Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by David Schoenbrod

Most Americans breath dirty air—in
many places, levels of pollutants like nitrogen dioxide and ozone are in violation
of federal air quality standards. And now,
those standards are getting even stronger, which will put even more of the
country out of compliance: EPA recently upped standards for nitrogen dioxide
and is working on strengthening limits for other pollutants. But to make real improvements in air quality without
breaking the bank, what is called for is not another round of top-down
regulation, but an update of the Clean Air Act to allow strong market-based
solutions.  

Progress on cleaning our nation’s
air pollution has slowed because of the Clean Air Act’s structure. The law was adopted in 1970 and hasn’t been
updated since 1990. It worked well
in the past when there was plenty of low hanging fruit-cheap reductions that
achieved big benefits. But now its format,
which relies on each state to create detailed plans to meet national air
quality goals, has become unbearably cumbersome.  

The state plans must specify who
cuts emissions and how much, but to decide that local regulators need to understand  the details of production processes and
engineering options for all factories, power plants, and other polluters in
their jurisdictions. Regulators are ill-equipped
to dig into the nitty-gritty of each company’s practices to find the most
cost-effective cuts. And under top down
regulation, businesses have little incentive to provide the information to
regulators—so further progress is tough.
Even though there are likely to be smart, cheap ways to reduce emissions,
no one has both the incentive and know-how to find them.

Switching from top-down
regulation to a cap-and-trade system would allow for progress without
regulators needing information they can’t get about how pollution can be reduced.
Cap-and-trade sets a declining cap on
total emissions and allowances to emit are limited by this cap. The declining
cap would drive up the price of an allowance, which gives companies a
profit-based incentive to figure out how to cut emissions. It’s a win-win solution
where more reductions are made at a smaller cost to businesses. And in this down-turned economy, that’s
important both to reduce economic harm and to sell stronger environmental
controls to a skeptical public.  

As Barack Obama said during his
campaign, cap-and-trade is “a smarter way of controlling pollution,” because
the government doesn’t dictate “every single rule that a company has to abide
by, which creates a lot of bureaucracy and red tape and often-times is less
efficient.”

Congress should amend the Clean
Air Act to reflect this reality: a
national cap-and-trade system should cover the “major” emitters in the most
polluting industries, plus new vehicles and vehicle fuels. By bringing most air pollution under the same
system of caps, we will see major efficiency gains that allow us to get much
cleaner air with much less cost. This
system need apply to only 6 percent of the major stationary sources and none of the
hundreds of thousands of minor ones, but would still capture the lion’s share
of pollution subject to national goals. States should be freed from these plan
requirements in dealing with the rest of the sources, but subject to fallback
federal safeguards.

Congress has not revised the
Clean Air Act or any of the nation’s other major environmental statutes since
1990—this is an irresponsible omission because the pollution problem and our
understanding of how to deal with it have changed radically since the early
1970s when most of these statutes were originally structured. New national caps
that cover carbon as well as a range of other air pollutants are a good place
to start. We explain how Congress can overhaul its outdated environmental
statutes in Breaking the Logjam:
Environmental Protection That Will Work.

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by Tom Philpott

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

————-

Obesity, it seems, is the popular frame for looking critically of the food system: it’s the respectable pathway through which public figures can criticize industrial food. I wish there were another one. While the expansion of the American waistline is a material fact, emphasizing it, obsessing over it, repeating it endlessly, I fear, reinforces our national obsession with skinniness, unintentionally stigmatizes the very people who have been failed by the food system, and opens space for the food industry to respond with new products speciously marketed as weight-loss panaceas. As a nation, we have a tortured and schizophrenic relationship with food and body weight; a bevy of public figures fixating on fatness underscores that unhappy fixation.

Having said all of that, I think Katie Couric did a great job in this conversation with Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser and former FDA Commissioner David Kessler. Schlosser does himself proud by continually bringing the conversation back to the economic structures that create cheap, unhealthy food.

To see Couric’s hard-hitting CBS News reports on antibiotic abuse in industrial meat production, click the “Chewing the Scenery” link above. Speaking of which, Couric turns the conversation to that topic. It’s great to hear former FDA man Kessler denouncing the practice of dousing livestock with antibiotics; Schlosser, of course, kicks ass in that section,

Kessler also gives the most critical take on GMOs I’ve ever heard from a once-or-current U.S. public official.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

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by Sue Sturgis

An Alabama creekkeeper has filed a complaint with the Environmental Protection Agency citing health threats including runoff containing alarmingly high arsenic levels at a bankrupt landfill that’s taking hundreds of millions of gallons of coal ash
spilled from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston coal plant.

The Arrowhead Landfill—owned by Perry County Associates and managed by Phill-Con Services and Phillips & Jordan—is near Uniontown, Ala., a community in rural Perry County where 88 percent
of residents are African-American and almost half live in poverty. The
landfill sits only 100 feet from some people’s front porches.

“Why
is Perry County being treated like this?” asks Hurricane Creekkeeper
John Wathen, who wants the ash shipments stopped until the problems are
fixed. “Are the people in Perry County any less valuable than the
people of Kingston, Tenn.?”

Last July, the EPA approved TVA’s plan to ship by train to the Perry County dump more than half of the 1
billion gallons of coal ash that spilled from TVA’s Kingston plant in
eastern Tennessee’s Roane County in December 2008. EPA assured the
public that the Alabama landfill “complies with all technical
requirements specified by federal and state regulations,” but what
Wathen has documented calls that into question.

After months of
investigating local residents’ complaints of unusual runoff and
sickening smells and getting no help from state or EPA regional
regulators, Wathen sent a complaint to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson
yesterday documenting serious environmental health threats at the
976-acre facility:

* Dangerously high arsenic levels have
been found in what’s described as “stinking gray/tannish waste” being
pumped nightly pumping from the landfill. Tests of the leachate
collected by Wathen from one of the on-site pumps indicated the
presence of arsenic—a contaminant characteristic of coal ash and a known carcinogen—at 0.840mg/L. That’s more than 80 times the U.S. safe drinking water
standard of 0.01 mg/L and far higher than what’s considered safe for
aquatic life. Wathen took his findings to the Alabama Department of
Environmental Management, but ADEM reportedly declined to investigate
after the landfill manager denied the pumping claims. “No tests, no
samples, no interviews of employees or nearby residents [affected],”
says Wathen’s complaint, “just a simple denial by the manager was good
enough to refute hundreds of photos, certified lab results, [anecdotal]
stories from the community, or first hand eye witness account[s] by me.”

* The arsenic-tainted waste runs in the landfill’s roadside ditches at levels that have exceeded safe drinking water limits. “While people do not drink from the ditch, it leads through private
land where farm animals do drink from the surface water,” Wathen says.
The ditches also drain into local streams. ADEM
has attributed the material in the ditches to the chalky local soils
used to build the haul road, but Wathen says the agency has failed to
produce any evidence to back up that claim. Perry County is not among the areas of the U.S. where dramatically elevated levels of arsenic have been found to occur naturally in groundwater due to high levels in soils.

* An excessive amount of wet material is being dumped into the landfill, threatening the protective liner. The mixture of spilled coal ash and and other hazardous waste being
dumped into the landfill is now piled about 60 feet high in places,
with the wet conditions adding to the crushing weight. “The liquid
levels actually stand well above the top of the liner and the high
water levels seem to be consistent regardless of rain,” Wathen writes.
“It is my understanding the landfill allows a maximum permissible
liquid level of only 18 inches above the bottom of the liner. There
looks to be at least 20 feet of water standing in existing cells.”
Compounding the problem, the company that had been taking waste liquids
from the landfill announced earlier this month that it would no longer accept the shipments,
which it had planned to treat before sending through the Mobile public
sewer system. Wathen had counted as many as 20 tanker trucks—each
carrying as much as 9,000 gallons of leachate—leaving the site each
day.

* Contaminated coal ash is falling from overloaded, uncovered trucks and spilling along the road. “This means that the haul road itself is now contaminated and all storm
water leaving the haul road should be treated as potentially toxic,”
writes Walthen. Untreated runoff from the road now flows into nearby
Tayloe Creek—and when the rain subsides and the weather dries out,
the concern is that all the mud will turn into airborne dust.

*
When the train cars hauling coal ash to the landfill are washed off,
the runoff is allowed to flow into Tayloe Creek’s drainage basin. While the landfill operator erected silt fences at the site recently,
they were standing under several feet of sludge during Wathen’s two
inspections earlier this month. And at the point where the site drains
into the creek, the operator has constructed a dam of riprap,
essentially using the waterway as a treatment facility—something
that Wathen notes is prohibited by both EPA and Army Corps of Engineers
regulations.

