Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Eric de Place

For all the haters who can’t abide cap-and-trade, I give you a new report by Environment Northeast, (ENE) grading RGGI—that’s the carbon cap-and-trade program that’s been operational for over a year now in the northeastern United States. I’m going to steal their thunder and take you right to the conclusion:

States deserve significant congratulations for coordinating to create RGGI, and for following through with excellent implementation, particularly around the success of the auction markets – the first public carbon market auctions in North America. The investment of RGGI auction proceeds in high value energy efficiency programs is contributing to a transformation in the electric sector; shifting focus from supply to demand and saving consumers millions of dollars. RGGI created organizational and market structures ranging from emissions tracking to regional auctions to market oversight, setting important technical precedents that will smooth the way for future cap-and-trade systems.

In other words, ENE concludes that RGGI is working exceptionally well. They do, however, ding the program in one area: for lacking a clear mechanism that can tighten the cap faster than planned. But what a problem to have!

In a moment, I’ll talk about how RGGI might fix the “problem,” but first let’s take a moment to acknowledge that cap-and-trade works. It really, actually works. It has a proven track record for air pollution—reducing contaminants faster and more cheaply than expected. Better yet, carbon cap-and-trade has worked well in Europe (despite what you may have heard) and now we have evidence that it’s worked well in the United States too.

Basically, it went down like this. RGGI policymakers set emissions reductions—the cap—at the outset of the program, but as things got underway, and as allowances got auctioned off, learned that the region’s emissions could easily fit under the cap. Some of the lower-than-expected emissions were due to the recession—a bad thing, obviously—while others were due to polluters taking early action to avoid having to pay a carbon price—a good thing. So now, because the program is achieving its carbon targets so easily and inexpensively, ENE is urging policymakers to lower the carbon cap further. 

One way to lower the cap is for the individual RGGI states to “retire” their carbon allowances early, unused, rather than selling them at auction. (By reducing the number of allowances in circulation in the region the states would have effectively lowered the cap.) However, retiring allowances early has its own practical pitfalls—especially when state programs need revenue—and, anyway, it’s not clear that all of the states have the authority to do so.

It’s something of a technical point, but RGGI’s program lacks a mechanism that allows it to lower it carbon cap easily. Doing so might require complicated new negotiations and legal agreements. That’s a bad thing from the perspective of wringing carbon out of the system faster than planned, but a good thing from the perspective of providing certainty for the economy. But all in all, being too effective is not exactly the worst problem one can imagine for a climate policy.

More coverage of ENE’s report here.

This post originally appeared at Sightline’s Daily Score blog.

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by Terry Tamminen

Driving around Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, you can easily see the massive construction sites and melting pot of cultures. What is less evident is that a sustainability revolution is going on, from the most humble corner shop to the highest levels of government.

Abu Dhabi may best be known in recent times for a financial bailout of its sister emirate, Dubai, but just as it preserved its oil wealth with a more practical approach than others, it has also quietly embraced a suite of measures to make its buildings, businesses, and homes more sustainable in terms of other critical resources.

Upon entering the Environment Agency, for example, a billboard proclaims that the ubiquitous, flimsy plastic grocery bag has been banned as a means to conserve resources and reduce pollution. That may sound trivial, but if we did the same thing in California, we would eliminate 19 billion plastic bags from landfills every year (yes, just one state uses that many throw-away bags!). Even small measures can save a lot of resources and money.

More significant, I met with members of government and the construction industry here and they are all competing to make their new projects more energy efficient and use greener building materials. A new marina boasts docks made of recycled plastic; a new high-rise (that coincidentally houses the city’s major investment authority) has earned the highest green building rating for things like recycled water use and sophisticated lighting and air conditioning controls; solar projects are sprouting up everywhere, including a massive utility-scale project that is being developed in the desert outside of town.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the leaders you meet here however is their commitment to share their experience with the world. Make no mistake—this is not purely altruistic, they hope to invest in companies that make their economy more efficient and sell those technologies globally, but the city is a living laboratory that is open for anyone to see if you look beyond the oil wealth and the apparent contradictions. In fact, speak to their investment managers and you hear a desire to put their money to work in this space—investing in green building materials, LED lighting, fuel cells, bio-fuels, waste-to-energy projects and other low-carbon, sustainable resource plays that will create a regional economy that lasts far longer than oil.

The message in all of this is clear—Abu Dhabi’s leaders understand that if the world continues to consume resources at the same rate—including less visible resources like the climate and public health—we’ll run out of almost everything in a few decades. Seventy percent of the building stock needed in the U.S. and E.U. between now and 2050 has already been built. By contrast, in China, India, and the Middle East, 70 percent of their needs have yet to be built.

If Abu Dhabi succeeds, it will become a model for growing economies everywhere—and that may just bail out the world in a much bigger sense than money alone.

 

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by Sean Casten

U.S. energy and environmental policy sucks. We burn too much fuel, we
emit too much pollution and we do so under a set of rules that cause us
to spend far too much on energy, even as we use it in volumes that
poison our planet, our geopolitics and our economy. We deserve better.

That said, while it’s fairly easy to identify what ideal energy and environmental policy would look like if we had a clean sheet of paper, it’s harder – and
ultimately, more important – to figure how to achieve those objectives within existing
political constraints. 

That’s not to say we settle for half-measures.  After all, the political challenge to reform is dwarfed only by the consequences of inaction. Rather, we need to insist that our politically-constrained actions pass two key tests:

They have to matter. The fact that big reform is hard shouldn’t
consign us to irrelevant actions. Getting a $100 million earmark in a $700 billion stimulus packages is
the same as getting a millionaire to write you a check for $142, and warrants about as much joy. The U.S. spends $360 billion
per year on electricity in the course of consuming some 3.5 million
GWh and releasing over 40 percent of all U.S. CO2 emissions. By all means, let’s celebrate
small victories, but not lose sight of the challenge we face.
They have to maximize the ratio of societal gain to
political pain. Except in times of
immediate, tangible crisis, the safest political action is always to do nothing
– and even reform-minded politicians need to get re-elected. Politically viable, lasting reform has to give enough mid-term social gain to quickly offset the near-term political pain. 

Of bricks and dams

An old joke: How fast do you have to run to outrun a hungry
bear? A: Faster than the other guy. Similarly, energy policy reform need not
out-run the bear – it simply needs to advance far enough to let others finish
the job. Our challenge
is not to remove every regulatory brick that holds back clean energy progress,
but rather to remove those few critical bricks so that the pent-up pressure
behind the dam can wash out the remainder. So which bricks? Here
are my three, in rank order:

Recast all emissions standards on an
output-basis.
Institute a Clean Energy Standard Offer for
federal electricity purchases
Create a regulatory modernization committee

None of these have obvious political opposition. None require picking a fight over states’
rights, opposing powerful vested interests nor are they dependent upon economic
sacrifice. All could be just as easily
justified on traditional Republican or Democratic principles. And most importantly, each would unleash a
flood through the dam. 

Recast all emissions
standards on an output basis

At the simplest level, an output-based standard is just
algebra. Take an existing,
parts-per-million standard, multiply it by a few factors relating to the
stoichiometry of a combustion process and its fuel efficiency and you can get
an environmentally-equivalent standard framed in pounds-per-unit of useful energy
output (e.g., MWh of electricity, MMBtu of thermal energy, etc.)  The math guarantees that the standard places
a standard for emissions at least as stringent as the existing regulations. But as the saying goes “what gets measured
gets managed.” Having historically ignored the efficiency
with which we convert fuel into useful energy, our environmental regulations
have unwittingly placed environmental compliance in direct opposition with
energy efficiency. I wrote here about the key details to get output-based standards right so won’t repeat them
– but suffice it to say that the details are really important.

Understanding why this simple tweak would unleash a flood of
clean energy investments requires first understanding how industrials invest
capital. Businesses have
fixed annual capital budgets. The simplistic view is that this capital is
allocated purely in terms of risk/reward, with the most attractive projects getting funded first. The reality is more nuanced. Like Orwell’s pigs, some high-return capital
projects are more equal than others. And
some negative return projects are more equal than high return ones. This is because of the sequential prioritization of capital that businesses follow:

The first use of capital is on
government-mandated projects. From
environmental remediation to health & safety compliance, there are a host
of projects that are built not because of their economic return, but because
they are required. (And yes, one could
argue that they have a high return since they allow you to keep operating. But by that logic, Catherine Martin had an economic interest to “rub the lotion on its skin”.)  
The second use of capital (to the extent that
any remains) is to invest in core-business activities. Peter Drucker has taught
a generation of managers to preferentially deploy scarce capital towards core
activities. This is very sensible, and
has led to the streamlining of American businesses; it explains
why so many paper goods companies no longer to own forests and why your
employer has (in all probability) long-since out-sourced its pension plan and
cafeteria. However, it also means that
lots of high-return projects don’t get built. A paper mill will invest in an upgrade to their paper machine that
delivers a 16 percent rate of return before they’ll invest in an upgrade to their
boiler that delivers a 20 percent rate of return – not because they see the latter as
more risky, but because they want their managers to stay focused on making
paper.
The third use of capital (again, to the extent
any remains) is for non-core investments. Unless you’re in the energy business, all energy projects fall into this
bucket.

In my experience, this means that any efficiency project
with more than a 2 year simple payback (about a 45 percent rate of return) is unlikely
to attract private capital. But an
output-based standard would jump clean energy from the third to the first
funding bucket. Better still, it moves
it to the top of that funding bucket since industrials will – for the first
time – have a way to profitably comply with environmental mandates. 

This is a brick that unleashes a flood. Change the algebra and you will see a huge
boom in the demand for clean energy. Rather
than prescribing specific pollution control devices (and hoping we prescribed
the right ones), industrials would have the flexibility to choose the mix of
cogen, solar, boiler controls upgrades, selective catalytic reduction and any
of a host of other technologies to meet the mandated emissions
level. This would also significantly
expand the financial resources available to the clean tech community – lowering
the investment returns required to get those technologies deployed will
necessarily induce more risk-averse investors to enter the space. And perhaps most important from a political
perspective, it would finally end the false debate between the economy and the
environment, by giving businesses profitable ways to meet (no less stringent) environmental objectives.

It’s worth a final note on the politics of output-based
standards. In talking about this idea with Congress, we‘ve encountered one
opposed constituency: U.S. coal miners. Not to output-based standards specifically, but to any policy that
increases the efficiency with which the U.S. uses energy. That sounds like a big deal, but it’s really
not. The entire U.S. coal-mining industry employs about 80,000 people,
providing employment for about 0.06 percent of all U.S. non-farm employees. To put that in perspective, there are 280,000
people employed in “baking and tortilla manufacturing.” It’s a winnable fight.

