As fires continue to rage across the west coast of the United States, the blazes have become a political issue with Joe Biden citing them as an example of the Trump administration failure to grapple with climate change, while President Trump has blamed poor forest management in states run by Democrats. Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the US Environmental Protection Agency in the administration of President George W. Bush, tells us why she as a Republican is voting for Joe Biden, not least for policies on climate change.
Also in the programme: Spain’s left-wing coalition government has proposed legislation to redress grievances from the dictatorship of General Franco; and items belonging to legendary hip hop musicians go under the hammer at Sothebys in New York, in a first for a major auction house.
(Photo: NASA image from 9 September 2020, shows a frontal boundary which moved into the Great Basin and produced very high downslope winds along the mountains of Washington, Oregon, and California. The winds whipped up the fires, while a pyrocumulus cloud from the Bear fire in California injected smoke high into the atmosphere. The sum of these events was an extremely think blanket of smoke along the West Coast. Credit: copyright NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE)
Transition Studies 