“According to the agreement with EPA and TVA, no
ash can be shipped to any landfill that does not meet compliance
standards,” Wathen writes in the complaint. “We therefore respectfully
request that EPA order a complete stopping of disaster ash to Perry
County until this landfill is in complete compliance as certified by
EPA national headquarters. EPA Region 4 and ADEM have failed us.”

In the meantime, Florida attorney David Ludder has announced that he plans to sue the landfill’s operators on behalf of 155 local residents over the foul smell coming from the
facility. He had previously announced plans to sue the facility’s
owners, but they filed for bankruptcy last month—a move that prevents any new lawsuits from being filed against them until the bankruptcy is settled.

(To see photos of the Arrowhead Landfill,
including aerial shots provided courtesy of SouthWings, click here. This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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by Lester Brown

More and more utilities are beginning to realize that building large power plants just to handle peak daily and seasonal demand is a very costly way of managing an electricity system. Existing electricity grids are typically a patchwork of local grids that are simultaneously inefficient, wasteful, and dysfunctional in that they often are unable, for example, to move electricity surpluses to areas of shortages. The U.S. electricity grid today resembles the roads and highways of the mid-twentieth century before the interstate highway system was built. What is needed today is the electricity equivalent of the interstate highway system.

The inability to move low-cost electricity to consumers because of congestion on transmission lines brings with it costs similar to those associated with traffic congestion. The lack of transmission capacity in the eastern United States is estimated to cost consumers $16 billion a year in this region alone.

In the United States, a strong national grid would permit power to be moved continuously from surplus to deficit regions, thus reducing the total generating capacity needed. Most important, the new grid would link regions rich in wind, solar, and geothermal energy with consumption centers. A national grid, drawing on a full range of renewable energy sources, would itself be a stabilizing factor.

Establishing strong national grids that can move electricity as needed and that link new energy sources with consumers is only half the battle, however. The grids and appliances need to become “smarter” as well. In the simplest terms, a smart grid is one that takes advantage of advances in information technology, integrating this technology into the electrical generating, delivery, and user system, enabling utilities to communicate directly with customers and, if the latter agree, with their household appliances.

Smart grid technologies can reduce power disruption and fluctuation that cost the U.S. economy close to $100 billion a year, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. In an excellent 2009 Center for American Progress study, Wired for Progress 2.0: Building a National Clean-Energy Smart Grid, Bracken Hendricks notes the vast potential for raising grid efficiency with several information technologies: “A case in point would be encouraging the widespread use of synchrophasors to monitor voltage and current in real time over the grid network. It has been estimated that better use of this sort of real-time information across the entire electrical grid could allow at least a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency in the United States.” This and many other examples give us a sense of the potential for increasing grid efficiency.

A smart grid not only moves electricity more efficiently in geographic terms; it also enables electricity use to be shifted over time—for example, from periods of peak demand to those of off-peak demand. Achieving this goal means working with consumers who have “smart meters” to see exactly how much electricity is being used at any particular time. This facilitates two-way communication between utility and consumer so they can cooperate in reducing peak demand in a way that is advantageous to both. And it allows the use of two-way metering so that customers who have a rooftop solar electric panel or their own windmill can sell surplus electricity back to the utility.

Smart meters coupled with smart appliances that can receive signals from the grid allow electricity use to be shifted away from peak demand. Higher electricity prices during high demand periods also prod consumers to change their behavior, thus improving market efficiency. For example, a dishwasher can be programmed to run not at 8 p.m. but at 3 a.m., when electricity demand is much lower, or air conditioners can be turned off for a brief period to lighten the demand load.

Another approach being pioneered in Europe achieves the same goal but uses a different technology. In any grid, there is a narrow range of fluctuation in the power being carried. An Italian research team is testing refrigerators that can monitor the grid flow and, when demand rises or supply drops, simply turn themselves off for as long as it is safe to do so. New Scientist reports that if this technology were used in the 30 million refrigerators in the United Kingdom, it would reduce national peak demand by 2,000 megawatts of generating capacity, allowing the country to close four coal-fired power plants.

A similar approach could be used for air conditioning systems in both residential and commercial buildings. Karl Lewis, COO of GridPoint, a U.S. company that designs smart grids, says “we can turn off a compressor in somebody’s air conditioning system for 15 minutes and the temperature really won’t change in the house.” The bottom line with a smart grid is that a modest investment in information technology can reduce peak power, yielding both savings in electricity and an accompanying reduction in carbon emissions.

Some utilities are pioneers in using time-based pricing of electricity, when electricity used during off-peak hours is priced much lower than that used during peak hours. Similarly, in regions with high summer temperatures, there is often a costly seasonal peak demand. Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE), for example, conducted a pilot program in 2008 in which participating customers who permitted the utility to turn off their air conditioners for selected intervals during the hottest days were credited generously for the electricity they saved. The going rate in the region is roughly 14 cents per kilowatt-hour. But for a kilowatt-hour saved during peak hours on peak days, customers were paid up to $1.75—more than 12 times as much. Thus if they saved 4 kilowatt-hours of electricity in one afternoon, they got a $7 credit on their electricity bill. Customers reduced their peak electricity consumption by as much as one-third, encouraging BGE to design a similar program with even more “smart” technology for summer 2009.

Within the United States the shift to smart meters is moving fast, with some 28 utilities planning to deploy smart meters in the years ahead. Among the leaders are California’s two major utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison, which are planning on full deployment to their 5.1 million and 5.3 million customers by 2012. Both will offer variable rates to reduce peak electricity use. Among the many other utilities aiming for full deployment are American Electric Power in the Midwest (5 million customers) and Florida Power and Light (4.4 million customers).

Europe, too, is installing smart meters, with Finland setting the pace. A Swedish research firm, Berg Insight, projects that Europe will have 80 million smart meters installed by 2013.

Unfortunately, the term “smart meters” describes a wide variety of meters, ranging from those that simply provide consumers with real-time data on electricity use to those that facilitate two-way communication between the utility and customer or even between the utility and individual household appliances. The bottom line: the smarter the meter, the greater the savings.

Taking advantage of information technology to increase the efficiency of the grid, the delivery system, and the use of electricity at the same time is itself a smart move. Simply put, a smart grid combined with smart meters enables both electrical utilities and consumers to be much more efficient.

Adapted from Chapter 4, “Stabilizing Climate: Shifting to Renewable Energy,” 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

Additional data and information sources at www.earthpolicy.org

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by Tom Philpott

What the hell are you feeding us?In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries.

————-

Agricultural societies, I imagine, have always fed waste products to livestock. On diversified farms, pigs and chickens get lots of kitchen scraps and “culls”—produce that can’t be sold. And it’s worthwhile to keep cows around if you have access to pasture—cows convert a wild, low-input perennial crop (grass), which humans can’t digest, into highly nutritious beef and milk.

But as agriculture industrialized, the waste products that farmers serve to farm animals have industrialized, too. Before the rise of massive facilities that house thousands of chickens and vast feedlots that confine thousands of cows, I doubt anyone thought of feeding “chicken litter”—feces mixed with bedding, feathers, and uneaten feed—to cows. Chicken litter was a valuable fertilizer; it added not just nitrogen and other nutrients to soil, but also plenty of organic matter.

But with the rise of industrial chicken production, farms produced way too much litter to be absorbed by nearby land (not that they don’t often severely overload the land around them).

So what was once a resource has become a waste problem—and one solution has been to feed chicken litter to cows. Cows consume between 1 million and 2 million tons of chicken waste per year—and then we consume those cows This is a vile practice that should be banned. Here’s how Consumers Union describes the quality of chicken litter as cow feed:

Poultry litter consists primarily of manure, feathers, spilled feed and bedding material that accumulate on the floors of the buildings that house chickens and turkeys. It can contain disease-causing bacteria, antibiotics, toxic heavy metals, restricted feed ingredients including meat and bone meal from dead cattle, and even foreign objects such as dead rodents, rocks, nails and glass. Few of these hazards are eliminated by any processing that might occur before use as feed. The resulting health threats include the spread of mad cow disease and related human neurological diseases, the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, and the potential for exposure to toxic metals, drug residues, and disease-causing bacteria.

That description reminds us that the regulation of livestock feed is pretty minimal.

As I’ve reported before, feedlot operators are feeding cows more and more distillers grains—waste from the corn-ethanol process—even though regulators acknowledge that the practice seems to encourage the growth of the deadly-to-humans pathogen E coli 0157. Distillers grains are also loaded with antibiotic residues  and various industrial chemicals.