Institute a Clean
Energy Standard Offer for federal electricity purchases

Lisa Margonelli wrote recently in The Nation about the idea for a Clean
Power Agency, tasked with buying clean power from high-efficiency and renewable
generation plants to create a market pull for clean energy. I love the idea, but suggest a few tweaks to make it more politically saleable. 

The creation of any new
federal agency is bound to face political challenge. However, two points are unassailable: (1) the
federal government buys a lot of electricity and (2) the federal government
stipulates how it buys a lot of things. This latter point is particularly relevant – from EEOC requirements to prevailing-wage construction principles, the government
mandates that many of its purchasing decisions factor in broader societal considerations. Why not do the same with
electricity?

To be sure, the federal government does have some limited guidelines
for electricity purchases, most notably those associated with the 2005
EPACT. But this law leaves a lot to
be desired. First, because it places
paths ahead of goals (e.g., it stipulates that the government must buy power
from certain technologies, rather than from any technology that meets certain
standards of cleanliness.)  Second,
because it includes those dangerous weasel words: “to the extent economically
feasible and technically practicable.”  In other words, we’d like to buy clean energy, but not if it’s too
expensive. (And even then, this requirement is only imposed on a tiny percent of total government electricity purchases.)

This sounds reasonable – except that we don’t tolerate it
with respect to other government purchases. Should the government buy 3 percent of their office supplies from companies
that don’t discriminate, but only if “economically practicable”?  Worse, “economically practicable” is in the
eye of the beholder. Getting rid of
child labor is economically impractical if you ignore the economics of the
kid. So should the government define
“economically practicable” without including all the externalities and
cross-subsidies innate to dirty energy? The law doesn’t say.

Fortunately, laws can be changed. 

First, instead of mandating the purchase of power from
specific technologies “if economically feasible,” mandate that the federal
government preferentially buy from any source that meets a goal-driven standard
of cleanliness under a Clean Energy Standard Offer.  For these purposes, define “clean” as
anything that is at least twice as efficient as the U.S. power grid on a fossil
energy in/delivered electricity out basis. Renewables count, but so does high-efficiency CHP. Second, eliminate questions of economic practicality entirely by setting a pricing heuristic such that the all-in, delivered costs of electricity (inclusive of all externalities)
sets a bogey, and the Clean Energy Standard Offer price is set to 80 percent of that
bogey. The price could be set by an
independent panel each year and – with this formulation – is politically
unassailable, since any power purchased under this program is saving the
country money. Obama has said that he wants to eliminate fossil energy subsidies because they distort the market – this simply accelerates that elimination for federal purchases, turning brown energy’s weakness into green energy’s strength.  Finally, rather than only applying this requirement to a tiny percent of purchases, stipulate that the
government buys up to the limits of their needs or the limits of supply at that
price.

So what would this drive? First, the government consumes a lot of
power. According to the Federal Energy
Management Program, they buy about 55,000 GWh of electricity per year –
roughly 1.5 percent of all U.S. electricity purchases or – seen from another lens –
about 50 percent of all non-hydro renewable generation in the U.S. Shifting any significant fraction of those
purchases to cleaner sources would represent an enormous growth engine. But perhaps most importantly, this would force
a conversation about the true costs of energy. Like it or not, we are going to have to confront those Medicare
entitlements one of these days, and it can’t hurt to get the public (and
government) to better understand the linkage between clean energy and lower
healthcare costs. Finally, it’s got a
nice “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” spin to it. If it’s good social policy to mandate that
utilities preferentially buy from clean energy sources, doesn’t the same hold
true for the government?

Create a regulatory
modernization committee

This is arguably the least important change from a
market-reformation perspective, but perhaps the most important
politically. Changing environmental
regulations and changing the way the government buys energy will have huge
long-term impacts, but their results will only be visible as projects get
designed, financed and built. At best,
that’s a 2 year process. On the other
hand, it’s really easy to identify dumb, antiquated laws that block efficiency,
and many of them are politically painless to fix. 

It’s also got photo op written all over it. Remember when Clinton deputized Al Gore to
“streamline government”? Cue the
fileboxes of bad regulations, and the positive energy that always surrounds a
good spring cleaning. Hell, even
tea-partiers can cotton to this idea. 

This committee should ideally not limit their scope to the
laws on the federal register; a host of more local regulations (building
codes, fire-safety codes, etc.) also block the deployment of clean energy. Whether that means one really big committee
or 51 small committees though is a matter of tactics. (After all, the committee that identifies the problematic laws is still going to depend on legislatures to enact change.) The important thing is
the conversation. Re-align the public debate so that the body politic understands how
many dumb laws block clean energy deployment and we can get past the idea that energy markets are perfectly allocating capital in response to nothing but the purest of economic signals. Shift the conversation from “can
we afford to subsidize yet another technology?” to “why do we tolerate
subsidies that block our forward progress?”

I’d argue that all three of these could be done – if not
immediately – pretty quickly. None of
these are so complex that they require months of hearings and debate (see:
healthcare, CO2 regulation).  All are
complementary with existing government programs. None have any strong constituency to
oppose. But if implemented, they would
unleash a flood of clean energy, finally starting to tear down the dam.

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Policy fixes to unleash clean energy, part 5

by Brendan DeMelle

Drilling companies seeking to exploit unconventional energy resources in the Rocky Mountain wilderness and elsewhere are running into all kinds of obstacles these days, thanks to lawsuits, regulations, and pesky citizens who would rather ensure their drinking water remains, well, drinkable, preferably without fear of ingesting toxic chemicals or lighting themselves on fire when they turn on the tap.

Take for example, the little-known Bill Barrett Corporation, a Colorado-based natural gas company that is planning to drill up to 3,000 wells in an area of the Colorado Rockies called the Roan Plateau.  Barrett Corp specializes in extracting unconventional shale gas and coalbed methane through hydraulic fracturing, a controversial technique many fear could have devastating consequences for drinking water supplies throughout the West.

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracing,” involves blasting a mixture of toxic chemicals, sand and water into rock formations to break apart rock and release hydrocarbons.  The oil and gas industry historically used fracing techniques to eek out more production from aging wells, but the technique is now used in some 90 percent of the country’s tight-sands and coal-bed methane gas wells. 

As Kevin Grandia explains today over at the Huffington Post, only an ambitious legal challenge and efforts to raise public awareness can stop the destruction of the Roan by Barrett Corp and other gas industry players.  Interior Secretary Ken Salazar last year called the Roan “one of those treasured landscapes of America,” and praised 
“the environmental values of the plateau” but he has yet to act to stop its destruction.

Hydraulic fracturing is exempt from scrutiny under the Safe Drinking Water Act thanks to the Halliburton loophole, a blatant industry giveaway inserted into the 2005 energy bill at the behest of Vice President Cheney, Halliburton’s former CEO.  Halliburton pioneered the fracing technique in the 1950s, and reportedly now earns about $1.5 Billion annually from hydraulic fracturing.

The House Energy & Commerce Committee recently launched an investigation into the potential impacts of hydraulic fracturing, as Grist‘s Jonathan Hiskes noted last week.  Fracing is also receiving more press coverage than usual these days thanks to a proposed $41 billion merger between Exxon Mobil and XTO Energy Inc.  If the deal goes through, Exxon would become the owner of 8 million acres of shale gas and other types of unconventional resources, the largest share in the industry. 

Barrett Corp., which specializes in the fracing method, is a much smaller player than Exxon, of course, but its potential to wreak havoc on water supplies in the Rockies is still noteworthy.  Barrett Corp. released its 4th quarter results this week, along with its 2009 annual 10-K report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, detailing for shareholders its financial position and threats to its continued profitability.

While the company announced a solid financial performance in ‘09 and a positive outlook for future growth, the 10-K isn’t all roses, to say the least, with Barrett revealing some of its key concerns for the future, including the age-old industry bogeymen, environmentalists and regulations:

“The practice of hydraulic fracturing formations to stimulate production of natural gas and oil has come under increased scrutiny by the environmental community. In reaction, moratoria have been imposed and legislation proposed at local, state and federal levels. While these proposals have not materially affected our ability to operate, adaption [sic] of certain proposals, in jurisdictions in which we operated, would adversely affect the Company.” (2009 10-K, pg 72)

As Barrett Corp. notes, “The regulatory burden on the oil and gas industry increases the cost of doing business and consequently affects profitability.” (pg 22)

Recognizing this threat, Barrett has followed in the well-worn footsteps of major polluters nationwide by increasing its spending on lobbyists.  The company has relied on several Beltway lobby shops in recent years to curry favor for its drilling plans in Congress and the administration. 

Since 2004, Barrett has paid roughly $60,000 a year ($380,000 total) to National Environmental Strategies (NES), which took over Barrett’s lobbying responsibilities from K Street’s top firm Patton Boggs, which earned $100,000 from Barrett Corp in 2004.

But last year, Barrett upped the ante significantly, retaining Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, Schrek (BHFS), to the tune of $240,000 just for 2009 lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.  On behalf of Barrett Corp., Patton Boggs, NES and Brownstein Hyatt have lobbied Congress and the Bureau of Land Management on the issues of energy production in the Rockies, resource management plans for federal lands, H.R.6, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, and Title I Denial of Oil and Gas Benefits.

That list is likely to grow this year, as the practice of hydraulic fracturing comes under increased scrutiny.  This episode provides a crystal clear example of special interests in Washington running roughshod over the interests of local populations whose water supplies are threatened by the unregulated practice of hydraulic fracturing.  Only a loud and organized public outcry can challenge the reach of Barrett’s lobbyists and stop this madness. 

About Barrett’s roster of registered lobbying operations:

NES, Inc.

In 2004, NES, co-founded by former Republican National Committee chairman, Haley Barbour and former American Petroleum Institute executive Marc Himmelstein, was caught up in an ethics controversy surrounding the close relationship the firm had with then deputy secretary of the Interior, J. Steven Griles, a former NES lobbyist.  NES was found to be paying $284,000 a year to Griles as a means of divesting his business interest in the firm. At the time of the dust-up, the NY Times reported that despite the controversy, “Mr. Himmelstein continues to represent companies involved with the department, including six clients that worked with the Bureau of Land Management on an environmental impact statement for the Powder River Basin, a large mining area in Wyoming.”

Himmelstein is listed as one of the lobbyists handling the Barrett account.  Besides Barrett, in 2009 NES clients included the American Gas Association, Encana Corporation, Utah Council for Clean Energy, Edison Electric Institute, Sunoco and Pacific Gas and Electric Company.

Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, Schrek LLP (BHFS)

BHFS is a large law/lobby firm founded in Colorado, with offices in major cities throughout the US.  Barrett Corp has retained three of the firm’s lobbyists, Alfred E. Mottur, Jacob Johnson and C. Kyle Simpson.  Mottur is a managing partner at BHFS and the co-chairman of the firm’s government relations group. Jacob Johnson is listed as a DC-based policy adviser to BHFS. Prior to joining BHFS in September 2007, Johnson was a legislative assistant to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch.  C. Kyle Simpson is a Policy Director out of the BHFS office in Washington, DC and has served as the associate deputy secretary of energy and a senior policy advisor to the secretary of energy. Simpson is the executive director of an organization called “The Energy Research Coalition” of which BHFS lists itself as a member. The Research Coalition was formed in 2007 to, “support federal funding for natural gas and petroleum R&D.” The coalition members include, Chesapeake Energy, Devon Energy, Gas Technology Institute, GE Infrastructure and Strata Production Group.

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by Sean Casten

Having noted in part 2 that all barriers to clean energy deployment can
be lumped into utility policy, environmental policy, and out-of-date policy—and having outlined the necessary fixes for the first two in parts 5 and 6—we now address out-of-date policies.

This is perhaps the hardest to address, because it is such a
catch-all. It is also, somewhat
uniquely, a case where we don’t even know where all the bodies are. In my experience, it is hard to build any
clean energy project without running into some antiquated law that impedes
progress. Which by extension means that
until such time as I am never again surprised by one of those laws, I can’t
credibly say I know where all, most, or even the biggest of those barriers are. But the truth is out there. Here’s how to find it.

At
every level of government, convene a regulatory modernization committee. Task this committee to identify any law that
blocks the deployment of clean energy (including energy efficiency), determine
the original purpose of that law, determine whether that purpose still applies
and—if necessary—eliminate or modify accordingly. This is perhaps the most naïve idea in this
series of posts, because of its sheer scale. There are barriers in our tax code, in municipal building codes, in
utility rate-making protocols, in our environmental laws and even in our
criminal statutes. Merely cataloging all
these challenges is a monumental task—so let’s acknowledge that the idea is
ridiculously idealistic. But they are
massive. A few examples may
illustrate. Insulation that is retrofit
into storage facilities has a tax depreciation life that exceeds the length of
the facility, creating a financial incentive not to insulate.  Many municipal building codes require
full-time lighting of all emergency exits, inadvertently precluding the
installation of motion-sensors.  Steam vessels
at pressures of >15 psig require full-time operators in many jurisdictions,
creating a barrier to waste heat recovery (to understand how crazy this is,
note that you can have a 250 psig propane storage tank without an
operator!) In many states, it is a
felony offense for anyone but a regulated utility to run a private wire across
a public thoroughfare, causing people with opportunity fuels to often undersize
their electric generator. All these,
and many more preclude efficiency for reasons that no longer make any
sense. This list is far from complete, and I’d love to hear about other ones that readers have run into. Maybe we can start the list here!
For all
laws identified above, ask whether the law follows the guiding principles
outlined here. As noted earlier, it is hard to craft good
policy if you are not first explicit about your principles. Suffice to say that many laws don’t follow
any consistent set of principles. To be
sure, sometimes this inconsistency is a virtue; utility law for years has
struggled with the conflict between the consumer interest (in lower energy
costs) and the public interest (in a solvent utility) and coalesced around a
single operative theory: “it all depends.”  While some of the outcomes of that particular debate may be goofy, this theory
of rate-making is obviously superior to a dogmatic insistence on One True
Path. Nonetheless, if we do seek to
reform existing barriers to clean energy, they ought to be reformed with a map
in hand; we may occasionally decide to go off-roading anyway, but let’s at
least know when we’re about to veer off the pavement.  Does a policy reward a goal or a path? Does a policy place the economy and
environment in unnecessary conflict? Does
a policy favor businesses or markets? Does a policy strike an appropriate balance between carrots and
sticks?

Let’s quickly review the key points of this series. Massive policy barriers to clean energy exist,
blocked by massive political barriers to reform. On the other hand, a better policy
environment is possible that need not sacrifice our environmental
responsibility nor economic growth. Change
will be hard, but the benefits will outweigh the costs. So that leaves one remaining question: What
do we do next? If we know where we want
to get to, and understand the political landscape that constrains our incremental
advances, what should we do? My effort
to answer that question in the next (and final) post.

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Job losses push need for energy bill

by Frank Sesno

What do the Vancouver Olympics have to do with Sir Richard Branson’s
“Carbon War Room” and solar power? We hear from venture capitalist Jack
Hidary on this Planet Forward webisode.

Hidary and Branson aren’t just enjoying the sporting events at the
Vancouver Olympics. They’ve started a “Carbon War Room”
which is looking for market-driven solutions to climate change.  And
they met with over 50 mayors to discuss how entrepreneurs can help
cities go green.

Find more videos like this on Planet Forward

Planet Forward is a
online social network where creative and innovative ideas addressing
global challenges are featured, discussed, and evaluated.  It is a
project of the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George
Washington University.

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by Tom Philpott

“The fruit was traditionally collected from wild palms. Now companies have açaí plantations, and collectors are raising more açaí palms on their land, according to Antônio Cordeiro de Santana, an agricultural economist at the Rural Federal University of the Amazon. With cultivation more concentrated, resistance to disease and productivity have decreased, he said, even as the number of açaí palms in Pará has exploded.”

—Seth Kugel, writing in The New York Times

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by Tom Philpott

“Just this week I promoted somebody—and I can’t even believe I’m saying this word here, folks—to a chief sustainability officer.”
—Larry Pope, CEO of Smithfield Foods, speaking before the North Carolina Agribusiness Council. Smithfield’s environmental record was nicely documented in the classic 2006 Rolling Stone article “Boss Hog.”

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by Elana Schor

Dubuque, Iowa, is one city getting a leg up from the feds as it tries to revitalize its downtown.Photo courtesy SD Dirk via FlickrThe word “silos” is most often used to talk about grain or
coal, not the federal government. But in the case of transportation and housing—two sectors that accounted for more than 43 percent of the nation’s carbon emissions in
2008—Washington’s
siloed approach of divided, blindered policymaking could put wheat farmers to
shame.

The Obama administration is starting to break down those
barriers between agencies, asking the Department of Transportation (DOT), the
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) to take an all-hands-on-deck approach to smart growth.
Dubbed the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, the effort aims to provide
federal support for localities that want to offer more walkable neighborhoods
and cleaner commuting options than the car.

“When it comes to housing, environmental, and transportation
policy, it’s time the federal government spoke with one voice,” HUD Secretary
Shaun Donovan said this month in a speech that officially tapped his deputy,
former Seattle-area official Ron
Sims, as the Partnership’s leader and “Designated Silo Buster.”

To smart-growth advocates who have waged long battles
against sprawl without much backup from Washington,
the Partnership is a cause for celebration.
The White House’s 2011 budget request included $527 million for the
Partnership, though Congress may not actually allocate the funds. Separately, HUD plans to award $100 million
in new grants for regional sustainability plans that integrate transportation,
housing, and land use by late summer.

The biggest pot of money for the administration’s
smart-growth focus is coming from the stimulus law—$1.5 billion in TIGER
grants (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) for
transportation projects that create jobs and help develop livable
communities. DOT is administering the
program, but it asked HUD and the EPA to help choose the grantees.

“This isn’t a case of HUD and EPA saying, ‘DOT has all this
money, let’s get in on it,’” said Will Schroeer, state policy director for Smart Growth America. “This is a
case of the agencies reaching out to each other, saying, ‘Your decisions affect
us and our decisions affect you—let’s make these decisions together.’”

Shelley Poticha, a longtime transportation reformer who became
a senior adviser to the Partnership in July, argues that smart-growth
efforts are key to fighting the recession.

“To me this is about helping to rebuild our economy, about
growing jobs in terms of making housing more energy-efficient,” she said in an
interview. “It’s also about helping places and regions really understand where
their economic future is going and how they can use that to be more
sustainable.”

But with Democrats facing deficit anxiety within their own
ranks and an opposition eager to depict new programs as the encroaching hand of
“big government,” it remains to be seen whether the Obama team can translate
their energy into significant progress toward denser, more close-knit local
development. A bill
sponsored by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) would officially create an office
within HUD to focus on sustainable communities and authorize up to $4 billion
in grants over the next four years, but it has yet to see even one vote in
committee, leaving the administration to use its own devices and seek one-year
infusions of money for the Partnership’s plans.

John Petro, urban policy analyst at the nonprofit Drum Major
Institute for Public Policy, offered a consciously pragmatic take on what the
Partnership can achieve during an economic downturn.

“It’s making the best of this moment,” he said. “When Obama
came into office, transit advocates were giving high-fives, [thinking] that
from this moment forward, we’re going to see new priorities from the federal
government and even Congress. With the recession and the financial crisis, the
situation has changed.”

Veteran urban infrastructure analyst Anthony Flint, of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, echoed that perspective
but warned that budgetary constraints and political realities could turn into a
drag on the administration’s smart-growth agenda. “Somewhat similar to what’s
happening with the stimulus, the question is: Is it really enough?” he said.
“And is it going to go to the right things?”

While the administration has embraced the idea of a stronger
federal role in local community-building, Flint
added, Obama aides seem to have paid less attention to countering politically
motivated critics who depict smart growth as an attempt to
dictate Americans’ lifestyle choices.

“It’s very much tied in to those who are calling action on
climate change a distraction and unnecessary,” Flint said. “In the court of public opinion,
that seems like pretty tough going. Do they [the Obama administration] have a
talking-points kind of campaign for that? I don’t know.”

When asked about ideological obstacles to funding and
support for less auto-centric development, Poticha cited studies that have
found walkable communities generating up to 50 percent of future housing-market
demand—not to mention a lower
share of foreclosures. “We’re not dictating anything, we’re not saying,
‘You’ve got to build in a certain exact way,’” she said. “There are still
plenty of sources of money that help all the folks who don’t agree with this
approach.”

The ‘New Federalism’

A major part of the Partnership’s ethos is redefining the
way Americans view their hometowns, treating the urban-suburban cultural divide
like another outmoded silo to be dissolved.

“Today, challenges we once associated with cities—from
homelessness to foreclosures—have become suburbanized,” HUD chief Donovan
noted in his speech this month, calling for “a new federalism, attuned to
place” that encourages different regions to connect their residents in ways
that make sense locally.

A sprawling metro area such as Raleigh-Durham, N.C., for
example, would be encouraged to pursue different transportation and land-use
strategies than denser, already transit-rich cities (think New York) or
fast-growing exurbs (think Loudoun County, Va., or Kendall County, Ill.).

The Partnership is not the first federal attempt to get
involved in local projects such as mixed-use zoning laws and pedestrian plazas.
More than a decade ago, Vice President Al Gore promoted an array of
smart-growth grants under the umbrella of “Livable Communities
for the 21st Century.” The Clinton
administration effort even included a “listening tour” with local officials working
on development reform, similar to the September
tour that Poticha made with the three Cabinet members she advises.

