Beyond Green

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Carbon unCaptured

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:50:00 +0000

I've never been a fan of carbon capture and sequestration for coal plants as a solution for addressing climate change. But so called "clean coal" technologies have been an important touchstone in pretty much every climate speech Obama has given -- and the current climate legislation enshrines it as a possible way forward for coal.

Well, now it looks like this particular vision of the future of coal was a mirage (via the Guardian):

A new research paper from American academics is threatening to blow a hole in growing political support for carbon capture and storage as a weapon in the fight against global warming.
The document from Houston University claims that governments wanting to use CCS have overestimated its value and says it would take a reservoir the size of a small US state to hold the CO2 produced by one power station.
Previous modelling has hugely underestimated the space needed to store CO2 because it was based on the "totally erroneous" premise that the pressure feeding the carbon into the rock structures would be constant, argues Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at Houston, and his co-author Christene Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M University
"It is like putting a bicycle pump up against a wall. It would be hard to inject CO2 into a closed system without eventually producing so much pressure that it fractured the rock and allowed the carbon to migrate to other zones and possibly escape to the surface," Economides said.
The paper concludes that CCS "is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in CO2 emissions, although it has been repeatedly presented as such by others."

An underground reservoir the size of a US state for a single plant?! Yeah, that's a big ol' oopsie right there. There are about 600 coal plants in operation in the US and there are, at last count, 48 contiguous states. Something about that math doesn't quite add up.

The question now is if anyone in government or industry will admit to the possibility that CCS is a fantasy. My guess is no. Like the ascendant nuclear power trend, CCS is such a convenient fiction, among other things as a way to ~~bribe~~ convince industry to go along with climate legislation it's hard to imagine the administration admitting we've got a naked emperor on our hands.

Photo credit: iagoarchangel

USDA Downplays Dangers of Monsanto's Roundup Herbicide

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:04:00 +0000

Sure, the crops are genetically engineered to withstand Roundup; but what about the soil?

What would happen if a USDA scientist discovered that one of the most commonly used pesticides on the planet with a reputation for having saved millions of tons of US soil from erosion was -- rather than a soil savior -- a soil killer?

That, to quote a certain paranormal expert, would be bad. And yet, it's true.

This news came to the fore thanks to a recently published must-read article from Reuters on how government regulators are "dropping the ball" on agricultural biotechnology. It begins with the story of USDA scientist Dr. Robert Kremer. Kremer has spent the last fifteen years looking at Monsanto's blockbuster broad-spectrum herbicide glyphosate (aka RoundUp), the most commonly used pesticide in the world and the companion to Monsanto's possibly monopolistic RoundupReady lines of genetically engineered seeds.

While exact figures are a closely guarded secret thanks to the USDA's refusal to update its pesticide use database after 2007, estimates suggest upwards of 200 million pounds of glyphosate were dumped on fields and farms in the US in 2008 alone. That's almost double the amount used in 2005.

Glyphosate has a reputation as the "safest" of all the agricultural herbicides and has become the primary means of weed control in industrial agriculture. While being the best of an extremely nasty bunch may be the faintest of praise, the USDA relies on this perception, which has been fueled by industry and government research indicating that the chemical dissipates quickly and shows low toxicity (as poisons go, that is) to humans.

The claim of "millions of tons of soil saved" relates to the soil that would have otherwise been lost to erosion without glyphosate's central role in chemical no-till farming techniques. Indeed, experts such as Dr. Michael Shannon, a program director at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service, as well as other USDA scientists, make this anti-erosion claim the core argument in favor of the widespread use of the chemical.

Even so, glyphosate has been under attack from several quarters of late. Research indicates that, while glyphosate on its own may be relatively "safe," it is actually quite toxic in combination with the other (supposedly "inert") ingredients in commercial preparations of the herbicide, i.e. the stuff that farmers actually spray on their fields.

And of course, there is the frightening spread of superweeds that glyphosate can no longer kill. It's to the point that thousands of acres in the South have been abandoned to resistant strains of giant pigweed.

Enter Dr. Kremer. His work, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of European Agronomy, further tarnishes glyphosate's golden status. He has found that glyphosate's side-effects in the ground are far more severe than previously thought.

READ THE REST OF THIS POST ON GRIST.ORG

BPA-free Canned Tomatoes Coming Soon

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:39:00 +0000

One of the top sources of BPA exposure is canned tomatoes. The high acidity leaches the BPA out of can linings at a higher rate and canned toms were one of the first things I dropped from the shopping list when the BPA scandal broke. So this is good news:

Muir Glen, a subsidiary of General Mills, will be switching to metal can packaging that does not contain bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical that numerous food and product makers have moved away from.

...Starting with the next tomato harvest, all Muir Glen tomato products will come in cans with BPA-free liners.

Sadly, General Mills isn't announced what chemicals are in the new lining. In fact, one of the main reasons the FDA has been so reluctant to ban the chemical is the lack of alternatives (although it's worth pointing out that canning did exist before BPA was discovered) so it would be nice to know what General Mills will be using. Anyway, as happy as I am that there will soon be a BPA-free brand of canned tomato products, I also feel like keeping endocrine disruptors out of consumers' bloodstreams should not represent a competitive advantage.

On a related note, Coca-cola shareholders are voting today on a proposal to require the company to disclose what it's doing on BPA (all soda cans are currently lined with it). It will be interesting to see 1) if it passes and 2) if it turns into the first step in getting Coke to dump BPA.