Given that food-safety authorities are only too willing to let filthy industrial waste be fed to the animals that we eventually eat—and overlook clear evidence of health consequences in the process—no one should be surprised that the biodiesel industry is jonesing for a piece of the livestock-feed market. The main industrial waste product from biodiesel is glycerin, a substance often used in cosmetics. As biodiesel production ramps up, the industry is churning out much more of the stuff than it can sell to the cosmetic industry.

And even when biodiesel producers can sell their glycerin for that purpose, the stuff first must be purified—an energy-intensive and expensive process. Often, biodiesel plants spend more purifying glycerin than they get back in sales. So there’s a huge glut, and the industry is looking for a place to profitably dump a bunch of unpurified glycerin. Can anyone guess not what comes next?

Get this, from Farm & Ranch Guide:

Crude glycerin can be purified for use in human products such as cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and a variety of food items. Purification of crude glycerin is a costly and energy-intensive procedure; therefore, glycerin intended for livestock consumption is normally not purified.

Yes, glycerin is now flowing from biodiesel factories to feedlots, without being purified in between.

I have no idea if cows fed on industrial glycerin suffer ill health effects. Nor, I’d wager, do food-safety authorities. But if evidence of such effects arises, we have no reason to think that authorities will intervene to stop the practice.

Enough tainted burger to infect the whole Mexico City
Last time the ol’ Meat Wagon got cranked up, California-based Huntington Meat Pack had recalled 860,000 pounds of ground beef laced with e. coli 0157. That was enough tainted product, we calculated at the time, to make the equivalent of 3.56 million Quarter Pounders. Whoa.

But it turns out that. like a certain car maker, Huntington didn’t cast its recall net quite wide enough. From a USDA press release:

Huntington Meat Packing Inc., a Montebello, Calif., establishment, is expanding its recall of January 18 to include approximately 4.9 million additional pounds of beef and veal products that were not produced in accordance with the company’s food safety plan. The products are adulterated because the company made the products under insanitary conditions failing to take the steps it had determined were necessary to produce safe products, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced today.

Damn: an additional 4.9 million pounds, produced “under insanitary conditions.” According to our proprietary mathematical models, that’s enough dodgy beef to make 19.6 million Quarter Pounders. The two recalls combine for a grand total of 24.5 million Quarter Pounders, or enough to (potentially) sicken every man, woman, and child in Mexico City—with a few million burgers left over for suburbanites. (Attention meat industry: this is not an invitation to dump recalled meat on foreign markets!)

The scale is colossal, jaw-dropping; the big numbers had Meat Wagon’s trusty IBM mainframe sending out smoke signals.

And it gets worse; there could literally be foul play involved. Back to the press release:

The recall was expanded based on evidence collected in an ongoing criminal investigation being conducted by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) with assistance from FSIS. This evidence shows that the products subject to this recall expansion were produced in a manner that did not follow the establishment’s Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) plan. A HACCP plan describes the process controls an establishment must take to prevent food safety hazards and create a safe and wholesome product. The investigation has uncovered evidence to show that the food safety records of the establishment cannot be relied upon to document compliance with the requirements. Therefore, FSIS must consider the products to be adulterated and has acted to remove the products from commerce.

I hope this means that the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), which oversees the meat industry on safety issues, is finally growing a set of …uh, teeth. Not long ago, the Obama administration finally named and FSIS director, after dawdling for a year. Last week, the agency ramped up its amazingly lax standards around the safety of meat served in schools. As Tom Laskawy out it, let’s hope these are “the seeds, and not the crumbs, of change.”

Here’s a litmus test: how about banning the dumping of disgusting industrial waste products in animal feed, like chicken litter and distillers grains?

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by Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON—Three major U.S. companies said Tuesday they were leaving a coalition pushing for action on climate change, dealing a potential fresh blow to landmark legislation to cut carbon emissions.

The companies—oil groups ConocoPhillips and BP America and equipment maker Caterpillar Inc.—said they backed efforts for a green economy but felt that proposed laws were unfair to them.

The firms said they would not renew membership in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of business leaders whom President Barack Obama’s Democratic party often cites to bulwark its case on climate change.

ConocoPhillips and BP America, a unit of British giant BP, said the bill under consideration did not attach enough importance to natural gas—which they promote as a way to curb carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

The bills “have disadvantaged the transportation sector and its consumers, left domestic refineries unfairly penalized versus international competition, and ignored the critical role that natural gas can play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Jim Mulva, ConocoPhilips chair and CEO. “We believe greater attention and resources need to be dedicated to reversing these missed opportunities, and our actions today are part of that effort,” he said in a statement.

Ronnie Chappell, a spokesman for BP America, said that demand for natural gas stood to stay flat or decline in the next 10 to 15 years due to concessions to the coal industry aimed at winning over lawmakers’ support. “We think we can address our concerns around these problem areas better as BP than as a member of USCAP,” Chappell said.

The House of Representatives in June narrowly approved the first-ever U.S. plan to force cuts in carbon emissions—a leading priority for the Obama administration. But the Senate has yet to follow suit and the political climate is uncertain, with the Democrats last month losing a seat to a critic of the legislation.

In a statement, USCAP said its membership periodically changed and that it expected more companies to join.

Companies that remain in USCAP include oil giant Shell, conglomerates General Electric and Honeywell, and Detroit’s Big Three automakers—Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors.

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by Umbra Fisk

Brianne DiSylvester, owner of Get Lick’d Organic Dog Treats and Change Agent featured in today’s Ask Umbra video, was kind enough to give us this tasty treat recipe for your furry friends. Enjoy, dearests, and let me know how your pups like the muffins in the comments below (FYI, you can eat them too, but they may not be up to your palate standards).

I’m the size of a muffin.

Get Lick’d Organic Peanut Butter Carob Treats
Makes 48 muffins

2 cups organic brown rice flour
1 cup water
1/4 cup vegan carob chips
1 Tb organic peanut butter
1 tsp aluminum-free baking powder
1/2 tsp organic vanilla
1 organic egg

Fill a pot with an inch of water. Heat on high. In a bowl, combine carob chips, peanut butter, and water. Place the bowl on top of the pot so the steam and heat melt the carob chips (a double boiler). Whisk occasionally for a minute or two until the carob chips are completely melted. Remove the bowl (careful, it’s hot), and whisk in the brown rice flour, baking powder, and vanilla. Once combined, whisk in an egg. Heat the oven to 350 degrees, and fill the mini muffin tin cups 3/4 of the way to the top. Bake for 12 minutes for the soft version, which lasts about a week (perfect for pooch parties). For a crunchy version that lasts three to four months, place the mini muffins on a cookie sheet and bake an additional three to four hours at 200 degrees.

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by Tim Halbur

This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community.

Transit agencies are failing to bring women into the planning process, according to a new report from the Mineta Transportation Institute. I talked with UCLA’s Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, author of the study, about what she uncovered in her research and strategies for improving the perception of safety on transit for women.

Loukaitou-Sideris is no stranger to the issue of safety and transit. In 1998, she authored a study with her colleague Robin Liggett looking at 120 bus stops around Los Angeles and found significant links between environmental attributes and crime. But her latest study goes beyond the actual crime statistics to look at fear itself. What makes women riders feel unsafe, and thus decide not to ride transit? We talked to Loukaitou-Sideris about this fascinating study.

Loukaitou-Sideris: In many parts of the world, women rely on public transportation more than men. And women are more fearful than men being out in public spaces. This study looks at women’s particular needs as transit riders, especially in respect to safety and security. What are they afraid of? What are the issues they are facing? But the other part of the study has to do with how these needs are being met, or not met. And then finally, are there any innovative solutions?

I did a number of surveys with national groups that are advocating for women’s issues, and a nationwide survey of all transit agencies throughout the U.S. that have more than 50 public transportation vehicles. Almost every state was represented. And the findings were revealing: While two-thirds of respondents believed that women travelers have some specific needs, only one-third felt that transit agencies should really do something about it. The most shocking part of that survey was that only 3 percent of the agencies had any programs for women.

In terms of the interviews, women have significant concerns about riding transit, and there is a mismatch between the practices of transportation agencies and some of the wishes of women riders. For example, women are much more scared waiting at the bus stop or transit station than within the enclosed space of the transit vehicle. Yet most transportation safety resources are concentrated on the vehicle. Women were also not comforted knowing that there was a camera or CCT technology. They were not against it, but they felt that if anything happened to them the camera would only help after the event, not during. So they were much more in favor of more policing, human solutions rather than technological solutions. Yet the trend is towards more technology, not less. We found a lot of these sorts of mismatches between policy and what women want.

