Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON – Americans are lining up to snap up rebates for “cash for refrigerators” and “dollars for dishwashers,” as part of a U.S. government program aimed at both economic stimulus and reduced emissions.

The effort, modeled after the “cash for clunkers” auto trade-in program, includes nearly $300 million to encourage consumers to dump older appliances in favor of newer, energy-efficient models.

U.S. officials say the effort, a small part of the nearly $800 billion economic stimulus measure enacted last year, will help reduce the U.S. carbon footprint because of the heavy electrical consumption of big appliances, and at the same time pump money into the economy and create jobs.

On one level, the program, which is being administered by individual states, appears to be succeeding in jump-starting sales.

In Iowa, which offered rebates up to $500 on refrigerators, washing machines, and dishwashers, the $2.7 million in federal funds was exhausted in less than a day by stampeding consumers. Minnesota needed less than three days to give out $5 million in appliance rebates.

In Ohio, which launched its program Friday with $10.5 million, the state agency administering it said it “anticipates the rebates will be exhausted in a few weeks.”

As of this week, New York still had $5.6 million remaining from its $18.7 million even though some waited in line on the opening weekend.

“It’s been a boon to consumers and retailers,” said Francis Murray of the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority.

The biggest of the state programs will be launched in California April 22, with $35.2 million. And more states will be launching rebate programs in the coming months.

To qualify for rebates, consumers must buy appliances which meet energy standards set by the federal government and are up to 30 percent more efficient than existing models. Some states are offering extra rebates if consumers recycle old appliances.

Some see the program as a natural follow-up to the “clunkers” program, which boosted new car sales, and in turn lifted auto production and jobs to help pull the U.S. economy out of its slump.

Economist Ryan Sweet at Moody’s Economy.com said the appliance program probably had an impact on sales and orders for durable goods, big-ticket items expected to last at least three years, which are critical to the manufacturing sector.

“Eight states launched rebate programs last month, which would help explain some of the strength in sales at both electronic and building material stores,” he said. “This also argues for strong gains in subsequent months and lends some upside risk to our forecast for real durables spending.”

Joel Naroff at Naroff Economic Advisors said that while the clunkers program appeared to have a positive economic impact, the effect of the appliance program may be far less. He said the impact may be reduced even more for appliances made outside the United States.

“On a $600 washing machine, the retailer may make $100, but the manufacturer will make $300,” he said. “But if the manufacturer is on the other side of the world, that’s $300 that goes out of the [U.S.] economy.”

University of Delaware economists Burton Abrams and George Parsons argue that both the clunkers and appliance programs are lemons for taxpayers, mainly because they are destroying otherwise productive assets.

With the auto program, the economists say the societal loss was as much as $2,250 per vehicle because “the value of resources used exceeded the value of resources created. In effect, we shrank the economic pie to improve the conditions of some workers and perhaps some sectors other than labor.”

For appliances, they say the overall loss is more modest, at $6 for every $100 invested.

“In essence, the taxpayers … are putting $100 into the pot on behalf of society as a whole,” they concluded. “Society gets back $9 in environmental benefits. People who buy refrigerators, on average, get
$85 in value from the cash transfer. The other $6 is lost to everyone.”

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by Tom Laskawy

A recent Washington Post article documented the stark reality of Haiti’s non-existent agricultural infrastructure:

Decades of inexpensive imports—especially rice from the U.S.—punctuated with abundant aid in various crises have destroyed local agriculture and left impoverished countries such as Haiti unable to feed themselves.

…Today Haiti depends on the outside world for nearly all of its sustenance. The most current government needs assessment—based on numbers from 2005—is that 51 percent of the food consumed in the country is imported, including 80 percent of all rice eaten.

This phenomenon is not unique to Haiti, of course. The developed world’s approach toward Haiti was replicated across the globe. At long last, however, people outside the NGO world are starting to realize that this strategy was indeed a mistake. In fact, the article contains a startling admission from a surprising source, former President Bill Clinton, on the wisdom of supporting cheap U.S. exports at the expense of developing world farmers:

“It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake,” Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10. “I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else.”

And yet, while the Obama administration pledged to help developing world farmers feed themselves, he also has pledged to double U.S. exports with agricultural exports a core part of that plan.

American farmers are rightly proud of their ability to grow vast amounts of food. But a desire to do good has been coopted by agribusiness’ interests in expanding and maintaining a subsidy system that causes overproduction and, as Tom Philpott details, primarily benefits large food processors rather than farmers.

I found it interesting, then, to read this article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about two Louisiana rice farmers who abandoned the conventional commodity agricultural system back in the 90s for the organic, local one.

Fifteen years ago, Kurt and Karen Unkel of Kinder, La., decided the risk [of going organic] was worth it. “I started this because I could not see the future in conventional farming,” Kurt told me when I visited him last month. Back then, he and his brother were farming 2,000 acres. But “it got to where you could plow 100 acres and you wouldn’t find one earthworm.” As he spoke, he turned over the soil in his experimental vegetable garden, sending earthworms squirming back toward the ground. “And as I learned about the nutrition, there just wasn’t no stopping. You’re dealing with life!”

A brown-rice farmer who refers to bugs as “beneficials” sounds like a member of the Michael Pollan order, hippie division. But Unkel is an S.U.V. driver in a baseball cap, Wrangler shirt and mud-caked cowpoke boots. His hands look like parched earth after 30 years of farming. They move a lot as he talks in his Cajun drawl about nutrition, the health of the soil and the benefits of good and bad bugs and bacteria. “I don’t have any Ph.D.’s,” he said after going off on a bacteria jag. “Me and Karen just got four years of college, but they didn’t teach any of this. Like these green manure crops: when I went through school, well, that was old-school. Now it’s back to the new school!

“Local farmers used to think I was nuts, but they’re coming around now,” he said. A decade ago, he was selling 200 pounds of brown rice a month at the Red Stick farmers’ market in Baton Rouge. Now Unkel takes 1,000 pounds of jasmine rice from the grain bin near his house every week and mills it himself using a compact Japanese machine. He and an intern bag it, stamp the Cajun Grain label with the milling date and send it to markets around the state, often to be sold that day.

In some ways, this profile fits a certain journalistic pattern that treasures the oxymoronic—an SUV driving, baseball cap wearing, 50-something Southern farmer who farms sustainably?! Wow!!

But what struck me was the main reason Unkel gave for making the switch:

In the mid-’90s, his uncle made him “a heck of a computer program,” which showed that the higher his yields, the lower his payments from government programs. After seeing his money remain steady no matter what he did, “I started trying to figure out how to get out of this,” Unkel said of conventional farming.

In essence—and this is really really important—the more grain the Unkels grew per acre, the less money they made. Though their government subsidy payments remained steady, increasing their yield increased their costs—more, or more expensive, seed, more pesticides, and more fertilizer. Unkel ran the numbers on his own and confirmed that the whole system turns out to be just the trap that Michael Pollan has been describing for years. In fact, the Unkels are going to grow even less rice this year to avoid selling anything into the money-losing (for them) commodity markets.

Have the Unkels discovered that commodity growers are better off if they, to rephrase Nixon-era USDA Chief Earl Butz’s famous advice to farmers, “Get small and get out”—out, that is, of the commodity market?

In a sense, Haitians and literally billions of people in Africa and Asia have become collateral damage in this misguided struggle to maintain a broken system. Bill Clinton understands the error of his ways, but there are still precious few Karen and Kurt Unkels out there who have come to the same conclusion.

I’d also like to make a point that’s often lost in the debate over farm subsidies. For all the billions that go into propping up ridiculous levels of corn, soy and wheat production, the impact of changes in commodity prices on American wallets is actually surprisingly modest, though you wouldn’t know it to hear the fear-mongering from certain quarters at any mention of subsidy reform. Since Michael Pollan wrote about cheap corn in The Omnivore’s Dilemma back in 2005/6, corn prices have increased on average by over 30 percent. And yet, processed food prices have continued to drop—even meat prices, U.S. production of which hinges on cheap grain, have been relatively stable.

To review: Subsidies have stayed the same. Commodity prices have doubled. Processed food prices have dropped. Even so, farmers still lose money, consumers still don’t get hurt and large food processors make ever more billions in profits. Meanwhile, the developing world can no longer feed itself because—even with all the grain we feed to our livestock, process into sweeteners and additives and pump into our cars and trucks—we still have tons and tons and tons left over, which end up flooding overseas markets and putting already poor farmers out of business.

It seems like the Unkels, along with Clinton, have figured out that industrial agriculture isn’t only unprofitable for anyone whose name isn’t Archers, Daniels or Midland. It’s also turning out to be immoral. When is everyone else going to realize this, too?

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by Umbra Fisk

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

I need to replace my eyewear—the lenses need updating and the frames are damaged—and I’m wondering what the most sustainable choice is. Frameless seems likely, but if I want to go with a frame (Coke bottle lenses, anyone?) then is metal the way to go?

Blindly,
Hope K.
Providence, R.I.

A. Dearest Hope,

As a fellow four-eyes, I feel you on the eyewear woes. I’ve worn glasses since I was a wee little Umbra, valiantly reaching out of my crib for my spectacles each morning so I could get back to perusing my pureed-carrot–stained copy of Silent Spring. I digress.

You say your frames are damaged. What’s wrong with them? A missing screw? Bent arm? Anything some geek-chic masking tape wrapped ‘round the nose bridge won’t fix? I say give the repair route a go for starters. And if they’re beyond refurbishing for your own wear or you’re just ready for a new look, go ahead and donate your old glasses to an organization like the Lions Club or New Eyes for the Needy.

