'BradCast' 2/18/2021 (Guest: Margot Paez, formerly of 'BradCast' and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
On today's 'BradCast':\xa0\xa0 With that other guy finally out of our White House, Fox 'News' is quickly returning to form as the GOP's go-to corporate propaganda mouthpiece, launching a tsunami of disinformation seeking to deflect responsibility for the massive blackouts and water outages across Texas away from the real cause -- the state's deregulated and privatized fossil fuel industry \u2013and instead falsely blaming wind energy. Texas officials failed to ensure reliable power and water to millions in a winter weather emergency that caused oil and gas wells, pipelines, power plants and refineries to freeze up due to failure to winterize, a direct consequence of deregulation and privatization of the state's electric grid. And those natural gas shortages are now affecting other states. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) angered his constituents by attempting to escape Texas' emergency with a trip to Cancun. But some good news:\xa0 NASA's newest rover, Perseverance, stuck its landing on Mars on Thursday. MARGOT PAEZ, former producer of 'The BradCast' who left us to work at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, spent several years on the team that developed the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument, one of several key tools central to 'Percy's' mission to search for signs of ancient microbial life on the planet. Paez, now a PhD candidate in climate change adaptation and mitigation, explains Percy's mission and the experiments on board, and offers clarifying thoughts on the broad applications of NASA's space research and how it is crucial to helping us understand climate change and other critical issues facing our home planet. Plus Desi Doyen has our latest 'Green News Report.'