We also found that other countries are doing much more. Particularly I’m talking about the U.K., Australia and Canada, that have all incorporated women’s voices into transportation planning. And the report talks about some of these efforts from the grassroots level to the institutional level that respond to women’s needs.

PLANETIZEN: It’s not surprising to me that cameras aren’t found effective when it comes to perceived safety. What were some strategies that you found are the most effective?

Loukaitou-Sideris: Well, when you’re dealing with issues of crime or the fear of crime, there’s not one solution. It’s a combination of things, ranging from where you choose to locate your bus stops—so that they are in settings that enable natural surveillance, that they have good lighting—but also how you connect the different parts of your transportation system.

For example, you have a station platform that is well lit and there are a lot of people around. But if you have to park at the park-and-ride lot and walk to the platform, the walk may be dark. Oftentimes, women are scared of parking lots. So they range from locational issues and design issues to policy issues like having dedicated spaces for women drivers nearby security kiosks. Some other countries have “request stop” programs at night, where women can ask the bus driver to stop where it is safer for them instead of just at the designated bus stop.

I’m not against technological solutions. Buttons that one can press to summon police or connect to 911 if one feel victimized are useful. Women talked about trying to minimize the time when they wait for the bus, so “next bus” or “next train” signs are good. There’s a combination of things that transportation agencies should use.

PLANETIZEN: There is obviously a difference here between actual crime statistics and what this report looks at, which is fear and feelings of safety. Did you look at the difference between the two?

First of all, it is two different things. But ultimately what matters for transportation agencies is if people, both men and women, are fearful. If people perceive an area as dangerous, they won’t take the bus or the train, no matter what the hard statistics say. So perception of fear, in my view, is as significant as the reality.

Second, there is a tremendous underreporting of crime from women on sexual harassment and assault. So the hard data about crime don’t show the whole story. And I’m not talking necessarily about what the FBI calls “type 1” crime, which is the most serious crime. What oftentimes scares is a whole category of crime that involves groping and sexual harassment. Women are quite intimidated to report these kinds of crimes, it is difficult to report, and there is a perception that there is not much that the police can do. And these types of crimes really intimidate women transit riders, and lead them to avoid certain transit modes or use them only during specific times of the day or only when they are accompanied. If you only look at the hard data, you don’t see that.

And transit agencies have to do something about this, because after all, 51 percent of their users are women. So even from the standpoint of expanding the transit market, it is a real issue.

PLANETIZEN: Did you also look at the demographics of the transportation agencies themselves? I assume they are overwhelmingly male.

Loukaitou-Sideris: The people we asked to survey from the transportation agencies were the general managers and the heads of security, and 75 percent of the respondents were men. Which I would say is indicative of the field, and certainly at higher administrative levels you find more men than women. This may be one of many explanations of why transit agencies here in the U.S. have not really looked at this issue. If you look into Japan, or Mexico, Brazil, the countries I mentioned before, this issue is being dealt with much more systematically than here in the U.S.

PLANETIZEN: Your “whole journey” approach is fascinating, that transit agencies need to plan not only for the vehicle and the station, but the parking lot and the surrounding approach to the station or stop.

Loukaitou-Sideris: There are studies in Chicago that find block-by-block that more crime tends to happen in the vicinity of the station than within the station, and my own studies show the same. And that’s something more transit agencies need to look at. It’s admittedly more difficult to implement, it’s easier to protect the enclosed vehicle or the enclosed station. But there are so many components to today’s transit stations, like park-and-ride lots, escalators, elevators. They really need to look at all of these components and how they link to the rest of the city, because a lot of the crime happens in these in-between spaces.

PLANETIZEN: So imagine I’m a transportation planner, and I’m reading your interview right now on Planetizen. What would you urge me to do?

Loukaitou-Sideris: To incorporate women’s voices into the planning process. I was asked to speak at a conference recently specifically on women’s issues and transportation, and there were some women transportation planners there who were saying, “Well, we have to look only to universal needs.” I respectfully disagree, because there are specific needs. Transportation planners really need to look at women’s fears in transportation settings and know that there are things that they can do to if not completely eliminate but reduce these fears. These solutions involve policy, design, policing, and outreach and education.

Of course, this costs money. But my work and the work of others has shown that crime comes at hotspots: not every area is equally unsafe. Transit agencies do audits every year, and they know where these hotspots are. So when we talk about limited resources, they could concentrate their resources on these areas.

——-

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris is a professor of urban planning in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA. She is the co-author of the book Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form and the co-editor of the book Jobs and Economic Development in Minority Communities. Her latest book, Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space (Urban and Industrial Environments), about the social uses of sidewalks was published by the MIT Press in 2009.

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How smart is your city?

by David Roberts

I have a piece in the latest issue of the American Prospect called “This Is How You’ll Get There.” It’s a review of two books: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), by journalist Tom Vanderbilt, and Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century, by three brilliant supergeeks (two from GM’s advanced auto division; one from MIT’s Smart Cities program).

I know book reviews aren’t the most exciting genre in the world, but I quite like this one, mainly because the books kind of blew my mind. The first is about the quirks and dysfunctions of our current transportation system; the second is about the transportation system of the future. Though Reinventing the Automobile is written in dry, wonky engineer-speak, it adds up to something fairly radical. The message: building 21st century transportation means building 21st century cities.

Anyway, go read it!

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by Grist

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Photo courtesy

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by Brad Johnson

Cross-posted from the Wonk Room.

In “Global warming’s snowball fight,”
Dana Milbank, the Washington Post‘s premier Capitol Hill
reporter-turned-columnist, applied his trademark snark to the political
debate over climate change. His George Will-style column is based on the premise that “the greens” have been “hoist by
their own petard” because they have “argued by anecdote to make their
case.” Milbank makes an incomprehensible attack on the “storm stories”
of Al Gore for making people expect an “endless worldwide heat wave”
even though it’s “not that Gore is wrong.” He goes on to mock science
by anecdote:

Other environmentalists have undermined the cause with claims bordering on the outlandish;
they’ve blamed global warming for shrinking sheep in Scotland, more
shark and cougar attacks, genetic changes in squirrels, an increase in
kidney stones and even the crash of Air France Flight 447.

The central flaw in Milbank’s piece is the idea that climate
activists discuss the consequences of global warming to validate the
theory of climate change. Rather, activists know that global warming is
real because of the broad corpus of scientific understanding that greenhouse gases are warming the planet. When scientists,
environmentalists, and politicians like Al Gore talk about storms and
squirrels, they’re explaining what global warming has already done to
the planet and what it will do in the future. There is no real debate
over the existence of global warming—it’s a fiction created by the
fossil industry, a handful of conspiracy theorists, and right-wing
ideologues. Environmentalists talk about typhoons and kidney stones
because those phenomena can kill people—and we are collectively
responsible for increasing these threats.

The specific examples Milbank chose for mockery from a list compiled by the Heritage Foundation are in fact perfectly valid observations conducted not by “environmentalists” but by research scientists:

“shrinking sheep in Scotland”  is a reference to “The Dynamics of Phenotypic Change and the Shrinking Sheep of St. Kilda,” a paper by Arpat Ozgul and other scientists published in Science, 2009.  The paper simply finds that changes in regional climate explain observed changes in sheep body weight, making no assertions about global climate change.

“more shark and cougar attacks” refers to two
different stories, neither of which “blame global warming” for the
attacks. A 2008 article in the Guardian quoted Dr. George Burgess, a
shark researcher at Florida University, as the “one thing that’s
affecting shark attacks more than anything else” is an “increase in human hours in the water.” Burgess also noted that “[a]nother contributory factor
to the location of shark attacks could be global warming and rising sea
temperatures.”

A 2007 Canada National Post story said that a “combination of warm
winters and Alberta’s population boom is causing a recent jump in
cougar attacks,” citing a Canadian government official. The “warm
winters” are described as “natural fluctuations.” No mention is made of global warming.

“genetic changes in squirrels” refers to “Genetic and plastic responses of a northern mammal to climate change” by Denis Reale and other biologists, published in 2003 in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B.
The researchers found that “increasing spring temperatures” in the
1990s “advanced the timing of breeding” of red squirrels in the
southwest Yukon by over two weeks. No “environmentalists” were involved.

“an increase in kidney stones” refers to 2008’s “Climate-related increase in the prevalence of urolithiasis in the United States,” published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science by climate scientist Tom Brikowski and urologists Yair Lotan and
Margaret Pearle. This funny-sounding problem, the scientists found, is
expected to increase medical costs from kidney stones by $1 billion a
year.

