Biofuel
Nation's Food Policy Pro-Pus, Pro-E. Coli, Pro-Bribery, Pro-GMOs
Published July 10, 2009 @ 05:19PM PT
Practices that were infuriating to me under Republicans have simply become disheartening under Democrats. I will explain.
Pro-Pus
So Michael Taylor, Monsanto's former lawyer and a fan of adding extra pus to the nation's milk supply by way of giving all our dairy cows chronic mastitis from rBST/rBGH, has indeed been hired to the newly created position of Deputy Commissioner of Food with the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.
In theory, Taylor might not be as bad as all that, he shilled for rBST as a young, impressionable executive and he seems to have grown as a person.
Though adding insult to injury, Pennsylvania's Dennis Wolff is a finalist for Undersecretary of Food Safety. A willing and enthusiastic participant in Monsanto's campaign to prevent rBST-free labeling on milk, Wolff tried to sneak a 2008 ban on the labels under the noses of Pennsylvania citizens who were outraged and forced the governor to overturn the policy.
But really, two, TWO people appointed or being considered to head food safety in the Obama administration who opposed the public's right to know when their milk came from cows being treated with a hormone that gives them chronically inflamed and infected udders!?
(BTW, people would have heard about the bovine growth hormone controversy more widely as of the year 2000, perhaps, if Monsanto hadn't instigated the firing of two journalists who tried to expose rBST/rBGH for the carcinogenic, bovine mastitis-causing health disaster that it is. Though also, and this is funny, ha-ha, as part of the resolution of the ensuing litigation, a judge ruled that it wasn't illegal for a news station to lie. F*ers!)
So, I think we can safely say that there are those in our national food safety leadership who don't consider pus a worrying contaminant in the milk supply. Even if they don't hire Wolff, that this didn't immediately disqualify him, that they'd consider adding to the shame of hiring Taylor, is a mark of some serious concern.
Pro-E. coli
As reported, again at ObamaFoodorama, this is another of goals of the Obama administration's food policy:
Agriculture Hold Up To Climate Bill
Published May 24, 2009 @ 07:55AM PT
So, the agriculture committee, and the industrial food interests they represent, still want the EPA to stop doing its job and they aren't happy at all with the Waxman-Markey climate bill.
These are their beefs, as laid out in the New York Times:
... Democrats and Republicans on the Agriculture Committee have a long list of grievances against the bill, and leaders of the panel are looking for ways to alter the legislation or slow it down before a full House vote. They want to see more offsets for farmers, a greater role for the Agriculture Department and changes in the bill's requirements for renewable fuels. ...
Translation: They would like an industry that's a net emitter of carbon to, without having to do anything differently, get credits for being a net carbon sink. Also, they would like to get paid for biofuels without their production of them having to be regulated.
Shorter translation: Where's our bribe?
As Tom Philpott gleaned recently, House Ag Chair, Rep. Collin Peterson, wants full veto power over the climate bill, particularly if this bill which was never intended to regulate their industry doesn't turn into a new revenue stream for subsidizing corn.
I have, as you might imagine, a lot of problems with bribing industrial agriculture for the sake of getting an already watered-down climate bill through Congress. But all things are relative.
For example, the bill is already loaded down with bribes to the coal industry, fossil energy producers and major polluters in general. As loathsome as Big Corn may be, it's not more loathsome in my estimation than Big Coal, and is probably, on net, slightly less bad.
(Though one of these days, maybe the agriculture industry will realize that climate change is a serious threat to their livelihoods and start acting like it instead of mouthing platitudes about it. It's crazy talk, I know, I'm funny like that.)
For everyone who wants a piece of this without providing some real climate benefit or actually new, actually sustainable job opportunities, the amount that goes to beneficial activities is diminished. I don't like that at all, but it's how business is done and I suppose the hope is that sustainable businesses will still be able to take off in spite of the overwhelming force of their more heavily subsidized opposition.
That's the hope, anyway. Shorter me: if there's a straw that breaks my back for support of Waxman-Markey (1Sky), a compromise with the notoriously retrograde House agriculture committee probably won't be it.
(Photo credit: twoblueday on Flickr.)
Biofuels vs. Bioelectricity
Published May 13, 2009 @ 02:20PM PT
According to Time magazine, the modest environmental impact analysis for corn ethanol, the one that Rep. Collin Peterson (MN-07) was complaining about, was too modest:
... Princeton scholar Tim Searchinger, who helped launch a global rethinking of biofuels in 2007 by calling attention to their effects on land use, warns that the EPA assumptions are extremely optimistic — and that if they're wrong the consequences could be extremely dire. "It takes a lot of land to make a small amount of energy," Searchinger says. "Academic studies have concluded that if the world gets even 10% of its energy from these new kinds of crops, most tropical forests will probably disappear." (Read "The Clean Energy Scam.")