That type of open communication between different levels of
government will be crucial to the Partnership’s success, said John Robert
Smith, who succeeded Poticha at the helm of the transportation-reform group Reconnecting America.

“The proof will be in pushing that same type of
collaborative effort down to the state and local faces” of HUD, DOT, and the
EPA, Smith said. “If it doesn’t get to the local level of implementation, it’s
not going to happen effectively.”

But Schroeer of Smart Growth America thinks smart-growth
efforts are better positioned to succeed now than ever before. During the late
1990s, he said, “we just didn’t know how to do some of those projects, and now
we do. [Now] it’s not so much being pushed from Washington as it is being demanded by
communities.”

The high level of interest in the TIGER program is evidence
of that demand.  More than 1,450
applications for grants, seeking a total of $59 billion in funding, flowed into
the DOT, but only
51 [PDF] got to split the $1.5 billion available. The winning proposals included $50 million
for Kansas City’s urban Green Impact Zone, which aims to
give low-income residents weatherization job training as well as better transit
access, and a $5.6 million remodeling of downtown
Dubuque, Iowa, one of the three stops on the Partnership’s September
sustainability tour.

Initially, Poticha confessed, “I’d been something of a
skeptic about including Dubuque,” a city of less than 60,000 that is known more
for its actual silos than for any commitment to bicycling or green buildings.

After hearing from local officials, however, she and other
Partnership officials walked away believers. “It was incredible—here in this
small community in the middle of the country, they had just completely embraced
the idea that the key to the future of their town was reinvesting in downtown,”
Poticha said.

“It was one of those moments when you just thought, ‘If they
can do it in Dubuque,
we can do this anywhere.’”

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by Tom Philpott

Fifteen minutes wrestling with dough—who kneads it?

A little more than two years ago, Mark Bittman and Jim Lahey got together and transformed home bread making for all time. In the kitchen of Lahey’s Sullivan Street Bakery, they shot a video illustrating Lahey’s simple method for making a top-quality loaf with no special equipment—and no kneading whatsover. If you haven’t seen it, you really have to watch it (damn The New York Times for not making its videos embeddable.)

Bittman wasn’t exaggerating when he wrote at the time:

INNOVATIONS in bread baking are rare. In fact, the 6,000-year-old process hasn’t changed much since Pasteur made the commercial production of standardized yeast possible in 1859. The introduction of the gas stove, the electric mixer and the food processor made the process easier, faster and more reliable.

I’m not counting sliced bread as a positive step, but Jim Lahey’s method may be the greatest thing since.

It’s no joke: Lahey’s technique counts as an honest-to-goodness innovation in bread-making—and one that genuinely empowers home cooks. Lahey delivered two masterstrokes: 1) by letting dough sit overnight, its glutens develop without the need for kneading; and 2) by cooking the dough in a blazing hot, tight lidded, heavy-bottomed pot, you mimic the conditions of a fancy bakery oven.

The early adapters to Lahey’s idea were people like me: passionate home cooks who had for years laboriously kneaded dough to make pretty-good home bread. With the exception of those truly hardcore fanatics among us, those willing to spend days on a loaf, we were making good bread, but not getting the rustic, chestnut-colored crusts and soft, air-hole-marked crumb of truly great bread. To have that in your life, you generally had to live near one of the country’s few excellent bakeries.

For us, Lahey’s technique was a revelation. I sometime miss the physical process of kneading, the feeling of getting one’s hands into one’s food, but I’ve been using the no-knead method ever since the Bittman article came out.

And now, with all the recent buzz around home cooking—sparked by Michael Pollan’s summer 2009 essay—the no-knead juggernaut is gaining new steam.

During the recent East Coast snowstorms, Washington D.C. home-baking legend—and food politics writer—Sam Fromartz published Lahey’s recipe on his blog, and declared a “snowpocolypse baking challenge” urging people to spend some of their snowed-in time baking bread. The idea was kind of ironic, given that Lahey’s recipe takes no more than about 15 minutes of active fussing; but Fromartz is right that people need a spur, an excuse, to get them to try something new. In this post, he highlights the challenge’s winners, many of them first-time bakers. You, too, can make professional-quality bread in your kitchen!

And today, The New York Times published a piece by the great food-science writer Harold MgGee taking a close look at the no-knead technique.   His verdict: It works! McGee also adds some important nuance to the discussion—as well as an appealing recipe for whole-wheat bread that requires just two minutes of kneading.

Speaking of whole wheat flour, I’ve been quite happily using the Lahey technique with half whole-wheat and half white flour. I find that it’s superb out of the oven, and quite wonderful the next day, after being toasted.

So, get baking!

 

Related Links:

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Still another critic of real food – this time in the NYT

by David Roberts

Van Jones.Center for American ProgressVan Jones, who resigned from the White House Council on Environmental Quality last fall in the face of a coordinated smear campaign by conservative activists, has emerged from his self-imposed semi-exile with a bang. He’ll be teaching a policy seminar at Princeton next year. He’s accepted a senior fellowship at the Center for American Progress, where he will head up a “green opportunity initiative.” And on Friday, he will accept the NAACP President’s Award from Benjamin Todd Jealous, who mounts an eloquent defense of Jones in an op-ed.

The Washington Post‘s Juliet Eilperin nabbed the first post-resignation interview—you can read her story and excerpts from the interview. This is good:

When the food fight is over, there’s one spot of clean common ground in American politics and that is the need for us to be leading on energy, clean energy, and for us as a country to be more secure with all those jobs. … I’m confident we’re going to get there because I don’t think America is going to be willing to pass this one up. I think at the end of the day, common sense will prevail, and the common ground will be in the direction of clean energy.

Some additional links:

Jones’ message to his supporters after his resignation.
My thoughts on Jones’ resignation.
My 2007 Grist interview with Jones.
Jones talks to Grist about his position in the White House.
Jones talks to Grist about his book The Green-Collar Economy (my review of the book).
Jones talks to Grist about the Lieberman-Warner climate bill.
Jones talks to Grist about the National Day of Action in 2008.
Jones on the Colbert Report.
Kate on Jones’ address to Netroots Nation.
My 2005 (!) post on the formation of Jones’ first green group, Reclaim the Future.
Jones writes for Grist.

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by Lester Brown

The past two years have witnessed the emergence of a powerful movement opposing the construction of new coal-fired power plants in the United States. Initially led by environmental groups, both national and local, it has since been joined by prominent national political leaders and many state governors. The principal reason for opposing coal plants is that they are changing the earth’s climate. There is also the effect of mercury emissions on health and the 23,600 U.S. deaths each year from power plant air pollution.

Over the last few years the coal industry has suffered one setback after another. The Sierra Club, which has kept a tally of proposed coal-fired power plants and their fates since 2000, reports that 123 plants have been defeated, with another 51 facing opposition in the courts. Of the 231 plants being tracked, only 25 currently have a chance at gaining the permits necessary to begin construction and eventually come online. Building a coal plant may soon be impossible.

What began as a few local ripples of resistance to coal-fired power quickly evolved into a national tidal wave of grassroots opposition from environmental, health, farm, and community organizations. Despite a heavily funded ad campaign to promote so-called clean coal (one reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s earlier efforts to convince people that cigarettes were not unhealthy), the American public is turning against coal.

One of the first major industry setbacks came in early 2007 when a coalition headed by the Environmental Defense Fund took on Texas-based utility TXU’s plans for 11 new coal-fired power plants. A quick drop in the utility’s stock price caused by the media storm prompted a $45 billion buyout offer from two private equity firms. However, only after negotiating a ceasefire with EDF and the Natural Resources Defense Council and reducing the number of proposed plants from 11 to three, thus preserving the value of the company, did the firms proceed with the purchase. It was a major win for the environmental community, which mustered the public support necessary to stop eight plants outright and impose stricter regulations on the remaining three. Meanwhile, the energy focus in Texas has shifted to its vast wind resources, pushing it ahead of California in wind-generated electricity.

In May 2007, Florida’s Public Service Commission refused to license a huge $5.7 billion, 1,960-megawatt coal plant because the utility could not prove that building the plant would be cheaper than investing in conservation, efficiency, and renewable energy sources. This point, made by Earthjustice, a non-profit environmental legal group, combined with strong public opposition to any more coal-fired power plants in Florida, led to the quiet withdrawal of four other coal plant proposals in the state.

Coal’s future is also suffering as Wall Street turns its back on the industry. In July 2007, Citigroup downgraded coal company stocks across the board and recommended that its clients switch to other energy stocks. In January 2008, Merrill Lynch also downgraded coal stocks. In early February 2008, investment banks Morgan Stanley, Citi, and J.P. Morgan Chase announced that any future lending for coal-fired power would be contingent on the utilities demonstrating that the plants would be economically viable with the higher costs associated with future federal restrictions on carbon emissions. Later that month, Bank of America announced it would follow suit.

In August 2007, coal took a heavy political hit when U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who had been opposing three coal-fired power plants in his own state, announced that he was now against building coal-fired power plants anywhere in the world. Former Vice President Al Gore has also voiced strong opposition to building any coal-fired power plants. So too have many state governors, including those in California, Florida, Michigan, Washington, and Wisconsin.

In her 2009 State of the State address, Governor Jennifer Granholm of Michigan argued that the state should not be importing coal from Montana and Wyoming but instead should be investing in technologies to improve energy efficiency and to tap the renewable resources within Michigan, including wind and solar. This, she said, would create thousands of jobs in the state, helping offset those lost in the automobile industry.

One of the unresolved burdens haunting the coal sector, in addition to the emissions of CO2, is what to do with the coal ash—the remnant of burning coal—that is accumulating in 194 landfills and 161 holding ponds in 47 states. This ash is not an easy material to dispose of since it is laced with arsenic, lead, mercury, and many other toxic materials. The industry’s dirty secret came into full public view just before Christmas 2008 when the containment wall of a coal ash pond in eastern Tennessee collapsed, releasing a billion gallons of toxic brew. Unfortunately, the industry does not have a plan for safely disposing of the 130 million tons of ash produced each year, enough to fill 1 million railroad cars. The dangers are such that the Department of Homeland Security tried to put 44 of the most vulnerable storage facilities on a classified list lest they fall into the hands of terrorists. The spill of toxic coal ash in Tennessee drove another nail into the lid of the coal industry coffin.

In April 2009, the chairman of the powerful U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Jon Wellinghoff, observed that the United States may no longer need any additional coal or nuclear power plants. Regulators, investment banks, and political leaders are now beginning to see what has been obvious for some time to climate scientists such as NASA’s James Hansen, who says that it makes no sense to build coal-fired power plants when we will have to bulldoze them in a few years.