“even the crash of Air France Flight 447” refers to an RT.com story that quotes Aleksey Kokorin, a Russian scientist who works for the
World Wildlife Federation. Kokorin warns that global warming could
increase severe weather like the conditions that contributed to the crash of Air France Flight 447. At no point does he “blame” global warming for the crash.

It’s probably true that hack journalists are writing too many
stories with sensationalistic headlines about work being done by
climate scientists. It’s also true that scientists like to study
funny-sounding things, something Milbank’s hero Sen John McCain (R-Ariz.) is famous for mocking.
But manmade global warming is an unfortunate reality, not a “cause”
based on shark and squirrel stories. Perhaps if Milbank worked harder
at his job than surfing DeMint’s Twitter feed, Inhofe’s Facebook page,
and the Heritage Foundation’s website, he’d understand that.

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by Agence France-Presse

PARIS—Less than two months after it was hastily drafted to stave off a fiasco, the Copenhagen Accord on climate change is floundering, and some are already saying it has no future.

The deal was crafted amid chaos by a small group of countries, led by the United States and China, to avert an implosion of the U.N.‘s Dec. 7-18 climate summit.

Savaged at the time by green activists and poverty campaigners as disappointing, gutless, or a betrayal, the Accord is now facing its first test in the political arena—and many views are caustic.

Veterans say the document has little traction and cannot pull the 194-nation U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) toward a new global pact by year’s end.

Political momentum is so weak that so far only two negotiating rounds have been rostered in 2010, one among officials in Bonn in mid-year, the other in Mexico at ministerial level in December.

Worse, the Accord itself already seems to have been quietly disowned by China, India, and other emerging economies just weeks after they helped write it, say these sources.

“Publicly, they are being bubbly and supportive about the Copenhagen Accord. In private, they are urinating all over it,” one observer, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP.

The Accord’s supporters say it is the first wide-ranging deal to peg global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) and gather rich and poor countries in specific pledges for curbing carbon emissions. And it promises money: $30 billion for climate-vulnerable poor countries by 2012, with as much as $100 billion annually by 2020.

Critics say there is no roadmap for reaching the warming target and point out the pledges are voluntary, whereas the Kyoto Protocol—which took effect five years ago today—has tough compliance provisions for rich polluters.

Anger among small countries sidelined from the crazed huddle in Copenhagen was so fierce that the paper failed to get approval at a plenary session.

That meant the Accord’s credibility rating is based on what happened on Jan. 31, a self-described “soft” deadline set by the UNFCCC. Under it, countries would register their intended actions for tackling carbon emissions and say if they wish to be “associated” with the agreement.

The roster on actions is nicely filled, but there are glaring gaps in the “association” side. China (the world’s No. 1 polluter), India, Brazil, and South Africa, as well as Russia among the developed countries, have all failed to make this endorsement.

The U.S. sees this as backsliding, which could return negotiations to the finger-pointing and textual nitpicking that brought Copenhagen so close to disaster. Its climate pointman, Todd Stern, said last Tuesday that he believed the big four developing countries “will sign on.”

“The consequences of not doing so are so serious—in a word, leaving the accord stillborn, contrary to the clear assent their leaders gave to the accord in Copenhagen,” Stern said.

The Chinese and Indian governments, questioned by AFP, declined to comment on specifics of their positions.

Michael Zammit Cutajar, former chairman of a UNFCCC negotiating group, said the Copenhagen Accord was flawed by “incoherence” as to how it should dovetail with the overall UNFCCC forum and parallel talks on extending Kyoto. “Beyond the lack of clarity in its drafting, its main weakness is the lack of ambition and identifying responsibilities,” he said in an interview. “Who should do what, and when, in order to limit warming to 2C?”

Saleemul Huq with the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London said the developing major nations, by refusing to endorse the Accord, “are clearly signalling their view that the UNFCCC process is still the only game in town.”

“This means that any impressions that anyone might have had that the Accord had succeeded in hiving off the ‘main players’ into a separate process to the UNFCCC are just a delusion,” he said.

So does the Copenhagen Accord have any real future? Or is it doomed to be consigned to a desk drawer?

“It’s still too early to know,” said Elliot Diringer of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a U.S. think tank.

Seeking to breathe life into its provisions, the United States and others may launch a “friends of the Accord” process, running parallel to the U.N. negotiations.

But in the likelihood that China and India will snub this move, the document may end up as “a political reference point” within the U.N. process, said Diringer. “It’s a messy situation,” he said.

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by Jonathan Hiskes

If we can’t yet require companies to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollutants, can we shame them into doing it?

The Obama administration and Democratic leaders in Congress have not so far succeeded in forcing big polluters to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.  But the U.S. EPA is about to force them to report their greenhouse-gas emissions.

Big whoop, you say?  Well, actually, it might be. 

The new Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule, which took effect last month, requires industrial facilities that release 25,000 metric tons of CO2-equivalent a year to measure and report their emissions.  (For comparison, that’s roughly what 2,200 average U.S. households emit annually.)  Initially the rule will affect about 1,200 sites—including factories that produce chemicals, cement, iron, and steel. A facility can stop reporting if it emits less than 25,000 tons for five years or less than 15,000 tons for three years.

The emissions data collected will be made public starting in March 2011.  Affected companies will find themselves in a searchable database—and maybe in the headlines too.  The data could well become fodder for “the biggest polluters in Area X” local and national stories.

Climate advocates hope the rule will inspire companies to cut their emissions voluntarily. “Some companies may have a light bulb turn on when they come face to face with their own emissions,” said David Doniger, climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Even if companies aren’t interested in doing the right thing for its own sake, they might act to avoid bad PR.  And the added attention on emissions could raise public support for regulations with teeth.

“When the data becomes public in 2011, it starts a critically important conversation in America about who the big emitters or greenhouse gases are, where they are located, and what commonsense steps they are taking to address their contribution to the climate crisis,” said Vickie Patton, an air and climate specialist at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and a former EPA attorney.

There is historical precedent for this. In 1985, in the midst of President Reagan’s assault on federal regulation, merely preserving clean-air and clean-water laws seemed to be the best hope, never mind expanding them. In the wake of the Bhopal, India, chemical disaster in 1984, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and others tried to close gaps in federal protection from airborne toxic pollution. Their legislation was pared down to a mere requirement that firms measure and report their emissions—the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). Chemical industry groups fiercely opposed even this, but it became law.

Waxman recounts what happened next in his book The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works:

The National Toxics Release Inventory could not, of course, reduce air pollution. But the invaluable information it provided became the basis for legislation that could. The first report appeared in March 1989 and immediately become front-page news across the country. It showed that a staggering 2.7 billion pounds of toxic air pollution was released into the air in 1987.

The media coverage and public outrage spurred by the Toxics Release Inventory eventually pushed Congress to regulate 184 new toxics in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. The inventory is still up and running, with a community explorer searchable by ZIP code. The law has also corresponded with a steady decline in toxic emissions:

Disposal of toxics measured measured by the Toxic Release Inventory, 1988-2008

Source: EPA TRI 2008 analysis [PDF]EPA

 

Before you get your hopes up …

There is a key difference, though, between the new rule and the toxics rule. The TRI told citizens which companies were causing measurable harm to their communities.  But greenhouse gases aren’t toxic and don’t have direct regional effects, so there’s less reason for locals to care about emissions from nearby factories.  Gases released in Denver and Beijing have the same effect in Denver.

This distinction may not matter in the minds of citizens, who like their local companies to be good corporate citizens across the board. And climate change will carry toll on public health, even though the effects are less immediate: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expects it will promote the spread of infectious diseases like malaria, worsen the effects of asthma, make heat-related illnesses more common, cause extreme-weather disasters, and threaten food security.
 
The impact of the new rule could also be limited because not all of the data it collects will be new. Large electric utilities have been reporting their greenhouse-gas emissions under the EPA’s acid rain program since 1995, and this hasn’t led to significant reductions. “We have hour-by-hour emissions data for every big power plant,” NRDC’s Doniger said. “It’s very good data and it’s very important for understanding how to build a climate control program, but it hasn’t inspired a lot of them to cut their emissions back.”

The new rule also has some obvious gaps—like letting several key industry sectors off the hook. About 40 agriculture sites emit more than 25,000 tons of CO2 equivalent, but they are excluded from the rule by a directive from Congress. The EPA has not finished its reporting requirement for coal, oil, and natural gas extraction either, which has led to a lawsuit from EDF and Earthjustice. And the agency must resolve legal challenges from as many as eight business groups opposing the rule, though an EPA official familiar with the program said the potential lawsuits were unlikely to stop the rule.

The new rule’s greatest value is probably the information it will give to policymakers designing climate action plans. “Thoughtful, well-designed public policy requires rigorous data,” said Patton. “This greenhouse-gas emissions data is the foundation.”