Red Flags in the Ocean

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 19:27:00 +0000

There's bad news in the oceans -- and I'm not talking about the Pacific Garbage Patch or the bluefin tuna (NSF via Brad Johnson on Twitter).

Current observational tools cannot account for roughly half of the heat that is believed to have built up on Earth in recent years, according to a "Perspectives" article in this week's issue of the journal Science.
Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., warn that satellite sensors, ocean floats, and other instruments are inadequate to track this "missing" heat, which may be building up in the deep oceans or elsewhere in the climate system.
"The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later," says NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, the article's lead author.
"The reprieve we've had from warming temperatures in the last few years will not continue. It is critical to track the build-up of energy in our climate system so we can understand what is happening and predict our future climate."
The authors suggest that last year's rapid onset of El Nino, the periodic event in which upper ocean waters across much of the tropical Pacific Ocean become significantly warmer, may be one way in which the solar energy has reappeared.

The article goes on to point out that we really need to understand where that missing heat is before we start hacking the planet.

But then there's this (via MoJo's Blue Marble):

A new study (pdf) shows a warming globe is intensifying Earth's water cycle, making arid regions drier and high rainfall regions wetter. It also finds a clear link between warming-driven salinity changes at the ocean's surface and changes underwater that match the pathways surface waters take into the deep ocean.

The changes in the water cycle mean that the ocean beneath rainy regions of the globe has freshened, while the ocean in areas dominated by evaporation have grown saltier. The paper also confirms that surface warming of the world’s oceans over the past 50 years has penetrated into the oceans' interior, changing deep-ocean salinity patterns.

Salinity affects the speed, direction, and depth of ocean currents.

The ocean's role as a massive heat exchanger is a central form of climate control for the planet. The fact that 1) we don't really understand what it's doing with all the excess heat we're pumping to it and 2) we're already causing pretty significant alternations to it makes me more than a touch nervous. It turns out we're already hacking the planet and we don't seem to be very good at it...

Photo credit: Duncan Rawlinson

The Un-supersizing of a Political Journalist

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 20:13:00 +0000

Some fries with that? Once you've been super-sized, it's hard to go backPolitical reporter Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic has a new must-read piece on the obesity epidemic. Ambinder comes at the issue from the perspective of a former obese person, though he himself notes that his "cure" of bariatic surgery is risky, expensive, and one that can't be considered a blanket solution for the general population.

He also raises the chilling but very real possibility that the current generation of the medically obese (i.e. those with a body-mass index reading of over 30) may never succeed in returning to a more normal weight. Scientists have learned how tenaciously the body guards its resources, even when body weight far exceeds what's needed for survival.

But Ambinder is not without hope. In fact, he also wrote an accompanying blog post summarizing his priority list for tackling the problem. And two of his elements refreshingly face the often overlooked issues of class and stigma head on:

Recognize that what separates skinny people from fat people is luck, and not willpower. Either your genes or your unchosen social environment, will provide a shield against the pressures of the default obesogenic environment. If you're part of a chronically stressed population, have little or no access to quality public infrastructure, find yourself growing up in a dysfunctional family, and have limited social mobility, the chances that you'll be able to summon some magical reserve of willpower is slim to none. If you're white, upper middle class, tend to be hopeful about improving your lot in life, and have the time and resources to diet and exercise, you might be able to find a weight loss regimen that works for you. Either way, don't give yourself credit, and don't blame other people who aren't as lucky.

Deal with stigma on its own terms: so long as there are fat people, there will be fat stigma. Fat stigma is a dangerous health problem in an of itself. Since we collectively perpetuate it, we ought to collectively be more aware of how harmful it is, and channel that energy into stigmatizing those specific institutions and entities that actually make us fat and profit from doing so.

This issue of luck is crucial. The food industry and others who hate regulation want the debate to revolve around personal responsibility. But if just doing the "right thing" isn't enough, i.e. if obesity could happen to anyone, then it’s harder to argue against universal policies to address it.

READ THE REST OF THIS POST ON GRIST.ORG

Americans See Weather Trees, Miss Climate Forest

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:24:00 +0000

A favorite refrain of climate change writers is that no individual weather event can be definitively linked to climate change. To see what's going on in the climate, you have to look at trends. And evidence is now pouring in that global warming has already changed our climate (via Brad Johnson):

Catastrophic rainfall is increasing in the northeastern United States, a new climate change report has found. As New England residents continue the clean up from the latest round of disastrous flooding, researchers at the University of New Hampshire commissioned by Clean Air-Cool Planet found these calamities are part of a long-term trend of extreme precipitation. The region, like the planet in general, is warming, shifting precipitation into more extreme events. As weather patterns are increasingly shaped by manmade pollution, the climate change impacts in specific regions like the Northeast become more starkly evident:
One of the most obvious examples of these impacts is the increase in extreme precipitation events, which, combined with changes in land use, have led to an increase in freshwater flooding events across the region, exemplified by the "100-year" floods that have occurred in southern New Hampshire in 2005, 2006, 2007. And again in 2010, powerful nor'easters drenched the northeast with 3" to 8" of rain three times (late February, middle of March, and end of March) which resulted in significant flooding across the region.

Subsequent to the floods in New England, came a record-breaking 90 degree day on April 7 in Boston. That's bad enough, but when you learn that it was the "earliest" 90 degree day on record -- the "typical" first 90 degree day in Beantown doesn't happen until June 5 -- I think you have to admit that, while we may not be at a tipping point quite yet, we're listing dangerously toward hot.

