The Summer Olympic Games are here! That means more than 300 events, ten thousand athletes and millions of spectatorscoming to watch. And the athletes are not the only ones with an Olympian task. The organizers of the Paris Games pledged to make their event emit only half of the carbon pollution of the 2012 London Games. 

“As an independent researcher my job is not to make people happy, but to tell them some things that are uncomfortable sometimes,” says Martin Müller, Professor of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. The uncomfortable people in question are the members of the International Olympic Committee, whose offices are ten minutes down the road from Müller’s office. 

“The Summer Olympics will be anywhere between 1.5 and 4.5 million tons of CO2 equivalent. That's roughly the equivalent of a relatively large city, such as Madrid.for a year,” says Müller. The largest share of those emissions come from spectators flying in. Paris’ central location at a hub of European rail networks may make it easier this year for the crowds to avoid flying. Another factor working in Paris’ favor is the fact that they have been building out mass transit for decades. The region is in the process of building 68 new subway stations in the city and the suburbs. Most won’t be open in time for the Olympics, but a new extension from Orly Airport into the city opened in June.

The second biggest source of emissions typically comes from construction. In the past, the Olympics have been synonymous with huge infrastructure projects and iconic structures like Beijing’s Birds’ Nest Stadium. For the Paris Games, the organizers decided to take a different approach. They renovated a number of existing venues and installed a lot of temporary structures that can be used elsewhere in the future. Author and journalist Henry Grabar says, “That might not sound like rocket science, but it previously has been an approach that the International Olympic Committee has not smiled upon.” 

The big project, the Olympic Village, was built with a passive cooling system rather than traditional air conditioning, which consumes much more energy. The passive cooling system will probably be just fine for the local residents who will move into the apartments after the Olympics are gone; most Paris apartments have no cooling system at all. But no one really knows how the new system will perform in a heat wave. That has many teams worried, to the point where they have brought in their own air conditioning units. Henry Grabar says he hears athletes saying, “This is the biggest moment of my life, and so I need the room to be the exact temperature that I want it to be so I can get the perfect night's sleep before I have to go out there and literally be the best in the world at the thing I'm trying to do.” 

Martin Müller suggests that it would be better if the Olympics had no audience – or at least, a much smaller, local one – in order to prevent most of the carbon pollution that comes from travel. But for athletes, the roar of the crowd can improve their performance.  

“Athletes will not perform at the same level in an empty stadium as they would in a completely full Olympic stadium,” says Oluseyi Smith, a two-time Olympian. “But if it's a necessary trade off to ensure that the sport survives for the next 50, 60 years, I would say I'd like to think most athletes would be okay with that.” Smith is now a renewable energy engineer and Founder of Racing to Zero, a consulting group that focuses on environmental sustainability in sports. 

In Beijing, the changes made for the 2008 Olympics had surprising environmental benefits that continue to this day. 

“Prior to 2008, the air quality situation was pretty dire. Most days had exceeded what the Beijing government had identified as being a blue sky day,” says Angel Hsu, founder and director of the Data-Driven EnviroLab and teacher of public policy and the environment at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In preparation for the 2008 games Beijing expanded their mass transit, enacted rules that limited how many cars were allowed on the road, tackled heavy industry by shutting down a number of polluting factories, and tried to increase the use of renewable energy. At first, most of those initiatives were meant to be temporary. But once the people got a taste of clean air, the government made them permanent. Hsu says, “I was just in Beijing this past January and I mean, the skies are blue.”

This week, a retrospective of the very first season of Ozark Highlands Radio featuring a variety of outstanding performances recorded live at Ozark Folk Center State Park.  Host Dave Smith and OHR producer Jeff Glover provide context and commentary for this captivating collection.

Each year at the Ozark Folk Center State Park, we record many hours of live music.  We cherish all of it, but some of these performances stand out as being uniquely interesting or moving.  On this episode, OHR producer Jeff Glover guides us through some of the most memorable moments of season one.  Featured on this show are: thumb picking guitar Jedi and country music legacy Thom Bresh; OHR guest host, writer, and renowned folk musician Aubrey Atwater; singer-songwriter Wil Maring with award winning guitarist Robert Bowlin; OHR host and our very own Dave Smith; Ozark originals The Lazy Goat String Band; Missouri folk sensations and Ozark originals Cindy Woolf & Mark Bilyeu; Outlaw Country star Malcolm Holcomb with multi-instrumentalist Jared Tyler; Ozark originals The Clark Family; world champion mountain dulcimer master Jeff Hames; writer, auto harpist and singer Bryan Bowers; and Ozark original husband and wife duo Lukas & Eden Pool.

In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, OHR host Dave Smith offers a 1975 archival recording of Ozark original musician, educator, country music legacy, and the original keeper of “the vault,” Mark Jones, performing the traditional tune “Arkansas Traveler” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives.

In his segment “Back in the Hills,” writer, professor, and historian Dr. Brooks Blevins presents a profile of renowned Ozark original folk singer Almeda Riddle, the voice of the Ozarks.

A decades-old lunar mystery gets an update in this week's Planetary Radio. Matt Siegler from the Planetary Science Institute shares his team's surprising findings about the granite formation that might lie beneath Compton-Belkovich, a thorium-rich hot spot on the far side of the Moon. Then Bruce Betts, chief scientist of The Planetary Society, shares What's Up in the night sky.

Scientists say cultivated, or lab-grown, meat could help shrink the massive carbon footprint that comes with farming animals for food. It could also abolish factory farming along with all its environmental and ethical downsides. So why the holdup?

ClassicalWorks (Episode 182)

In the strangeness of mid-summer 2024, the cosmopolitan novelist Joseph O’Neill is our bridge between the Republican convention in Milwaukee and the Summer Olympics in Paris. He knows both sides of that gap: politics and global celebrity sports.

He’s famous as an amateur cricket player in New York, of all places, and as a writer about cricket and the many meanings of sports in general. His new novel, Godwin, is deep into soccer/football in a wild intercontinental search for the next superstar, the next Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappé. 

Every ten shows, Katie Marie and Joe put together an hour of tunes and songs that we had to cut due to time from the last ten shows. For an extra treat, we also feature a bunch of new releases that we've received over the last few weeks.

This week's artists: Kathleen MacInnes; Oisín Mac Diarmada-Daithí Gormley-Samantha Harvey; Michael Black; Barry & Laura Kerr; Open The Door For Three; Anthony Quigney; Ad Vielle Que Pourra; Réalta; Nuala Kennedy & Eamon O' Leary; Elaine Reilly; Dan Possumoto; Roisin McGrory; Mick McAuley, Winifred Horan & Colm O Caoimh; Jerry Holland; and Patrick Street.The FairPlé score this week: 47