Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Tom Laskawy

Sugar in school: give the people what they want? Reporter Ed Bruske spent a week working in a Washington, D.C. public school lunchroom. His series of articles (1, 2, 3) that resulted are fantastic reading for anyone following the ongoing debate regarding school lunches and the challenges for enacting real reform. Today’s entry looked at how sugar is used in school food.

Bruske lists the multiple ways schools find to sugar up our kids—Pop-Tarts, sugar cereal, canned fruit in syrup, flavored milk, cookies and other desserts and even juice. Yes, juice is part of the problem, too. By weight, it has just as much sugar as Coke. Bruske observes that a 4 oz cup of apple juice has the equivalent of 3 tsp of sugar. As for flavored milk, an 8 oz carton of the brand served in the DC school contains 6 tsp of sugar. It’s the same percentage of sugar as juice but at twice the service size, it’s almost the same amount of sugar as a can of Coke—and handed out to many of our kids for free. Got diabetes?

I recommend an experiment. Take a cup measure and put in 4 oz (1/2 cup) of water. Then add 3 tsp of sugar. If you’re feeling saucy, double the amount of both. Now drink. That’s what we serve to our kids at school? Yuck. Of course, there’s an added wrinkle with juice, which Bruske discusses and which I have written about as well. The sugar in juice comes in the form of fructose. Well, I’ll turn it over to Ed to explain:

Some medical researchers are now concerned that high doses of fructose may have other health consequences besides contributing to an overabundance of calories in the diet. Fructose is metabolized somewhat differently by the body than sucrose and other forms of sugar. It goes directly to the liver. Researchers hypothesize that fructose could be responsible for an increasing incidence of fatty liver disease, as well as metabolic problems such as insulin resistance, obesity, diabetes.

This is one reason why NYC’s landmark anti-soda campaign recommends only water (flat or fizzy) and low-fat milk as alternatives. It may turn out that juice, believe it or not, is as much of a culprit in the obesity/diabetes epidemic as soda.

In my own experience, whenever restrictions on access to sugar at school come up you hear objections like “they get it at home” or “why are you imposing your food judgments on other people.” The obvious response to the first objection is that kids can still get sugar at home. But there’s no reason to give it to them at school. By that logic, we should just sit kids down in front of the TV all day at school. They get it at home, right? So what’s the difference?

My favorite, however, is the idea that kids really want that sugar so we just have to give it to them. Bruske certainly witnessed that desire. But since when do we let kids make their own decisions in area of health, much less education? Isn’t that what parents do, decide what is and isn’t good for our kids? Well, you know what? Making a small part of their day and one meal out of three include only a minimal amount of sugar should be an obvious decision. If parents are that uncomfortable with reduced sugar in school, they are free to make up for it with more sugar at home. But somehow I don’t think they will.

A fascinating element in Bruske’s piece is the observation that current school lunch rules lead schools to pump up the sugar content:

Federal rules for the school lunch program require that the fat in food be kept at or below 30 percent of total calories, something few schools actually achieve. The rules also stipulate minimum calories for school meals–for instance, 664 lunch calories for kids in Kindergarten through sixth grade. Since fat is dense with calories, and also delivers flavor, succulence, a sense of satiety, school food service providers struggle to meet the minimum calorie levels without the fat and still make food appealing. Sometimes a boost of sugar to the foodline is just the thing to deliver the required calories, even though it may be the last thing students with weight issues need. Some schools serve up the sugar as dessert. Diced peaches in sugary “light syrup” accomplishes the same thing.

Well, well. What a surprise. While there are guidelines, there’s no legislated limit on the amount of sugar served to children at school so, when holding fat and calories constant as required by law, sugar ends up boosted. After all, sugar is cheap and school food is woefully underfunded—why not use empty calories to meet the letter of the law.
There are a lot of good ideas floating around the USDA and Congress about restricting access to junk food at school. But from the sound of it, nothing short of a cap on the total amount of sugar served to children—including added sugar or as naturally occurring sugar in beverages—will stop these sorts of games. It is our children’s health we’re talking about. That does matter to people, doesn’t it?

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by Tom Philpott

In Tom’s Kitchen, Grist’s food editor discusses some of the quick-and-easy things he gets up to in, well, his kitchen. He thinks the column name sucks—please help him rename it. Email ideas to tphilpott[at]grist[dot]org. He apologizes for the lame iPhone photography.

—————

Photo: Tom PhilpottIt’s been a rough winter up here in these North Carolina mountains. When it hasn’t been bitterly cold—day after day of sub-20 degree chill—it’s been just sort of cold but very rainy. One of my main food obsessions has been split-pea soup—one of the most warming dishes known to man.

Actually, I’ve been obsessed with split peas since having a bowl of them at Sandwhich, a fantastic lunch spot in Chapel Hill, a year or so ago. I had always thought it a dull, prosaic dish. But then I tried tried the Sandwhich version: spiced up with smoked paprika and finished with a lashing of peppery olive oil. The combination of flavors—sweetness from the peas, smoke and heat from the paprika, and richness from the oil—stopped me in my tracks.

I’ve been making it at home ever since, trying to recreate that Sandwhich magic. Since the cold settled in last month, I’ve ramped up my efforts. Split peas make a fantastic midweek dinner. Unlike other dried legumes, they cook quickly—in an hour or so. This flavorful version, served over brown rice or crusty toasted bread, is deeply satisfying.

In this column, I won’t be giving recipes per se; but describing how I cook a simple dish, with plenty of variations.

Split peas for four (easily doubled)

Mise en place: get it together. Photo: Tom PhilpottMise en place (A French cooking term that essentially means, “getting your shit together”):
1) 1.5 cup split peas, rinsed and picked through for rocks
2) 1 large onion, 1 large carrot, 1 large celery stalk, chopped. (This flavor-building mixture is called a mirepoix in French; it is a great thing).
3) 2-4 cloves garlic, minced. (I use four.)
4) 4.5 cups water or homemade stock.
5) Some decent extra-virgin olive oil; and the best olive oil in the house (don’t worry if you don’t have a special bottle).
6) Something spicy/smoky: 2 teaspoons of Spanish smoked paprika (pimenton de la Vera, available where good spices are sold); or 1-2 minced chipotle peppers, dried and re-hydrated in hot water or canned. Alternately, a few slices of good quality bacon (i.e., from pastured hogs) could be chopped and added to the mirepoix (number 2 above).
7) Something acidic, like a wedge of lemon or some wine vinegar.
8) Good sea salt and a pepper grinder.
9) Something green, like flat-leaf parsley or even arugula. To be chopped while peas are cooking.
10) A little crushed red chile pepper, optional but really nice.

Process:
Cover bottom of a medium heavy-bottom pot with your everyday olive oil. Turn heat to a gentle medium. After a minute, add the miroepoix vegetables (hold off on the garlic; it burns easily). Cook, stirring often, for ten or so minutes, until veggies are soft but not browned. If they threaten to turn brown, turn heat down a little. Add the garlic and the paprika or chipotles. Cook, stirring, until garlic perfumes the air, a minute or so. Note the beautiful red hue everything has turned. Add the peas, stir to mix with the veggies. Add the water or stock; bring to boil; cover; turn heat to low; let simmer.

As the beans cook, check them every few minutes. If they seem on the verge of drying out, add some hot water or stock. While they’re cooking, chop about half a bunch of parsley or a several arugula leaves for garnish. The beans should be done in about an hour, maybe a little less. They are ready when they are very soft. Their collapse should be complete, catastrophic, abject: like a Democratic Senator confronting a question of principle.

When they are done, add a vigorous twist or three of black pepper, and taste. They will taste quite flat. Stir in a teaspoon of salt, and marvel at the flavors that emerge. Now add a small amount of acid—a teaspoon or so lemon juice or vinegar. You don’t want it to taste lemony or vinegary; you just want the acid to balance the flavors. Taste again and adjust for salt, pepper, and acid. More smoked paprika could be added at this stage, if desired.

To serve, ladle into warm bowls over brown rice or toasted crusty bread. Drizzle with the best olive oil you have—this dish will showcase its flavor—add a dash of crushed chile flakes, and a good sprinkle of chopped greens.

This dish goes with malty, lightly hopped brown ales like Bell’s Best Brown; and with rustic, simple red wines. I’ve been enjoying the 2008 Vin de Pays du Vaucluse ($10), bottled for the great wine merchant Kermit Lynch.

 

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by Ed Bruske

Ed Bruske spent a week in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke
Elementary School in the District of Columbia observing how food is
prepared. This is the fourth in a six-part series of posts about what
he saw. Check out the first, second, and third posts. Cross-posted from The Slow Cook.