The only thing more disturbing than these developments is the fact that here in the US we're not allowed to talk about them. And -- as with other signs of civilization like national paid parental leave policies, affordable health care and effective environmental regulation -- we're increasingly alone among nations (via Joe Romm):

Other countries don't have a problem explaining to the public that extreme weather is already becoming common, just as scientists said it would (see "Must re-read statement from UK’s Royal Society and Met Office on the connection between global warming and extreme weather"). Indeed, at the very same time all the U.S. records were being smashed, the UK's Guardian reported that China is taking action to deal with warming-driven extreme weather:
China will tomorrow start ramping up preparations for typhoons, dust storms and other extreme weather disasters as part of a 10-year plan to predict and prevent the worst impacts of climate change….
China has a long history of devastating floods and droughts, but officials said the problems were intensifying.
"It is necessary to respond to the new situation under climate change to avoid and mitigate the losses caused by meteorological disasters," said Gao Fengtao, deputy director of the state council’s legislative affairs office, as he unveiled the new policy.
In recent years, he said, disasters were characterised by "sudden occurrence, wider variety, greater intensity and higher frequency in the context of global warming".

But in this country, as I've noted many times, the anti-science disinformers try to shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather.

It may partially be due to the fact that the people we've put in charge of reporting the weather don't know which way the wind blows -- but it's pretty much censorship at this point. I used to think that having lived through nearly a decade of GOP mis-government meant we'd learned some lessons about the benefits of living in the "reality-based community." But it sure seems like we're headed right back down the rabbit hole again.

Americans are Number One - at Eating Packaged Food

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:05:00 +0000

The New York Times had a small article and a big graphic recently on America's love affair with processed, packaged food:

Americans eat 31 percent more packaged food than fresh food, and they consume more packaged food per person than their counterparts in nearly all other countries. A sizable part of the American diet is ready-to-eat meals, like frozen pizzas and microwave dinners, and sweet or salty snack foods.

This probably doesn't come as too much of a surprise to anyone, especially given our outsized obesity rates compared to other countries. But the accompanying graphic helpfully illustrates a most unfortunate kind of "American exceptionalism."

READ THE REST OF THIS POST AT GRIST.ORG

Photo credit: Hieropenen

BPA Has Now Widely Contaminated the Ocean

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:51:00 +0000

It's looking more and more like the chemical industry's idea to make the endocrine-disrupting chemical bisphenol A ubiquitous in the environment was a terrible, and terribly dangerous, idea. Having successfully tainted the food supply with its presence, BPA has now has put the world's oceans at risk (via Science Daily):

Scientists have reported widespread global contamination of sea sand and sea water with the endocrine disruptor bisphenol A (BPA) and said that the BPA probably originated from a surprising source: Hard plastic trash discarded in the oceans and the epoxy plastic paint used to seal the hulls of ships. The team analyzed sand and seawater from more than 200 sites in 20 countries, mainly in Southeast Asia and North America. All contained what Saido described as a "significant" amount of BPA, ranging from 0.01 parts per million (ppm) to 50 ppm. They concluded that polycarbonates and epoxy resin coatings and paints were the main source.

One of the notable findings in this study is that in the ocean environment, "unbreakable" polycarbonate plastic... breaks down. And when the stuff breaks down, it releases a nasty set of toxins, including BPA.

READ THE REST OF THIS POST ON GRIST.ORG

Proof that High Fructose Corn Syrup is Worse than Sugar

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:07:00 +0000

No refined sugar is good for you--but HFCS seems to be significantly worse. Photo: Nafmo on FlickrThe long-running, contentious debate over the dangers of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) may be approaching a conclusive end -- one not likely to please those sensitive souls over at the Corn Refiners Association.

While there has been extensive evidence that fructose is harmful to human health and associated with metabolic diseases like diabetes and liver problems, the fact is that plain old table sugar is itself 50 percent fructose. HFCS does have a higher concentration of fructose at 55 percent but it's close enough to table sugar that most experts continue to dismiss claims that HFCS is on its own more dangerous. And certainly the claim that the introduction of HFCS in the '80s directly led to the current obesity epidemic continues to be a highly controversial view.

A massive missing piece in this debate has been an absence of research directly comparing the effects of HFCS and table sugar (as opposed to pure fructose and glucose sugars, which is typically how the research has been conducted). Thanks to a group of researchers at Princeton, however, that missing piece may just have been found (via Science Daily):

A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.

READ THE REST OF THIS POST ON GRIST.ORG

Another Summer, Another Food Crisis?

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:32:00 +0000

Corn prices peaked during the run up to the 2008 economic crisis at $7.88 per bushel and as the prices of corn and other commodities rose we saw food riots worldwide. Commodity prices soon came back the earth -- corn is currently trading at about $4 a barrel. Given that we're in the middle of an anemic recovery, you'd think spiking food prices are thankfully the last thing we have to worry about.

Not so, say a pair of economists from University of Illinois (via Phil Brasher of the Des Moines Register). In an analysis of past growing seasons, they suggest that commodity corn prices could reach $7 by summer. The reason for the potential coming price spike? Would you believe ethanol?

