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We’re not saying there wasn’t any environmental news to report this week, we’re just saying we had too many smart people to talk to to get around to it. Specifically:

• Joseph Romm, author of many books on climate change and other topics of energy and the environment, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and former Assistant Secretary for Energy. He maintains an excellent blog on energy issues at climateprogress.org. Go there now, you can read and listen at the same time.We asked Joe what exactly offsets, cap and trade, and renewable energy credits are, what they do and what they don’t do. His message: don’t count on ’em.
• Howard French, professor of journalism at Columbia, former senior writer for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. Howard is author of A Continent for the Taking: the Tragedy and Hope of Africa, and was in town last week to give a talk in the Africa Workshop series. We talked with him about the implications, social and environmental, of the expansion of Chinese industry in Africa.

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