Climate
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.)
Saturday Brunch: No Breakfast for Old Hens
Published May 23, 2009 @ 06:36AM PT
Raiding the internet fridge for your intellectual delectation ...
- OpenLeft: The one type of claim to global warming skepticism that you will ever see me approvingly link to.
- Civil Eats: Ethical eating means care for the people who grow and harvest our food as much as it means care for how that food was produced. Also, is organic farming a form of activism without land reform?
- The Green Fork: What's the difference between a pigeon and an investment banker? A look at Food and Water Watch's guide to sustainable seafood (go, tilapia!)
- ObamaFoodorama: While California's first lady, Maria Shriver, followed Michelle Obama's lead in starting a garden in Sacramento on state grounds, it isn't organic, which must please some people no end. The USDA hires Rajiv Shah, yet another biotech booster.
- LaVidaLocavore: Vilsack may be pro-biotech, but at least he also likes small-scale, organic farming. The CropLife jagoffs are back at it, with a letter writing campaign encouraging people to tell Mrs. Obama that pesticides are yummy. McDonald's caught McGreenwashing. About not being anti-farmer.
PS - Dear The People Who Run Entertainment Companies: When you disable YouTube embedding of your artists' original videos and live performances, you are preventing me from advertising the music in your catalog for free on my website. A service which, I might point out, is even more valuable to you for music that's older and rarely played on the radio anymore. (Seriously, does anyone profit by my not showing people how cool the Eurythmics were, and hey, maybe they should grab one of their albums or some iTunes for old times' sake? Same for mini-clips from movies that aren't in theaters anymore.) This is moronic and self-defeating. Learn how to use advertising embeds and grow the f* up already. Kissy the face, n.
Food Production as Net Energy Consumer
Published May 17, 2009 @ 10:47AM PT
The sun has been raining down a large amount of energy on the surface of the planet for billions of years, while the molten core of the planet has been sending heat and various reactive substances to the surface and asteroids rained down water, possibly even the organic compounds that were the building blocks of life.
The heat provided by the sun and volcanic vents on the ocean floors has been used by living organisms to power endothermic chemical reactions. (Pause: An endothermic reaction is an interaction between elements that needs an external energy source to get started.)
The net effect of those reactions has been to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, combine it with things like hydrogen, nitrogen and phosphorus, and form a gaseous envelope around our planet composed mainly of inert nitrogen gas with a reasonable amount of free oxygen and a few other trace elements thrown in. The new compounds contain and store, in those chemical bonds, some fraction of that energy that can be released on dissolution of the bonds. The energy, the work, captured in all these reactions is enormous.
What needs to be understood about phrases like 'destroying ecosystems' or 'reducing biodiversity' is that they mean the slowing of the mechanisms used to capture the energy of the sun and make it available for living things.
While the sun drops a lot of energy our way ...
... The amount of energy from the sun that falls on Earth's surface is enormous. All the energy stored in Earth's reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas is matched by the energy from just 20 days of sunshine. ...
... neither we nor our photosynthetic friends are very efficient at capturing it. Life has been around for billions of years, after all, and it has managed to store and bury for the long haul only 20 days worth of sunshine. And while we're using that stored energy at an astonishing rate, we're mainly ignoring the solar wealth constantly raining down on us:
... Every year, the sun irradiates the land masses on earth with the equivalent of 19,000 billion tons of oil equivalent (toe). Only a fraction — 9 billion toe — would satisfy the world's current energy requirements. Put differently, in 20 minutes, the amount of solar energy falling on the earth could power the planet for one year. ...
If this explanation has merely put an extra dimension on how ridiculous our situation is, I will have done my job here. But naturally, I had a point specifically about how this relates to agriculture.
Thursday Breakfast
Published May 14, 2009 @ 05:57AM PT
Raiding the internet fridge for your intellectual delectation ...
- Here's a rundown of predatory insects that prey on common garden pests, which you can use in your home garden instead of pesticides.
- The City of Denver considers the urban, backyard chicken question.
- A new generation of greenhouses being tried in California could point the way to both the next productivity and sustainability leaps in agriculture.
- Hundreds of millions of farm operating loans are in question as a large agricultural bank in Colorado collapses.
- Climate change is believed by some experts to be the world's biggest global health threat due to the migrations and civil unrest it's likely to generate as various parts of the world become less livable.
- Lastly, just because it's interesting, a SEED article on how babies' minds work.
(Photo credit: audreyjm529 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 ...
Food Transition
Published May 10, 2009 @ 09:04AM PT
The Post Carbon Institute shares a report on the food and farming transition that'll be needed after fossil fuels, post-carbon, if you will. Which is a funny way to talk about food if you know your chemistry, but one gets the point.
I'll probably have more on this later in the week, just wanted to put it out there for consideration.
Climate Trauma
Published May 08, 2009 @ 04:13AM PT
Gillian Caldwell of 1Sky writes about climate trauma, something affecting people of all ages and levels of activism. She wrote it after the two part interview, the first part of which is at the top of this post.
And climate is traumatic because, for instance ...
Energy Secretary Steven Chu gave a speech at the beginning of his tenure where he said that we could see the end of agriculture in California, as Change.org climate blogger Emily Gertz wrote at the time. As Chu said at the National Clean Energy Summit, the effects of weather and resource wars could affect "hundreds of millions, to billions of people."
A lot of people's lives literally hang in the balance, waiting for Congress to do things like stand up to industry today in order to save them tomorrow. It's unnerving, to say the least, but as Caldwell writes:
... All the polls and marketing specialists tell us that people will tune us out if we shriek about the fact that the sky is falling and that people want to hear about solutions. We do see a path forward -- a way out of this mess we got ourselves into. But in our heart of hearts ,we are fearful that the powers that be in industrial America, the votes in Congress, and the ignorance or economic plight of voters all around us, will stand in our way and we may get nothing at all, or too little to late. Will we add up? ...
As she says, the unholy trinity of "depression, irritability and anger" are ultimately stumbling blocks to getting positive results and engaging the public, probably because they don't want to share this damage.
Why would you want to work on something that just makes you angry all the time? That's a good question. I hope so, anyway, I end up asking it a lot.
My answer comes down to the possible result: a good future.
I'd rather live in a world where the food was good, fresh and healthy, the weather was predictable, industries couldn't make money from wrecking the joint, and when, frankly, we could move on to more interesting problems than this collective death wish we all seem to have.
For instance, is interstellar travel at speeds pictured in movies like Star Wars or Star Trek possible, or would approaching them create so much pressure that it would turn living beings into goo? Can we terraform Mars? Can we build a space elevator? Can we get solar power beamed to us directly from the Moon or from orbit? Can we mine asteroids? Can we figure out a better way to ensure reasonable living standards for all while still rewarding initiative and invention? Can I please have my flying car, already?
But can we sit around working on these things? No, because we still haven't figured out the basic questions, like how to dig ourselves out of the mud of a mean animal existence without destroying everything we touch.
So we have to solve that problem before moving on, though I really wish we could just move on already. Which keeps me going. The dream of a Mars colony someday does rather presume our survival as an advanced species, even if it's a very winding path from here to there.
Anyway, this last video is from a 1Sky contest. Caldwell linked to it in her post, from an interview with a little girl whose parents say they don't really talk to her about global warming. She just heard all of this 'around' somewhere. Wouldn't it be great if she could forget about all this irritating crap unless she was studying history and answer a better question with her life than, "Are we facing the end of agriculture as we know it?"
Ask the Children from Barbara Lucas on Vimeo.