At 7:30 a.m., the first glimmer of daybreak tints a wall of windows in the big, new dining area at H.D. Cooke Elementary School. Three children sit with food they’ve brought from home; their eyes are glued to a wall-mounted television monitor tuned to SpongeBob cartoons.

One little boy has several items spread out on the table in front of him: “Lunchables” from Oscar Meyer, consisting of crackers, cheddar cheese, and slices of processed ham; a 4-ounce (half-cup) container of apple juice; a bag of “Skittles” candy; and something called “Fruit by the Foot” made by General Mills, a turquoise-colored concoction like fruit leather made of starches, gums, food chemicals, and colorings the company describes as a “fruit-flavored snack.”

Other than some “pears from concentrate,” there’s very little recognizable food in “Fruit by the Foot.” The most prominent ingredient is sugar—9 grams of it, or more than two teaspoons, accounting for fully half the snack’s 80 calories. The small bag of Skittles is even more potent. It contains almost 15 grams of sugar, or nearly four teaspoons.

(There are 4.2 grams of sugar in a teaspoon. Remember drinking coffee with a teaspoon of sugar, maybe two? Try to imagine your cuppa joe with three teaspoons, or even six, as you shall soon see. Table sugar is a solid, of course, and the ingredients discussed here are mostly liquid, which might translate into fewer teaspoons than I’ve listed. But you get the picture.)

Studies have found that meals sent from home are frequently inferior, nutritionally speaking, to food served in schools. But during my week as an observer in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke., I found there’s plenty of sugar in school food as well. School food providers know just as well as parents that a little sugar goes a long way towards enticing kids to eat what’s served.

Breakfast is a prime example and could well be described as sugar loading time at school. Standard in the food line, for instance, is the morning display of Kellogg’s Pop Tarts. These iconic, 1.76-ounce pastries, individually wrapped in foil, are advertised as “whole wheat” and “20 percent fiber.” But the second ingredient in the strawberry Pop Tarts served at H.D. Cooke is high-fructose corn syrup. The 13 grams of sugar, or more than three teaspoons, in each Pop Tart accounts for 27 percent of its 190 calories.

Sugar provides calories, but not nutrition. That’s not the only thing some parents might be concerned about. Pop Tarts are a highly processed convenience food with a daunting list of ingredients: whole wheat flour, high fructose corn syrup, enriched flour, soybean and palm oil, polydextrose, sugar, dextrose, corn syrup solids, corn syrup, whole grain barley flour, glycerin, two percent or less of insulin from chicory root, wheat starch, salt, dried strawberries, dried pears, dried apples, cornstarch, leavening, natural and artificial strawberry flavor, citric accid, gelatin, caramel color, soy lecithin, xanthan gum, modified wheat starch, Vitamin A palmitate, Red #40, reduced iron, several B vitamins.

Another standard item on the breakfast line is Pepperidge Farm “Goldfish Giant Grahams.” The individually packaged .9-ounce servings each contain 6 grams of sugar, or about one and one-half teaspoons. That comes with a dose of trans-fats in the form of partially-hydrogenated vegetable shortening.

Photo courtesy ohdearbarb via Flickr Kids at H.D. Cooke usually can select a cold cereal for breakfast and these are typically spiked with sugar as well. Cereal is packed in sealed, individual plastic tubs so that students can simply peel open the container, add milk and eat. Kellogg’s chocolate-flavored “Little Bites Mini-Wheats” was one of the featured cereals when I was visiting. A 1-ounce serving contains six grams of sugar. But there’s more sugar in one of the other cereal’s on the food line, Kellogg’s Apple Jacks. A .63-ounce serving carries eight grams of sugar, or nearly two teaspoons.

Canned fruit in “light syrup” is a standard offering at lunch. It comes in different guises. One day it might be a fruit mix, another day diced peaches. Typically most of the calories come from sugar, as much as 18 grams—usually from corn syrup—in a single half-cup serving. That’s the equivalent of more than four teaspoons of table sugar. There’s sugar in the cafeteria’s salad dressing—Kraft ranch—and high-fructose corn syrup is in the “wheat bread” delivered by H&S Bakery in Baltimore.

Kids are always on the prowl for sugar, and there seems to be no end of occasions for getting more of it. One day as I was observing breakfast service, my daughter, who attends fourth grade at H.D. Cooke, appeared in the food line. We waved to each other, and I couldn’t help noticing that although the day had hardly started, already she was munching her way through a chocolate chip cookie. The grandmother of one of her classmates, she explained, had stopped at Starbucks on the way to school and bought cookies for everyone in early morning band practice.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the rate of adolescent obesity in the District of Columbia is the highest in the nation. Nearly half the children in some wards of the city are overweight. Eighteen percent of high school students in the District are obese, and 35 percent are overweight.

Experts don’t agree on what makes people fat. Some think it comes down to a simple equation: too much eating, not enough exercise to burn calories. Other medical researchers are equally convinced that insulin, a powerful hormone responsible for fat storage, is a primary culprit because it is triggered whenever we eat carbohydrates such as sugar or starchy foods. School menus are loaded with carbohydrates, in part to compensate for the calories sacrificed by serving fewer fats, and because they’re cheap. Or perhaps gaining too much weight is caused by a mix of factors. Despite more than 30 years of hyper-vigilance on the issue of fat in food, Americans—and their children—continue to get fatter.

One thing authorities do agree on is that kids eat too much sugary food, refined grains, and snacks. Sodas, chips, french fries, white bread, pizza, tater tots—all show up on the list of foods that critics of school meals most love to hate. But kids crave them, which creates a dilemma for schools, since they depend on federal payments to support their food service programs, but only receive the federal subsidies for meals that are actually served. In other words, schools have to sell kids on the idea of eating what’s offered. That’s why a school “meal” can actually consist of pizza and tater tots. Though it’s full of starch and fat, it fulfills government requirements for protein, grain, and vegetable—and kids love it.

Federal rules for the school lunch program require that the fat in food be kept at or below 30 percent of total calories, something few schools actually achieve. The rules also stipulate minimum calories for school meals—for instance, 664 lunch calories for kids in Kindergarten through sixth grade. Since fat is dense with calories, and also delivers flavor, succulence, a sense of satiety, school food service providers struggle to meet the minimum calorie levels without the fat and still make food appealing. Sometimes a boost of sugar to the foodline is just the thing to deliver the required calories, even though it may be the last thing students with weight issues need. Some schools serve up the sugar as dessert. Diced peaches in sugary “light syrup” accomplishes the same thing.

In 2006, the D.C. School Board agreed to eliminate sodas and other sugary beverages from schools and to manage the portion sizes of snack foods. ‘Healthy Schools” legislation pending before the D.C. Council would put those policies into law for all public schools in the city, meaning sodas would be banned from charter schools for the first time as well. Charter schools might also have to adjust the snack foods they sell in vending machines.

But while the “Healthy Schools” bill would establish upgraded nutritional standards for D.C. schools, it specifically exempts two beverages that are among the most sugar-laden items on school menus: flavored milk and fruit  juice.

Fruit juice, such as grape juice and apple juice, is a common offering in the H.D. Cooke cafeteria. It arrives at the school frozen, in cases of individual 4-ounce containers. At some point the cases are moved into the kitchen’s walk-in refrigerator to thaw. But according to my daughter, the juice is almost always still frozen when it is served. I looked on as the kids had fun with their mostly-frozen juice cups, first sucking out the juice with a drinking straw, then picking away at the rest with a plastic spoon.

People think of fruit juice as being healthful. What could be more natural than the concentrated essence of fruit? But 100 percent fruit juice is loaded with sugar in the form of fructose. A 4-ounce container of apple juice, for instance, contains nearly 13 grams of sugar as fructose. That’s the equivalent of three teaspoons of table sugar, or virtually the same, ounce-for-ounce, as Coca-Cola [PDF].

Some medical researchers are now concerned that high doses of fructose may have other health consequences besides contributing to an overabundance of calories in the diet. Fructose is metabolized somewhat differently by the body than sucrose and other forms of sugar. It goes directly to the liver. Researchers hypothesize that fructose could be responsible for an increasing incidence of fatty liver disease, as well as metabolic problems such as insulin resistance, obesity, diabetes.

An even greater controversy is brewing around the issue of flavored milk in schools. I still remember as a kid lining up at a machine in elementary school to pay two cents for a carton of milk. These days schools are required to offer milk at all meals. At H.D. Cooke, that means four different varieties of milk from Cloverland Green Springs Dairy in Baltimore are displayed in a cooler at the entrance to the food line: low-fat regular milk, non-fat regular milk, chocolate-flavored milk, and strawberry-flavored milk.