The new rule took effect just before another big step in corporate transparency on climate issues—a Securities and Exchange Commission ruling that companies “must consider the effects of global warming and efforts to curb climate change when disclosing business risks to investors.” This too could lead to more public understanding of just how disruptive climate change could be to U.S. businesses, and to more pressure for businesses to do their part to avert it.

In the big picture, of course, the planet continues heading toward tipping points beyond which scientists fear it will be too late to stop climate change. Voluntary cuts from businesses are no longer enough, and even if the new information shines new attention on large polluters, there’s no reason to wait for that.

“Frankly, I hope we have [climate] legislation before those public reports come out,” Doniger said.

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by Joseph Romm

Sen. Evan Bayh

Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh will not seek re-election this year, a decision that hands Republicans a prime pickup opportunity in the middle of the country.

“After all these years, my passion for service to my fellow citizens is undiminished, but my desire to do so by serving in Congress has waned,” Bayh will say.

As I said when Sen. Dorgan (D-N.D.) announced in January he would retire, what’s bad news for the Dems in the longer term could be good news for the climate bill in the short term.

Nate Silver had given Bayh a “Probability of Yes” vote of 46%, but recently, Bayh has been sounding much more squeamish, as in this E&E Daily interview (sub req’d) a few weeks ago:

Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) urged Obama to scale back his effort on climate.

“I think this is a very difficult time, given the state of the economy,” Bayh said. “And the lack of a firm commitment on the part of other nations. That makes it more difficult. That’s not to say progress can’t be made. If I were advising the president, I would focus on energy security, job creation in the energy space that would have the additional advantage of helping to address carbon emissions but do it an economically friendly way.”

Memo to Bayh:  That’s what the bipartisan climate bill does!

In fact, we have firm commitments from just about every major country in the world besides ours (see “Progress from the Copenhagen Accord”).

An energy-only bill doesn’t help address carbon emissions, it would only add to the budget deficit, it would be too small in scale to generate many jobs or compete with our hyper-charged competitors, who aren’t squeamish about making major investments to push clean energy and reduce emissions (see “The only way to win the clean energy race is to pass the clean energy bill”).

It’s a sad commentary on moderate Dems that they don’t even have the backbone on—or understanding of—the solution to the central issue of our time that one of the most conservative Republicans does:

Stick a fork in the energy-only bill: Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) slams push for a “half-assed energy bill”
Graham: “Every day that we delay trying to find a price for carbon is a day that China uses to dominate the green economy”
Graham: “The idea of not pricing carbon, in my view, means you’re not serious about energy independence. The odd thing is you’ll never have energy independence until you clean up the air, and you’ll never clean up the air until you price carbon.”

Like Dorgan, let’s say for now that Bayh is 50-50 or better to vote for the final bill—and maybe higher for at least cloture.  After all, what possible reason could he give to support a filibuster?

Perhaps all of the swing state senators could announce their retirement and then vote sanely—especially those who probably aren’t going to be reelected anyway.  Paging Blanche Lincoln!

Finally, what exactly is the point of electing these people if they won’t act on the big issues?  As Graham said:

If [the] lesson from health care is let’s not do anything hard, then why don’t we all go home, which might be good for the country by the way.

But if we go home, China won’t …

This is the time, this is the Congress, and this is the moment.  So if we retreat and try to just go to the energy-only approach which will never yield the legislative results that I want on energy independence, then we just made the problem worse.

What Congress is going to come up here and do all these hard things?

Who are these people in the future?

Because we constantly count on them.

I don’t know who they are.  I’ve yet to find them.

So I guess it falls to me and you.

So let’s do it.

If it wasn’t clear before, it’s pretty much now or never who knows when?

The time to act on a comprehensive bill is now.

For more on Bayh and the climate and clean-energy bill, check out this Grist profile of the senator.

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by Tom Philpott

You read the first post; then you read the second post. But admit it: you still haven’t heard enough about why I think you should see Fantastic Mr. Fox, and why the esteemed ladies and gentlemen of the academy were putzes for stiffing it on a best picture nomination. So now you will listen to me babbling about Mr. Fox on Green Patriot Radio. Since you people are still not flocking to the film—and how could you, after it was so unceremoniously dropped from the theaters after just a week or two in release—I’ll just go back to affectless moping, like one of Wes Anderson’s sad young men.

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by Ed Bruske

Launching her anti-obesity campaign—“Let’s Move”—last week, First Lady Michelle Obama vowed to add 1 million kids to the 31 million already being served daily by federal reimbursable meal programs while cutting back on the foods kids like most—refined grains, potatoes, sugar, salt—and adding things kids like least—vegetables and whole grains. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama offered to split $1 billion per year over the next 10 years between schools and other meal programs, an amount school food advocates say isn’t enough to add even an apple to kids’ cafeteria trays.

Sound like a winning strategy?

Impressively, Michelle Obama has rounded up a bevy of national interest groups and corporations to attempt yet another transformation of school meals. A program that started as a convenient way to dispose of farm surpluses during the Great Depression and turned into an anti-poverty weapon in the 1960s would now become, with the Obama imprint, a teachable moment in the country’s battle against swelling waistlines. But success could hinge on whether the government antes up to pay for it, and whether kids will actually eat it. Skeptics are yet to be convinced.

“Michelle Obama is leading a grassroots effort to try and bring the country along. But I don’t think the USDA or the White House have the ‘clout’ or the political will to make the hard changes,” said Ann Cooper, nutritionist for schools in Boulder, Colo., and a leading advocate for improved school food. She said “true change” would require at least another “$1 a day” per child in federal reimbursements. The federal government currently pays $2.68 for each fully reimbursable school lunch.

Much of the “Let’s Move” agenda turns on nutrition standards recommended last October by the Institute of Medicine at the behest of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The IOM found that kids are eating too much pizza, french fries, and candied cereals. But it warned that replacing Tater Tots with fresh broccoli is bound to raise the cost of school meals considerably, including the addition of kitchen equipment and skilled staff to prepare attractive, palatable meals.

Specifically, the panel making the recommendations called for adding five servings of fruit each week in the subsidized breakfast program as well as seven or more servings of whole grains. The panel recommends adding two to four servings of fruit at lunch (six to eight servings  for high schoolers), and two to four additional servings of vegetables (four to six servings for high schoolers), especially dark green and orange varieties, and legumes.

“A change in the meal requirements could have a major effect on the cost of food to school food authorities (SFAs) if there are large changes in the types and amounts of foods required by the standards for menu planning,” the IOM panel reported. The panel said it could not predict exactly how much food costs might increase. But the IOM estimated that if students actually select the increased offerings of fruits, vegetables, and whole grain products when they are in the meal line—which is, after all, the point of improving the standards—the cost of breakfast would likely rise 23 percent, lunch by 9 percent.

Replacing refined-grain products with whole grain foods, for instance, would result in increased costs of between 3 and 20 percent. But the cost could be higher as there are few whole grain products readily available for school meal programs. They would need to be developed. The IOM recommendations are potentially years from being implemented by the USDA.

Cooper, who previously teamed with Alice Waters to introduce school meals with freshly cooked, local ingredients in Berkeley, Calif., said that while the average cost of food in a school lunch runs around $1, she spends about $1.20 in Boulder, and the budget in Berkeley is around $1.30.

Raising the cost of school food by improving quality is just half the picture, however. The other half of school food budgets is taken up by labor, and Michelle Obama’s action plan runs exactly counter to the trend of the last several decades. To cope with tight budgets, schools and their contracted food providers have moved away from skilled kitchen workers and replaced them with “warmer-uppers” who don’t work enough hours to qualify for benefits and whose primary qualification consists of being able to re-heat highly processed, precooked meal items shipped from industrial food factories. Introducing more vegetables and other whole ingredients to school menus and making them palatable, the IOM warns, would certainly require more qualified chefs—as well as improved kitchen equipment to work with.

“One possible approach to offering school meals that meet the recommended standards for menu planning is to introduce more on-site food preparation,” the IOM states. “This approach requires greater managerial skill, often requires substantial one-time investment in equipment, and most often would require more skilled labor and/or training …”

The IOM panel cited an analysis of data from 350 Minnesota schools suggesting that “healthier” meals required higher labor costs, but lower expenditures for processed foods. “The authors call for funds to be made available for labor training and kitchen upgrades.” But if these kinds of improvements are made on the front end, and lower food costs offset higher labor costs as a result, an increase in federal reimbursement rates might be unnecessary, according to this analysis. Many schools do not have kitchens at all, but could fit within a different model in which meals are prepared fresh in central kitchens and then distributed.