Now when it comes to shopping for specs, definitely try to avoid ones made from new plastic—as you know, it’s petroleum-based and will never fully biodegrade. Plastic frames do tend to be less expensive than their metal counterparts though, so if you’re looking to save some green and our green planet, look for frames made from recycled plastic. Reclaimed metal frames are another recycled option. ICU Eyewear, for example, has some cool readers made from reclaimed plastic, recycled metal, and bamboo.

A note on frameless glasses: Oddly, they can be a bit more expensive than their framed cousins; plus, they’re more susceptible to damage than glasses with frames, which could lead to having to replace them more quickly anyway. However, yes indeed, they do require fewer materials up front than framed lenses.

And whether you’re a hipster and want to wear them ironically, a poser, or just a regular nerd like myself, vintage (read: secondhand) frames are pretty rad. A pal o’ mine inherited his grandpa’s old black Buddy Holly–style frames and just got them fitted with lenses in his own prescription.

Also, you mentioned Coke bottle glasses, but have you ever considered Sprite bottle glasses? Someone did. I wonder what prescription Sprite bottles typically come in…

Optometrically,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

My 3-year-old’s school encourages kids to get involved with a twice-yearly Walk to School Week. The idea is to get kids to exercise more, parents to drive less, and all of us to think of walking as a normal, healthy daily activity. So far, so good.

The trouble is that we don’t live anywhere near close enough actually to walk from home to school. And there’s no public transportation between our house and the school. We have no choice but to drive the kid every day.

The Walk to School Week organizers have a clever solution to this: I am supposed to drive my car around to a parking lot in the village (which is a slightly farther distance for me to drive), and then park the car and have my kid walk a meaningless 200 yards to school. The kids stationed at the school door, counting the numbers of their peers walking each morning, will put a check mark in their clipboards, my son will get a sticker, and everyone will pat themselves on the back for saving the planet.

Am I crazy to think this is nothing but a big fat lie? I’m all for kids learning about the environment in fun, participatory ways, but isn’t this just fake action? Should we really be telling our kids that it’s OK to pretend to walk to school—that it’s enough just to take part, even if you don’t actually save any carbon emissions (or even create more) in the process? I would prefer that kids who need to go by car be encouraged to do something else to offset their commute during the week, but my husband is worried I’m just going to get our family branded as a bunch of spoilsport eco-freaks if I raise a fuss.

Am I making too much of this?  Should I just smile and say a couple hundred yards of fresh air will do us all good?

Mrs. Welshie
Buckinghamshire, England 

A. Dear Mrs. Welshie,

Yes, you are crazy. Crazy like a fox, my friend. If, like the venerable Ms. Whitney Houston, you believe the children are our future and that we should teach them well and let them lead the way, then I give you a big virtual high five for not wanting to perpetuate this myth of the pretend walk to school.

When I was 9, my class did a trash pickup around the school grounds for a display we were creating for the lobby. We wanted to show kids (and adults) what a littered mess we had in our own backyard. Once the display of milk cartons, torn handouts, soda cans, cigarette butts, and plastic bottle caps was set, we needed a big, brazen sign to announce our message. My school was so freaking proud of its hoity-toity “School of Excellence” designation—seriously, they referred to it in the morning announcements, on our lunch menus, and in ginormous script on a wall at the front of the school. So my renegade idea for the sign was: “This is your School of Excellence!” My teacher thought it was too edgy. Sigh.

Point being, kids are pretty savvy about what’s real and what’s just for show. I think pomp for pomp’s sake sends an icky message. But no kid wants to stick out like a sore thumb, even at age 3. 

So what to do about it? Well, you’re going to have to step up. Find out who’s in charge of Walk to School Week; let them know your concerns and tell them you’d really like to be involved in heading up the initiative for the kids who must be driven to school. I really liked your idea of encouraging the car-riding kids to do something else to offset their commute during the week. Perhaps they could go vegetarian that week, not watch TV, or agree to walk other places closer to home.

I’ll bet there are other parents who will hop on your bandwagon. And if this is just the beginning of your kid’s school years, it’s a great way to start off your involvement.

Sure-footedly,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

With Easter fast upon us, do you have some eco-friendly chocolate alternatives for the kids’ Easter baskets?

Leah J.
Eaton Rapids, Mich.

A. Dearest Leah,

Ah, foregoing chocolate because of this little gem? Yeah, it put me off the sweets a bit as well. Definitely reject all the little plastic Easter trinkets. Easter means different things to different people, but when I think of it, I think eggs. And when I think eggs, I think chickens. And then I start thinking about the gnarliness of industrial chicken farming and the lack of strict regulation around terms like “cage free” and “free range.”

But all these mental dominoes do give me an idea for better Easter basket filler for your kiddies: eggs and chickens. Stick with me here. Start off by scouring for local, pastured eggs; hard boil them, and then dye them naturally with a little help from Martha and some red cabbage, turmeric, onions, beets, and coffee.

And if you really want to go whole hog, er, chicken with this, you can add a baby chick or two to the basket—pending that you actually want to and are permitted by the city to own backyard chickens in your neck of the woods. Only do this if you’re truly up for the responsibility, as I’m guessing all manner of baby chicks and rabbits find themselves homeless each year shortly after Easter. The chicks won’t yet be big enough to need a coop, so a lined box will suffice in the beginning. In four to five months, they’ll start producing eggs—ah, the gift that keeps on giving.

Not satisfied with snagging chicks for your offspring? Check out my column on holiday gifts for kids (hint: Steer clear of stuff).

Hoppily,
Umbra

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by David Roberts

Last Friday, the EPA took a significant step toward blocking a Clean Water Act permit for Arch Coal’s Spruce Mine, the largest proposed mountaintop-removal coal mine in West Virginia history. It’s a big deal—see Ken Ward Jr. for more on what it means and what comes next.

I just wanted to highlight the reactions of West Virginia legislators. See if anything jumps out. Here’s Rep. Nick Rahall (D):

This is an unprecedented, unjustified and undeserved decision and I completely disagree with it as I told EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson directly.

Rep. Shelly Moore Capito (R):

Today’s announcement by the EPA to begin the veto process for the Spruce Mine permit confirms what many have long suspected: the Agency has no regard for the economic hardship created by their policies, or for the judgment and authority of the state and federal agencies involved.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D):

I have said this before, and will say it again: it is wrong and unfair for the EPA to change the rules for a permit that is already active.

Sen. Robert ByrdNow, here’s Sen. Robert Byrd (D):

The announcement by the EPA today of its Proposed Determination to exercise its veto authority over the Spruce #1 Mine permit begins a process that enables the company and the public to comment on the matter in writing and at public hearings.  I would strongly encourage all parties to seek a balanced, fair, reasonable compromise.

What makes Byrd’s measured, conciliatory statement so remarkable is not just its contrast with the other three reactions but its contrast with a long career spent fervently defending the coal industry against any regulation or restraint. Byrd has been been scrapping for coal in Congress since 1952, nine years before Barack Obama was born. But this isn’t the first sign that he’s gone rogue on coal—in Dec. 2009 he issued a remarkable statement condemning the “fear mongering” and “grandstanding” used by coal proponents against Obama’s administration.

What’s going on? What, in the twilight of his career, has led the longest serving member of Congress to rethink coal’s place in modern Appalachia? A cynical sort might point out that the senator has been hospitalized several times in recent years and is reportedly in fragile health. Perhaps his staff has mostly taken over.

Or maybe it’s just Byrd finally accepting the inevitable: coal has to change. Perhaps he read “The   Decline of Central Appalachian Coal and the Need for Economic   Diversification” (PDF). He has lived through a precipitous drop in mining employment:

Graph: Downstream Strategies

 

Some mining companies have cut their workforce by 90 percent in the last 40 years, shifting from underground mining to mountaintop removal. Coal now employs just 2 percent of Appalachians. The supply of Appalachian coal is declining as well, pushing the price out of competitive range:

Graph: Downstream Strategies

 

More broadly, a recent study from West Virginia University found that for Appalachia, the health costs of coal mining exceed its job and economic benefits by more than five to one. West Virginia ranks 49th in terms of income; its waterways are poisoned with mercury, its streams are buried, its mountains lie in rubble.

It simply can’t continue. As Byrd said, “West Virginians can choose to anticipate change and adapt to it, or resist and be overrun by it.” It’s the message the state’s residents need to hear, but most of its elected officials lack the foresight or courage to tell them. There’s something poetic about the fact that their most venerated elder is the first to realize that it’s time to start letting go.

———

Bonus Byrd!

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by Tyler Falk

Leonardo da Vinci’s 1498 painting of The Last Supper.Photo: Drewwiki via Wikimedia Commons

In a strange study published this week by the International Journal of Obesity, professors found that portion sizes in artistic renditions of The Last Supper increased dramatically in the past 1,000 years, the L.A. Times reports.

The study, conducted by brothers Brian and Craig Wansink, looked at 52 artistic versions of The Last Supper created between 1,000 and 2,000 A.D. The finding: portion sizes of entrees of Jesus’ disciples grew by 70 percent and the bread size grew by 30 percent. Even the size of the plates ballooned by 66 percent.

Brian Wansink, director of Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab told the Times, “I think people assume that increased serving sizes, or ‘portion
distortion,’ is a recent phenomenon. But this research indicates that it’s a general trend for at least the
last millennium.”

If portion sizes started rising hundreds of years ago, does that mean we needn’t worry about the effects now? Not quite, New York University nutrition researcher Lisa R. Young tells Healy:

There is scant evidence that the body mass index of people in developed
societies soared into unhealthy ranges for most of the 1,000 years
studied, Young said. But there is little doubt, she added, that that
changed in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s—coincidentally, when portion
sizes began a dramatic run-up.

Now that we know what Jesus would do—pile more food on his disciples’ plates—we have to ask, What would Michelle do?