Adherents to the theory that fat is behind America’s health problems have done a great job of driving the naturally occurring fat out of milk. But until recently, little attention was paid to the amount of sugar being added to milk served in schools. While federal rules place a limit on fat in meals, there’s no limit on sugar. All milk contains some natural sugar in the form of lactose. But flavored milk has much more sugar added, usually in the form of high-fructose corn syrup. For instance, an 8-ounce serving of chocolate milk from Cloverland Dairy contains 26 grams of sugar—about 6 teaspoons—only slightly less than Coke. Cloverland strawberry milk has more sugar still: 28 grams  in a single, one-cup serving, putting it almost in the same league as Mountain Dew.

Children who choose strawberry are getting a dose of other ingredients that never came out of a cow: beet juice concentrate (for color), propylene glycol, ethyl alcohol, natural flavoring, garrageenan, sugar, Vitamin A palmitate, and Vitamin D3.

Ann Cooper, nutrition director for schools in Boulder, Colorado, is a leading advocate of school meals cooked from scratch with natural ingredients. Cooper has dubbed flavored milk “soda in drag,” and is part of a gathering movement to remove flavored milk from schools. The dairy industry, which depends on flavored milk for a large portion of its sales to schools nationwide, is fighting back, claiming the added sugar is justified because kids might not drink their milk otherwise and would be deprived of important nutrients such as calcium and Vitamin D.

Some school districts report success getting children to drink non-flavored milk and save money in the bargain by allowing the kids to pour their own from pitchers. Kids only pour as much as they want and teachers sit at the same tables to encourage better eating habits. That would represent quite a change at H.D. Cooke where there are no cups. Kids drink milk directly from the carton it comes in.

Oblivious to the health debate, kids at H.D. Cooke love their chocolate and strawberry milk. “It’s the first thing they go for,” said a teacher standing near the food line one day. From my own observations, the overriding majority of children choose a flavored milk with their meal. In the middle of lunch service one day, the cooler ran out of chocolate and strawberry milk while there was still plenty of regular milk to go around.

“I know that they prefer the flavored milk over the white because some of them put it in their cereal,” said kitchen manager Tiffany Whittington.

Sure enough. Touring the dining hall one morning, I saw kids eating their chocolate-flavored “Little Bites Mini-Wheats” swimming in chocolate milk. Nothing like a double dose of sugar first thing in the morning. Throw in a container of apple juice and you begin to understand why kids expect a dose of sugar with every meal.

Tomorrow: The environmental consequences of school food.

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by Todd Woody

Photo courtesy obrien26382 via Flickr The great hope for powering a sustainable world is renewable energy. The great barrier to powering a sustainable world is the cost and complexity of building a new national transmission grid that will transmit the carbon-free electricity generated by remote wind farms and solar power plants to population centers.

In 2008, the U.S. Department of Energy released a report that concluded the United States could obtain 20 percent of its electricity from wind power by 2030. This week the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory issued a study that shows how the eastern half of the U.S. could obtain as much as 30 percent of its electricity from wind by 2024. The study focused on what transmission geeks call the Eastern Interconnection, six linked regional power grids that run from the Great Plains to the Eastern Seaboard and from the Canadian border to the tip of Florida.

“Although significant costs, challenges, and impacts are associated with a 20 percent wind scenario, substantial benefits can be shown to overcome the costs,” the report’s authors wrote. “Such a scenario is unlikely to be realized with a business-as-usual approach, and that a major national commitment to clean, domestic energy sources with desirable environmental attributes would be required.”

Essentially, all we need to do is come up with at least $93 billion for new power lines and infrastructure and get myriad transmission operators and local agencies to cooperate on the design of a new high-voltage grid.

Sounds daunting. But let’s put the numbers in context. The $93 billion is roughly what the U.S. spends in eight months on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Or to use another metric, a little more than what Joe Taxpayer forked over to bail out AIG.

The payback to build a transmission grid, however, is likely to be far more productive.  Such an expansion of transmission capacity (and the resulting increase ) in wind power—and one assumes, other renewable energy—would displace coal-fired power plants, according to the NREL.

It would also solve one of the biggest problems with wind—its intermittency, which plays havoc with keeping electricity flowing smoothly. To greatly simplify, the wind is usually blowing somewhere. By multiplying the number of wind farms that feed into a single transmission grid from a broad swath of the country, transmission operators can rely less on fossil fuel power plants—read coal—as a backup when the wind dies, say, in South Dakota.

That will lower not only the price of renewable energy but utilities’ capital costs, which are, of course, passed on to their customers.

In California, for instance, utilities like PG&E spend billions on natural gas-fired power plants in order to provide emergency power for those few days each year when the grid is overloaded—hot summer afternoons when everyone cranks up their air conditioners at the same time.

“About 10 percent of our generation capacity sits idle for all but 50 hours a year,” Andrew Tang, a senior director at PG&E, tells me. “This industry is predicated on the premise that you always prepare for the worst day. It’s hugely expensive.”

Left unsaid in the NREL report is that the massive expansion of wind power needed to supply 20 to 30 percent of the nation’s electricity would be a green jobs machine.

At the beginning of 2009, according to the report, the U.S. had 25,000 megawatts of wind capacity installed and added another 4,500 megawatts during the first half of that year, despite the recession. To reach the 20 percent target, NREL estimates that 225,000 megawatts of new wind capacity must come online. Add another 105,000 megawatts to hit 30 percent.

The researchers offered different scenarios on how to achieve those goals, relying on varying mixes of wind from the Great Plains, the East and offshore. The 30 percent target relies heavily on developing wind farms off the East Coast, a capital-intensive undertaking that so far has run into huge political problems.

The NREL report, which was prepared by the consulting firm EnerNex, offers a highly technical discussion on how to reconfigure the grid to accommodate all that wind. But the bottom line is that between 8,352 and 11,102 miles of 800-volt direct current transmission lines, as well as thousands of miles of lower-voltage power lines, must be built. All in all, as many as 22,697 miles of new transmission lines would need to be installed, along with all the supporting infrastructure.

But the key takeaway is that NREL has concluded that there are no overriding technological hurdles or insurmountable financial obstacles to be overcome on the way to achieving the 20 percent target. It is basically a political problem—just imagine the NIMBY nightmare all those power lines would create.

Well, a political solution has been offered up by, of all people, Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who previously advised President George W. Bush on how to neutralize demands that the government take action on global warming.

Luntz has apparently undergone a climate change conversion. In a poll he released on Thursday, Luntz found that there is broad support among both Republicans and Democrats for climate change legislation when the issue is couched in terms of national security and energy independence.

“National security tops every other reason to support cap-and-trade,” Luntz concluded. “It’s about freeing the U.S. from foreign oil—and opening the door to greater security and prosperity.”

And as green energy advocates press to translate the NREL report into action, it’s worth remembering how a 20th century president managed to persuade Congress to fund a similarly ambitious infrastructure project, the interstate highway system.

Eisenhower did not argue that we needed to spend billions of dollars on a vast road system so we could develop the suburbs or drive coast-to-coast with ease. In the fearful fifties, he said building such a transportation network was all about creating the ability to move troops around the country in a national emergency. In other words, a national security argument secured what would become the driver of American prosperity in the coming decades.

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by Jonathan Hiskes

When I hear folks like Alex Steffen talk about “remaking cities,” my gut reaction is that U.S. cities seem mostly permanent, like they’re already built and we’re stuck with them. (Quick reminder: The world’s cities cause 75 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions, according to several measures.) But then there’s this new slideshow at Slate, in which Camilo Jose Vergara photographs the ruins of urban America. Some of the photos portray the same abandoned landscapes just a few years apart. It’s amazing how quickly built structures decay, and how quickly weeds and rot take root. It’s a reminder that cities—especially the struggling ones—offer constant opportunities for smarter rebuilding and redesigning.

For a more empirical perspective, Architecture 2030 offers a useful rundown:

Courtesy Architecture 2030

Herein lies the hope. By the year 2035, approximately three-quarters (75%) of the built environment will be either new or renovated.

Architecture 2030 founder Ed Mazria notes that these are pre-recession figures. Construction rates are significantly lower at the moment, though renovation rates are probably up. Even with that caveat, our built environments are less permanent than you might assume.

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DOE and EPA Agree to Make a Brighter Energy Star

by Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON—The past decade was the warmest ever, according to a new analysis of global surface temperatures released by NASA.