Scott Irwin and Darrel Good modeled a good- and poor- scenario based on the five best and worst growing seasons since 1960 in the main corn-growing states. They then came up with average yields that could range from 134.5 to 172.5 bushels per acre. Because of the national biofuels mandates, which guarantee that a certain percentage of the corn crop will go into making ethanol, the average farmgate price of corn could be near $5.75 per bushel while daily highs in the cash price could reach the $7 level that occurred during the marketing year for the 2007 crop, the economists found.

Right now, the ethanol mandate is forcing us to take almost a third of the US corn harvest and burn it in our cars' fuel tanks. And unlike the economic bubble which helped power the last rise in commodities prices, the ethanol bubble still shows no sign of bursting. For better or for worse (well, okay, for worse) a significant chunk of the US food system relies on a low price of corn. If we don't lose our infatuation with food-for-fuel soon, we may be seeing a new plateau for commodity prices at what we used to consider crisis levels. And that ain't good.

Clearly, the administration's continued embrace of biofuels is looking plain idiotic at the moment. Sure, these economists' may turn out to be wrong, but if they're not we'll all pay the price -- literally.

The economists go on to suggest that policy makers prepare now for the possibility of price spikes. That they would do so is highly unlikely, however. If the USDA cared about price volitility, it would support re-instituting a grain reserve. With a reserve, the government buys grain from farmers when prices are low and sells it back into the market when prices are high.

One elegant aspect of a grain reserve is that it's a deficit-neutral -- in fact a cost neutral -- way of subsidizing farmers since the government is practicing the ultimate investing strategy of "buy low, sell high." Too bad USDA Chief Tom Vilsack (along with the entire food industry) is on the record opposing -- after all, its goal is to stabilize prices at reasonable levels. Did I mention that the US food system relies on cheap corn?

I wonder if they have a Plan B.

Photo credit: mfrascella

Can the USDA Really Fight Industry Consolidation?

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:17:00 +0000

The first of the much anticipated agricultural competition workshops are underway right now in Iowa. Hosted jointly by the USDA and the Department of Justice, the workshops aim to explore the question of consolidation in agribusiness. The workshops themselves have already come under scrutiny for initially excluding actual farmers on the panels -- and have come in for continued criticism that the farmers who have been put on are more representatives of corporations than real farmers.

It's hard not to be somewhat cynical about our government's claim that they're shocked, shocked to discover there's anti-competitive behavior in agriculture. On the other hand, for the last twenty or so years, consolidation has been -- in Washington at least -- the crime that dare not speak its name. So the fact that it's the USDA and DOJ running these workshops is nothing short of astonishing.

And while the whole of the industry will get attention, much of the focus so far has been on Monsanto, which thanks to its aggressive practices -- along with support from the USDA -- now controls up to 90% of the seed business in some markets. It's to the point that in many parts of the country non-Monsanto (and thus non genetically engineered seed) are simply unavailable to farmers.

The Justice Department is already investigating the company and it will undoubtedly get a lot of attention during these workshops. But knowing the Obama administration's support for biotechnology generally and reading between the lines in this NY Times article on the issues involved with Monsanto, I'm starting to get concerned.

The way the article characterizes the debate, the goal appears to be to broaden access to Monsanto's intellectual property, i.e. the herbicide-tolerant genetic traits in its seeds, rather than to broaden access to conventional seeds:

Monsanto sells its own branded seed varieties, like Dekalb in corn and Asgrow in soybeans, to farmers. But it has expanded its influence and profits by licensing those traits to hundreds of small seed companies, allowing them to incorporate the traits in the seeds they sell. It has also granted licenses to the other large trait developers, allowing them to create combinations of engineered traits in a process known as stacking.
Monsanto says that its licensing shows it is the opposite of a monopolist, encouraging rather than hampering competition.
But critics say the licenses give Monsanto excessive control. Seed company executives said the licenses were sometimes worded in a way that compelled them to sell Monsanto traits over those of its competitors. Mr. Quarles denied that, saying the contracts contain sales incentives typical of the industry.

The rest of the article focuses on the legal battles between Monsanto and Dupont, another biotech giant, over access to Monsanto's patents. It may very well be that the anti-competitive behavior the government punishes is that which prevents even greater adoption of biotech seeds -- the opposite of what many progressives want out of anti-trust enforcement.

Until we can displace agricultural productivity as the only measure of success of government policy, even this new attention to anti-competitive practices is unlikely to lead to meaningful reform. To me the focus must be on finding ways to increase farmers' share of consumers' spending without threatening significant increases in food prices -- there is, after all, no government that likes to champion policies that increase the cost of food. Nothing puts a damper on electoral prospects like bread riots.

Keep in mind that a mere 7 cents of the consumer's food dollar gets to the farmer, while 73 cents goes to distribution costs. The only way we can get to a win-win -- and not be forced to choose between higher farmer income or higher retail prices -- is to let the middleman, i.e. the processors and yes, the retailers -- take the hit. Sadly, I don't think Walmart, Safeway or Whole Foods are on the agenda at the moment, even though some experts believe the real squeeze on farmers comes from them.

It's when we start having discussions like that and start recognizing that a relentless focus on agricultural production simply is not consistent with helping rural economies that I'll believe we might just be getting somewhere.

Photo credit: Farm Aid

Spring Gleaning

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:09:00 +0000

There's a nice article in USA Today about a new generation of public urban orchards, ripe for the picking:

Fruit-picking opportunities... are becoming more common, as volunteers in cities including Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia and Madison, Wis., mobilize behind a goal of planting fruit trees on public land in city parks and neighborhoods.
"This is part of what's obviously been an explosion in interest in locally grown and organic food," said Janet Parker, a founding member of a group called Madison Fruits and Nuts. "I think we're coming to realize more and more that it doesn't make any sense, at this late date with climate change being what it is, to truck in so much of our food from California, in the cases of apples, sometimes New Zealand."

