Policy
The Dead Zone
Published May 28, 2009 @ 01:58PM PT
No, not the TV series. The fish kill:
... Wilma [Subra] explains, “Nitrogen and phosphorous from fertilizers travel down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico. This makes algae blossom like crazy. As the algae grow, they use up all the oxygen. When they die off, they sink to the bottom of the ocean and use up more oxygen there, too. So there’s this layer of water in the Gulf that is void of oxygen—that means nothing can live there.” ...
As they explain over at Twilight Earth, the fertilizer used to grow plants on land (including and especially the corn used for animal feed) is killing off ocean fisheries near the mouths of our rivers, pitting one food sector against another.
Fishing is particularly dependent on the health and vibrancy of wild ecosystems, and humans are very dependent on fishing. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, fish make up 15 percent of the world population's protein intake. That's a fairly sizable supply of food for which there isn't a ready replacement.
Nor is that the only threat to our fishy food supply. Along with overfishing, other agricultural chemicals threaten the continuity of safe seafood consumption, such as direct pesticide fish kills and the tissue accumulation of organochlorine pesticides (including those that have been banned in the US but are still used abroad,) and mercury from coal plants.
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.
Obama Tackles Federal Preemption of State Safety Laws
Published May 22, 2009 @ 10:51AM PT
And federal preemption in general. Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft writes the following about hitting the back button on regulations that prevented consumers suing companies according to state and local laws in a number of policy areas:
... This will irritate the Chamber of Commerce types who have no interest in "states' rights" when those rights include a consumer's right to sue businesses under state law. Business interests persuaded the Bush administration (and have often persuaded federal courts) that state law should be preempted by federal law to spare businesses the burden of complying with 50 different standards of liability. Of course, businesses aren't forced to do business in 50 different states, and it hardly seems unfair that they be subjected to the laws of those states in which they choose to do business. ...
Well, good. Sometimes state laws are more protective of consumers.
So maybe this means that California can keep downer cows out of their food supply. Maybe it will return control of seed law to local governments.
Medical device manufacturers are adamantly opposed to ending FDA's preemption authority, rounding up patients from all over the country who've been convinced that extending stronger consumer protections would be the death of medical innovation. Yep, if manufacturers have to avoid killing or injuring their customers, they could no longer heal them and would stop marketing new products. By that logic, food companies, also, would stop selling food if they couldn't occasionally get away with giving people Salmonella or E. Coli infections.
That's logic for you. Just, whimper.
Children: Not Actually Garbage Disposals
Published May 21, 2009 @ 01:13PM PT
Apparently, it costs too much to give kids healthy food in school.
School lunches are full of excess fat and school nutrition budgets used as a slush fund for commodities producers, especially the beef and dairy industries, which are overrepresented in children's diets by even this unrepentant omnivore's estimate. Emphasis mine:
... But all that cheese adds up. Public schools serve more than 4 billion meals every year -- a number that would make many fast-food chains envious -- and officials say all those lunches are contributing to the growing health crisis among kids. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity rates have doubled in children and tripled in adolescents since 1980, spurring an epidemic of type II diabetes, once considered an adult-onset condition. Obesity has also been associated with heart disease, arthritis, and certain cancers, and researchers have found fatty streaks in the blood vessels of children as young as 10.
"USDA needs to relate the current crisis in kids' health to the meals that are being served, especially to poor kids, because that's the population that's most vulnerable," says Antonia Demas, director of the Food Studies Institute, a child-nutrition group based in upstate New York. Because low-income children often eat both breakfast and lunch at school, "they get at least two-thirds of their calories from school each day, and they're the population really showing an increase in the diet-related diseases."
... Given the industry's clout, USDA officials are careful to include agribusiness representatives in almost every discussion about the school lunch program. In the mid-1990s, a group of health advocates met with the USDA a to ask that schools be allowed to serve soy products like veggie burgers. According to one participant, a department official asked them, "Have you spoken with the Cattlemen about this? Until the Cattlemen go for this, we aren't going to be able to move on it." Soy alternatives were eventually allowed, but only after the beef industry group was consulted. ...
And as we discovered last year when video footage of slaughterhouse practices was revealed, downer cows have been making it into the school lunch meat supply. Children aren't only eating too much meat, it isn't the good stuff.
Jill Richardson, writing at LaVidaLocavore, suggests an alternative: make school lunches wholesome and appetizing, like they do in Italy, France and Japan,countries where they don't treat kids like garbage disposals for food only the starving would volunteer to eat.
(Photo credit: Marshall Astor on Flickr. That picture might look appetizing, unless it was a good composite of your every single breakfast and lunch, as opposed to the occasional 'I'm going to hell for this' treat.)
Cheerios and Truth in Labeling
Published May 14, 2009 @ 08:31AM PT
So while I was looking for bridesmaids' earrings the other day, I came across these delightful and sparkly things, which were described as "classic Hollywood glam". I couldn't help but smile, really accurate labeling is a precious commodity.
When it comes to food labels, as anyone with allergies knows firsthand, that's doubly true.
Consider Vitamin Water, a product marketed to appeal to the health conscious. Its vitamin content may not be absorbed, but its dose of sugar certainly will. This almost-but-not-quite-soda drink can seem like a break from the typical sugared beverage, but it's a difference only in degree.
Industry has responded to people's concern for their health by claiming that the junk we've already been eating was healthy for us all along. As if the problem with processed food was that we didn't believe nice things about it.
I was going to let the argument pass though, today's developing cereal theme notwithstanding, until I ran across this Reuters oped outlining the fury of right wing bloggers over the decision by the FDA to class Cheerios as a drug due to its health claims. High comedy:
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 ...