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by David Roberts

She & Him—the indie It band composed of musician/producer/genius M. Ward and actress Zooey Deschanel—have released a follow-up to their 2008 debut, Volume One. They’re calling it … wait for it … Volume Two.

When I first FMB’d She & Him, I went on at length about my unseemly crush on Deschanel, so I won’t cover that ground again. (Except to note how $#*%! cute she is.) More to the point, her voice is fantastic, sultry and playful. Just like those doe eyes and delicate … wait, not covering that again.

Volume Two is not a huge departure—more strummy, breezy, doo-woppy singalongs that are pretty much impossible not to like.

Here’s a retro gem called “Gonna Get Along Without You Now.”

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by Jennifer Prediger

HomegrownSpring and the Environmental Film Festival both
burst into full bloom at the festival’s start in the Nation’s Capital last
weekend. Eco-movie buffs, many having
withstood record snowfalls in Washington, D.C., this winter, eschewed the
beauty of the outdoors to watch the beauty of the outdoors indoors in the form of a wellspring
of eco-conscious cinema.

And there was a lot to see. In its 18th year, the
festival, which ends Sunday, is in the midst of screening an ambitious 155
films over 12 days at some 56 venues around town. Not in freezing, old theaters in some overrun
city in Utah, the Environmental Film Festival takes advantage of the great
wealth of resources in the District of Columbia, including prime screening venues
like The National Gallery of Art, American History Museum, seven different
embassies, Georgetown University, and the National Museum of Natural History
among many others. 

Among the feast of food-themed films is a charming one called
Homegrown.

It’s about a pioneering Pasadena, Calif., family who transformed
their single-family home on a third of an acre into a micro farm. With eight
chickens, two goats, four ducks, and producing around 6,000 pounds of food, the
Dervaes family serves as a beacon of brilliance and can-do-it-iveness. 

In addition to growing their own sustenance, the Dervaes
family sells local, organic produce to Pasadena restaurants. They also run a website, where their journey to
self-sufficiency is inspiring and also accessible. 

This film shows the triumph and satisfaction of growing your
own food, along with underscoring the community created by such audacious acts
of turning your lawn into a farm. What
begins as an oddity in the neighborhood becomes a community treasure, bringing
people together. 

After the film, the impulse to get your hands dirty is great—one
felt even greater after attending a screening of a documentary film called Dirt!
The Movie.

For such a strong word, something so, well, dirty, you wouldn’t expect homage of
this order to exist. Never has a film created in a viewer such a visceral need
to thrust one’s hand into the soil. This
ode to dirt begins with the Big Bang. From that beginning, it takes us to
another beginning narrative: God makes humankind from soil; he names the first
person the Hebrew word for dirt, Adam. Eve is life.

Dirt links us to where we come from—stardust. And this film
is full of stars. Narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis and featuring interviews with
luminaries like Vandana Shiva, Wangari Maathai, Alice Waters, Majora Carter,
and others, dirt remains the true star of this film. 

The film illustrates the true importance of its subject. Based
on the book by William Bryant Logan, Dirt:
Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, it draws attention to the top six inches of
soil as living and breathing and among the most vital parts of life as we know
it.

Dirt! The MovieIndustrial agriculture’s use of nitrogen fertilizers,
pesticides, and monocultures are having devastating effects on the state of our
dirt. We are doing something very dangerous to life itself: We are treating our dirt like dirt, an
expression whose meaning should change to “treating something with great respect
and care.”

The filmmakers and dirt-matologists, Bill Benenson and Gene
Rosow, have combined information, passion, compelling storytelling and humor in
a rich way to cast a radiant light upon a not often thought about subject. Their animated personification of dirt in the
film, Digby, is a source of adorableness and ample guffaws throughout a
screening. Playing in the dirt makes the film something for children and
adults.

Like a good environmental film, Dirt! aims to be more than a movie. It seeks to be a movement. It
educates and encourages viewers to compost, buy from local agriculture
producers and have relationships with them, and screen the film wherever they
live to help more people get the dirt (the good kind) on dirt. 

After screening at Sundance this year, the film will be
aired nationwide on PBS. You can see it during Earth Day week on Tuesday, April
20.

After happily getting my nails dirty, I came up for air and
light to see a film about the power of light itself and the politics that have
slower solar power called A Road Not Taken, about Pres. Jimmy
Carter’s solar panels.

In 1979, Pres. Carter installed the solar panels on the
White House roof, at a time when the oil crisis and the Iran hostage crisis
were making our relationship to oil seem all the more questionable. He asked us as a nation to look at our
consumption and change. 

A Road Not TakenNot surprisingly, the panels were removed in 1986 by Pres. Reagan
before making their way to Unity College in Maine in the early ‘90s

The filmmakers are two Swiss artists who were taken by the
history and symbolism of the panels. The film journeys back in time to the
installation of the panels, with well-placed archival footage and actual
speeches by Pres. Carter. The young
artists and students then take a road trip with the panels in tow to the
American History Museum, trying to secure a rightful place there.   

The panels were unfortunately rejected from the museum. Though,
not to give away the ending, the film screened at the American History Museum—a sign that the sunshine machine was let in.

A funny, sad, weird, and illuminating film, it is worth a
watch, as were so many others at the festival. These three movies just begin to scratch the
surface of the embarrassment of environmental cinematic riches that the
Environmental Film Festival has to offer. 

By all means, take in the offerings yourself! If you’re in D.C. this weekend, you can check
out the blossoms and some of the films before the festival ends. If you’re an out-of-towner, have a gander and
find out where to watch the impressive list of films here.

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Have Jesus’ disciples been overeating?

by Jeff Young

It’s about 8:45 a.m. and I’m sitting in an audio booth, waiting to talk to Brit celebrity chef Jaime Oliver on the other end of a high-quality line. I’m his third, set-‘em-up-and-knock-‘em-down “interview” of the morning. The night before he was on Letterman. He’s 15 minutes late, and I have an uneasy feeling. Not about him being late. And not about being a cog in the hype machine for a TV show. No, I’m uneasy—downright queasy—because Oliver’s new show, Food Revolution, takes aim at “America’s unhealthiest town.” And it’s my hometown: Huntington, West Virginia.

I work in public radio. I don’t own a TV. So of course I’m more than a little bothered by the thought of my little hometown made a spectacle on reality TV. When I imagine the tawdry titillation of the weepy confessional scenes I shudder.

Will it be a Food Revolution, or just plain revolting?

In case you missed the ubiquitous promos, Oliver’s bringing his brand of foodie edutainment to America. We watch in wonder as he visits a Huntington school where kids can’t name tomatoes. We titter as he opens the fridge of a fat Huntington woman and her obese kids, piling their greasy food on their sad little kitchen table. And I think, what does TV America make of it? Do they see the slow motion tragedy of poor school nutrition and an obesity epidemic? Do they see themselves in this?  Or do they see the other, the hillbilly? They talk funny. They’re dumb. They dig coal, handle snakes, and marry their cousins. What do you expect them to eat?

Appalachians have an “otherness” that makes us one of the last groups that even the politically correct can still comfortably, cruelly laugh at. I’m sure this added entertainment value is not lost on the likes of Ryan Seacrest, Oliver’s executive producer.  Mr. Oliver tells me he was not familiar with the stereotypes and the jokes. He loves HunTington, he tells me. (He emphasizes the first “t.” We do not.)

Yes, I know Huntington has a food problem. I know that. I see it in my family members who suffer diabetes but still eat crap. Of course West Virginians eat crap. Crap is cheap, and nearly a quarter of Huntington residents live below the poverty line. I know.

But I also know that right around this time of year a lot of West Virginians take to the woods looking for bright green shoots and shiny white bulbs of the ramps pushing up through sloping, hillside soil among the trillium and squirrel corn.

I know that a little later they’ll seek out the dying elms and wood edges that give rise to morels, the tastiest of mushrooms.  Come summer they’ll tend their mortgage lifters, big as your head. I know they filled their freezers with venison last fall.  I know my grandfather will still make his cornbread and pintos every time I visit, and black walnut cake from the tree out back if I’m lucky. And I know it will all taste of the place it came from, like a piece of our past made real, made part of our bodies. It will taste like home.

If Mr. Oliver could get that on the air, then there’s a food revolution I’d like to see.

But maybe I just have a bit of a chip on my Appalachian shoulder. I watch the 30 minute preview of his show with my wife and we share a look of surprised relief. It might not be as bad as we’d feared. In fact, it might be that Mr. Oliver’s medium is just right for this message. Let’s face it, how many people in my hometown are reading Michael Pollan, or seeing docs like Food Inc.? (Well, OK, a few. Heck, Morgan Spurlock, of Supersize Me is a fellow West Virginia native.)

But highbrow foodie books and films don’t often reach the broader (hah) audience that needs the message. Food Revolution just might. It could be that Mr. Oliver’s found a higher purpose for this low and often loathsome form of entertainment.

You can watch the two-hour premiere tonight on ABC. Here’s a promo:

Jeff Young hosts PRI’s Living on Earth. He is from Huntington, West by God Virginia.

 

Related Links:

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The NYT highlights a key food-system gap: infrastucture

Blanche Lincoln’s dismal school lunch bill passes committee

by Tom Philpott

In Tom’s Kitchen, Grist’s food editor discusses some of the
quick-and-easy things he gets up to in, well, his kitchen. Forgive him for the lame iPhone
photography.

—————————

Last night, I wanted something fast and simple for dinner—that also tasted really good. I hadn’t been grocery shopping for a while, and nothing much is coming off the farm except eggs.

I did a little survey of what I had on hand. A few red potatoes. A small sweet potato. Farm eggs, and garlic from last season. An onion. A bunch of mustard greens that needed to be used.

So here’s what I did. Serves one; can be multiplied.

