Climate
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:
What Sustainability Means
Published May 04, 2009 @ 03:18PM PT
As Michael Pollan and many other people have repeatedly said, sustainability refers to things that can go on for a very long time. (The temptation to say forever is strong, but look, even the sun is going to burn out eventually.)
Sustainable practices are ones that can continue for the forseeable future without diminshment, at the least.
The official definition is more of an economic argument about not disadvantaging the future for the sake of the present, nor disadvantaging those in the present for the future. Yet the economy exists within the context of the environment and its capacity to support life; which should be obvious, but apparently isn't to everyone.
Ducks in the Back 40
Published May 04, 2009 @ 01:54PM PT
Cresting one of the many rolling hills in central North Dakota, I came upon yet another large gray lake with the strong wind making waves, ducks near the shore feeding and telephone poles running through the middle.
Wait, double take. Telephone poles? What are they doing in the middle of a lake?
One of several telltale signs that somewhere under several feet of "lake" water is a wheat field that won't be plowed this year or a pasture that won't be grazed.
Like the rest of the country four weeks ago, I heard about the flooding that plagued North Dakota. The media attention focused on the Red River Valley and the cities of Fargo and Grand Forks, and since western parts of the Dakotas tend to be drier, I assumed that the rest of North Dakota wasn't especially wet. Especially not four weeks later.
I was wrong.
Most of the conversations I had while traveling around North Dakota to discuss health care reform started with talk of the floods. The couple who owned one hotel I stayed at said they've had water in their basement for 4 weeks and they had to build a 3 foot dyke of sand and metal behind their hotel to keep it from being inundated.
Valley City, home of Congressman Earl Pomeroy, had to ban flushing toilets when their sewer system overflowed. The city resorted to placing hundreds of portable toilets scattered around town, and business and restaurants shut down due to lack of sanitation. The rumored new crime is people stealing them to put in their garages so they don't have to walk outside to use the loo.
My trip took me to Fargo and Grand Forks, a small town called Northwood west of Grand Forks, then west to Bismarck via Fargo. There was a stretch of road outside of Fargo where the road is literally surrounded on all sides by water - which makes one very conscious about cautious driving. The "shore" was at least a half mile away on either side, and a flock of geese could be seen in the distance. The Red River in Grand Forks is still well outside its banks, to the point where stairway railings simply disappeared into the cloudy water.
The "prairie pothole" region is known for its small wetlands, but even the flattest farm fields looked damp and mucky at the least and at worst had standing water between the plowed rows. As I drove west, there were stretches of drier fields leading me to think that the flooding was over, only to see more as I crested another hill. North Dakota had a wet fall, so much so that in a few places I even saw corn standing in the field. The farmer had clearly hoped that spring would allow him to harvest, but with the heavy snow this winter and the wetness now, that corn is a total loss.
While one wet year cannot make the case that climate change is shifting farmers' ability to grow crops, North Dakota has had a whole lot of flooding in the last dozen years. However, I fear that a wetter North Dakota might be a permanent condition unless we all take some drastic action to reduce the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. It's just too bad they can't grow rice that far north.
Meanwhile, there's more rain the forecast.
(Photo credit: law_keven on Flickr.)
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.
Less Means More For Europe's Low-Input Farmers
Published April 28, 2009 @ 10:58AM PT
This article is reposted with permission from the author, Wayne Roberts, manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council. It's adapted from a print only story that appeared in NOW Magazine, April 2, 2009, and as published to the COMFOOD listserv. Wayne Roberts is also the author of "The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food."
The great divide between food and farming is about to become a blur as a result of pioneering scientific research in Europe that's pushing the boundaries of health and agricultural policy.
Though no poem insists that "food is food and agriculture is agriculture, and never the twain shall meet," that may as well be the watchword in both fields.