Free fruit also is available for picking in season on public land in Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, Minneapolis and New York, according to neighborhoodfruit.com, a site that helps people track down available fruit.

One of the compelling points in Sharon Astyk's A Nation of Farmers involves her observation that we've been trained to see "free" food as having minimal actual value-- we're better off buying our fruit in the store than gleaning from what's available around us.

But that's why this urban orchard movement is so compelling -- it's another way to bring the reality of food production closer to home for millions of urban residents. Also, note the shout-out the article gives to the Philadelphia Orchard Project, which has started 17 orchards in the Philly area in the last 3 years.

Oh, and for the rest of you wanting to find your nearest gleaning opportunity, there's an app for that.

Photo credit: Muffet

Heirloom Apples to the Rescue!

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:42:00 +0000

Here's another example of the power of diversity over monocultures in agriculture. Writer Gary Nabhan has a great piece at Grist on how heirloom apples may save US apple growers from the risks of climate change:

Recent studies have suggested that orchard keepers face a new challenge to supplying a variety of apples to their customers. Shifts in weather patterns may be reducing the number of winter chill hours that apple and other trees require in order to bear abundant fruit. If trends continue as predicted, most California orchards are expected to receive less than 500 chill hours per winter by the end of the 21st century. Most apple varieties require 1,000 chill hours per winter to yield harvests large enough to keep orchards economically viable, although some require as little as 800 hours and a few can get by on just 500 chill hours.

In its "high emissions scenario" for climate change, the Union of Concerned Scientists has predicted that orchards in southeastern Pennsylvania will receive 1,000 or more chill hours in just 50 to 60 percent of winters. Because Pennsylvania is the fourth-largest remaining producer of apples in this country, and because much of its $60 million annual crop comes from the southeastern region, these predictions have generated considerable anxiety among orchard keepers. But no one knows how many of the varieties currently being grown there can actually tolerate fewer than 1,000 chill hours -- the meteorological projections have not yet been tangibly related to the specific responses of particular varieties. And of course, no one knows for sure how much of the perceived weather shifts are due to global warming or to more localized urban heat-island effects of changing land uses.

As Gary mentions, this is of particular concern in Pennsylvania. But farmers like Nick Botner in Oregon are doing their part to fill in some of the blanks on which varieties will thrive in the new conditions. Botner may be in his eighties, but he's not slowing down -- he's testing 3,000 heirloom varieties to see which will grow best in our changing climate. Will apples disappear from store shelves? Not if we remember that there are plenty of apples in the ~~sea~~ tree.

Photo credit: Amanda "Bake it Pretty"

Philly Proposes a Big Soda Tax

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:35:00 +0000

Music to my ears (via the Inquirer):

Mayor Nutter wants to treat the city's weight and wallet problems in his 2010-11 budget with the same remedy: the nation's highest tax on all sweetened beverages including soda, energy drinks, ice tea, even chocolate milk.

Nutter's plan would put Philadelphia at the front of the movement to tax sweet drinks, an effort that the beverage industry already opposes and that could encounter resistance in City Council.

The tax rate would be 2 cents per ounce, 40 cents on a 20-ounce bottle of soda. The levy would cover fountain-drink syrups and powders, based on the number of liquid ounces they produce. Diet drinks without added sugar and baby formula would be excluded.

City officials said they could raise $77 million a year. Health Commissioner Donald F. Schwarz estimated that a typical city resident drinks a half-liter of sweet beverages a day.

Not mentioned above, but confirmed is that the tax would also apply to flavored, sweetened milk. At 2 cents an ounce, it's about double the most commonly discussed tax and would add $1.34 to the price of a two-liter bottle of soda. If enacted, there's no question it will affect consumption.

Look, nobody likes taxes, but Philly already consumes above average amounts of soda and has high rates of obesity. Plus, for any arguments about regressivity of a soda tax (since it would theoretically hit low-income folks harder), it's important to remember that this is all about preserving services that help those low-income folks the most. I don't agree that a reduction in soda consumption because of price is on par with that same person losing access to vital city services -- we need to have some sense of perspective.

It will be very interesting to see if this tax can make it into law. Meanwhile, Democrats everywhere could learn something from Mayor Michael Nutter. Even if the City Council halves his tax to a penny per ounce, it's still going to be effective. Somehow, Dems seem to think that negotiating with oneself is the best strategy. Nuttter seems to be coming in high to make sure he gets something meaningful out of it. Anyway, stay tuned. The fight over this will no doubt be something to see.

Photo credit: poolie

GMOs as Big Ag's Version of "Financial Innovation"

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:36:00 +0000

(Photoillustration by Grist)Financial blogger Felix Salmon has an essay in Foreign Policy called "How Locavores Can Save the World" -- expanded, by the way, from a wonderful blog post he wrote after attending a panel discussion on world hunger at the Davos World Economic Forum in the company of Blue Hill Farm's Dan Barber. Salmon usually focuses on issues involving economic crises, monetary policy, complex derivatives, macro-economics and governmental oversight of the financial markets, but here he's talking monocultures, sustainable agriculture, and transgenic seeds. Tom Philpott has in the past opined on the similarities between financial and food crises, so I suppose this turn of events is not too surprising.