1) Turn oven to 450 F, stick in a large cast-iron skillet.

2) Mise en placePhotos: Tom PhilpottSlice the sweet potato lengthwise at a slight angle, then cut each slice lenghthwise into sticks. Do the same thing to the potato. Dry the sticks with a kitchen towel; if they’re wet they won’t caramelize. Add them all to a bowl; give them a heavy drizzle of olive oil and a good lashing of sea salt, black pepper, and crushed red chile pepper. Mix them with your hands until well-coated, and set aside. Cut a peeled onion in half lengthwise; set each half on its flat side and cut cross-wise into thin strips. Set aside. Clean the mustards; without drying them, chop them. Don’t worry about taking out the stems unless they’re real tough. Chop two cloves of garlic. Get out an egg, some butter, and a bottle of red-wine vinegar.

The potatoes will cook better in a single layer. Watch that hot handle! 2) Put another cast iron skillet n the stovetop, add some olive oil and turn heat to medium. When the oil starts to shimmer, and the onion and stir in. Allow onion to saute until soft, stirring occasionally. Give it a punch of salt, and some crushed chile. When onions are soft, add the greens and another pinch of salt. Stir and cover, and turn heat to low.

3) When the oven has reached temperature, pull out the cast-iron skillet. Its handle will be very hot. Whenever you’re working with a hot-handled cast-irion skillet, always drape a pot holder over the handle. Otherwise, you might forget it’s hot and grip—or someone else might do so. Add the sliced sweet/regular potato slices. They should sizzle vigorously. Give them a s stir, arranging them so that they will form a single layer. Add to onion.

4) Fuss over the mustards. Check them, stir them—you want to cook them until they’re just tender. When they are, take off the lid and add a small splash of vinegar. Let most of the liquid evaporate, stirring, and turn off heat. Taste and correct for salt and vinegar.

5) Take out the potatoes and flip them with a spatula. They should be browning nicely. Put them back in. Do some dishes. Open a beer. Listen to some music. With a few minutes, they should be starting to get done.

Almost ready ….6) When the potatoes are done—crisp and brown on at least two sides, and tender in the middle, put the skillet on the stovetop (taking care to drape the handle with a pot holder) and turn off the oven. Add the chopped garlic to the pan, stirring. (I didn’t add it before, because delicate garlic burns fast.) Now, using a spatula, clear a nice round space in the middle of the pan. Add a pat of butter to the empty space. When it melts and its foam subsides, crack the egg on of the butter. Give the sizzling egg a sprinkle of salt and a grind of pepper. After the egg set and turns white, flip it. If you like it over easy, just let it sit there a minute or two. I like mine over medium, so I turned the flame to low under the pan—by now, the pan is cooling—and let it sit for a few minutes.

A satisfying supper—without much fuss or mess.7) Serve. On one side of the plate, the greens (you probably will only eat about half, saving the rest for leftovers.) On the other side, the potatoes. On top of the potatoes, the egg. The yolk on mine was just a little runny—as i like it—and when the knife hit it, hot yolk oozed over the potatoes.

 

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A recipe for delish disaster: global warming hot apple pie

by Todd Woody

I attended an agriculture conference this week at the Four
Seasons in Palo Alto.

There were no pickup trucks in the BMW-packed parking lot,
and few farmers with dirt under their fingernails could be found milling about
the sleek hotel lobby. But the place was swarming with venture capitalists from
some of Silicon Valley’s marquee firms looking to grow profits with investments
in sustainable agriculture.

Welcome to Agriculture 2.0.

That was the name of the conference and represents a growing effort to
scale up sustainable agriculture from a hodge-podge of hippies and
back-to-the-land types into a viable big business by bringing together venture
capitalists and startups doing everything from rooftop farming to high-tech
soil mapping to identifying the best areas for growing crops.

The big idea is that venture capitalists can help disrupt
industrial agriculture much as they have the computer, entertainment and energy
industries by investing in sustainable ag and using information technology to
connect producers and consumers.

“We want to create an opportunity for a market, not a
movement,” said Roxanne Christensen of SPIN Farming, which promotes the
creation of urban microfarms.

The Palo Alto conference was organized by NewSeed Advisors, a New York firm
that acts as a matchmaker between investors and sustainable ag startups.

Janine Yorio, a young former Wall Street investment banker,
founded NewSeed and persuaded such high-profile venture firms as Kleiner
Perkins Caufield & Byers, Foundation Capital and Mohr Davidow Partners to spend Wednesday hearing pitches from a roster of sustainable ag entrepreneurs, who
ranged from twenty-something Los Angeles farmers to silver-haired engineers
developing environmentally friendly fertilizers.

So how to crack a century-old food production system that
has become both increasingly centralized and globalized?

It won’t be easy, says Melanie Cheng, founder of FarmsReach,
a San Francisco startup developing an online market to connect farmers to local
buyers like restaurants.

Regional markets are the most sustainable, according to
Cheng, allowing fresh food to be distributed to inner city “food deserts” while
reducing transportation costs and thus agriculture’s environmental impact.
People who actually live where food is grown also tend to use far less
pesticides and toxins, she noted.

But the current disconnect between local farmers and
consumers means that those growing food often remain in the dark about what the
market is demanding.

“We have no data,” says Cheng. “And that means there’s a
great opportunity for information technology solutions.”

You could almost see the ears of the venture capitalists in
the audience perk up at that remark. Think of the companies that have remade commerce—and
made many billions of dollars—over the past 15 years: Amazon, eBay, Google. They all exploited networks and data mining to upend conventional
competitors.

Many conference goers compared the potential and challenges
of sustainable ag to investing in renewable energy and other green technologies
that are trying to disrupt another entrenched industry.

“Agriculture is still largely an old boys network and deals
get done on a handshake,” says Stu Rudick, whose Marin County private equity
firm, Mindful Investors, takes stakes in sustainable, natural consumer products
startups.

As is the case with many green tech investments, the
question is whether venture capitalists have the patience for the years it may
take sustainable ag startups to turn a profit, go public or get acquired.
Bioengineering a new environmentally benign pest control organism, after all,
takes a little longer than writing code for the latest iPhone app or social networking
site.

Amol Deshpande, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, thinks Silicon
Valley is more open to taking the long view these days.

“Most venture firms have green tech investments,” he says.
“I think the nature of venture capital is changing.”

Deshpande himself could be Exhibit A in the bets venture
firms are preparing to make on sustainable ag. He joined Kleiner Perkins, one
of the Valley’s premier VC firms, in 2008 after working at industrial ag giants such
as Cargill, as well as starting his own agricultural biotechnology company.

If there was a common thread running through the conference
it was that Agriculture 2.0 is essentially about distributed food production,
much like many promising renewable energy technologies are about distributed
power generation—putting solar panels where electricity is consumed, for
instance.

Of course, the killer app would be to power urban microfarms
with renewable energy, noted Mike Yohay, founder of Cityscape Farms, a San
Francisco startup developing rooftop greenhouses that use hydroponics and
aquaponics technology to grow food without soil and fertilize it with fish waste.

For Silicon Valley, sustainable ag offers a way for the tech
industry to literally get back to its roots. Before the Santa Clara Valley was
rebranded Silicon Valley in the 1970s with the rise of the semiconductor
industry, it was long known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight for the lush
expanses of orchards that stretched between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the
Diablo Range.

Who knows, in the coming years you might start to see a few
dusty pickup trucks parked next to those Tesla Roadsters on Sand Hill Road.

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HFCS study authors defend work against attacks

by Jonathan Hiskes

This (ahem) “space heater” earned a government Energy Star rating.Photo: Government Accountability OfficeWell this is embarrassing: Federal monitors granted
the Energy Star stamp of approval to a
number of bogus appliances, including a gas-powered alarm clock and an electric
space heater with a feather duster taped to it. The Government Accountability
Office submitted the fake items in an audit to test the integrity of the well-known
efficiency program. The New York Times describes how it worked:

The fake companies submitted data indicating that the models consumed 20

percent less energy than even the most efficient ones on the market. Yet those

applications were mostly approved without a challenge or even questions, the

report said.

“Auditors

concluded that the Energy Star program was highly vulnerable to fraud.”

As Kate Sheppard notes,
Energy Star has been praised as one of the government’s most successful
efficiency programs (until now anyway). Americans are used to seeing the logo
on air conditioners, refrigerators, lamps, laptops, and other appliances.

Sheppard offers another bit of context:

Even

more worrying, the Energy Star program is also the inspiration for the

Obama administration’s proposed $6 billion Home

Star program, which will award ratings and incentives for more energy

efficient homes.

Lane Burt, an NRDC building-energy specialist and
Energy Star defender in the past, wants a stronger certification system:

I think it is clear why the manufacturer self

certification system that Energy Star generally employs needs to be

revised.  DOE and EPA have both acknowledged as much, as increased

verification and compliance testing was part of the suite or improvements they

proposed to the program last year.  In fact, the stakeholder calls on

verification and testing will be held next week and NRDC will

participate. The

agencies have also taken immediate steps in response to the report.

You can fit this quite easily into the narrative
of “government bureaucrats can’t do anything right,” if that’s your ideological
bent. In this case, a select office of government bureaucracy seems to have
failed—although fed auditors did discover the problem. To me, the more interesting issue is how to improve what the
government’s already doing. Read Lane Burt for more of that.

If you’re buying an appliance or laptop this
weekend, Energy Star is probably still
a more trustworthy guide than anything else out there.

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by Jonathan Hiskes

Update below

The Center for American Progress offers
a reminder that we already have a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions up
and running in the U.S.— it’s called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, it operates in 10 northeastern states, and it works fairly well, according to CAP’s new
review.

Bradford Plumer rounded
up the details in the CAP post. Now I’m copping from his post—what fun, this internet.