The U.S. space agency also found that 2009 was the second-warmest year on record since modern temperature measurements began in 1880. Last year was only a small fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest yet, putting 2009 in a virtual tie with the other hottest years, which have all occurred since 1998.

According to James Hansen, who heads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, global temperatures change due to variations in ocean heating and cooling. “When we average temperature over five or 10 years to minimize that variability, we find global warming is continuing unabated,” Hansen said in a statement.

A strong La Niña effect that cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean made 2008 the coolest year of the decade, according to the New York-based institute.

In analyzing the data, NASA scientists found a clear warming trend, although a leveling off took place in the 1940s and 1970s. The records showed that temperatures trended upward by about 0.36 degrees F per decade over the past 30 years. Average global temperatures have increased a total of about 1.5 degrees F since 1880.

“That’s the important number to keep in mind,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist with the institute. “The difference between the second and sixth warmest years is trivial because the known uncertainty in the temperature measurement is larger than some of the differences between the warmest years.”

Last year’s near-record temperatures took place despite an unseasonably cool December in much of North America and a warmer-than-normal Arctic, with frigid air from the Arctic rushing into the region while warmer mid-latitude air shifted northward, the institute said.

The analysis was based on weather data from more than a thousand meteorological stations worldwide, satellite observations of sea surface temperatures, and Antarctic research station measurements.

“There’s a contradiction between the results shown here and popular perceptions about climate trends,” Hansen said. “In the last decade, global warming has not stopped.”

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by David Roberts

On Thursday the University of Charleston in West Virginia hosted a debate between Don Blankenship, CEO of mountaintop-removal mining firm Massey Energy Co., and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., environmental lawyer and founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance. I kept up a running play-by-play that can be accessed by scrolling back through my Twitter feed, but I didn’t take notes, so this is from memory and I won’t be using direct quotes.

The mystery to me going in was why Blankenship agreed to it. What possible incentive is there for a corporate CEO to put himself in a risky situation, publicly defending a widely reviled product? What’s the upside? Why not just buy some ads or hire more lobbyists?

Having watched the debate, I’m more mystified than ever. If that was supposed to be damage control, I’d hate to see damage. Blankenship had every advantage, with a friendly hometown crowd eager to applaud him and a moderator who helpfully read off pro-coal facts during commercial breaks, but he was painfully and obviously outmatched by Kennedy. I guess it’s easy to get over-confident when you’ve effectively purchased a state government and broken the law with impunity for years.

He didn’t seem even cursorily prepared. Kennedy reeled off fact after fact about declining mining employment in WV, the age of Appalachian ecosystems and the impossibility of recovering them after MTR mining damage, the enormous health and economic impacts of coal on Appalachia, the size of Chinese investments in clean energy, the number of Clean Water Act violations from Massey, and on and on and on. Every fact was geared toward a plea to West Virginians: look, this man is making himself rich by making you poor. He’s sapping your state of jobs, income, health, and a future.

In response Blankenship had nothing but ressentiment and nativism. Over and over he dismissed Kennedy’s facts as “rhetoric” and “just false” claims that “you can find on the internet,” but not once did he refute or even convincingly contest a particular claim. He asked the audience to dismiss them based purely on crude stereotypes about out-of-state environmentalists.

His very first rebuttal drew on a familiar conservative trope: environmentalists are are overly emotional and rely on extremist rhetoric rather than facts and cool reason. But no sooner had the words left his mouth than he was talking about how the coal industry is really “your neighbors” and “Sunday school teachers,” working to create down-home energy so terrorists don’t come over and kill us. He warned that pesky regulatory constraints from do-gooders mean “we all better learn to speak Chinese.” This is what reasoned, non-emotional rhetoric looks like, I guess: if you criticize my company you hate Sunday school teachers, love terrorists, and want to surrender national sovereignty to Red China.

When Kennedy accused him of leaving behind ghost towns across WV, Blankenship responded that he’d bought up all those homes at fair market value (“those people left voluntarily”). In response to Kennedy’s points on water pollution, Blankenship effectively dismissed the threat of mercury as a bunch of hype on the internet. (If mercury is dangerous, he asked, how is it people in India live to be 79? Really, that was his argument. Apparently he’s never heard of Minimata disease.) When Kennedy listed the social and health damages done by coal—“externalities” the industry charges to taxpayers—Blankenship mumbled, “do we have some of those externalities? I don’t know. Maybe.” When Kennedy pointed out that China is dumping trillions into renewable energy, Massey responded that they were only building windmills to appease the UN. When Kennedy pointed out that Massey’s own disclosure revealed some 12,000 violations of the Clean Water Act last year, Blankenship responded that they’re reducing their violations year to year, now that they’ve been reminded by the EPA that it would be a good idea.

In short, Kennedy was the encyclopedic superego of environmentalism and Blankenship was the raw id of crony capitalism.

I’ll admit I’ve always been perversely fascinated by Blankenship. Most big corporate CEOs have mastered the art of calorie-free management speak. They’ve learned how to stay on message and skirt controversy. Not Blankenship. Not only does he openly flout the law and buy political access, he remains defiantly unpleasant in person, speaking in an affectless, heavily accented mumble. Watch toward the end of this video, the archival footage:

He still talks like that. He simply dismissed Kennedy’s facts and stuck to his narrative:  global warming’s a hoax, hippie environmentalists are strangling free enterprise,  out-of-staters have no right to question what happens in WV, and China is going to take over if we don’t mine and burn all the coal we can as fast as we can. We’re crazy to be worried about “parts per million” of pollutants when coal is the only thing keeping our life expectancy above Angola’s. We’re in a ruthless global competition for dominance and the most productive and efficient win, mountains and poor people be damned.

In sharp contrast to, say, Duke Energy’s congenial, folksy CEO Jim Rogers, Blankenship fashions himself a hillbilly John Galt and doesn’t give a f*ck what you think about it.

Why he’d want to take that act to a national audience is a true puzzlement.

—-

Addendum:

By the way, asked what they might agree about, the Blankenship and Kennedy settled on two things: they don’t like “free trade” and they think carbon capture and sequestration is nonsense.

Related Links:

Stephen Colbert on mountaintop-removal mining [VIDEO]

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

We are all from Wise County

by Tom Philpott

“I’ve got an idea”: Mr. Fox and friends fight the power. 

I’m writing a post that I shouldn’t have to write: a plea to get you, political-minded foodie that you are, to go to whatever lengths necessary to see Fantastic Mr. Fox.

How do I know you haven’t? Because the box-office numbers stink: the film has grossed just $20 million domestically since being released in November. That’s a decent weekend for a superhero blockbuster. Even adding foreign receipts—$17 million—the film hasn’t made back its $40 million budget. Forty million bucks sounds like a king’s ransom to me; but it’s equivalent to a dime for every dollar spent by James Cameron to make Avatar (which I haven’t seen).

These box-office data aren’t mere trivia. If this picture goes up in flames, Fantastic Mr. Fox’s director, Wes Anderson, might never get a decent budget again. According to Richard Brody’s profile  in the The New Yorker, Anderson’s previous two films (the wonderful Life Aquatic and the pretty-good Darjeeling Limited) bombed at the box office. Like baseball umpires, Hollywood suits frown at three strikes. “Anderson is acutely aware that much depends on the reception of Fantastic Mr. Fox,” The New Yorker dryly notes.

And why do I give a damn—and insist that you do, too? First of all, Fox is a beautiful piece of visual storytelling, based on a book by the peerless children’s author Roald Dahl. Its lead roles are voiced by two of Hollywood’s very few genuine stars at the height of their powers—George Clooney and Meryl Streep. The stop-action animation is downright artisanal. We need good popular filmmaking in this country; otherwise, it’s all dumb-guy fart comedies and brainless action sequels. Well, here it is. Support it.

Even more importantly for our purposes, the film dramatizes the brutal and arbitrary power of industrial meat giants—and depicts a daring (and successful) revolt against them. As conjured up by Anderson, Dahl’s “equally mean” farmers, Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, are stand-ins for larger-than-life, yet quite small-minded, U.S. meat moguls like Don Tyson and “Bo” Pilgrim. The film’s end—which I won’t spoil—is a wry commentary on vertical integration and consolidation in the food industry.

Clooney’s wily Mr. Fox is a classic Wes Anderson father figure—unreliable, borderline negligent, never dull. But he’s also a daring, resourceful activist who uses his charisma to form powerful coalitions. And he does so with style and brio. In our time of political fecklessness and timidity, a rebellious fox with a plan makes a worthy hero.