The chasm between the two is rarely bridged at any level of public discussion or decision-making. Food writers rarely report on farms, and vice versa. Nutritionists rarely discuss anything that happens to food before it's harvested, and vice versa for agronomists; even the champions of organic farming rarely make nutritional claims. Doctors barely know about nutrition and hospitals serve what is called hospital food, just as farmers and processors don't fret about what happens to diabetes rates when all their corn is turned into cheap pop and junkfood filler. Government ministries and departments of food and agriculture rarely meet, let alone worry about harmonizing their policies.
I've long believed that the vice versas of the Two Solitudes of food and farm are responsible for most of the ills in both worlds, and so was all ears when Carlo Leifert came to speak to the annual Canadian Organic Growers (COG) conference in Toronto during February.
Leifert, a professor of ecological agriculture at Newcastle University in England, manages 31 institutes in a collaborative research project that's revolutionizing our understanding of how humble farming methods - not just high-tech food storage, packaging and cooking methods - can boost health outcomes of food. Leifert's team is tasked to help farmers do more with less by using low-cost methods to grow high-value food - thus the name of his project, the Quality Low Input Food Project.
Climate Change Hurting Poor Farmers Most
Published April 27, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT
Phillipine farmers already feeling the pain:
... “Climate change affects the hydrology of an area. Weather patterns have changed. Now, farmers can no longer rely on suggested planting calendars,” said [University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB) statistics professor Dr. Felino] Lansigan in a phone interview with the BusinessMirror. He also noted “significant” yield losses due to increasing temperatures and “extreme” climate variability from the effects of heightened El Niño and La Niña occurrences.
... Citing 2004 statistics from the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa), Lansigan said average annual temperatures have increased by 0.14 degrees Celsius from 1971 to 2000. Meanwhile, average annual rainfall has increased since the 1980s alongside a noted rise in the occurrence of landslides and floods. ...
Sadly, they're going to try genetically modified rice strains that are supposedly flood-resistant in order to combat their problems. Maybe that will work better than other GM crop applications, which have mostly been successful in growing pesticide sales.
Earth Only Gets The One Day?
Published April 21, 2009 @ 10:29PM PT
Via Meteorblades, an excellent rant from the folks at Grist about making Earth Day the appropriately sanctioned box for 'green' sometimes seems to trivialize it.
Sure, it's a great excuse for people everywhere to make awareness-raising papier mache demonstrations, of which I am quite fond, but do those efforts just end up preaching to the choir?
We've talked here before about the urgency of climate change induced droughts, flooding, and seasonal fluctuations to the food system. Not to mention that it threatens the existence of maple syrup, as fellow Change.org blogger Emily Gertz points out on the Global Warming blog. When I talk about it like that, it sounds serious.
Then you walk away from your computer and go outside. You walk downtown and see trashcans overflowing with non-recyclable containers. If you wanted to recycle a beverage container or similar item when you were out walking around, you'd probably have to take it home with you and put it out on your curb on recycling day. That's if your city or town has a recycling program.
You go to a restaurant, where you will routinely be offered more food than any one person should really eat in a sitting, unless that person is Andre the Giant or Michael Phelps. If you can't or don't want to take it home, that food won't be composted and returned to the soil. It will end up in a landfill mixed with old batteries, thrashed appliances, the contents of foreclosed homes, torn clothing, used diapers, expired pharmaceuticals and all manner of thing.
Your digital camera wears out and the manufacturer tells you it'd be cheaper to get a new one than to fix the old one. Which is nothing special to digital cameras. Nothing gets fixed anymore except used cars.
All the rest of the year, nearly everywhere except special events or demonstration projects, we live in a grinding clockwork of unfathomable waste. It's easier to waste. It's cheaper to waste. It's more normal to waste. It makes more sense to waste as we go about our daily lives.
This is not a society that's been paying attention to the last 38 Earth Days, nor anticipates any future time when the flow of raw resources might be restricted.
So while I'm very glad that there are people who spent a lot of time and effort arranging Earth Day demonstrations, I feel confident that if they're that committed, they'd agree that the state of our only home needs more sustained attention.