But the bit I found most striking was how Salmon characterized Big Ag's claim that genetically modified organisms are an "answer" to the problem of world hunger:

[It] is the agricultural equivalent of creating triple-A-rated mortgage bonds, fabricated precisely to prevent the problem of credit risk. It doesn't make the problem go away: It just makes the problem rarer and much more dangerous when it does occur because no one is -- or even can be -- prepared for such a high-impact, low-probability event.

Well, hey. That's a new one. GMOs as CDOs...

READ THE REST OF THIS POST ON GRIST.ORG

Junk Food Taxes May Be Better than Healthy Food Subsidies

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 02:55:00 +0000

An interesting new study was just published in Psychological Science, about a lab experiment at SUNY Buffalo that suggests junk-food taxes increase the overall nutritional quality of a shopping trip, while subsidies on healthy foods actually decrease the nutritionally quality (via Science Daily).

[Study author and clinical psychologist Dr. Leonard] Epstein and colleagues simulated a grocery store, "stocked" with images of everything from bananas and whole wheat bread to Dr. Pepper and nachos. A group of volunteers -- all mothers -- were given laboratory "money" to shop for a week's groceries for the family. Each food item was priced the same as groceries at a real grocery nearby, and each food came with basic nutritional information.

The mother-volunteers went shopping several times in the simulated grocery. First they shopped with the regular prices, but afterward the researchers imposed either taxes or subsidies on the foods. That is, they either raised the prices of unhealthy foods by 12.5 percent, and then by 25 percent; or they discounted the price of healthy foods comparably. Then they watched what the mothers purchased.

The study authors separated food into two categories, "high calorie for nutrient" food and "low calorie for nutrient" food -- i.e. junk food and healthy food. They did this so that they could specifically measure the effect pricing changes had on the nutritional content of a participant's shopping basket. As you might expect, taxing junk food reduced junk food purchases, and subsidizing healthy food increased healthy food purchases. But the story does not end there. The researchers discovered that taxing the bad stuff was far more effective from a nutritional standpoint than subsidizing the good stuff -- and not just because prices affected sales.

The junk food taxes caused a real shift in nutritional quality because the money saved on junk food was spent on healthy food, which has more nutrients per calories. However, when the researchers subsidized healthy food in their test, many participants spent the savings on -- wait for it -- junk food. A subsidy for health foods actually increased the amount of fat, protein, and carbohydrates from that simulated shopping trip by about 10 percent each.

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Who Needs Clean Water Anyway?

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:28:00 +0000

Another entry in the New York Times fantastic "Toxic Waters" series came out Sunday. This latest one is about the slow but tragically effective weakening of the Clean Water Act:

Thousands of the nation's largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act's reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators.

As a result, some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising.
Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years.
The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation's largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.
"We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states," said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. "This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek."
"This is a huge deal," James M. Tierney, the New York State assistant commissioner for water resources, said of the new constraints. "There are whole watersheds that feed into New York's drinking water supply that are, as of now, unprotected."

All this despite the dangerous rise in pollutants in our drinking water. Meanwhile, Congress has been trying to engineer a fix in the form of the Clean Water Restoration Act, specifically by removing the word "navigable" from a description of waterways subject to regulation under the CWA. But guess who is among the lobbying groups leading the charge against reform? Our good friends in industrial agriculture, the American Farm Bureau. They are lobbying directly and through corporate front groups like the perniciously named Waters Advocacy Coalition. And here's what an AFB spokesman had to say to the New York Times:

"If you erase the word 'navigable' from the law, it erases any limitation on the federal government's reach," said Mr. Parrish of the American Farm Bureau Federation. "It could be a gutter, a roadside ditch or a rain puddle. But under the new law, the government gets control over it."

The article also suggests that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson could issue a ruling that would clear up some of the confusion regarding the EPA's jurisdiction. She has so far refused, preferring to wait for Congress to act. But with the GOP doing an awesome impersonation of a brick wall, it's hard to see the legislation moving forward any time soon. Perhaps Ms. Jackson might reconsider. It's only our water, after all.

In Philly? Come Chat with an Urban Farmer

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:47:00 +0000

Snow got you down? Would you rather be talking about spring planting? Well, if you happen to be in Philly this weekend, you're in luck. Urban farmer extraordinaire Dave Zelov, fearless leader of the Weavers Way agricultural empire, will be at the Allen's Lane High Point Cafe at the R8 Allen's Lane train station in NW Philly giving a presentation and answering veggie gardening questions this Sunday, February 28 at 2pm.

I can vouch for the fact that Dave is an amazing resource and a super nice guy. And yes, even in the middle of the snowiest winter in Philly history -- a winter which shows no sign of abating -- he's already harvesting chard, kale, bok choy, tatsoi, lettuce, arugula, pea shoots, and baby greens out of his hoop houses. But he's taking a break to help us all get a mental head start on the growing season.

Anyway, if you're around and want to think and talk about something green, swing on by this Sunday. Tell him Tom sent you.

Robots Should Stay out of the Kitchen

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:58:00 +0000

This is wrong on so many levels. The NYT reports on the latest doings in the robotics lab:

With Dr. Rybski looking on like a proud parent, a bearded graduate student clacked away at a laptop on a roving service cart, and the robot rolled forward to fulfill its primary function: the delivery of one foil-wrapped Nature Valley trail-mix flavor granola bar.