In April 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is both authorized and obligated to regulate CO2 emissions under the Clean Air Act. This watershed decision prompted the Environmental Appeals Board of the EPA in November 2008 to conclude that a regional EPA office must address CO2 emissions before issuing air pollution permits for a new coal-fired power plant. This not only put the brakes on the plant in question but also set a precedent, stalling permits for all other proposed U.S. coal plants. Acting on the same Supreme Court decision, in December 2009 the EPA issued a final endangerment finding confirming that CO2 emissions threaten human health and welfare and must be regulated, jeopardizing new coal plants everywhere.

The bottom line is that the United States now has, in effect, a de facto moratorium on the building of new coal-fired power plants. This has led the Sierra Club, the national leader on this issue, to expand its campaign to reduce carbon emissions to include the closing of existing plants.

Given the huge potential for reducing electricity use in the United States by switching to more efficient lighting and appliances, for example, this may be much easier than it appears. If the efficiency level of the other 49 states were raised to that of New York, the most energy-efficient state, the energy saved would be sufficient to close 80 percent of the country’s coal-fired power plants. The few remaining plants could be shut down by turning to renewable energy—wind farms, solar thermal power plants, solar cell rooftop arrays, and geothermal power and heat.

The handwriting is on the wall. With the likelihood that few, if any, new coal-fired power plants will be approved in the United States, this de facto moratorium will send a message to the world. Denmark and New Zealand have already banned new coal-fired power plants. Other countries are likely to join this effort to cut carbon emissions. Even China, which was building one new coal plant a week, is surging ahead with harnessing renewable energy development and will soon overtake the United States in wind electric generation. These and other developments suggest that the Plan B goal of cutting net carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020 may be much more attainable than many would have thought.

Adapted from Chapter 10, “Can We Mobilize Fast Enough?” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/books/pb4

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by Umbra Fisk

Dearest readers,

Look, Ma—no takeout!The sharper among you
already know from yesterday’s
video that HuffPost Green is exhorting
us all to board the cooking-at-home train via its Week
of Eating In experiment. Not one to
ask of others what I myself am not willing to do, I have taken the pledge. That’s right; I’m eschewing morning chai lattes
from the coffee shop downstairs, avoiding my favorite lunchtime bakery, and
turning a blind eye to the oh-so-delicious takeout from the new vegetarian Thai
place.  

Just last night I served roasted butternut squash soup and
crusty bread. Down in the stacks today,
I dug into spinach lasagna for a midday meal. Tonight I’m thinking baked salmon and something
with potatoes and kale from this past weekend’s farmers market (here’s one
idea from Cooking Up A Story).

You haven’t yet begun your week of eating in, you say? No
worries—start now. And who says it only has to be for this week? Cathy Erway, author of The Art of Eating In, kicked the habit
for two years—no pressure, of course.

If eating is a political statement, then making your own
meals is the best way to have the ultimate say in the consumer food fight. Plan
ahead and astound other shoppers with your market efficiency and Alice Waters-style
variety. And remember, Michael Pollan says you can have junk food as long as
you cook it yourself. I’ve rounded up some resources that helped me on my
journey to eating in. Other ideas? Let me know in the comments section below.

Erway inspires would-be chefs with this
appetizing slideshow
of winter vegetable recipes on HuffPost Green. She even throws the
meat-eaters a bone with a recipe for braised cabbage with sausage and polenta. Never
underestimate the power of a head of cabbage. HuffPost Green also gives us the best
apps for eating in like Locavore,
which tells you what produce is in season in your part of the country, and Grocery
Gadget, which keeps up with your shopping list and can compare prices
across stores.

NoTakeout.com offers a complete menu, shopping list and detailed game plan—from the time you
walk in the door after work—each day for that night’s dinner (big fan of last
week’s mushroom penne). I think its tool list is marvelous—from bare essentials
to well-equipped—so you can make sure you have the necessary pots, pans,
knives, bells, and whistles. If you don’t, no need to go out and buy tons of
new stuff. Ask a friend about borrowing an item like a hand blender that you
may not use often enough to own one yourself (I did this for the butternut
squash soup—thanks, neighbor!). Or scour your local second-hand store for
some cool, vintage-y measuring cups to cut cost and new materials.

Speaking of a well-stocked kitchen, Real Food Rehab has a spectacular pantry essentials guide for $10 (check out an abridged
version on NoTakeout.com) as well as a scintillating recipe for gooey mac
& cheese.

Cooking
with Friends is based on the premise of, well, cooking with friends. You
shop together, make a bunch of food for the week (say multiple lasagnas,
batches of soup, dozens of cookies), and then divvy it up and take it home—or
eat in together.

Follow Paula Bernstein on her journey to domesticity
on her blog Undomesticated
Me (she’s working up to her first dinner party on March 6). For
non-foodies, reading about Paula’s culinary progress could offer a little nudge
in the kitchen’s direction.

Veg-heads and veggie supporters can head to Meatless Monday for a bevy of meat-free
recipes from breakfast (hello, baked sweet potato pancakes) to dinner and
snacks in between.

Want some
vino to go with your homemade goodness? In the Food and Wine Pairing Guide,
you select the type of dish and spices used, and it tells you what wine would
best complement your dinner. (Garlicky pasta? Why, merlot, of course.)

Happy eating in!

Bon appétit-ly,
Umbra

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by Ashley Braun

Hipupcracy

What do you get when an insufferable breed of the two-wheeled species meets a fey brand of urban canines? Hipster puppies:

Photo: elizabeth e via hipsterpuppies.tumblr.com

lola bean believes “cars suck” and cyclists have a “right to the road”—but has no idea how mean and annoying she is to pedestrians.

Furthermore, hipster pups can’t stand non-vegan butter and being too hungover to bike at Critical Mass.

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by Michael T. Klare

Cross-posted from TomDispatch.

The anticipation may be building, but we’ll all have to wait for the 82nd Academy Awards on March 7th to find out just how many Oscars the global box-office smash Avatar will receive. That 3-D sci-fi spectacle, directed by James Cameron, has garnered nine nominations, including ones for Best Picture and Best Director, and it’s already overtaken Titanic, another Cameron global blockbuster, as the top money-maker in movie history.  But there’s an even bigger question absorbing Avatar’s millions of fans: What will Cameron, who has already indicated that he’s planning to write a novel based on Avatar, do for a screen encore?  As it happens, I have a suggestion: skip the sequels on faraway Pandora’s sister worlds, and do the prequel.

Admittedly, the movie I have in mind (set in a world that Avatar hints at) would lack the blue-skinned Na’vi people, but it would still feature Jake Scully, this time in his real body, on the most intriguing planet of all: Earth.  And given a global audience that can’t get enough of Cameron’s work, how many wouldn’t pay big bucks for a chance to take a Pandora-style, sensory-expanding guided tour of our own planet?  It would be part of a harrowing tale of environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and perennial conflict in the twilight years of humanity’s decline.  Think of it as Avatar: Earth’s Last Stand.

Cameron offers many indications in Avatar that this is the logical direction for him to take.  At a poignant moment before the climactic battle between the Na’vi and the remorseless humans begins, for instance, Scully, the renegade Marine turned native rebel, pleads for help from Eywa, the goddess who rules over Pandora: “See, the world we come from—there’s no green there—they killed their Mother.”  At another point, Colonel Quaritch, the homicidal Marine commander played with gusto by Stephen Lang, refers to Scully’s previous service with the First Marine Reconnaissance unit on Earth, highlighting his three combat tours in Venezuela.  “That was some mean bush,” he says.  Then, speaking of his own combat record, Quaritch alludes to fierce fighting in Nigeria.  For anyone familiar with the present competition for global energy resources, Venezuela and Nigeria stand out as major oil producers with a history of civil strife. 

2144 in 3-D

Imagine them, then, on a future, energy-starved planet.  In fact, I can easily picture such a future, so let me take one more step and offer myself to Cameron as a technical consultant on his prequel.  Admittedly, I wouldn’t be the person to write the film’s plot or script—I know my limits—but when it comes to charting future resource wars, I think I could be useful.  Drawing on Cameron’s clues in Avatar and my own books, including Resource Wars, Blood and Oil, and Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, let me just sketch out the prequel scenario I envision:

It’s the torrid summer of 2144, just a decade before Avatar begins.  (That movie takes place in summer 2154, after a flight from Earth that, we’re told, involves six continuous years of sleep, which helps us backdate Jake Scully’s Venezuelan combat tours.)  As it has been for decades, the world is at war, with competing power blocs fighting bitterly over a diminishing pool of vital resources. 

Three great power centers dominate the global resource struggle, all located in the northern latitudes where the climate still remains tolerable and the land still receives sufficient rainfall to support agriculture.  The first of these, in whose legions both Scully and Quaritch fight, is the North American Federation, founded after the United States, facing desertification in its southern half, invaded and absorbed Canada.  The second, Greater China, incorporating northern China, the Korean peninsula, and eastern Siberia (seized from Russia in a series of wars), dominates what’s left of Asia; the third, the North European Alliance, encompassing Germany, Russia (west of the Urals), and Scandinavia, relies heavily on Arctic resources.  As in the world portrayed by George Orwell in 1984, these powers continually jockey for dominance in shifting alliances, while their armies face one another in the torrid, still relatively resource-rich parts of the planet.  In this neo-Orwellian world, warfare and the constant pressure of resource competition are the only constants.

Thanks to global warming, the planet’s tropical and subtropical regions, including large parts of Africa, the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia, as well as Mexico and the American Southwest, have become virtually uninhabitable.  Many island nations and coastal areas, including much of Florida, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Philippines, lie under water.  Critical raw materials like oil, coal, natural gas, uranium, copper, and cobalt are perennially scarce.  Starvation is a constant fear for those not affluent enough to pay for increasingly expensive genetically-modified crops and meat produced on corporate farms with multiple chemical inputs. 

Large-scale industrial civilization still persists, but many once-industrialized areas have been abandoned, and what factories and transport systems remain are constantly constrained by limited energy supplies and the lack of steady flows of vital resources.  Oil is particularly hard to come by, and so, in all three power blocs, its use is largely restricted to the military, security forces, emergency services, the largest of corporations, and the very rich.  (If you want to get a sense of such a world, imagine Mel Gibson’s 1979 movie Road Warrior on steroids.)  Other sources of energy, including natural gas and uranium, are also in increasingly scant supply.  Renewable sources, including wind and solar power, help to make up some, but not enough, of the difference, while a shortage of critical minerals—copper, cobalt, tin, manganese, titanium—limits the scale of many industrial undertakings. 