Four useful takeaways
here, via Plumer:

The program started modestly—maybe too modestly: “The price of
carbon is extremely low—a meager $2 per ton of emissions—which isn’t really
high enough to persuade utilities to change their behavior.”
Polluters pay the low price—they don’t get giveaways: “All of those
carbon permits are auctioned off by state governments, which has allowed states
to raise about $88 million* for efficiency and renewable-power programs. So as a
funding stream, it’s not too shabby.”
It’s not creating any Enrons: “It hasn’t been subject to the sorts
of market manipulations or price volatility that people worry about with
cap-and-trade. A recent
audit found that the permit auctions have all gone off smoothly—no
outsiders are leaping in and creating a carbon bubble.”
More will be revealed!: “Pretty soon, the cap will start
tightening, prices will go up, and then we’ll presumably get a better look at
how well the program forces power plants to reduce their emissions.”

Also, the cap-and-trade program is not killing the
economy or freedom or kittens. This needs harping on. As urban designer Steve
Price will tell you, the best way to convince people to embrace something
new is to show them what it’s like. A
theoretical phantom cap-and-trade system, in the hands of the right
fear-mongers, can spook a lot of people. A real-life, moderately successful
program just isn’t very scary. The real life version is less useful for
drumming up Tea Party rallies. It’s more useful for taking modest early steps
toward reigning in carbon pollution.

Related note: According
to today’s New York Times, cap-and-trade is dead. John Broder
writes the latest pre-mortem about why Congress will never pass an economy-wide
cap-and-trade program.

If you’re going to read
it, keep in mind all the “healthcare reform is dead” stories and predictions that surfaced over the past year—Huffington
Post has a
roundup.

Or just skip it and
listen to what Rep. Tom Periello has
to say instead: “I’m sick of starting with what can we get through the
Senate; let’s start with what solves the damn problem. Until the Senate gets
its head out of its rear-end and starts to see the crisis we’re in, our country
is literally at risk. Our economy is at risk, because these jobs are being
created overseas.”

* A reader notes that $88 million was from only the most recent auction. Altogether, RGGI auctions have raised some $582 million for efficiency and renewable programs.

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by Tom Philpott

What will 6 cents change in this picture?“‘No machines until you get your lunch!’ an aide yells, trying to keep students from the bank of vending machines at the back of the cafeteria ringing with the siren call of Pop-Tarts and Cool Ranch Doritos.
—From “Schools’ Toughest Test: Cooking,” by Kim Severson, The New York Times, Sept. 29, 2009

When I wrote about Senate ag committee chair Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s school lunch billl last week, I left out a key fact: the bill would force the USDA to regulate the stuff schools sell in vending machines.

That’s important. Schools peddle all manner of industrial crap in cafeterias: from high-fructose corn syrup-laden sodas to trashy chips and pastries.

But why do schools do that? Because they want to get kids hooked on junk food and make them overweight and sick? No. They do it because it’s really, really hard to put lunch on the table for kids on the miserly outlay they get from the federal government; and proceeds from the machines act as a subsidy to the lunch budget.

Right now, cafeterias get $2.68 per student for every free lunch they serve. Two-thirds of that goes to labor and overhead, leaving about 90 cents to spend per student on ingredients. The vending machines stand as an indictment to a Dickensian program.

And under Lincoln’s bill, which won bi-partisan approval in Lincoln’s committee this week,  Dickensianism remains in place, despite the new rules on vending machines. As I reported before, Lincoln’s bill would add $450 billion over 10 years, or $450 million per year, to school lunch budgets. That’s less than half of President Obama’s budget request—which itself wan’t nearly enough. The USA Today has details on how Lincoln’s bill would work:

Those schools that implement the new [nutrition and safety] rules would get an additional 6 cents per meal added to their federal reimbursement rate. Current reimbursement rates, which give schools $2.68 for each lunch they serve, have not changed since 1973, except for inflation adjustment, and schools have long complained that they are insufficient.

Ouch. Six extra cents. Will that even keep up with inflation over ten years? As a carrot to inspire schools to follow new nutrition rules, that amount won’t even procure an extra carrot per kid. It should also be noted that recent food-safety scandals related to food, including the infamous pink-slime episode, can be directly related to miserly lunch budgets.

Thus is the bitter taste of “change,” I suppose, in an age of fiscal austerity. But pinching pennies isn’t always the fiscally responsible thing. Stiffing kids on school lunches today will likely generate massive costs down the road. The USA Today piece has a great map showing that in great swaths of the country, upwards of 77 percent of public-school kids rely on reduced-price or free lunches. This bill fails those kids. Yes, we can do better.

 

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by David Roberts

Van JonesIn part one of our interview, Van Jones discussed the evolution of his values, the controversy that’s surrounded him over the past year, and his ongoing commitment to “love-based politics.”

Here, in part two, we turn to the road forward: the policies and projects he is working on for the next year. Along with his usual vigorous speaking itinerary, Jones will be teaching a class at Princeton and working at the Center for American Progress, developing policy tools for legislators keen on helping along a green economy.

———

Q. What’s the Princeton class going to be about?

A. Environmental policy and politics.

Q. Have you taught or lectured before?

A. Not in that kind of setting, but I come from a family of educators. My granddad was a college president at Lane College in Jackson, Tenn. Both my parents were school teachers. I’m not shy about ideas. I wrote a best-selling book on green jobs and traveled the country lecturing on the green economy for years before I moved to D.C.

Q. What sorts of ideas are you going to work on at the Center for American Progress?

A. Three things I’m passionate about. One is what’s now being called Home Star, or Cash for Caulkers. When I was at the White House, I ran an interagency process called Recovery Through Retrofits that developed and teed up a lot of these ideas. By building up a new sector of our economy, home energy performance, we can create a whole bunch of jobs and save a bunch of money. We turn wasted energy into wanted jobs. That’s now going to be a part of the jobs bill, but I think we should continue to push to make sure it passes in the most robust form possible. We have a hundred million American homes that could be upgraded in terms of energy performance. If it’s financed properly, all that work can pay for itself over time, through energy cost savings.

No. 2, for our industrial heartland, we need a strong renewable energy standard [RES], say 25 percent of all American energy to be produced by renewables by 2025. That gives the wind industry in particular certainty of demand, so they will invest in building factories here and putting manufacturing workers to work here. If you don’t do that, all the investments are going to happen in Asia and the only green jobs Americans will have will be installing Chinese technology. Wind turbines will be built overseas, and we’ll bring them here and stick them in the ground. Solar panels will be made overseas and we’ll bring them here and bolt them to a roof. You’re not going to get a bunch of jobs out of that. You get jobs out of manufacturing the stuff here and putting it up here, and also shipping it out around the world. That’s not going to happen with even a good cap-and-trade bill by itself. When you get that kind of RES, you turn the rust belt into a green belt.

Lastly, we need some kind of Green Enterprise Zone legislation that will reward green and clean energy companies for locating and hiring in tough neighborhoods and communities. If you’re a green entrepreneur and you want to go to Appalachia, or you want to go to a Native American reservation, you should be able to get some tax credits or other support for making that choice. Right now you can scrape together a couple different packages and programs, but there’s nothing designed for the particular challenges of the clean energy sector.

Q. Do you still consider yourself a part of the grassroots movement?

A. Yes, absolutely. Just last week I was working with grassroots leaders in Flagstaff, Arizona and Detroit, Michigan, formulating strategies for advancing green jobs on the ground. I am especially proud to still be involved as a senior advisor to Green For All, which I helped to found in 2008. The new CEO there, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, is simply amazing and has taken that organization to new heights. They are now advancing projects in dozens of cities, linking with celebs, and moving Congress. The real fight for green jobs is happening on the ground, every day, in cities and towns across America. I am happy to be a part of that forward momentum.

In terms of political ideology I’m probably more moderate than most people think, but I am still a life-long opponent of corporate abuses, especially in the incarceration industry and by the big polluters. I am still seeking a deep transformation of our economy so that we create more jobs and stop poisoning and baking our planet. I am still fighting to eliminate extreme poverty.

Those are big goals. I just think we have to be wise enough to know that getting there will require a mix of government intervention and market forces. Plus a whole lot of community-level cooperation. Plus a ton of individual responsibility. Plus a lot of prayer. The government can’t just wave a magic wand and fix all this stuff. Government has to get the public rules, investments, and incentives right, but then the private sector will step in to become the big engine driving change.

I know for sure that no single class, race, or political party can effect this level of change all by itself. If we are going to revive the economy and rescue the earth, we have to work together across the old lines of class and color and ideology. So that’s where I stand. That’s what I’m about.

Q. You and others in the Bay Area in the early ‘00s were insistent that green jobs be tied to equity, specifically targeted to disadvantaged communities. That seems to have faded a bit from the broader conversation. Why do you think that is?

A. When we first started the conversation, we had a functioning economy and unemployment was relatively low. If you were going to grow the economy in a green direction, you absolutely needed to pull new people into the workforce. You saw that happen in California in 2006, 2007, when the solar industry started taking off. Homeowners were facing three- to six-month delays getting their solar panels put up. There just weren’t enough trained workers. So the evaluation was, we’ve got a lot of work that needs to be done and we have a lot of people who need work, mainly people who have been locked out of the workforce for awhile. There was an objective basis for bringing chronically poor, unemployed folks into the green economy—we were already experiencing a labor shortage in green sectors and fields.

Now you don’t just have the chronically poor, you have the newly poor. You don’t just need to grow the green economy, you need to grow the whole economy. Those factors tend to pull the conversation toward a general prescription for a much broader section of workers. That said, it’s still just as important to focus on those places that most need jobs and make sure that both public policy and private enterprise have impact there. You still have to deal with places like Appalachia, the Native American reservations, the industrial heartland, the agricultural heartland. It’s just that more people fall into the bucket of needing employment.