"Hello, I'm the Snackbot," it said in a voice not unlike that of HAL 9000, from "2001: A Space Odyssey," as its rectangular LED "mouth" pulsated to form the words. "I've come to deliver snacks to Ian. Is Ian here?"

Now, Snackbot exists to help gather data on human/robot interactions. Although a careful review of the relevant data contained within such works as Battlestar Galactica, Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey or even the lackluster I, Robot will give a discerning viewer all the information he or she needs to understand the dangers robots pose to humankind.

But it gets worse:

The Snackbot is but one soldier in a veritable army of new robots designed to serve and cook food and, in the process, act as good-will ambassadors, and salesmen, for a more automated future.

The article then proceeds to describe some of these "soldiers" culminating in the shocking robot-human hybrid that is the innocuously named Motoman SDA-10:

First they make our sushi. Then they enslave us.

The scientists involved with these efforts readily admit that the whole idea is meant to counteract the important lessons we've learned from Terminator and BSG and acclimate us to the idea of a future populated with robot servers. We all know how that story ends, don't we?

My suggestion: boil your own pot of water and leave the robots out of the equation entirely.

Photo credit: Koji Sasahara/Associated Press

Is there too much 'Let's Hope' in 'Let's Move'?

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:45:00 +0000

The industry talks a good game, but keeps churning out the same old junk. It's no mystery that Michelle Obama's Let's Move anti-obesity campaign is built on industry cooperation. It's also true that many experts are skeptical of the wisdom behind it; nutritionist Marion Nestle has been particularly critical both of the government's food industry "health" partnerships as well as of the administration's unwillingness to fight the industry's relentless media advertising.

I tend to agree. While the Let's Move initiative is full of worthy proposals, especially in the area of addressing food deserts and promoting farm-to-city initiatives, the idea of leaving restrictions on junk food television advertising -- not to mention junk food taxes -- out of the equation seems to base the pitch just a bit too much as an appeal to our better angels. It's hard to see public service announcements and educational campaigns counteracting those hundreds of millions of dollars work of junk food ads Americans of all ages submit to every time they turn on their televisions.

And it certainly doesn't help when star athletes, some of whom will no doubt participate in Let's Move, continue to flack for junk food (from Petyon and Eli Manning and Oreos to Derek Jeter and Gatorade). Meanwhile, anyone who's been watching the Olympics knows that NBC's coverage of this ultimate athletic event has been awash in ads for soda and other junk food. Even the Olympians themselves are in on the act -- Alternet noted that snowboarder Brad Martin is featured prominently in a McDonald's ad shown repeatedly during the Olympics.

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The Cleveland Model

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:28:00 +0000

Let's go back to the co-op theme, shall we? Tom Philpott of Grist wrote some time ago about the need for a "less efficient and more robust food system." He sketched a vision, based on his experience with his own farm, of small interrelated businesses benefiting communities via the local multiplier effect and generating jobs, good wages and affordable, healthy food far beyond what globalized multinational corporations have been able to manage for most American regions. It's a vision that without doubt shouldn't be restricted to the food system. Philpott closed the piece with a question: "How do we get there?"

Well, Cleveland, Ohio -- of all places -- has attempted an answer which caused Philpott to review the Nation's coverage of this "new" phenomenon of large scale cooperatives:

In a must-read article in the March 1 issue of The Nation, Gar Alperovitz, Ted Howard, and Thad Williamson lay out what they call the "Cleveland Model," a reference to that city's emerging complex of worker-owned businesses under the Evergreen Cooperatives umbrella.

The key enterprise in the Cleveland initiative is the Evergreen Cooperative laundry, "a worker-owned, industrial-size, thoroughly 'green' operation" that "opened its doors late last fall in Glenville, a neighborhood with a median income hovering around $18,000," The Nation reports. Overall in Cleveland, the poverty rate stands at about 30 percent; the population has halved since 1950. The hollowed-out city, like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and other rust-belt metropolises, stands as a stark rebuke to 30-plus years of de-industrialization and corporate-dominated globalization.

While these are "not your traditional small-scale co-ops," the authors report, they are also not faceless entities that turn workers into cogs in a vast machine. The authors write:

The Evergreen model draws heavily on the experience of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in the Basque Country of Spain, the world's most successful large-scale cooperative effort (now employing 100,000 workers in an integrated network of more than 120 high-tech, industrial, service, construction, financial and other largely cooperatively owned businesses).

...To fund the Evergreen initiatives, the project's founders have been resourceful: they've cobbled together funds from a combination of local foundations, banks, and city government, The Nation reports. And get this:

An important aspect of the plan is that each of the Evergreen co-operatives is obligated to pay 10 percent of its pre-tax profits back into the fund to help seed the development of new jobs through additional co-ops. Thus, each business has a commitment to its workers (through living-wage jobs, affordable health benefits and asset accumulation) and to the general community (by creating businesses that can provide stability to neighborhoods).

Besides the laundry, Evergreen also runs Ohio Solar Cooperative, which installs PV solar panels on commercial and government buildings and provides weatherization to homes. The group will soon roll out Green City Growers Cooperative, "a 100% worker-owned, hydroponic, food production greenhouse."

That's change we can believe in. Sadly, I question how much commitment there will be from the administration for this kind of thing. From the federal government's perch in DC it's easy to mistake what Cleveland is doing as "too small" to address the jobs crisis that we face. But that is nothing more than a failure of imagination. Still, the leadership on this will likely come from cities. Even so, we should all be thinking about how we might be able to get something like the Cleveland model to take root in our own communities.