For ordinary people—and only somewhat less so for the elites of the planet’s heavily militarized states—survival is a constant struggle.  Outside of the industrialized power centers, life involves a daily search for food, water, and energy of any sort, as well as whatever precious goods (gems, weapons, bits of technology) might be traded to get those basics.  For the big corporations and their government sponsors, as they send the Scullys and Quadritches to the distant corners of the planet to enforce their will, the struggle is no less fierce for control of the world’s few remaining deposits of oil, natural gas, coal, copper, and uranium.

In 2144, only five areas of the world still possess any significant reserves of oil and natural gas: Russia (and contiguous areas of the former Soviet Union), the Persian Gulf, West Africa (including Nigeria), the Orinoco basin of Venezuela, and the now long ice-free Arctic.  Even these areas have been substantially depleted, giving the remaining deposits staggering value to whichever country or company controls them.  If these are not quite as valuable as “unobtanium,” the rare metal being plundered from Pandora and brought back to Earth, they are close enough to be thought of as “barely-obtanium.”

Life (and death) on a depleted planet

For the record, I’m being an optimist here for the sake of Avatar: Earth’s Last Stand.  Based on my own assessment of planetary energy resources, I doubt that any oil or natural gas worth drilling for will remain in 2144.  But for narrative purposes, if such deposits are to be found anywhere almost a century and a half from now, the likely candidates are:  the Persian Gulf area because it still possesses the world’s largest combined reserves of oil and natural gas, and so probably will be the last to run out; Russia, Africa, and the Orinoco basin because they have to date been spared intensive exploitation by the major Western firms, and so still retain substantial recoverable reserves; and the Arctic, which will only become fully accessible to oil producers when global warming has melted the ice cap.

Given the tripartite global power structure of 2144, Russian oil and gas reserves will have been divided between the North European Alliance, controlling western Siberia and the Caucasus, and Greater China, garrisoning eastern Siberia and Central Asia.   The Arctic will be a constant source of conflict among all three blocs, with periodic fighting breaking out concerning overlapping territorial claims in the region.  That leaves the Persian Gulf, West Africa, and Venezuela—the sites of constant warfare between the Na’vi of this planet and the various expeditionary forces sent out by the three big power blocs which, often in temporary alliances of convenience, will also be fighting each other.

Already, we can get a sense of what this might look like.  Under its ultra-nationalist president Hugo Chávez, Venezuela has sought to distance itself from its traditional client, the United States, and bolstered its ties with Russia and China.  As part of this effort, Venezuela has purchased billions of dollars worth of arms from Russia and forged a strategic energy alliance with China.  Claiming evidence of a U.S. plan to invade his country, Chávez has also conducted sizeable self-defense maneuvers and strengthened the military’s control over ports and other infrastructure. 

Looking into the future, one can imagine a time, some decades distant, when Venezuela is a satellite of Greater China and its deposits of heavy oil—the largest remaining on the planet—are reserved for China’s exclusive use.  Under these circumstances, it is not hard to imagine a move by the North American Federation to oust the prevailing Venezuelan regime by launching an invasion on a remote stretch of coast and striking out for the capital, Caracas.  The Venezuelans, backed up by Chinese expeditionary forces, might manage to halt the invasion, but fail to dislodge the North Americans, holed up in harsh patches of the countryside.  Brutal fighting might follow—the “mean bush” mentioned by Quaritch in Avatar.  Jake Scully, sent back into this gruesome contest for his third deployment, is gravely wounded and barely survives the trek back to safety.

If Venezuela is still a peaceful land today, Nigeria is already conflict-ridden and certainly destined to be a major battlefield in the unending resource wars of a future planet.  Possessing the largest pool of untapped oil and natural gas in Africa, it is already the site of a fierce competitive economic struggle involving the United States, China, Russia, and the European Union, all of which seek to exploit the nation’s energy riches.  Nigeria’s oil and gas reserves were first developed by Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum (now BP)—a legacy of the country’s past as a British colony – but now American, Chinese, and European firms have acquired drilling rights to valuable hydrocarbon deposits.  Russia, too, has entered the scene, promising to help build a natural gas pipeline from the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria across the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast for eventual shipment to Europe.

Nigeria is also a battlefield today.  Disgruntled inhabitants of the Niger Delta area, where most of the country’s oil is produced and few benefits are ever seen, have taken up arms in a struggle to receive a bigger share of the nation’s oil revenues.  Both the United States and China are competing to provide the Nigerian government with military aid to defeat the insurgents, hoping to strengthen their respective positions in the country’s oil fields in the process. 

Again, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine a scenario in which, 134 years from now (or a lot sooner), Nigeria has fallen under the sway of Greater China or the North American Federation and Colonel Quaritch and his cohort are carrying out combat operations in the Delta’s jungle regions, a setting not so unlike Pandora’s, with obvious Cameron-esque possibilities.

Where else might Scully, Quaritch, and their buddies be sent to fight?  As a start, don’t assume that the current fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan will simply end or that the United States will ever willingly withdraw its forces from a whole string of bases in the Persian Gulf area.  As long as the United States obtains part of its oil from the region—and the North American Federation might still be fighting to do so in 2144—U.S. forces are likely to remain.  Given the historic enmities that divide the region and a widespread antipathy to the U.S. presence, don’t be surprised if North American Federation forces are still in battle there deep into the twenty-second century.

Finally, the warming Arctic, not currently on the global conflict map, could also experience warfare as it attracts major oil and gas drilling operations.  The region also houses some of the world’s last remaining indigenous communities that still practice a traditional way of life, and which will undoubtedly face the sort of habitat-destroying invasions pictured in Avatar.

Still, as Cameron imagined, despite constant warfare, the North American Federation (like the other major power centers) will, by 2144, still find itself in desperate need of vital materials, no longer easily available on this planet.  Economic conditions, even for privileged elites, will by then be deteriorating rapidly.  It is in this context that the giant mining corporations might join in a fabulously expensive bid to use space travel to replenish the planet’s resources, voyaging to distant Pandora to extract its precious supply of unobtanium, a miraculous new source of energy.

It’s not that hard to imagine just such a future world if we continue on our present course toward ever greater resource consumption, increased carbon emissions, and the militarization of resource dependency.  Can you doubt that the movie Cameron and I would make, Avatar: Earth’s Last Stand, would be both gripping and spectacular?  It would be an amazing, if tension-producing place to visit in 3-D.  Here’s the only catch: you wouldn’t want to live there. 

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by Tom Laskawy

The industry talks a good game, but keeps churning out the same old junk. It’s no mystery that Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move anti-obesity campaign is built on industry cooperation. It’s also true that many experts are skeptical of the wisdom behind it; nutritionist Marion Nestle has been particularly critical both of the government’s food industry “health” partnerships as well as of the administration’s unwillingness to fight the industry’s relentless media advertising.

I tend to agree. While the Let’s Move initiative is full of worthy proposals, especially in the area of addressing food deserts and promoting farm-to-city initiatives, the idea of leaving restrictions on junk food television advertising—not to mention junk food taxes—out of the equation seems to base the pitch just a bit too much as an appeal to our better angels. It’s hard to see public service announcements and educational campaigns counteracting those hundreds of millions of dollars work of junk food ads Americans of all ages submit to every time they turn on their televisions.

And it certainly doesn’t help when star athletes, some of whom will no doubt participate in Let’s Move, continue to flack for junk food (from Petyon and Eli Manning and Oreos to Derek Jeter and Gatorade*). Meanwhile, anyone who’s been watching the Olympics knows that NBC’s coverage of this ultimate athletic event has been awash in ads for soda and other junk food. Even the Olympians themselves are in on the act—Alternet noted that snowboarder Brad Martin is featured prominently in a McDonald’s ad shown repeatedly during the Olympics.

Past attempts to restrict food-related advertising have failed, although our experience with restrictions on tobacco and liquor advertising makes clear the potential positive effect. There is, however, surprisingly little science behind proposals to restrict food ads. In fact, a recent study out of UCLA which claimed to find a connection between commercials and obesity, though it got a fair amount of attention, merely hinted at the relationship. The researchers used time-use diaries from 1997 and 2002, which included BMI data for parents and children who participated, to tease out a relationship between obesity and specific television viewing patterns.

Through statistical analysis of the data, the researchers concluded that there was an association between watching commercial broadcast television and increased BMI. The researchers reasoned that this was due to the high number of food ads. But their only measure was time spent watching television and not exposure to particular ads. Their conclusion is in effect, and sad to say, a big time assumption.

Further, because of the nature of the underlying data, they were unable to control for the income level of participants, which turns out to be a huge weakness in their analysis. This is because they also looked at the effect on BMI of watching commercial-free videos or DVDs and public television to try and impute the role of ads in obesity. Unfortunately, commercial-free television viewing habits (not to mention DVD ownership, especially ten years ago when the data were collected) correlates very highly with income. Income, in turn, correlates strongly with obesity: the poorer you are the more likely you are to be obese. As a result, it’s hard to know if their results tell us anything new.

This isn’t to say that I don’t believe in the connection between exposure to ads and obesity. It’s rather to observe that weak science won’t help convince anyone and tends to provide ammunition to the other side.

So color me pleased when I ran across this:

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago Institute for
Health Research and Policy have received a $2.2 million federal grant
to determine whether or not TV food advertising affects children’s
diet, physical activity and weight.

The four-year project,
funded by the National Cancer Institute, is unique because it will
separate out the effect of food advertising from the amount of time
that children watch TV.

“A number of studies have shown that increased TV watching is
associated with higher weight outcomes among kids, but they haven’t
been able to determine whether or not this is directly due to the type
of ads children see,” said Lisa Powell, research professor of economics
at UIC and lead scientist on the study.

…The research, Powell said, can provide important information for
policymakers and public health advocates about the potential
effectiveness of regulating television food advertising to children and
using TV media campaigns as policy tools for improving these health
outcomes.

Previous research conducted by Powell and her colleagues showed that 98
percent of food-product ads viewed by children ages 2 to 11, and 89
percent of those viewed by adolescents ages 12 to 17, were for foods
high in fat, sugar or sodium.

The current study is the first to combine food, beverage and restaurant
ad ratings and nutritional data with individual data on obesity to
analyze the relationship between product exposure, nutritional content
of ad exposure, and food consumption, diet quality and obesity,
according to the researchers.

The study will also examine the relationship between exposure to health
promotion ads—those that encourage eating fruits and vegetables or
getting regular physical activity—and individual behaviors related
to diet, activity and weight outcomes.

This study, it bears repeating, is government funded—the National Cancer Institute is an arm of the NIH. So, while the Let’s Move initiative very publicly launches with the food industry as a willing partner, the government is quietly funding research that might finally kick the legs out from industry’s arguments against more vigorous government regulation. It might also tell us if those public service announcements do any good as well.