Q. If you take a global equity perspective, you have to think that dirt poor Chinese peasants need jobs more than almost any American. Yet there’s been an uptick in talk about a competition or “race” with China. What do you make of that?

A. I’m concerned about two things now: one is making sure Americans have a fair share of the global set of green jobs; the other is making sure all Americans have a fair shot at America’s fair share. You can fight for a fair share of the global set of green jobs without being anti-Chinese. You can aspire for your own country to lead, to rely on our own natural advantages, without being protectionist.

I am thrilled that India and China are getting traction economically. They have hundreds of millions of desperately poor people. I want to see them come out of poverty into a green and sustainable economy. And I want the same thing for America. I don’t think one has to come at the expense of the other.

There are good reasons for the United States to be a world leader on clean energy. We have a Saudi Arabia of solar power, not just in the Sun Belt but on rooftops across America. We’ve got a Saudi Arabia of wind power in the plain states, near the Great Lakes, and off our coasts. We’ve got the innovation and investment community, not just in Silicon Valley but also in New England and elsewhere. We’ve got some of the best workers in the world sitting idle in our industrial heartland. Those are all good reasons for us to lead. The reason we’re not leading is we’ve got dumb policies, while our friends in Asia are putting in place smart policies. A friendly competition between the United States and China, where both put in place the best policies and rush ahead to come up with the best technologies and the best jobs, could be good for the world.

It’s a leadership challenge to make sure we don’t fishtail over into anti-Chinese demagoguery or jingoism. We have to avoid that. The ideal is a cross between a global partnership and a friendly rivalry.

But we can’t be partners with China, can’t be partners with Asia, in repowering the world on a green energy basis if we aren’t aggressively moving in that direction ourselves. This is one reason I’m confident and somewhat patient. Nobody believes we’re going to be able to tax-cut our way into an economy that works any more. A pretty broad cross section of economists, left and right, are saying we need to stop borrowing and start building again. We’ve got to start selling things to people around the world and not just importing and racking up debt.

Q. You’ve had that vision of consensus for a while, and it overlaps with Obama’s appeal in 2008. But the experience of the last year seems to point in the other direction. One party is spinning farther and farther out. Is that going to end?

A. I think people are overreacting to the past 12 months. You have red states and blue states with cities and state governments that are already driving in a clean energy direction, creating a bottom-up constituency of elected representatives, business leaders, and labor leaders. They’re already in motion. It will be increasingly safe political ground for the people in both parties. You have leadership in the Republican party, Lindsey Graham, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and others pointing in the direction of smart climate and energy policy—even in the middle of this horrible food fight and gridlock. When the dam finally breaks and this stuff starts happening, it will be good for red states, blue states, and both parties.

The movement for hope and change is going to go through its own metamorphosis and reemergence—first from opposition to proposition, now from inspiration to implementation. That’s a learning curve for elected officials; it’s also a learning curve for a movement. We should be tough on our problems but easy on each other, because this is not easy to do.

Take a step back and ask, where was the country a year and a half ago and where is it now? There’s been so much progress it’s almost unrecognizable. If you zero in on any particular bill or any particular subcommittee or any particular tactic, you can get depressed. But on any given day, the administration’s getting tons of good stuff done. The fact that we have a functioning economy, even though recovery isn’t as strong as we’d like it, is itself a huge victory. The fact that the EPA is actually living up to its name again. The Department of Labor is concerned about working people. HUD went from a joke to becoming one of the best-led agencies in the federal government.

What we’ve got to do is not despair. We went from despair to hope in
2008, expecting to go from hope to change in 2009. But change didn’t
come instantly and so some people were wanting to go from change all
the way back to despair again, in 12 months. I think that’s silly.

Q. In the past, you and I have talked about why politics seems so broken and stalled. Now that health-care reform has passed, do you see the political landscape differently?

A. In hindsight, the fact that it took a year to get this done is not going to seem so bad. I think it should restore our confidence that our movement can achieve important milestones. Obviously we need to work harder and more consistently

Part of what we’ve got to do is recognize that the president ran on the slogan, “Yes, we can,” not “Yes, I can.” The “we” kind of fell out and the grassroots started acting like it was all about him, all about one person, like “Yes, he can.” Before the immigration march, the last time I saw people in the streets was for the inauguration a year ago. People couldn’t have come out with “Yes, we can” and “We are one” banners when the opposition kicked up at a street level last fall? Finally, now you see the Coffee Party movement starting up. People are rolling up their sleeves again. I think the hoperoots have returned. Obama is back, but the hoperoots are back as well.

Q. It has been quite a ride.

A. Who you telling? I know this. If anybody in American politics might qualify for the despair and bitterness program, I might. I had as rough a 12 months as anybody and I’m not throwing my hands up. I’m as committed to the politics of hope as ever. I’m as confident as ever that we can get to these solutions. We’re just getting started.

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by Tom Laskawy

Photo: BoekeMarion Nestle, along with other nutritionists have joined the Corn Refiners Association in criticizing the recent Princeton study on High Fructose Corn Syrup. Indeed the very title of Nestle’s post on the subject—“HFCS makes rats fat?”—seems to question the well-established practice of using rats to test hypotheses regarding human nutrition.

While I personally found her objections unpersuasive, she raised several issues with the researchers work that have been echoed far and wide. She questioned the methodology of the study as well as whether there was indeed a direct comparison made between HFCS and sucrose. She also claimed the following:

[A]s summarized in Table 1 in the paper, the researchers did only two experiments that actually compared the effects of HFCS to sucrose on weight gain, and these gave inconsistent results.  Their other experiments compared HFCS to chow alone.

…Although the authors say calorie intake was the same, they do not report calories consumed nor do they discuss how they determined that calorie intake was the same.  This is an important oversight because measuring the caloric intake of lab rats is notoriously difficult to do (they are messy).

In response, Jennifer LaRue Huget of the Washington Post, in an otherwise unsympathetic blog post, contacted the study’s lead author, Princeton’s Dr. Bart Hoebel, to give him a chance to respond to Marion Nestle’s (and others’) criticisms.

In sum, he basically declared Nestle incorrect. According to Hoebel, the researchers did compare rats which consumed HFCS with those which consumed sucrose directly and they did carefully record and present in the paper precise caloric intake for each rat, as well as the source. He also observed that they put anti-drip guards on the liquid dispensers and picked up any spilled chow to eliminate the risk of overestimating caloric consumption. As Hoebel put it a bit puckishly: “This is all explained in the article for anyone who wants to study it carefully.”

It appears that Nestle didn’t review the study rigorously. It’s certainly true that she has long been skeptical of finger-pointing studies on particular ingredients. She feels strongly that all processed sweeteners are bad (which they are) but her reaction to this study 1) suggests that in this case her bias has gotten the better of her objective review of new research and 2) inadvertantly aids the very corporate behemoths that she has spent much of her career combating. The food industry is already touting Nestle’s opposition to the study as an indication of its lack of merit.

Tom Philpott summed up the issue well in his recent post concerning the idiocy of our obsession with corn:

All processed sweeteners add empty calories to food; but calorie for calorie, HFCS appears to be even worse than white sugar. Although the two sweeteners have roughly the same fructose/glucose ratio, we mammals seem to metabolize the HFCS differently than we do cane sugar.

Still, I have reached out to the study author myself to see if he can clarify some of the other objections that have arisen. There is clearly hostility in surprising quarters to evidence that HFCS may accelerate weight gain and cause increased risk of metabolic disorders in humans. And yet it’s a crucial piece of the obesity epidemic puzzle. I don’t understand why Nestle and others who care about addressing obesity don’t see it that way.

The full exchange between the WaPo’s LaRue Huget and Dr. Hoebel is below:

JLH: Can you explain, for the nonscientific folks out there, how reliably rat-study results translate to humans?

BH: The rat is much like the human in regard to feeding behavior and basic metabolism. Rats evolved eating a diet something like ours; in some cases our own garbage. Thus the rat is a reasonable “animal model” of human feeding behavior in many cases. There are some cases in which rats taste things differently and metabolize food differently than people. Rat studies need to be reproduced in people whenever possible, after the critical variables have been established using laboratory animals…. To see a review of all fructose studies in animals and people, I recommend [George Bray’s article in the February 2010 issue of Current Opinion in Lipidology, “Soft drink consumption and obesity: it is all about fructose.”] However, note that many human studies compare pure fructose with other sugars, which is not what we did. We offered rats high-fructose corn syrup or sucrose, which are the common ingredients in soft drinks. The results do not apply directly to humans, but strongly suggest the need for more experiments along these lines.

JLH: Marion Nestle criticized the study for not being clear about the rats’ calorie consumption. Can you speak to that?

BH: She says: Although the authors say calorie intake was the same, they do not report calories consumed.
We say: Caloric intake was reported in the Results section for Experiment 1.
She says: nor do they discuss how they determined that calorie intake was the same.
We say: In the Methods section we explain that we measured HFCS, sucrose and chow intake daily. We computed the calories consumed, which is also described in the Methods section.
She says: This is an important oversight because measuring the caloric intake of lab rats is notoriously difficult to do (they are messy).
We say: We do not see any oversight. The drinking tubes had an anti-drip device built in and we collected spillage for the food pellets for accuracy. We reported the caloric intake and the standard error, which shows the variability in intake for a given group. This is reported in the Results section.

JLH: Also, many critics felt the study was designed poorly, never pitting HFCS directly against sucrose and testing for what seemed to be almost arbitrary time periods. Again, anything you could offer to help us better understand those issues would be helpful.