“It’s really hard work,” said Cooper of the kinds of changes envisioned in the IOM recommendations. “You need to change the menus, change your procurement system, train the entire staff, get more equipment, find more money, do fundraisers, train the staff some more, market to parents, market to teachers, market to kids, retest recipes, work with unions, figure out the budget … It goes on and on. I’ve often said it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Where would the money for kitchen upgrades come from? The IOM report suggests there might be some in the “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” [PDF] program instituted last year by USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan. Merrigan has said that nearly $1 billion in federal grant funds used in the past for building rural fire stations, hospitals, and community centers could be allocated to food-related projects, such as building storage facilities for locally grown produce, food markets, and school kitchens. But schools would need to apply for the money.

The IOM panel also warns that implementing the standards it proposes could attract more children to the federal school meal program—or drive them away. Kids notoriously don’t like vegetables when they are overcooked and slapped on cafeteria trays.  As I found while observing the kitchen operations at my daughter’s elementary school recently, kids will refuse the standard vegetable offerings when given a choice, and the IOM acknowledges that while new standards might result in more vegetables being served in school cafeterias, that doesn’t mean kids will actually eat them. A 1996 nationwide survey of school cafeteria managers found that 42 percent of cooked vegetables—along with 30 percent of raw vegetables and salads—ended up in the trash.

Kids also don’t like whole grains much. Nevertheless, Michelle Obama said several national school food suppliers—Sodexho, Chartwells, Aramark—have “voluntarily committed” to meet the Institute of Medicine’s recommendations within five years to decrease the amount of sugar, fat, and salt in school meals, and increase the whole grains and double the amount of produce they serve within 10 years—a rather long time frame, as far as advocates such as Ann Cooper are concerned.

In fact, the Obama plan proposes a model of school wellness that incorporates fresh, local produce, school gardens, and nutrition education at a time when most school administrators seem incapable of focusing on anything but reading and math scores.  “Let’s Move” sets worthy goals for school food, but whether those are achievable within the confines of the Obama budget proposal is anybody’s guess.

Related Links:

Did Michelle Obama get the president to create a national Food Policy Council?

To flourish, school gardens need more than photo ops

USDA makes the right call on school meat safety, animal tracking

by Sean Casten

Now we come to the fun part. If you could build a dream spouse, what would he or she look like? Describe their personality, sense of humor, and relative similarity to Kelly LeBrock.

It’s fun to think about, and utterly unrealistic. So too with the question we now build to. If you were king, had a clean sheet of paper and were completely unconstrained by politics, how would you design our energy and environmental policy to eliminate the existing barriers to clean energy?

This type of politically-unconstrained question is too often dismissed as naïve. It isn’t. As Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might get there.” Energy policy has historically been promulgated in fits and starts, with patches on patches and damned little holistic review. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t all fit together very nicely. Idealistic, politically impossible energy policy may be naïve, but it is a far greater sin to steer a policy vehicle this big and with this many economic and environmental consequences without having some sense of where we’d like to go.

I’m starting to feel a bit Douglas-Adams-ish with this now the 5th part of the trilogy. Nonetheless, in the interest of brevity, I limit this post only to utility policy, with more parts of the trilogy to follow.

Ideal utility reforms

Eliminate all power generation monopolies. A case can be made that the power grid is a “natural monopoly,” neither conducive to nor benefitting from competitive pressure. Generation, on the other hand, is a different story. All generation assets sell a commodity that is differentiated only by its location. Moreover, since fuel selection and energy efficiency contribute overwhelmingly to the cost of power and its CO2 signature, it is quite appropriate to expect generator investors to select technologies based on their expectations of future market pricing and CO2 regulation. So long as generation remains regulated, antiquated, otherwise-uncompetitive plants get built and maintained in the name of capital recovery, while competitors who would otherwise steal their market share are held at bay. Fix this by immediately eliminating all generation monopolies, and shift the state’s regulatory oversight from one of rate recovery to one of anti-trust enforcement.


Require regulated wires monopolies to bear the cost of all generator interconnections. A grid without generation is useless. So long as the wires companies retain the obligation and liability to ensure grid stability and safety, it is appropriate for them to specify the specific hardware and controls paradigms for the interconnection of any generator to their grid. However, it is inappropriate for a wires company to specify capital equipment that others must pay for—even though this is current practice for any generator not owned by the wires monopoly. This creates an innate conflict of interest, with one party bearing liability for failure and the other bearing the cost—made all the worse by the fact that the utility monopoly often has a vested commercial interest in keeping the non-utility generator from coming into operation. Fix this once and for all by mandating that the costs of all generator interconnections, regardless of owner are borne by the wires utility and added to their ratebase.

Establish Independent System Operators (ISOs) across the country, with responsibility for grid management and the creation/oversight of markets for grid services. We must eliminate the fiction once and for all that the costs, insurance requirements, transaction fees, and electrical characteristics of the power grid change when one crosses a state border. FERC began the process of creating regional transmission organizations (RTOs), but while some (like ISO-New England) have taken this directive seriously, many parts of the country remain beholden to state-specific variances. So long as the current system stays in place, we will lack both a coordinated system and a transparent way to establish the price, supply and demand of necessary grid services. These ISOs should be tasked—following ISO-NE and PJM examples—to establish markets for energy (MWh), capacity (MW) and all relevant ancillary grid services (power factor correction, voltage support, etc.) with transaction costs structured to ensure maximum participation by all generators, location-specific price differences and complete separation of market oversight/market participation functions to ensure transparency.

Put the responsibility for Wires-company regulation at the regional (ISO/RTO) level. Our national power grid is dominated by companies (Southern Company, National Grid, Duke, AEP, etc.) that span multiple states, but have their rates and responsibilities set at the state level. Electrons know nothing about state boundaries, but the rules relating to their production, distribution, and coordination change at every state borders. In addition to the technical inanity of this approach, it has created a culture of jurisdiction shopping, where utilities that don’t like a decision in one regime can try to shift it or otherwise temper it by a decision in another. (It also means that reforming national utility regulation today requires coordinated action by 51 separate regulatory bodies.) Since ISOs are all FERC—and therefore, federally—jurisdictional, this would once and for all consolidate utility regulation under a single roof. It’s time to get rid of state-level wires regulation, and move it to the level where it belongs.

Establish uniform grid-wheeling fees, based on distance travelled, allow private entities to enter into private transactions to sell power and eliminate the ban on private wires. Today, unless you are a regulated electric utility, you cannot sell electricity directly to an electricity consumer unless you are (a) inside their facility, selling power that does not flow out across their meter to the grid; (b) not resident in one of the dozen states where only a regulated utility can sell electric power; and (c) willing to pay the wheeling charge imposed by the electric utility who moves your power. In the more restructured markets like ISO-NE and PJM, this latter charge has been largely standardized, but elsewhere the rules are far less consistent. Meanwhile, while you can run a wire from your generator to your factory so long as you stay within your own property lines, you cannot run a wire from your generator across the street to your neighbor. These laws are dumb, and increasingly anachronistic. In Alberta, Canada, any generator can sell power to any customer anywhere in the province subject to a standard grid “wheeling” charge, based on distance. Similar rules exist in Mexico. Mexico goes one step further and allows any generator to build their own wires to connect up to 50 distinct customers, to the degree that it is more cost-effective to build those wires than to pay the wheeling charge. Few take this option, but its presence serves to keep the utility honest when they calculate their wheeling fees. In both cases, the result is to allow buyers and sellers to meet and negotiate price—a basic principle of market economics that remains stubbornly absent in U.S. power markets.


Set Wires-utility rates of return based on the fossil-efficiency of their service territory. Today, utilities have their rates set by commissions who determine a “fair” return on invested capital for all their investments, and pass along operating costs without profit. This predisposes utilities to expensive capital projects, makes them agnostic on efficiency and makes them hostile to anyone who makes an investment (efficiency, local generation, etc.) that reduces the revenue earned on their system. Fix this by providing an explicit linkage between utility returns for the purposes of rate setting and the fossil efficiency of their customers (e.g., fossil energy consumed per MWh of electricity consumed, so as to provide an incentive for conventional renewables, conventional efficiency and anything else that increases the ratio of MWh to fossil energy input). This would immediately give those utilities a vested financial interest in actions that increase the efficiency and/or renewability of their service territory, and bias them in favor of new clean sources in a much more direct way than RPS mandates and feed-in tariffs ever could.