The only shame is that we have to wait for another four years and for President Obama’s re-election, to get the study results and perhaps government action. For those awaiting truly dramatic, effective action on reducing Americans’ massive junk food consumption rates, Let’s Move threatens to remain Let’s Hope.

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by Fast Company

Photos: flickr users b and Jason McHuff

Portland, Oregon, is consistently ranked as one of the country’s most
livable cities (and it was a Fast City in 2007). And it continues to show solid
growth despite having the second lowest per capita transit spending of
the 28 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. A system of trains, streetcars,
buses, and aerial trams give the city one of the most diverse
transportation portfolios in the world. In this episode of e2, we find
out how have city planners integrated transportation planning into their
decision-making over the past 40 years?

This story provided by our friends at Fast Company.

Additional
digital shorts from the e2 Series: Seoul Reengineers a Freeway Into a Stream.

 

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by Teryn Norris

Bill Gates speaking at the TED conference.Photo: jurvetson via Flickr“If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years,” declared the world’s wealthiest man during last week’s TED 2010 conference, “I can pick who is president, I can pick a vaccine … or I can pick
that [an energy technology] at half the cost with no CO2 emissions gets
invented, this is the wish I would pick. This is the one with the
greatest impact.”

Bill Gates is right. And he is not just talking about the impact on
climate change, which does of course present a major threat. He is also
talking about one of the most critical global imperatives to make
poverty history: making clean energy cheap.

“If you could pick just one thing to lower the price of to reduce
poverty, by far you would pick energy,” said Gates in his introduction.
Gates should know as well as any development expert, since the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—the world’s largest transparent private foundation—has invested
billions of dollars in extreme poverty alleviation since 1994.

Nearly 1.6 billion of our fellow human beings have no access to
electricity, and around 2.4 billion people—over one third of global
population—meet their basic cooking and heating needs by burning
biomass, such as wood, crop waste, and dung. “Without access to modern,
commercial energy, poor countries can be trapped in a vicious circle of
poverty, social instability, and underdevelopment,” concludes the International Energy Agency.

The direct health consequences of using primitive solid fuels like biomass and coal are severe.  According to the World Health Organization,
solid fuel use causes 1.6 million excess deaths per year globally,
especially among women and children—the fourth largest risk factor
in developing countries after malnutrition, waterborne disease, and
unsafe sex, and the second greatest environmental cause of disease
overall.

These numbers are staggering. Energy poverty is an extreme and
dangerous condition, and its elimination must be one of the highest
development priorities for the 21st century. Nobody on this planet
should be forced to burn dung to feed their family and heat their home,
and access to modern energy sources should be considered a basic human
right.

The implication is that energy technology innovation today should be
considered one of the world’s most important social and economic
justice movements. The growing movement to make clean energy cheap, and
to deliver that energy globally, has the potential to alleviate as much
human suffering and injustice as some of the largest, concerted social
movements in history.

Of course, driving down the price of clean energy technologies is
also essential for reducing global carbon emissions. Until the price
gap between low-carbon and high-carbon energy is bridged, poor and rich
nations alike will continue relying upon coal and other fossil fuels to power their development.  This would virtually assure climate destabilization.

The task is clear: to eliminate energy poverty and avoid climate
catastrophe, we must unleash our forces of innovation—namely,
scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs—to develop a portfolio of
truly scalable clean energy technologies, bring these technologies to
market, and ensure they are affordable enough to deploy throughout the
world.

If you gave me only one wish, then, it would be for the United States to launch a major public-private project to make clean energy cheap (or as Google puts it, “renewable energy cheaper than coal”).
This requires the development of a comprehensive, strategic roadmap for
technology development and deployment, including the identification of
specific technical hurdles and the various financial and human
resources needed to overcome them. It will then require large-scale
public-private investment in each stage of the energy innovation
pipeline—from basic research and development, to applied R&D,
demonstration, direct deployment, infrastructure, and education—eventually on the scale of $50-80 billion per year of federal
investment.

The clean energy investments in the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act were an important first step. Congress should take the
next step today with a bipartisan plan to increase the federal energy
R&D budget to $15-30 billion per year, on par with the National Institutes of Health, and to develop a comprehensive federal energy education program.
If these investments are funded by a modest carbon price, then all the
better, but we can no longer make energy technology policy dependent on
the carbon pricing agenda. Clean energy innovation is an economic,
national security, and human development imperative, and these public
investments should be made with or without cap-and-trade.

The United States was a driving force behind the worldwide expansion
of prosperity and security in the 20th century. Today, a new American
project to make clean energy cheap can alleviate untold human suffering
and injustice, develop the world’s strongest clean energy industry, and
help save the world from climate destabilization. In short, it may be
our generation’s single greatest opportunity to advance global
prosperity in the 21st century and secure the lives of future
generations. As Bill Gates put it, “This is the one with the greatest
impact.”

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by Tom Philpott

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Just precisely what does all of that nitrogen ferilizer do to the soil?“Fertilizer is good for the father and bad for the sons.”
—Dutch saying

For all of its ecological baggage, synthetic nitrogen does one good deed for the environment: it helps build carbon in soil. At least, that’s what scientists have assumed for decades.

If that were true, it would count as a major environmental benefit of synthetic N use. At a time of climate chaos and ever-growing global greenhouse gas emissions, anything that helps vast swaths of farmland sponge up carbon would be a stabilizing force. Moreover, carbon-rich soils store nutrients and have the potential to remain fertile over time—a boon for future generations.

The case for synthetic N as a climate stabilizer goes like this. Dousing farm fields with synthetic nitrogen makes plants grow bigger and faster. As plants grow, they pull carbon dioxide from the air. Some of the plant is harvested as crop, but the rest—the residue—stays in the field and ultimately becomes soil. In this way, some of the carbon gobbled up by those N-enhanced plants stays in the ground and out of the atmosphere.

Well, that logic has come under fierce challenge from a team of University of Illinois researchers led by professors Richard Mulvaney, Saeed Khan, and Tim Ellsworth. In two recent papers (see here and here) the trio argues that the net effect of synthetic nitrogen use is to reduce soil’s organic matter content. Why? Because, they posit, nitrogen fertilizer stimulates soil microbes, which feast on organic matter. Over time, the impact of this enhanced microbial appetite outweighs the benefits of more crop residues.

And their analysis gets more alarming. Synthetic nitrogen use, they argue, creates a kind of treadmill effect. As organic matter dissipates, soil’s ability to store organic nitrogen declines. A large amount of nitrogen then leeches away, fouling ground water in the form of nitrates, and entering the atmosphere as nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas with some 300 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide. In turn, with its ability to store organic nitrogen compromised, only one thing can help heavily fertilized farmland keep cranking out monster yields: more additions of synthetic N.

The loss of organic matter has other ill effects, the researchers say. Injured soil becomes prone to compaction, which makes it vulnerable to runoff and erosion and limits the growth of stabilizing plant roots. Worse yet, soil has a harder time holding water, making it ever more reliant on irrigation. As water becomes scarcer, this consequence of widespread synthetic N use will become more and more challenging.

In short, “the soil is bleeding,” Mulvaney told me in an interview.

If the Illinois team is correct, synthetic nitrogen’s effect on carbon sequestration swings from being an important ecological advantage to perhaps its gravest liability. Not only would nitrogen fertilizer be contributing to climate change in a way not previously taken into account, but it would also be undermining the long-term productivity of the soil.

Getting their hands dirty: Saeed Khan, Richard Mulvaney, and Tim Ellsworth (l.-r.), in front of the Morrow Plots, University of Illinois. An Old Idea Germinates Anew
While their research bucks decades of received wisdom, the Illinois researchers know they aren’t breaking new ground here. “The fact is, the message we’re delivering in our papers really is a rediscovery of a message that appeared in the ‘20s and ‘30s,” Mulvaney says. In their latest paper, “Synthetic Nitrogen Fertilizers Deplete Soil Nitrogen: A Global Dilemma for Sustainable Cereal Production,” which appeared last year in the Journal of Environmental Quality, the researchers point to two pre-war academic papers that, according to Mulvaney, “state clearly and simply that synthetic nitrogen fertilizers were promoting the loss of soil carbon and organic nitrogen.”

That idea also appears prominently in The Soil and Health (1947), a founding text of modern organic agriculture. In that book, the British agronomist Sir Albert Howard stated the case clearly:

The use of artificial manure, particularly [synthetic nitrogen] … does untold harm. The presence of additional combined nitrogen in an easily assimilable form stimulates the growth of fungi and other organisms which, in the search for organic matter needed for energy and for building up microbial tissue, use up first the reserve of soil hummus and then the more resistant organic matter which cements soil particles.

In other words, synthetic nitrogen degrades soil.

That conclusion has been current in organic-farming circles since Sir Albert’s time. In an essay in the important 2002 anthology Fatal Harvest Reader, the California organic farmer Jason McKenney puts it like this:

Fertilizer application begins the destruction of soil biodiversity by diminishing the role of nitrogen-fixing bacteria and amplifying the role of everything that feeds on nitrogen. These feeders then speed up the decomposition of organic matter and humus. As organic matter decreases, the physical structure of soil changes. With less pore space and less of their sponge-like qualities, soils are less efficient at storing water and air. More irrigation is needed. Water leeches through soils, draining away nutrients that no longer have an effective substrate on which to cling. With less available oxygen the growth of soil microbiology slows, and the intricate ecosystem of biological exchanges breaks down.

Although those ideas flourished in organic-ag circles, they withered to dust among soil scientists at the big research universities. Mulvaney told me that in his academic training—he holds a PhD in soil fertility and chemistry from the University of Illinois, where he is now a professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences—he was never exposed to the idea that synthetic nitrogen degrades soil. “It was completely overlooked,” he says. “I had never heard of it, personally, until we dug into the literature.”

What sets the Illinois scientists apart from other critics of synthetic nitrogen is their provenance. Sir Albert’s denouncement sits in a dusty old tome that’s pretty obscure even within the organic-agriculture world; Jason McKenney is an organic farmer who operates near Berkeley—considered la-la land by mainstream soil scientists. Both can be—and, indeed have been—ignored by policymakers and large-scale farmers. By contrast, Mulvaney and his colleagues are living, credentialed scientists working at the premier research university in one of the nation’s most prodigious corn-producing—and nitrogen-consuming—states.

Abandon all hope, all fertilizer execs who enter here. The Dirt on Nitrogen, Soil, and Carbon
To come to their conclusions, the researchers studied data from the Morrow plots on the University of Illinois’ Urbana-Champaign campus, which comprise the “the world’s oldest experimental site under continuous corn” cultivation. The Morrow plots were first planted in 1876.