I don’t want to oversell the allegory. Like all of Anderson’s films, this one is mainly about family dynamics that manage to be both sad and zany at the same time. It’s also about cinematic pleasure. (Few food lovers will fail to be delighted by the feast scene, which features the voice of Mario Batali as a bossy rabbit-chef). I’ve seen the film twice, with a broad range of people: from film nerds to a fan of the Scary Movie franchise; from a four-year-old to a grey-hair from the Bronx. All adored it. I can’t figure out why folks aren’t flocking to it.

If the film has left your area without your having seen it, kick yourself. (Waiting for the DVD is okay, but this is one for the big screen.) If it gets some Oscar nominations and reappears at a local theater, get thee to it.

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Washington Times puts screws to city’s food provider, Chartwells

by Adam Browning

David Roberts wants to see distributed generation taken seriously. He’s getting his wish.

Let the era of solar wholesale distributed generation begin.

Last Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a resolution to implement the auction portion of Southern California Edison’s Distributed Generation PV program. This is a big deal—the door is now open for a competitive bidding process for 250 MW of solar photovoltaics from independent solar developers (of 1 to 2 MW in size, 90% of which must be rooftop) over the next few years. First auctions should begin in the next month or two.

More importantly, this is the beginning of what will be a wave of wholesale distributed generation in the state.

To recap, almost 2 years ago, SCE applied to regulators for permission to build and own 250 MW of distributed solar. Solar advocates made the argument that this should be conditioned on opening market opportunity for independent solar developers to provide the same value to ratepayers—and in the end, the Commission agreed. The final decision required SCE to buy an equal amount—250 MW—from independent solar developers (for a combined total of 500 MW). Decision here.

(For the curious or masochistic, all docs in proceeding here ).

Importantly, much work on the auction process and standard contract terms and conditions were worked out last fall. This is a key element. Drafts available here but were modified (mostly for the better) by the final decision.

Pacific Gas and Electric has proposed a similar program, which should wrap up by February. With a lot of issues worked out in the SCE process, once (if) approved, PG&E’s program should be able to launch fairly quickly. This is another 500 MW (250 utility owned, 250 from independent power producers, in the 1-20 MW range).

In the same vein, the Administrative Law Judge on the proposed 1 GW market-based feed-in tariff could decide shortly (knock wood), and if there are no bumps from the trajectory that the staff proposal laid out, a functional program for 1 GW of 1-10 MW sized renewables over the next four years could be launched before summer.

Total, that’s at least 2 GW over the next few years. But I expect that more will come in under the state’s regular RPS process, and as (or, if) these programs prove successful, they can be modified and increased.

Success begets success.

Related Links:

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by David Roberts

The University of Charleston in West Virginia is hosting a debate today between Waterkeeper Alliance founder Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Massey mountaintop mining CEO Don Blankenship. You can watch here starting at about 3:30pm Pacific.

I will be “live-tweeting” the debate, so for a play-by-play please follow my Twitter feed. When it’s over, I’ll write a short wrap-up here, so come back later today or tomorrow and refresh.

Related Links:

Stephen Colbert on mountaintop-removal mining [VIDEO]

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

We are all from Wise County

by David Roberts

This morning Lisa Murkowski took to the floor of Congress to introduce her joint resolution of disapproval, which would overturn the U.S. EPA’s endangerment finding deeming greenhouse gas emissions a threat to public health.

It was one of the most spectacular displays of mendacity and misdirection I’ve ever seen from a U.S. senator, and that’s really saying something.

There were lots of little misleading tidbits, but the big lie at the core is this: Murkowski said “this has nothing to do with the science of climate change.” That is just flatly false. The point of her resolution is to overturn a judgment by EPA scientists that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health. That is a scientific judgment; it is precisely about the science of climate change. It is exactly the same as if a Senator tried to overturn a ruling by the EPA that arsenic, or mercury, or lead paint is a threat. It’s a radical attempt by the legislative branch to interfere with executive branch scientists.

Murkowski’s deceptions

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Here are a couple of others:

1. Murkowski referenced the EPA’s “tailoring rule,” which would raise the threshold for regulated entities from those that emit over 100 tons of CO2 to those that emit over 25,000 tons. That would substantially reduce the number of regulated entities. Murkowski stated flatly that the courts will overturn the tailoring rule. (Ironically, it’s polluting businesses that are suing to block the tailoring rule, since they very much want EPA regs to be a mess.) This is something she can not possibly know; the legal community generally believes otherwise. Even if the tailoring rule is rejected, nothing says the EPA has to regulate small entities the same way they regulate large entities. They can come up with special, expediting permitting processes, etc. (More on EPA regs here.) The notion of EPA regulating churches and bakes sales is just a scare story to spook the public.

2. Murkowski said that EPA regulations would shut down natural gas pipelines, since there is no “best available control technology” for natural gas compressor stations. That’s false on two counts. First, nothing compels the EPA to simply shut down facilities that have no obvious way to reduce their emissions. EPA regulators are not robots; they can tailor their rules to different classes of emitters.

Secondly, it is possible to reduce emissions at compressor stations—the waste heat they emit can be captured and used to create more power to run the stations, increasing efficiency and reducing emissions. (Alternatively, the electricity can be fed into the grid, with the same net effect.) In aggregate there’s something like 2GW of potential power here. FERC chair Jon Wellinghof is all over this—it’s a personal mission of his. It’s precisely the kind of thing that regulations might finally kick into action.

3. Murkowski slathered her comments with a thick layer of concern trolling, saying repeatedly that she and her colleagues are working diligently to find a solution for reducing emissions and that the threat of EPA regulations was only hindering that work. That is, of course, delusional on both counts.

Where to begin? Murkowski noted that she has co-sponsored a climate bill, and it’s true. In 2006 she co-sponsored an absurdly weak bill with Jeff Bingaman and Arlen Specter, which would have capped the price of CO2 permits at $12, effectively neutering its effect. Since then she has signed on to none of the many subsequent bills and done her best to undermine all of them. When she listed the efforts underway in the Senate today, she pointedly left out the main bill under consideration, passed by the House and the Senate EPW Committee last year. She has not said a single word in support of any bill that actually has a chance of passing.

She made no attempt to outline what kind of solution would actually solve the problem (as opposed to the euphemistic “balancing environment and economy,” long-time Republicanspeak for protecting corporate backers). She made a big production of saying that this issue warrants full and extensive (and slooow) debate in the Senate, but made no note of the fact that her party has gone nuts,  been unified in opposition to every single thing Democrats have tried to do, and put forward as its principle spokesperson on the issue a senator, James Inhofe, who denies that climate change even exists. The pieties about the sanctity of the democratic process are a bit rich in light of Republicans’ serial abuse of Senate rules and procedures.

Finally, the idea that it’s the EPA backstop preventing Republicans from engaging with the issue in good faith … does that bit of fabulism even warrant a response? Can she be serious?

Weak defense

Boxer took the floor after Murkowski to rage against the resolution, pointing out—accurately—that it’s an unprecedented attempt by legislators to overrule the work of federal scientists. Would Senators try to tell federal agencies that nicotine isn’t harmful if they didn’t like the implications? How about arsenic, or lead?

Boxer’s speech was fine as far as it went, but it doesn’t go far enough. Neither Boxer nor any other legislator is taking on Murkowski’s main argument directly. Murkowski says these new environmental regulations would destroy the economy. Why won’t Boxer defend them on those grounds? Conservatives have been Chicken Little-ing about environmental regulations for a century now, and every time, without fail, experience proves their fears unfounded. Can’t some senator stand up and say clearly that the economic fear-mongering is bankrupt?

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) came closer in a statement released after Murkowski’s speech, in which she says:

If passed, this amendment would send a message that the United States will remain reliant on outdated and inefficient energy technologies and delay investment in new, clean technologies that would spur innovation and create good-paying, American jobs, all across this great nation

Exactly.

Related Links:

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An argument against Murkowski’s radical attempt to overrule EPA scientists

Hanging EPA regulations around Democrats’ necks

by Eric Roston

First things first: A new U.S. senator and a blip in the post-Copenhagen U.N. negotiations may cause comprehensive global climate policy to melt away faster than the Himalayas-or will they?

Surgeon General’s warning: Many points in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report have been revealed to be wrong as scientists observe global changes occurring faster than predicted just three years ago. Yet these accelerated changes are little remarked on in the mainstream press in the way a dumb mistake has been remarked on this week.  Please keep this general observation in mind through the next section.

