edginess into the green movement.

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12.28.11: From the debates on federal oil subsidies, the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant to the fight over fracking in New York State, environmental news in 2011 mirrored the contentions and unknowns also found in the economy and the world of politics.

In our year end retrospective we bring you the varied voices from some of our stories that were the news of 2011: political insiders in DC, ethanol growers in Iowa, dishwashers at Occupy Wall Street and a fisherman in Louisiana one year after the BP oil spill.

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