Mulvaney and his collaborators analyzed annual soil-test data in test plots that were planted with three crop rotations: continuous corn, corn-soy, and corn-oats-hay. Some of the plots received moderate amounts of fertilizer application; some received high amounts; and some received no fertilizer at all. The crops in question, particularly corn, generate tremendous amounts of residue. Picture a Midwestern field in high summer, packed with towering corn plants. Only the cobs are harvested; the rest of the plant is left in the field. If synthetic nitrogen use really does promote carbon sequestration, you’d expect these fields to show clear gains in soil organic carbon over time.

Instead, the researchers found, all three systems showed a “net decline occurred in soil [carbon] despite increasingly massive residue [carbon] incorporation.” (They published their findings, “The Myth of Nitrogen Fertilization for Soil Carbon Sequestration,” in the Journal of Environmental Quality in 2007.) In other words, synthetic nitrogen broke down organic matter faster than plant residue could create it.

A particularly stark set of graphs traces soil organic carbon (SOC) in the surface layer of soil in the Morrow plots from 1904 to 2005. SOC rises steadily over the first several decades, when the fields were fertilized with livestock manure. After 1967, when synthetic nitrogen became the fertilizer of choice, SOC steadily drops.

In their other major paper, “Synthetic Nitrogen Fertilizers Deplete Soil Nitrogen: A Global Dilemma for Sustainable Cereal Production” (2009), the authors looked at nitrogen retention in the soil. Given that the test plots received annual lashings of synthetic nitrogen, conventional ag science would predict a buildup of nitrogen. Sure, some nitrogen would be removed with the harvesting of crops, and some would be lost to runoff. But healthy, fertile soil should be capable of storing nitrogen.

In fact, the researchers found just the opposite. “Instead of accumulating,” they wrote, “soil nitrogen declined significantly in every subplot sampled.” The only explanation, they conclude, is that the loss of organic matter depleted the soil’s ability to store nitrogen. The practice of year-after-year fertilization had pushed the Morrow plots onto the chemical treadmill: unable to efficiently store nitrogen, they became reliant on the next fix.

The researchers found similar data from other test plots. “Such evidence is common in the scientific literature but has seldom been acknowledged, perhaps because N fertilizer practices have been predicated largely on short-term economic gain rather than long-term sustainability,” they write, citing some two dozen other studies which mirrored the patterns of the Morrow plots.

The most recent bit of evidence for the Mulvaney team’s nitrogen thesis comes from a team of researchers at Iowa State University and the USDA. In a 2009 paper (PDF), this group looked at data from two long-term experimental sites in Iowa. And they, too, found that soil carbon had declined after decades of synthetic nitrogen applications. They write: “Increases in decay rates with N fertilization apparently offset gains in carbon inputs to the soil in such a way that soil C sequestration was virtually nil in 78% of the systems studied, despite up to 48 years of N additions.”

Fertile ground for research: the Morrow Plots at the University of Illinois.Photo:brianholsclaw Slinging Dirt
Mulvaney and Khan laughed when I asked them what sort of response their work was getting in the soil-science world. “You can bet the fertilizer industry is aware of our work, and they aren’t too pleased,” Mulvaney said. “It’s all about sales, and our conclusions aren’t real good for sales.”

As for the soil-science community, Mulvaney said with a chuckle, “the response is still building.” There has been negative word-of-mouth reaction, he added, but so far, only two responses have been published: a remarkable fact, given that the first paper came out in 2007.

Both published responses fall into the those-data-don’t-say-what-you-say-they category. The first, published as a letter to the editor (PDF) in the Journal of Environmental Quality, came from D. Keith Reid, a soil fertility specialist with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. Reid writes that the Mulvaney team’s conclusion about synthetic nitrogen and soil carbon is “sensational” and “would be incredibly important if it was true.”

Reid acknowledges the drop in soil organic carbon, but argues that it was caused not by synthetic nitrogen itself, but rather by the difference in composition between manure and synthetic nitrogen. Manure is a mix of slow-release organic nitrogen and organic matter; synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is pure, readily available nitrogen. “It is much more likely that the decline in SOC is due to the change in the form of fertilizer than to the rate of fertilizer applied,” Reid writes.

Then he makes a startling concession:

From the evidence presented in this paper, it would be fair to conclude that modern annual crop management systems are associated with declines in SOC concentrations and that increased residue inputs from high nitrogen applications do not mitigate this decline as much as we might hope.

In other words, modern farming—i.e., the kind practiced on nearly all farmland in the United States—destroys soil carbon. (The Mulvaney team’s response to Reid’s critique can be found in the above-linked document.)

The second second critique (PDF) came from a team led by D.S. Powlson at the Department of Soil Science and Centre for Soils and Ecosystem Function at the Rothamsted Research Station in the United Kingdom. Powlson and colleagues attack the Mulvaney team’s contention that synthetic nitrogen depletes the soil’s ability to store nitrogen.

“We propose that the conclusion drawn by Mulvaney et al. (2009), that inorganic N fertilizer causes a decline in soil organic N concentration, is false and not supported by the data from the Morrow Plots or from numerous studies worldwide,” they write.

Then they, too, make a major concession: “the observation of significant soil C and N declines in subsoil layers is interesting and deserves further consideration.” That is, they don’t challenge Mulvaney team’s contention that synthetic nitrogen destroys organic carbon in the subsoil.

In their response (PDF), Mulvaney and his colleagues mount a vigorous defense of their methodology. And then they conclude:

In the modern era of intensified agriculture, soils are generally managed as a commodity to maximize short-term economic gain. Unfortunately, this concept entirely ignores the consequences for a vast array of biotic and abiotic soil processes that aff ect air and water quality and most important, the soil itself.

So who’s right? For now, we know that the Illinois team has presented a robust cache of evidence that turns 50 years of conventional soil science on its head—and an analysis that conventional soil scientists acknowledge is “sensational” and “incredibly important” if true. We also know that their analysis is consistent with the founding principles of organic agriculture: that properly applied manure and nitrogen-fixing cover crops, not synthetic nitrogen, are key to long-term soil health and fertility.

The subject demands more study and fierce debate. But if Mulvaney and his team are correct, the future health of our farmland hinges on a dramatic shift away from reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.

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by Daniel J. Weiss

Big oil, the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and senators including Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) are whipping up hysterical fears that the Environmental Protection
Agency will use its existing authority under the Clean Air Act to
immediately restrict global warming pollution for even the smallest of
emitters. For instance, NAM President John Engler makes the ridiculous claim that
“If EPA moves forward and begins regulating stationary sources, it will
open the door for them to regulate everything from industrial
facilities to farms to even American homes.”

In fact, EPA’s efforts are simply following the law of the land established by the  Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA.

To calm the hysteria, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson sent a letter to eight Democratic senators assuring them that EPA will
pursue a very deliberative process for establishing limits on global
warming pollution from the largest polluters first, which would leave
ample time for Congress to establish a more comprehensive pollution
reduction program before EPA standards take effect.

Administrator Jackson’s letter responded to a Feb. 19 letter from eight Democratic Senators that raised concerns about EPA’s plans to establish limits on global
warming pollution from industrial sources. The eight senators
represent coal mining, auto manufacturing, or oil and gas states. Five
are from coal states: Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Bob
Casey (Pa.), Max Baucus (Mont.), and Robert Byrd (W.Va.). Two come from auto
manufacturing states: Claire McCaskill (Miss.), Carl Levin (Mich.). And one
senator comes from an oil and gas state: Mark Begich (Ark.).

These senators urged that EPA provide time for Congress to adopt
comprehensive global warming legislation before using the Clean Air Act
authority to restrict pollution. They worry about the impact of EPA
setting carbon pollution limits for the utility and other large
polluting industries. They wrote Jackson:

We need a clear understanding of how you view your
agency’s responsibilities and the process by which you intent to carry
them out in order to represent the workers industries, taxpayers, and
economic interests of our states …

The President and you have been explicit in calling on
Congress to pass comprehensive legislation that would enhance our
nation’s energy and climate security. We strongly believe this is
ultimately Congress’ responsibility, and if done properly, will create
jobs, spur new clean energy industries, and greatly advance the goal of
U.S. energy independence.

These senators concerns are legitimate, but will not occur.
Administrator Jackson’s letter makes it clear that there is ample time
for Congress to pass bipartisan comprehensive clean energy and global
warming legislation before pollution limits under the Clean Air Act would begin.

No facility will be required to address greenhouse gas
emissions in Clean Air Act permitting of new construction or
modifications before 2011.

For the first half of 2011, only facilities that already must apply
for Clean Air Act permits as a result of their non-greenhouse gas
emissions will need to address their greenhouse gas emissions in their
permit applications.

EPA does not intend to subject smaller facilities to Clean Air Act permitting for greenhouse gas emissions any sooner than 2016.

Administrator Jackson also plans to increase the threshold for
setting carbon pollution limits so that it focuses on the largest
sources first.

EPA is also considering a modification to the rule
announced in September requiring large facilities emitting more than
25,000 tons of greenhouse gases a year to obtain permits demonstrating
they are using the best practices and technologies to minimize GHG
emissions. EPA is considering raising that threshold substantially to
reflect input provided during the public comment process.

Senator Begich was reassured by Administrator Jackson’s letter. He said that schedule described by in the letter “makes me feel a lot more comfortable.” Senator Rockefeller noted that “it helps,” though he still plans to
introduce a bill to delay EPA for two to five years. This delay seems
fairly unnecessary given the schedule in the EPA letter.

Administrator Jackson also makes it clear that passage of Sen.
Murkowski’s “Dirty Air Act” to block EPA from protecting people from
global warming pollution would undo the near final limits on greenhouse
gas pollution from motor vehicles that the auto industry negotiated in
2009.

You asked in your letter what the result would be if
Senator Murkowski’s resolution of disapproval of EPA’s endangerment
finding were enacted. One result would be to prevent EPA from issuing
its greenhouse gas standard for light-vehicles, because the
endangerment finding is a legal prerequisite of that standard … It would
undo an historic agreement among states, automakers, the federal
government, and other stakeholders.

Senator Levin expressed serious concerns about passage of the
Murkowski Dirty Air Act if it would undo the clean car agreement.  He
wrote a Michigan constituent that it

would undercut the Obama administration’s intention to
pursue a single, national standard for vehicle greenhouse gas
emissions. I support the administration’s plan to implement a single,
national standard, rather than a patchwork of standards that vary from
state to state.

These eight Democratic senators raised legitimate questions about
the impact of EPA’s following the law and the science, as required by
the Supreme Court. The endangerment finding will establish a careful,
thorough process for establishing limits on carbon pollution from the
largest industrial sources, such as coal fired power plants. It is now
incumbent on these senators—and Senator Murkowski—to ignore big oil
and special interest flame throwing, and instead join efforts led by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) to craft bipartisan, comprehensive legislation.

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