Farm fuels can sound like the ultimate win-win situation, reducing our dependence on carbon-intense fossil fuels while boosting demand for American farm products. And they're "renewable," which has become a kind of synonym for green. But years ago, researchers began raising concerns about the direct emissions created by the heavy machinery and petroleum-based fertilizers it takes to grow corn and other biofuel feedstocks, the energy-intensive plants that convert the crops into fuel and the trucks that transport the fuel to market. A slew of studies have concluded that when you include all these life-cycle emissions, corn ethanol only produces about 20% fewer emissions than gasoline, although cellulosic ethanol produced from feedstocks like switchgrass can reduce emissions around 90%. ...
Though it turns out that you don't even have to convert cellulosic feedstock into liquid fuel if you use electric cars, you can just burn the stuff directly:
... The study team of Eliott Campbell, David Lobell and Chris Field found that an acre of switchgrass could produce enough battery power to drive a small electric SUV for 14,000 miles. The same acre of crop would only produce enough ethanol to power a similar vehicle with an internal combustion engine for 9000 miles. ...
Anyway, it seems like a better plan than burning food, and if there's biochar left over after the electricity generation process, that might mean the feedstock could be used to help trap carbon in the ground if it were used as a soil amendment. It couldn't be burned with anything toxic if it were to be used that way, but something to think about ...
Peterson to EPA: Stop Doing Your Jobs!
Published May 06, 2009 @ 01:48PM PT
This is House Agriculture Committee Chair Collin Peterson's (MN-07) response to the news that a climate bill may include emissions regulations for biofuels production, particularly corn ethanol. Emphasis mine:
A key House Democrat, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, lashed out at the Obama administration today over its biofuels analysis and said he would likely oppose a climate-change bill because of it.
“The only way I would consider any kind of climate-change bill is if it was ironclad that these agencies don’t have authority to do any kind of rulemaking whatsoever,” Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., said at the beginning of a hearing on biofuels policy this morning.
It’s safe to say that’s not going to happen. The climate bill being developed in the House will almost certainly give the administration wide authority to regulate both emissions of greenhouse gases and potential offsets such as reduced crop tillage. ...
Ahem. Dear Rep. Peterson ... after a bill becomes a law, the regulatory agencies have to enforce it. To ensure that they enforce it in a way that can nominally be considered fair and defensible, they have to make rules governing those actions.
Though there's no particular reason to listen to me on this. I defer here to Ernest Gellhorn and Ronald M. Levin, and their comments on the administrative rulemaking process in their well-respected book, Administrative Law and Process: In a Nutshell, Ch. 9, "Rules and Rulemaking". Emphasis mine:
Measuring Land Use Carbon Flow
Published May 01, 2009 @ 07:26PM PT
A bipartisan group led by Senators Harkin and Grassley is questioning the EPA's ability to measure net carbon flow from land use changes:
... A bipartisan group of 12 U.S. Senators led by Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) called on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) not to propose regulations assuming that greater U.S. biofuels use would increase carbon dioxide emissions.
The senators argued the data and methods for calculating such “indirect land use changes” such as from forest or grassland to crops are not adequately developed, and thus should not be used in ways making it harder for ethanol and biodiesel to meet requirements of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 for reduced carbon emissions from advanced biofuels under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). ...
I'm confused. As I've understood it, a lot of farmers are pretty keen to sell carbon offsets, and one presumes that these would also be predicated on measuring the net carbon flow of land use changes. Perhaps from crops to grassland, for example.
If government scientists at regulatory agencies, and the suggestion is that it's a problem with the state of the science itself, are incapable of calculating net carbon outflow to a land ecosystem, why should they be capable of calculating net carbon inflow to a land ecosystem?
... [Tom Vilsack] also seemed to be echoing some of the comments by environmental groups and Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, his chief sponsor for the secretary’s position, during the 2008 farm bill debate.
Those groups and Harkin have argued that traditional farm program payments should be dismantled and replaced with “greener” conservation program payments that would reward producers for reducing the carbon footprint in the farming practices. Markets for trading “carbon credits” have already sprung up in some areas. ...
I understand that slightly different things are being discussed. However, the underlying bodies of knowledge have a lot of overlap.
If agricultural carbon credits are to be a sound investment and, more importantly, to provide true added value to the goal of reducing global carbon emissions, the scientific models for describing land use changes and the physical/economic implications of their indirect impacts must be sound. If these are in truth poorly understood, then we're nowhere close to being able to credit farmers for increasing carbon sequestration in their farming practices.
Sen. Harkin is one of my favorite Senators and I rarely find myself disagreeing with him, but I don't really get where he's going with this line of reasoning.