The IPCC regrets the error: Readers of this space are likely to posit certain things about the world, that global temperature increases are “unequivocal,” that industrial emissions and unchecked land-use change are the major causes, and that we understand these things because the method that scientists don’t call the “scientific method” has historically been terrific at weeding out and incinerating errors in our understanding of nature.

And so it is again. The IPCC this week sort of apologized for an error embedded in the 938-page second volume of its 2007 report, one frequently repeated as an alarming glaciological observation: “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.”

What the scientific method has revealed here is that this statement is not true. The Himalayan glaciers are receding plenty fast—around the world glaciers are melting more and more quickly—but the projection of 2035 is an error, as explained cogently and thoroughly by the AP’s Seth Borenstein (“The year 2350 apparently was transposed as 2035.”).

What we have here is a failure to communicate: Unlike the University of East Anglia climate e-mails revealed in November, this Himalayan hiccup is an embarrassing error, rather than just embarrassing, full stop. But this is the way science works: Un-replicable results or, in this case, a plain-old mistake, are weeded out to make our understanding of nature ever more precise. There’s always plenty we don’t know. Remember Mencken: “Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.”

However, like the University of East Anglia climate e-mails, this Himalaya hiccup is another case study in poor handling of scientific communication to the public. The IPCC addressed the matter in a statement Wednesday, saying that the Himalaya error “refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers.” The group adds that “IPCC procedures” “were not applied properly.”  The statement isn’t “poorly substantiated.” As far as anyone knows, it’s false. Scientific communicators might best take a lesson from newspapers, don’t be such a scientist, and just say, “IPCC regrets the error.”

Changing political climate: The election of Republican Scott Brown to fill the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) seat is the first great political story of the new decade, with likely consequences on climate-and-energy legislation. Brown’s campaign website states, “I oppose a national cap and trade program because of the higher costs that families and businesses would incur.” (Massachusetts already participates in a regional cap-and-trade program.) The Congressional Budget Office and EPA estimates of the House climate bill put the cost of transforming the national energy system at about the same price as a pizza a month.

Some of Brown’s new colleagues addressed climate policy this week.  Retiring Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) said that the Senate is unlikely to take up climate policy this year, suggesting an energy bill without economic mechanisms to close the market’s loophole that allows unfettered pollution of heat-trapping gases. Dorgan’s comments contradict Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who last week said legislation may come to the floor this spring.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) today introduced a bill that would restrict the White House from regulating greenhouse gas pollution. With climate politics (and regular politics) halting action on Capitol Hill, the Obama administration has moved aggressively to impose restrictions through the Environmental Protection Agency. Attacks on the White House’s policy are coming from outside offcialdom, too. Leading business groups and firms met last week to decide on a course of action. The Hill reports that not everyone in attendance opposes the new regulations.

Polling superpower Frank Luntz, who for a long time was a top GOP adviser, has teamed up with the Environmental Defense Fund to argue that most Americans think climate legislation would help solve a real problem with benefits that reach far beyond it. Among the findings [pdf]: Poll respondents are uninspired by the phrase “carbon neutral.”

The Yvo Empire: The Copenhagen Accord set Jan. 31 as a deadline for developed countries to define 2020 emissions reductions targets and for developing nations to announce mitigation actions. That date is fast approaching but fewer than two-dozen nations have signed off on the Accord itself, which make it a “soft” deadline. A tentative agreement that rich countries disseminate $30 billion in adaptation funds by 2012 still faces challenges, such as “who will donate how much, where the money will go and who will oversee the spending.” U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer says that congressional inaction will not relieve the White House of Obama’s commitment in Copenhagen to reduce U.S. emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.  U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern opened up to Grist about his concerns.

The Himalayan error is not the only item weighing on the IPCC’s public reputation, and by extension public appetite for climate policy. Scrutiny of IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri’s business relations is also taking attention away from the robust findings of climate science. With the next big report, the group’s fifth edition, due in 2013-2014, some are wondering if there are alternative avenues to codify climate science for policymakers and the public. Economist Richard Tol has written, “For many policy makers, the IPCC reports are the only source of scientific information on climate change. Monopolies are easily seduced into abusing their power. A duopoly may work better, but given the scale of the effort, this may not be feasible” [pdf].

Prasad Kasibhatla, associate professor at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, has suggested that national academies might work together to issue climate science synthesis reports.

Climate Post book club: Every now and then it seems worthwhile to share a recent read. This week’s news coincides with some of the themes in Thin Ice, by Mark Bowen, an adventure-filled biography of rugged, globe-trekking Lonnie Thompson and a sweep through climate science and history.

Applicants must make very few numerical typos: When looking for the Himalaya statement on the IPCC website the first thing you see is this confidence-building item: “The IPCC has started work on the preparation of its Fifth Assessment Report. We are currently looking for experts who can act as authors.”

Related Links:

U.N. scientist refutes Daily Mail claim he said Himalayan glacier error was politically motivated

Murkowski’s floor speech on EPA regulations was full of deceptions

An argument against Murkowski’s radical attempt to overrule EPA scientists

by Eric de Place

It’s a smidge belated, but the folks at Clean Energy Works have a smart video rejoinder to Annie Leonard’s December hit video on cap-and-trade. (Readers may recall me flying off the handle about Leonard’s video, here and here.)

In The Facts of Cap-and-Trade, Nat Keohane, economist for Environmental Defense Fund, gives a thoughtful and friendly defense of cap-and-trade—why it’s sound policy and why now is the time to act. 

There’s more here.

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

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Q&A: what will happen with climate legislation in 2010?

by Ed Bruske

Ed Bruske spent a week in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke
Elementary School in the District of Columbia observing how food is
prepared. This is the third in a six-part series of posts about what
he saw. Check out the first and second posts. Cross-posted from The Slow Cook.

Each morning Mattie Hall performs a ritual in the cafeteria at H.D. Cooke elementary school. She takes 17 blue, insulated travel bags and lines them up on the lunch counter. Then she begins filling the bags with fruits or vegetables from all over the country: one day it’s 1.6-ounce plastic bags of carrot bites from California, another day whole oranges from Florida, another day apples from Washington state or New Zealand.

Each bag is assigned to one of the classrooms at H.D. Cooke. The fruits and vegetables are a morning snack, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which funds the purchase of fresh fruits and vegetables in schools with a high enrollment of needy students. Around 10:30 a.m., students, usually in pairs, begin making their way to the kitchen to retrieve the bags and take them back to their classrooms.

Hall, who is nearing retirement and has seen it all where school food is concerned, says she has a pretty good idea what will happen to those snacks after they leave the kitchen. If what’s inside the bag is fruit, it most likely will be eaten. “Kids love the fruit. they never send fruit back,” said Hall. But vegetables are a different story. If the day’s snack is a raw vegetable, as the vegetable snacks invariably are, chances are it will come back in the bag at the end of the day.

Kids will eat carrots, Hall says, but that’s about it. “They don’t eat the broccoli,” she says. “They don’t eat the zucchini squash and a lot of them won’t eat the cucumbers.”

In fact, Hall said, some of the students have devised an ingenious method for avoiding vegetable snacks: They don’t bring their bag back at the end of the day as they are supposed to, but instead wait until the last minute, making an appearance just before snack time in the morning knowing that vegetables have already been dispensed and that Hall will give them some kind of fruit instead. “They know I won’t refuse them,” Hall says with a wry smile. “I can’t refuse them.”

It sounds a little far-fetched. I wonder if Hall isn’t pulling my leg. But sure enough, after most of the bags have left the kitchen, I watch as the stragglers begin to appear with their empty bags from the day before. Hall gives them bananas.

On that particular day, Thursday, the snack was cucumbers, having arrived pre-sliced in sealed plastic tubs from Keany Produce in Landover, Md. There were only enough tubs for about half the snack bags; the rest got bananas. I asked Hall if the cucumbers wouldn’t be more palatable if they included a dressing, such as the Kraft ranch dressing that proliferates in the cafeteria in individual foil packets.

“They don’t send enough (dressing) in here for me to do that,” Hall says. She’s certain the cucumbers will not be eaten. “I’m going to come in here on Monday and those cucumbers will still be sitting in those bags and I have to deal with it,” she says in a low voice.  But it’s even worse than that. Not only is Friday a day off for “staff development,” but Monday is a holiday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The uneaten cucumber slices would be sitting in their plastic tubs for four days, unrefrigerated, before Hall got to them.

When I ask my 10-year-old daughter about this, she confirms that kids eat the carrots, but not so much the other vegetables. “They like to turn them into slush,” she says. When I ask her what that means, she says: “They step on them in the plastic bag.”