BH: Not true. In male HFCS was compared directly to sucrose in Exp 1. In Exp. 2, we compared HFCS to sucrose in females, and we describe in the paper our reasons for using 12-h and ad libitum access to sucrose vs. HFCS. We were interested in comparing the effects of limited vs. continuous access.

JLH: Finally, something about the way the study was written sounds as though researchers set out to link HFCS to obesity, not to determine whether such a link exists. It feels as though the dots aren’t all connected very clearly. Can you address that, please?

BH: The study was designed to explore the comparison of HFCS with sucrose and at the same time to compare 24 h access with 12 hr access, plus males with females. Keep in mind that this is research, and one does not know which will be the key results when starting out. We discovered that male rats drinking HFCS were heavier than the matched sucrose controls in Exp 1 and heavier than the other groups in Exp 2. Regarding females, again the HFCS rats were the heaviest; although the sucrose control group had sugar available for less time per day, we had reason to think this was not a critical variable based on our prior publications in which 12 and 24 hr access to sucrose leads to the same body weights. Moreover the females, like the males, showed elevated triglycerides and increased fat deposits. This is all explained in the article for anyone who wants to study it carefully.

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Watching the green screens at the Environmental Film Festival in D.C.

by Tom Laskawy

In “Chewing the Scenery,” we round up interesting food-related videos from around the Web.

——————-

The White House has released a new video documenting the drama of Snowmaggedon … and the White House garden:

Despite two feet of snow, the White House garden managed to produce an impressive amount of lettuce, spinach, turnips, arugula, and carrots during January and February. Leeks, garlic, and even peas are already well along and will be harvested later in the spring. It’s hard to imagine a better advertisement for the USDA’s new hoop house-based winter growing programs. If the White House staff can produce this amount of food as a “hobby,” imagine what full-time professional farmers could manage with dedicated winter growing efforts.

The video also provides a spectacular time lapse sequence showing the falling and melting of this winter’s heavy snow on the garden itself.

White House food inititative coordinator and garden ambassador Sam Kass put it best when he said, “You’re not suposed to grow any food [during winter] and this is a lot of food. Look at all this! We’re doing pretty well.”

You said a mouthful, Mr. Kass.

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by Agence France-Presse

A darkened “Birds Nest” Olympic stadium in Beijing during the 2009 Earth Hour.Photo courtesy Earth Hour Global via FlickrSYDNEY—World-famous landmarks including the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and Beijing’s Forbidden City will go dark Saturday as millions turn out the lights for “Earth Hour,” a rolling grassroots movement aimed at fighting climate change.

Now in its fourth year, the event looks set to be the biggest yet with thousands of cities and towns in 125 countries—37 more than last year—pledging to take part.

Despite December’s fractious Copenhagen summit and recent controversy over climate science, the public still wants meaningful action to avert catastrophic global warming, according to Earth Hour founder Andy Ridley. “There appears to be some fatigue to the politics around it … But people are far more motivated this year than they were last year,” he told AFP in Sydney.

Now run by the WWF, Earth Hour began in Sydney in 2007 when 2.2 million people switched off the lights in their homes and businesses for 60 minutes to make a point about electricity consumption and carbon pollution.

The campaign went global the following year, and this Saturday, more than 1,200 of the world’s best-known sites will kill their lights at 8:30 p.m. local time in what organizers describe as a “24-hour wave of hope and action.”

A raft of multinational companies including Google, Coca-Cola, Hilton, McDonalds, Canon, HSBC, and IKEA have endorsed Earth Hour 2010 and pledged to darken their offices worldwide in support.

Sydney’s iconic Harbor Bridge and Opera House will help kick off the energy-saving marathon, with Egypt’s Pyramids and Sphinx, the Trevi Fountain and Tower of Pisa in Italy, and all major landmarks in Paris to take part, led by a five-minute blackout of the Eiffel Tower.

In London, Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the London Eye ferris wheel were among the tourist hotspots set to plunge into darkness, along with Manchester United’s Old Trafford football ground.

Some 30 U.S. states and municipalities were to mark Earth Hour with darkness falling on sites including Mount Rushmore, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Seattle’s Space Needle.

The lights illuminating the massive statue of Christ the Redeemer that overlooks Rio de Janeiro will be switched off, while in Mexico key buildings in the capital will also take part.

In Dubai, the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa tower, will dim its lights, as will the high-priced office towers and five-star hotels strung along Hong Kong’s famed harbor-front.

The Forbidden City in rapidly developing China, which was blamed by many activists for Copenhagen’s failure, will go dark, along with the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium.

Elsewhere in Asia, where 3.3 million people have registered to take part, the world’s biggest observation wheel, the Singapore Flyer, will extinguish its main lights, while official buildings will be blacked out in Seoul and Jakarta.

Scores of cities in India were expected to take part, including the massive urban centres of Delhi and Mumbai, while the country’s thriving Bollywood film studios were to shut down for the hour.

Japan’s heritage-listed Hiroshima Peace Memorial, one of few buildings to survive America’s 1945 atomic bomb attack, will take part, while major companies including Sony, Sharp, and Asahi were to switch off across Tokyo.

Residents of Norway’s Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost town, are set to brave an influx of curious polar bears normally deterred by lights after voting—for the first time—that participating was worth the risk.

But in Bangkok, city authorities said they were under military orders to halt their Earth Hour campaign for security reasons, as tens of thousands of anti-government protesters planned another major rally on Saturday.

“Earth Hour is meant to cross geographic, economic, country boundaries,” said Ridley, acknowledging that it was mostly a symbolic act. “It’s one hour, one day, one year. We’re not saving the planet by turning the lights off for one hour.”

But, he added, “What you are doing is adding your voice to a global call for action.”

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by David Roberts

 

Sen. Tom UdallPhoto: Center for American Progress Action FundLike his cousin Mark, Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) spent 10 years in the House of Representatives before being elected to the Senate in 2008. Like his legendary father Stewart (the former interior secretary who passed away last week), he has always had a keen interest in the environment. His first speech and bill in the Senate proposed a tough renewable electricity standard, and he’s pushing hard for comprehensive climate legislation.

I caught up with Udall this week to talk about the fate of climate and energy legislation, his efforts to strengthen the Senate’s renewable standard, and the growing momentum behind reforming the filibuster.

———

Q. You sent Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [D-Nev.] a letter last Friday, cosigned by 21 of your fellow Democrats, asking him to bring a comprehensive climate and energy bill to the floor this year. Was that pushback against the effort by Sens. Jeff Bingaman [D-N.M.], Byron Dorgan [D-N.D.], and others to back an “energy-only” bill?

A. Discussion in our caucus has focused around two alternatives: one would be an energy-only bill and one would be energy bill with a climate change component. Sen. Reid’s making this decision. He needs to decide whether he has the votes to bring a particular proposal up and move it along. So this was a helpful way for him to know who was weighing in on the side of the combined energy and climate approach.

Q. What’s your sense of the balance of opinion in the Democratic caucus right now?

A. I think there’s even more support for a comprehensive approach than what’s in the letter. When you do these things, sometimes you can’t quite capture the language that you need in the letter to get a broader group [of signatories]. I sense there’s very strong support in the caucus for a stronger approach.

We must put a price on carbon. That’s what’s going to drive the clean energy economy. We’re going to have to do it at some point, in some form, and I believe doing it sooner rather than later is the way to go. It will give the clearest possible signal to industry, consumers, and everyone else as to the direction we want to move. I would just remind people that China is already moving aggressively on a clean-energy economy in the manufacturing area.

Q. Obviously the question for Sen. Reid is whether he can pull together 60 votes for a bill that includes a carbon pricing system. After health-care reform passed, Sen. McCain said, flatly, “There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year.”  Do you think it’s going to be possible to get the four or five Republican votes necessary?

A. The [Kerry-Graham-Lieberman] process is trying to build that support. At this particular point, we may be up to four or five. I think we can do some things to broaden out—my goal would be to get 10 Republicans on the bill.

Q. That would be quite something. Are there details about the KGL bill that you’d like to share?

A. We’re not ready to put it in detailed form right now. We first need to develop the narrative, then get down to the specific concepts, and then get into the details. I’m not suggesting this should be a year-long process—we need to do all of this in the next couple of weeks, and then give Sen. Reid a sense of where we are. He’ll work with Sen. [Dick] Durbin [D-Ill.] to find out how much support this has.

Q. Are financial regulation and immigration both ahead in line?

A. Sen. Reid has not given us a priority at this point. I hope we can get things together to do a comprehensive energy package right after health care. The reason for that is jobs. It’s what the American people want us to focus on. The clean-energy economy is where we need to be, and many states are leading now. If we had a national policy, it would really move us in the right direction.

Q. The first bill you introduced as a U.S. senator was a renewable electricity standard with a 25 percent by 2025 target. The RES that passed the Senate Energy Committee as part of the American Clean Energy Leadership Act is much more modest, 15 percent through 2030, with several loopholes. Are you working to try to bulk up support for a stronger RES?

A. Yes, I am. Our bill is the strongest one in the Senate and focuses strictly on renewable energy: wind, solar, biomass, geothermal. Right now we have 10 cosponsors and we’re continuing to push for more.

Q. What’s your sense of why the Energy Committee’s RES is so modest?

A. You have to look at the makeup of the Senate Energy Committee—it’s a very moderate committee. As we move to the floor, I think we’re going to see growing support for making the RES stronger, moving it closer to 25 percent by 2025.

If we do have an energy-only bill—and I’m not saying that’s where I want to be—I still think there’s going to be a push to strengthen the RES. Sen. Bingaman is the father of the RES in the Senate and a champion on this issue. It’s not as strong as either I or Sen. Bingaman would like, but it’s a significant achievement to move it through committee with the support of Sen. [Sam] Brownback [R-Kan.]. Without Sen. Brownback’s vote, it wouldn’t have passed the committee. So Sen. Bingaman was focusing on how to get a bill out of committee, and he did that narrowly.