Finally, nationalize any monopoly utility that fails to show demonstrable, steady progress in increasing the fossil-efficiency of its territory. A for-profit monopoly tends to provide the worst of both worlds—profit-seeking behavior without competitive pressure to keep them honest. It is not at all clear that such entities make sense; if it did, we ought to give a profit-incentive to the local fire department and eliminate anti-trust laws in the name of creating more for-profit monopolies. That said, the case is often made that attracting quality people in today’s market requires the potential for financial gain only possible in a private company. Whether true or not, this measure would put that to the test. A utility engaged in profit-seeking behavior under these guidelines would be steadily reducing the amount of fossil energy consumed on its system. A utility that is failing to accomplish that goal is one that is failing to invest in profit-seeking behavior, and is demonstrating by its actions that the profits paid to shareholders are simply a tax on social welfare. This rule creates the incentive to do good, with the balancing penalties for falling asleep at the switch.

That’s it for ideal electric utility policy reforms. Next up: ideal environmental policy reforms.

Related Links:

Smarter grids, appliances, and consumers

Policy fixes to unleash clean energy, part 3

Never mind what people believe—how can we change what they do? A chat with Robert Cialdini

by Umbra Fisk

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

A while back, you said that political
activism was really important. I think I
can tear myself away from my new(ish) organic garden long enough to do a little,
but I’m not sure what to do. How can I be politically active with my busy
schedule?

Jon B.
Lakewood, Ohio

A. Dearest Jon,

Happy Presidents Day, a perfect occasion to reflect
on how you can get more involved in the political landscape of our great
country. Let’s face it—your garden is
probably in deep freeze mode at the moment, so you may have a little
time on your hands. And the good news is that political activism doesn’t have
to be a major time suck. Perhaps just cut your Facebook, email, reading, or TV
time in half, and devote some of the excess
to taking action. Do you have the day off today? If so, even better!

First off, think about what’s really important to you. What are your values? Are you
frustrated with climate and energy policies (or lack thereof)? Do you want
schools to serve healthier lunches? Are you worried about billboards in national parks? Maybe you want to ensure the survival of orangutans
or tree
kangaroos. Whatever it
is, educate yourself, read everything you can about the issues—from both
sides—and figure out where you stand. Then let your voice be heard.

Engage in
the lost art of letter writing. If you’re not sure whom to write or what the
hot-button issues are, check out organizations like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the national
League of Conservation Voters, or your state LCV, which can fill you in on action
items, bills that are up for debate, and legislators that need to be contacted
to hear your support or opposition. Sign a petition. Engage
in an act of civil disobedience (check out The
Yes Men for some inspiration). Get involved with organizations like 1Sky, which provides tools like a letter template to contact your local newspaper to spread the word about the importance of a strong clean energy
bill. Or volunteer for a town board or committee—obviously more of a commitment,
but a delightful way to have a political impact with results you can really
see.

Finally, it
sounds really simple, but vote. As I’ve
said before, yes, our particular system of democracy is indeed flawed, but
pouting on the sidelines doesn’t do anything except potentially make you
miserable. So whether it’s on the local, state, or national level, read up on
the candidates and issues and cast that ballot. And if you’re too busy to get
to the polls, ask for an absentee ballot. Whatever you do, thanks for stepping
up—and for the organic gardening, too (spring’s just around the corner).

Patriotically,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

We switched out all the light
bulbs in our home and office to CFL. What do we do with the old incandescent
ones? I am considering donating them to
a local women’s shelter, but should I just put them in the recycling?

Katy
Charleston, S.C.

A. Dearest Katy,

You made the switch—that’s splendid! Give yourself a hearty pat on the back.

Now, I can’t tell you whether you can recycle your incandescent bulbs—you’ll have to check with your local recycling program for that info. However,
donating them to a local women’s shelter, where they can have another life
before they die, is a better option than tossing the still-viable bulbs into
the trash can. Props to you for your sense of altruism. And if you’re feeling
really generous, throw (well, gently nestle) a few new CFL bulbs into the mix
with your donation.

Remember, when it comes time to replace your CFLs, don’t toss them in
the trash. Because of the small
amount of mercury these bulbs contain, they’ll need to be handed over to your
local hazardous waste peeps. Check out LampRecycle.org for places to recycle compact fluorescents in your neck of the woods.

Brightly,
Umbra

I get acres of letters every week
from readers, and unfortunately, I can’t answer them all. The ones I do answer
can sometimes take a little while to make it into the rotation. Thus I
occasionally hear from especially eager readers, like the one below, who have gone
the extra mile to solve their own conundrum.

Q. Dear Umbra,

In my quest to find organic
tomato sauce without sugar, I have been forced into making my own sauce. I was
happy to find organic crushed tomatoes in a can. All I need to do is add
onions, garlic, some spices, and cook for 20 minutes. I just read somewhere that
some cans are lined with plastic and this can be toxic. Is this true? I wrote
to the companies (Muir Glen and ShopRite) inquiring about this, and I never received an answer. Please
don’t tell me I need to start crushing the tomatoes myself.

Veronica L.
East Stroudsburg, Pa.

Q. Dear Umbra,

I am looking into the practice of
lining cans with plastic. I emailed some companies asking if they do this—no
reply. Dude, I even emailed you for help. Well, the Environmental
Working Group website came through again.

Everyone seems to use it except
for Eden foods.

Veronica L.
East Stroudsburg, Pa.

A. Dearest
Veronica,

Way to be
industrious with your research! I heartily embrace the EWG site for just this
sort of dilemma. My advice would be to take things a step further: Write back to the companies, telling them your concerns about the bisphenol-A often used in the
lining of canned foods, the nasty effects of it, and your decision to
switch to a brand that doesn’t use BPA-lined cans. Also, request a reply
detailing the companies’ plans to find an alternative. Perhaps send a copy of the
email to friends, asking that they also contact the companies with the same
message.

Before long,
you’ll have a grassroots movement on your hands, which is way better than
having BPA on them.

Cannily,
Umbra

Related Links:

Ask Umbra’s video advice on greening your dog with DIY treats

Pom-Pom club: Just how ‘Wonderful’ are pomegranates?

Policy fixes to unleash clean energy, part 2

by Agence France-Presse

Bill GatesPhoto: magnifynetLONG
BEACH, Calif. – Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates on Friday strayed from his
philanthropic focus on fighting poverty and disease to address another threat
to the world’s poor—climate change.

“Energy
and climate are extremely important to these people,” Gates on Friday told
a TED Conference audience
packed with influential figures, including the founders of Google and climate
champion Al Gore. “The climate getting worse means many years that crops
won’t grow from too much rain or not enough, leading to starvation and
certainly unrest.”

He
broke down variables in a carbon-dioxide-culprit formula, homing in on a
conclusion that the answer to the problem of climate change is a source of
energy that produces no carbon.

“The
formula is a very straightforward one,” Gates said. “More carbon
dioxide equals temperature increase equals negative effects like collapsed
ecosystems. We have to get to zero.”

To
dramatize his point, Gates pulled out a large jar of fireflies in playful
flashback to when he unleashed mosquitoes on a TED audience a year earlier
while discussing battling malaria. “They won’t bite,” Gates joked of
the fireflies. “As a matter of fact, they might not even leave this
jar.”

Gates
said he is backing development of TerraPower reactors that could be fueled by nuclear waste from disposal facilities or
generated by today’s power plants.

Gates
touted TerraPower as more reliable than wind or solar, cleaner than burning
coal or natural gas, and safer than current nuclear plants.

“With
the right materials approach it could work,” Gates said. “Because you
burn 99 percent of the waste, it is kind of like a candle.” Nuclear waste
fed into a TerraPower reactor would potentially burn for decades before being
exhausted.

“Today
we are always refueling the reactor so lots of controls and lots of things that
can go wrong,” Gates said. “That is not good. With this, you have a
piece of fuel, think of it like a log, that burns for 60 years and it is
done.”

Researching
and testing TerraPower will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, with the
building of a test reactor likely to cost in the billions.

Once
the technology is proven, market forces will drive down costs, Gates predicted.

Work
on TerraPower has been done in France and Japan, and there has been interest in
India, Russia, China, and the United States, according to the famed
philanthropist.

Gates
said that if he were allowed a single wish in the coming 50 years, it would be
a global “zero carbon” culture.

“We
need energy miracles. The microprocessor and internet are miracles. This is a
case where we have to drive and get the miracle in a short timeline.”

Gates
dismissed climate-change skeptics, saying TerraPower would render arguments
moot because the energy produced would be cheaper than pollution-spewing
methods used today. “The skeptics will accept it because it is
cheaper,” Gates said. “They might wish it did put out CO2, but they
will take it.”

Related Links:

Why Bill Gates is wrong

ConocoPhillips, BP America, and Caterpillar quit climate coalition

Is the Copenhagen Accord already dead?