Health authorities are desperate to get children to eat less fatty, salty, and sugary foods and more vegetables as a way to combat the growing incidence of childhood obesity. First Lady Michele Obama famously planted a vegetable garden at the White House, brought in D.C. school children to help, and has made better diets for kids her personal crusade. “Healthy Schools” legislation now pending before the D.C. Council would require that children in Kindergarten though eighth grade be served a minimum 3.75 cups of vegetables per week, with at least one half cup each of “dark green vegetables, orange vegetables, and legumes.” High school students would be served five cups weekly.

But as every parent knows, serving vegetables is one thing. Getting kids to actually eat those vegetables is quite another. Some kids love certain vegetables. Others will go to elaborate lengths to avoid vegetables, picking them out of their food with extraordinary determination. This is a battle we fight with our 10-year-old daughter every day.

The kitchen supervisor at H.D. Cooke, Tiffany Whittington, is sympathetic. “I don’t eat vegetables,” she says. “When I was eight, I used to eat dinner at my half-sister’s aunt’s house. She would make me sit at the table until I finished everything on my plate. I was stubborn. I would sit there all night.”

What kids really want are all the familiar fast foods. “I really like pizza on Fridays,” says one eight-year-old girl. “I like the chicken. But I think my favorite thing is hamburgers.”

In a survey of its members in 2004, the School Nutrition Association found that pizza was by far the favorite food in schools, followed by chicken (meaning chicken nuggets), corn, and french fries. If you combined all types of potatoes, however, potato would come in second. Potato is treated as a vegetable in the National School Lunch Program, even though it is so starchy it might as well be white bread as far as the human body is concerned. Salad did not even make it onto the list.

The same day the cucumbers went out in Mattie Hall’s snack bags, mixed vegetables appeared on the lunch menu along with “Asian noodles” and “teriyaki beef bites.” When students enter the food line, or “Kid’s Stop Cafe,” at H.D. Cooke they immediately pull a carton of milk out of a cooler, then pick up a disposable Styrofoam tray that doubles as a plate. Under rules set forth by the school lunch program, which subsidizes the meals, students must be served at least three items from the foods offered—in this case the the milk, the noodles, the beef, the vegetables, and canned diced peaches—in order to be nutritionally complete. But since kids have a choice, they can opt out of the vegetables.

I could hear Mattie Hall, who was helping with the lunch service, asking the children as they passed: “Do you want vegetables? Do you want vegetables?” And I could hear the replies: “No! No! No! No!” Standing at the other end of the line, I quickly lost count of the number of students who exited the “Kid’s Stop Cafe” with a tray containing chocolate milk, noodles, beef patties, canned peaches—but no vegetables.

Advocates for better school lunches suggest that kids would eat more vegetables if the vegetables were more appealing, prepared more creatively. Other than the fresh produce provided for snacks, most of the vegetables served at H.D. Cooke arrive frozen or canned. This certainly speeds up food preparation and reduces the need for skilled labor in the kitchen. Labor represents roughly half the cost of school food service. But more speed and convenience typically means less flavor and eye appeal in the finished product.

The first day I arrived at the H.D. Cooke kitchen to observe how food was prepared, kitchen supervisor Tiffany Whittington was readying frozen mixed vegetables by cooking them in a commercial steamer, then seasoning them with a butter-flavored vegetable oil spread to boost the flavor. The vegetables looked dull and tired.

Similarly, on Thursday, Whittington prepared a mix of broccoli and cauliflower florets and sliced carrots from Mexico that had been blanched, or partially cooked, and shipped frozen in 20-pound bags. Coming out of the bags, the vegetables were gleaming and full of color. But after they were cooked in a deep stainless pan covered with foil in the steamer, the broccoli had turned from bright green to drab olive. After an hour of lunch service on the steam table, the broccoli had completely disintegrated and was no longer recognizable, except as specks clinging to the carrots and cauliflower. This is what the kids were refusing.

One of the menu items in the recipe book provided by Chartwells, the company that handles food for D.C. Public Schools, is titled “Roasted Italian Vegetables.” It calls for fresh yellow squash, green zucchini, fresh tomatoes, green peppers, and onions. I try to picture how that would look on the steam table at H.D. Cooke. It certainly would be a change from the usual routine of frozen or canned vegetables. I wonder if the kids would find it more appealing.

One thing students do seem to like, despite the findings of the School Nutrition Association, is salad. At H.D. Cooke, that typically means five-pound bags of prepared iceberg lettuce from California. Inside the bags of torn iceberg are separate little bags of grated carrots and grated purple cabbage. It’s all tossed together, frequently with shredded cheddar cheese, then offered on the lunch line from time to time with packets of ranch dressing. Or, it can serve as one of the daily “alternate” meals.

Whittington says alternates are the most likely place to find fresh vegetables in the cafeteria. Turkey wraps, for instance, are made with fresh lettuce and diced tomatoes. But normally she would only make 10 of these for the approximately 280 students she serves lunch to on any given day. Most kids take the regular meal that’s offered. But on Thursday when I was there, while kids were refusing the vegetable combo with the disintegrating broccoli, they were scooping up an alternate meal consisting of paper “boats” filled with iceberg lettuce salad, “popcorn chicken”—little balls of breaded chicken baked in the oven—and a dinner roll. Under the rules, this constitutes a complete meal: vegetable from the lettuce, protein from the chicken, grain from the bread.

In the dining room, children squeeze gobs of ranch dressing onto their lettuce, and it’s no wonder they like it. A single, two-tablespoon serving of Kraft ranch contains 12 grams of fat, or 18 percent of the daily recommended allowance of fat for an adult. The other ingredients are a food chemist’s brew: sugar (a half-teaspoon), modified food starch, phosphoric acid, monosodium glutamate, xanthan gum, polysorbate 60, sodium lactate, natamycin, and calcium disodium EDTA.

Healthy food advocates offer yet another line of attack on the vegetable front: locally grown produce. According to this thinking, foods that are grown locally and minimally processed are more nutritious and more likely to be eaten because they are fresher, more appetizing, more flavorful. The “Healthy Schools” bill would require D.C. schools to serve locally and sustainably grown produce “whenever possible.” It would further require that schools identify the origins of all the produce they serve.

In the cafeteria at H.D. Cooke, posters with kid-friendly animal figures extol the virtues of seasonal, fresh fruits, and vegetables. “Eat Healthy!” declares one. “Fresh foods contain lots of vitamins and minerals. So if I eat healthy fruit I will keep my body strong!” 

“By growing my own vegetables just like farmers, I can eat well and have more brain power!” exhorts another.

Since the late 1990s, more than 2,000 school districts around the country have incorporated some form of farm-to-school scheme in their meal service. Salad bars are a popular option. In the last year, a D.C. Farm to School Network has formed around local food advocacy groups and has played a role in drafting the “Healthy Schools” initiative. (Full disclosure: I sit on the network’s advisory board.)

Serving local produce to the approximately 40,000 students in the public schools, plus another 20,000 students in public charter schools, would certainly boost the local farm economy. But since so much of the fruits and vegetables served in schools is designed for a production scheme that relies on frozen and canned convenience foods, it’s unclear how local farm products would fit in. Could the schools build their own processing facility? Or, could schools afford to start making meals from scratch?

As always, where school food is concerned, money is an issue.

Tomorrow: Everything goes down better with sugar.

Related Links:

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Tales from a D.C. school kitchen: How food service turns a green school into an enviro hog

Tales from a D.C. school kitchen: Hold the fat and please pass the sugar

by Senator Jeff Merkley

Today one of my Republican colleagues introduced a proposal
to brazenly overturn sound scientific work done by our nation’s leading public
health experts and prohibit the Environment Protection Agency from doing its
job to protect the health and welfare of the American people. This extremely damaging proposal is a
political stunt designed to effectively strip the EPA’s power to curb harmful
air pollution.  

Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) proposal takes the form of a “Resolution
of Disapproval” under the Congressional Review Act. It is so extreme that it would legally
overturn scientists’ very conclusion, based on decades of scientific study,
that greenhouse-gas emissions threaten public health and the environment, and
it would have the effect of prohibiting the EPA from making the same conclusion
in the future. It could block any action
by the EPA to protect our families, our communities, and our economy from
greenhouse-gas pollution.

This resolution represents an irresponsible attempt to take
away the power of an independent agency whose sole purpose is to protect the
health of our families, friends, and neighbors and the environment we live in.

Imagine if Congress always put the interests of polluters
ahead of the health of our families. Our
rivers and lakes would be choked with sewage.
Acid rain would pour down from smog-filled skies. Hundreds of thousands more of our neighbors,
friends, and loved ones would be victims of cancer, heart disease, and
asthma.  President Nixon—Nixon!—signed the EPA into law because even Republicans recognized that unchecked
pollution was poisoning our people. 