Q. One thing that vexes the politics of the RES is that some states, particularly in the Southeast, don’t think they have access to enough renewables to hit the targets. They think they’ll end up subsidizing the Midwest states with wind and the Western states with sun. How do you bring them around on this?

A. We faced this when we got the bill through the House of Representatives. We had some support in the South when they understood that they have significant biomass resources in their forests. What we’re really doing with an RES is creating a national market. In some areas the market may be a little more advanced in solar, or a little more advanced in wind. But by creating a national market, we’re going to move all areas of renewable energy along. What I would tell my friends in the South is: all the third-party studies have shown that you can achieve the goals in the bill, and this is something that can be accomplished without too much pain.

Q. As you know, there’s a push in the Senate to broaden the RES so that it includes nuclear and coal with carbon sequestration. Is that something you plan to fight? Or do you think it’s a reasonable compromise to gather some votes?

A. I would prefer, at this point, to leave the RES clean, the way it’s passed the House and the Senate before, and try to work on a separate nuclear title. Nuclear’s in a different category. It’s a mature industry; it’s had subsidies in the past. Last time I looked, it was in the range of $36 billion in subsidies, and there may be many more on top of that. So, if we’re trying to get an additional generation of nuclear plants, the way to do that is to address the issues within the industry rather than trying to do it through the RES.

Q. You were on the peak oil caucus in the House.

A. I started it. I saw Roscoe Bartlett [R-Md.] one evening on the floor talking about peak oil and I went up to him and said, “I’m interested in this too. This is something that people need to understand here in Congress. If you and I teamed up, we’d have a Democrat and a Republican. Why don’t we start a peak oil caucus?” That’s what we did. I worked hard on educating my colleagues after we got it started and I’m going to continue to do that here in the Senate.

Q. Given your awareness and understanding of that issue, how do you feel about the push to expand offshore and domestic drilling as part of the energy bill?

A. One of the things that we have been doing, which I think is significant, is increasing our recovery of our oil and natural gas resources. We’ve been good at technological developments on that front. We need to continue to do that. I think there are going to be areas where we can work with the states and develop additional offshore resources.

I don’t think the Interior Department is prepared at this point to open everything [to oil drilling]. We should do it in a methodical way, pick the areas that are ripe, and get them done. We should be a good steward of these resources and make sure that they’re developed properly.

Q. Harry Reid recently signaled some openness toward filibuster reform, which was a fringe idea not very long ago.

A. We’re gaining momentum on this one.

Q. How much momentum? What are the chances that, per your reform idea, Congress will vote at the beginning of the 2011 session to establish new rules for the Senate?

A. I wouldn’t predict. I will tell you that momentum is growing every day. If the Republicans continue their tactics, momentum will increase. That’s part of the reason Sen. Reid announced to them that he was going to look at filibuster reform and other rule reforms in January.

It’s not just the rules; it’s how you use the rules. And it’s clear that the Republicans have abused the rules. In the last Congress there were 112 filibusters, more than in the 1950s and ‘60s [combined]. That shows how far it’s gone over the line.

Q. Will the rules around holds be part of reform?  [Editor’s note: Currently, individual senators can place anonymous holds on legislation or nominations, effectively grinding the Senate to a halt. See: Sen. Jim Bunning.]

A. That should be part of it. Holds aren’t even in the standing rules of the Senate, except in the sense that it’s the threat of a filibuster. We have to make them transparent. I’m working with a group of senators on it, including Ron Wyden [D-Ore.].

Read more interviews with members of Congress:

Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.)
Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.)
Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.)
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

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by Umbra Fisk

Whatever
you do when you meet Moby (eventually, we all will), don’t tell him you enjoy
his book.

“That’s
a strange word to use,” he said when I did the very thing I’m telling you not
to do.

My
face briefly turned the same shade as my hair as I attempted to explain how
exactly it is I enjoyed reading about
the grisly perils of factory farming in the newly released collection of
essays, Gristle,
which the musician and long-time vegan edited along with Miyun Park, the
executive director for Global
Animal Partnership.

Once
I regained my composure, Moby and I chatted about animal welfare, veganism, and
why a meal at McDonald’s should cost $75. Seattleites can listen to him further elaborate tonight at Town Hall.

Q. Did you draw the cow on the front of the book?

A. No, I didn’t. I wish I did. My drawing ability is mostly limited to little bald-headed
aliens looking to one side. I wanted the cow to look more worried, though. I
think originally it didn’t have an eye. So I told the graphic designer I wanted
it to have an eye, and I wanted it to look worried.

Q. What do you feel like this book contributes to the
factory farmed meat discussion that others in the genre do not?

A. It’s for people who might be interested in the consequences of agribusiness and
factory farming. And also, kind of like a companion to some of these other
books and movies. I really like the Michael Pollan book and Jonathan Safran
Foer’s book. And I have a lot of admiration and respect for the authors, but
their books are a bit more subjective and personal. And so I think we wanted to
make this as sort of a bit more factual, less opinionated, less emotional, and
just a factual companion to books like that.

Q. Why do you think you were a good fit for editing the compilation?

A. I think Miyun and I working together made a lot of sense because we both have
been in the world of animal welfare for a long time. It’s her day job, and I’m
more of a dilettante. I guess I was a good fit in that, with information like
this, which is not the happiest, funnest information in the world, the choice
was to make a very dry, factual book that wouldn’t get much attention, but if
you attach a well-intentioned, quasi public figure to it and give it a cute cow
on the cover and a nice yellow background, it increases the chances that more
and more people might actually look at it. If it just had a brown cover with
some bad printing, I think there would be 10 people on the planet who would
look at it—so just a sort of acknowledgment of the ways in which media are
disseminated.

Q. Factory farming affects a lot of areas like our health, animal welfare, and climate
change, but where do you think it has the biggest impact?

A. It’s hard to say because it depends upon who is being impacted and also depends
on the long-term impact. I think the biggest and most impactful aspect of
agribusiness is really going to be on climate change. The U.N. released a
report basically stating that 25 percent of all climate change is a result of
animal production, and they also released a statement saying probably the
easiest way to arrest climate change would be to change the practices of
agribusiness, of factory farming. But the effects of climate change are slow;
they’ll be drastic, but they are slow. So in the short term it seems like the
biggest impact, apart from the impact on the welfare of animals that are being
tortured and slaughtered, the biggest impact is on the communities where the factory
farms actually are. It’s estimated that when a factory farm is introduced to a
community, the price of residential real estate goes down 80 percent. I mean,
it’s impacting consumers and it’s impacting the animals and impacting the
environment, but it really is decimating the communities where the factory
farms actually exist.

Q. What do you think the solution is for getting people to cut back on animal
consumption? Is it education?

A. For me, there’s one simple solution, which the likelihood of it happening is
pretty slim, but still, my pie in the sky dream is to end subsidies for
agribusiness and end subsidies for animal production and basically let the free
market decide the cost of a pound of beef and a pound of chicken. If there were
no subsidies for beef, a pound of beef would cost around $25, and if every
aspect of animal production wasn’t subsidized, a family of four going to
McDonald’s for a quick meal would spend $75. So really it’s like the silver
bullet that fixes the problem. And I would almost think it would make for
interesting bedfellows, where you might even get some libertarian Tea Party
people to talk about ending giving subsidies to animal production. But then
again, not to be too inflammatory, but thus far every single person in the Tea
Party is a raving lunatic, so I don’t expect them to join our cause any time
soon.

Q. What sort of group activism would you suggest people get involved with that
would really have an impact on this?

A. Not to be overly simplistic, but the first thing that springs to mind is people
talking to each other—just communicating. Because I spent a long period of
time being a really annoying, militant, didactic vegan. And over time I
realized my militancy and didacticism was just irritating people, so now I try
to communicate a lot more honestly and respectfully and without judgment. So my
first thought is just talking to people. I mean a lot of it is more individual
action in terms of how people shop, because every time you spend money, you’re
voting for the practices of whoever’s produced what you’re paying for. Also, lobbying
local legislators. On a group level, nice things like invite people over for
dinner and surprise them with the fact that vegetarian, vegan food isn’t as
strange as they would think and is actually really tasty. And one of the
greatest things, and this plays perfectly into this, is the idea of building
community gardens. Just as agribusiness decimates everything with which it
comes into contact, community gardens benefit everything with which they come
into contact. They raise property values, they benefit the people working on
them, and they can actually produce healthy, locally grown food.

Q. Have you ever cheated on your vegan diet?

A. See, I also don’t want to be a judgmental like holier-than-thou vegan. Like
if someone is a meat eater but they maybe reduce their meat consumption for
environmental reasons, more power to them. And far be it for me to judge. But
in the last 22 years, I cheated twice. I had, and this is going to sound so
crazy, I had yogurt in 1992, and I have to say it was really good. And about
five years ago, I was talking to a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner,
and he said I should start eating eggs. So I went to the store and I bought
organic, free range, locally grown eggs and I tried to eat an egg, but I just
didn’t like it.

Q. Were you emotionally scarred afterward?

A. No, I was just reminded of why I’m a vegan, but really I don’t judge people’s
lifestyles. If someone chooses to eat meat or dairy, that’s their choice. I
just think that meat and dairy can be produced a lot more ethically than they
currently are being produced and with much less impact on communities, on the
environment, and on people’s health.

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by Ashley Braun

For all the bad rap that climate change gets, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to look on the bright side of things. Tensions have been rising between Bangladesh and India for the last 30 years over who owns New Moore Island. But rising seas have made the island no more. Problem solved!

(Unless, like LOST fans, they’re not bothered by disappearing islands.)

dklimke via Flickr

 

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