A Better Plastic?

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:01:00 +0000

If you've been watching the Olympics, you might have seen an ad for Sun Chips that features its "compostable bag." The plastic in the bag is derived from GMO corn and made by Cargill. The ad neglects to mention those inconvenient truths, though it does claim that its bag will break down in home compost "under ideal conditions."

Even worse, with the possible exception of the Sun Chips bag, corn plastic generally will not break down in home compost, even under ideal conditions -- it's only compostable in "industrial-scale" composting systems. So for those of you who live in San Francisco, which actually has municipal composting, that's all well and good, I guess. But for the rest of us, this stuff is still plain, old [genetically engineered] garbage.

But now researchers in the UK may have just fixed all that:

Scientists at Imperial College London are working on bioplastic packaging - made from trees and grass - that can break down in home composting bins.

The polymer developed by the scientists is made from sugars that come from the breakdown of fast-growing trees and grasses, or agricultural and food waste.

The scientists from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council purposely focused on non-food crops - many common bioplastics come from corn or sugar cane waste - and using low-energy and low-water processes.

Very cool. Keep an eye on this stuff. It could really be the packaging of the future.

Co-ops: for Farmers What's Old is New

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:57:00 +0000

I love my food co-op. It's not a secret. Heck, I blog for it. And what works for consumers works for farmers like Sam Simon of upstate New York, too (via the NYT):

He began his dairy operation in 1999, more as a labor of love than a business venture. But he soon realized that the economics were unsustainable: Farmers couldn't survive being paid roughly the same price for milk that they were in the 1970s. "This is nuts," he thought.
So he looked for an alternative in which a farm could produce premium milk, process it and sell it on its own label. The farms he looked at that had tried it weren’t succeeding, so he came up with the idea of a nonprofit co-op selling premium-quality milk, without artificial hormones, traveling 80 or so miles instead of 1,200, to customers in the Northeast. The hope was that people would pay more for locally produced, higher-quality milk, and that the extra cost would be passed on directly to the farmers.
He signed up eight family farms in Dutchess and Columbia Counties that produce 1.6 million pounds of milk a month, 200,000 of it sold through Hudson Valley Fresh. So far it's working. The farmers get paid a price, now $21 per hundredweight of milk, based on their cost of production, not on the fixed commodity price, now about $16, up from as low as $11 last year. That can be the difference between breaking even and not. Hudson Valley Fresh sells a third of it in New York City, in places like Whole Foods, and the rest in the Hudson Valley and Connecticut and on Long Island.

Milk is a troubled commodity, of course, but much of that trouble comes from the fact that, thanks to Ronald Reagan, its price is set on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where large speculators can (and have) manipulated the price. Even though fluid milk is a perishable commodity, for some reason commodity traders get to determine the wholesale cost, which now has no relation to the actual cost of production. That's capitalism for you!

Meanwhile, the Philly area also has a great example of another kind of successful farmer co-op in Lancaster Farm Fresh, which joins fifty farmers into an entity that can efficiently distribute tons of produce into urban markets from New York City to Washington, DC.

And small scale co-ops may even provide the way forward for ethanol as well -- not as a means to produce fuel for cars on a massive scale, but as an alternative to diesel fuel for farm equipment.

Co-ops have a long history in agriculture but have struggled since corporate consolidation became the watchword in Washington DC and state capitals nationwide. To this day, the USDA remains far more interested in low retail prices of commodities, irrespective of the impact it has on farmers themselves or rural communities. But with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative, there seems to be a bit more momentum coming from the USDA for helping farmers establish co-ops. Hoping corporations behave benevolently is not a plan. Giving farmers the ability to act as a countervailing force to corporate control of agricultural markets? Now that's a plan.

Did the President Just Create a National Food Policy Council?

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:52:00 +0000

Michelle Obama kicked off her campaign against childhood obesity today. Among the provisions are a revamping of the school lunch program, a small boost in funding for farmers markets, a major initiative to "end" food deserts by 2017, a focus on maintaining children's exercise levels, a set of broad public-private partnerships, along with reforms to front-of-package nutrition labeling and the food pyramid (see the WaPo's Jane Black for a good summary).

But the most intriguing element may have been the creation of The Presidential Task Force on Childhood Obesity. According to the White House blog:

The new task force is charged with developing an interagency action plan to solve the problem of obesity among our Nation's children as part of the First Lady’s Let's Move campaign. The campaign will take a comprehensive approach to engage both public and private sectors to help children become more active and eat healthier within a generation, so that children born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight.
Members of the task force include: the Secretary of the Interior; the Secretary of Agriculture; Secretary of Health and Human Services; Secretary of Education; Director of the Office of Management and Budget; Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to the First Lady; Assistant to the President for Economic Policy; and heads of other executive departments, agencies, or offices as the Chair may
designate.

By their nature, food policy councils are designed to circumvent the parochial interests and often "captured" status of regulatory agencies. By making people who don't normally talk sit together and consider the broader impact of their policies, food policy councils have the potential to keep special interests from dominating policy debates.

Most state-level food policy councils, such as New York's or Iowa's (created by then Gov. Tom Vilsack), include nutrition and access to health food as their core mission. And many find themselves moving towards involvement in local food and expansion of farmers markets and the like as a result of the inevitable conclusion that food production and food access are inexorably linked.

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