This resolution is a return to that polluter-first approach
that even President Nixon found intolerable. 

Decades of scientific research has proven that carbon pollution
is harmful to human health and causes global warming. The EPA’s endangerment finding—as required
by the Clean Air Act—found that carbon pollution endangers the health of
millions of American families and future generations. This resolution would block the EPA’s ability
to regulate unsafe air pollution and would continue to allow our nation’s
considerable contribution to global warming to go unchecked. What’s worse, this resolution aims to
politicize an independent agency and prevent it from protecting the health of
our citizens and our communities.

While supporters of this misguided resolution try to tout its
supposed positive impact for our economy, it would actually harm our economy by
helping maintain our dependence on foreign oil, hamstringing EPA’s ability to
promote clean energy options, and negatively impacting our nation’s clean
energy jobs industry. This resolution encourages big polluters to
continue polluting, and discourages one of the fastest-growing industries in
America: clean energy. Continuing on the path of spending billions
of dollars a day to import foreign oil rather than make significant progress
transforming our energy economy and developing American-made renewable energy
is a deeply flawed approach. 

Plainly
put, this dangerous resolution has the best interest of big energy industries
in mind, not the health and welfare of the American people or our environment,
and not the clean energy job creation we urgently need right now. Because
this extreme resolution only needs a simple majority to pass, we need you to
speak out. Please consider calling your senators and urging them to put the health of our citizens before politics and vote against
this harmful resolution.

Related Links:

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Hanging EPA regulations around Democrats’ necks

by Tom Laskawy

In a ruling today, the Supreme Court rolled back campaign finance laws to the pre-Watergate era:

Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First
Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has
no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing
corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt
democracy.

The 5-to-4 decision was a doctrinal earthquake but
also a political and practical one. Specialists in campaign finance law
said they expected the decision, which also applies to labor unions and
other organizations, to reshape the way elections are conducted.

I’ll say. Corporations will now be able to run ads supporting or opposing particular candidates up until the day before an election. While unions will likely gain the same right, they have never been able to spend more than a fraction of what large corporations typically do in an election year.

The majority opinion also offered some magical thinking in its ruling when it dismissed any risk that corporations might exert undue influence over elections as it referred to corporations as just another kind of “association of citizens.” Sadly, large corporations more often act like amoral, profit-driven robots—not the kind of associations any reasonable person would want pouring millions (perhaps up to a billion) dollars into federal campaign advertising.

This ruling will have profound effects not just on elections but on the very concept of reform in all areas of government. One of food policy expert Marion Nestle’s favorite refrains is that the best way to fix the food system is to remove corporate influence from government—she even lists that point as an important element in any attempt to fix food safety. And you need only read Grist’s David Roberts to hear the effect corporate money has on the debate over climate legislation.

This Supreme Court ruling solidifies corporations’ position as the ultimate power in American politics—they can use their deep pockets to assault voters with advertisements to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt on any issue and on any candidate they choose. And unlike elected officials, corporations are accountable to no one but their shareholders, especially if they’ve managed to stack the regulatory deck in their favor.

Anyone who believes that we need to address climate change, our food system, our exposure to toxic chemicals and our energy policy to put this country on a sustainable path should be outraged by the Supreme Court’s ruling—President Obama certainly is. There are election reform bills pending in Congress that may now get a boost but the fact is—barring Supreme Court retirements—nothing short of a constitutional amendment will close the Pandora’s Box this unconscionable ruling has opened. You have been warned.

Related Links:

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Did Jamie Oliver meet his match in ‘America’s Fattest City’?

Lesson for schools: sweetened junk shouldn’t count as food

by Lester Brown

The 107 million tons of grain that went to U.S. ethanol distilleries in 2009 was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels. More than a quarter of the total U.S. grain crop was turned into ethanol to fuel cars last year. With 200 ethanol distilleries in the country set up to transform food into fuel, the amount of grain processed has tripled since 2004.

The United States looms large in the world food economy: it is far and away the world’s leading grain exporter, exporting more than Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Russia combined. In a globalized food economy, increased demand for food to fuel American vehicles puts additional pressure on world food supplies.

From an agricultural vantage point, the automotive hunger for crop-based fuels is insatiable. The Earth Policy Institute has noted that even if the entire U.S. grain crop were converted to ethanol (leaving no domestic crop to make bread, rice, pasta, or feed the animals from which we get meat, milk, and eggs), it would satisfy at most 18 percent of U.S. automotive fuel needs.

When the growing demand for corn for ethanol helped to push world grain prices to record highs between late 2006 and 2008, people in low-income grain-importing countries were hit the hardest. The unprecedented spike in food prices drove up the number of hungry people in the world to over 1 billion for the first time in 2009. Though the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression has recently brought food prices down from their peak, they still remain well above their long-term average levels.

The amount of grain needed to fill the tank of an SUV with ethanol just once can feed one person for an entire year. The average income of the owners of the world’s 940 million automobiles is at least 10 times larger than that of the world’s 2 billion hungriest people. In the competition between cars and hungry people for the world’s harvest, the car is destined to win.

Continuing to divert more food to fuel, as is now mandated by the U.S. federal government in its Renewable Fuel Standard, will likely only reinforce the disturbing rise in hunger. By subsidizing the production of ethanol, now to the tune of some $6 billion each year, U.S. taxpayers are in effect subsidizing rising food bills at home and around the world.

 

For more information on the competition between cars and people for grain, see Chapter 2 in Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), on-line for free downloading with supporting datasets.

Related Links:

Made in America

Small cars make it big at Detroit Auto Show [slideshow]

America’s Century-Long Love Affair with the Car May Be Coming to an End – Data Highlights

by Jonathan Hiskes

Michael BrunePhoto courtesy Sierra ClubThe Sierra Club’s new leader will come to the job with a record of “environmental agitation” against big industrial polluters.  The group announced on Wednesday that Michael Brune, 38, currently head of Rainforest Action Network (RAN), will replace Carl Pope as executive director as of March 15. Brune honed RAN’s strategy of negotiating politely with corporate heavyweights such as Bank of America, Citigroup, and General Motors—and then, if they don’t clean up their acts, campaigning mercilessly against them. The two-pronged approach earned results that belie RAN’s modest size—it helped convince Home Depot to stop selling wood from endangered forests, for example.

Brune spoke to me about his plans to bring similar ferocity to the comparatively mild Sierra Club, the nation’s largest environmental group, which claims 1.3 million members. With its self-governing regional chapters, its way-outside-the-beltway headquarters in San Francisco, and a smaller D.C. policy shop than other Big Green groups, the Sierra Club has always relied more on grassroots advocacy than direct work with Congress. Brune offered thoughts about what’s ahead for the Sierra Club and the environmental movement as a whole. 

——-

Q. The so-called environmental problems we face now are closely integrated into our lives—our energy systems and buildings, our food and transportation. They’re a different beast than traditional wilderness conservation. How does the Sierra Club adapt?

A. By not looking at these problems as obligations but as opportunities. With clean energy and climate legislation, there are enormous benefits like job creation, reduced health burden from the toxic pollution many communities are facing, and a whole series of opportunities that will result from deeper investments in clean-energy research, development, and deployment.

Q. What should we be calling this work in the 21st century, to get more people on board?

A. I don’t focus so much on the name—I think environmentalism is a decent word. What is perhaps most important is to appeal to a wider set of values. In talking about climate change, we can discuss terms like parts per million or discuss how many votes we have in the Senate. But what’s more inspiring is talk about the people who will be hurt by climate change, the people who will benefit from a clean energy transition, and also, as the Sierra Club has done for decades, talk about the wild places that need to be protected and restored in order to address climate disruption. If we look at health concerns, jobs, the impact on the economy that climate change will have, we’ll do a much better job appealing to a wider section of the public.

Q. What habits and ways of thinking—perhaps acquired in the ‘60s—does the movement need to shed?

A. I’m reluctant to criticize folks on whose shoulders we’re standing. The work that was done in the ‘60s and ‘70s might be a little outdated, perhaps, but the results have improved the lives of millions of people.

That said, there is important work to be done in the near term, such as isolating the corporations and public institutions that are most resistant to change, that are most aggressively fighting to maintain a failing status quo. Companies like Massey Energy and much of the coal and oil industries need to be challenged to either evolve or face dramatically decreasing public support.

Q. Where should the climate movement be focusing this year? The Senate looks like an even tougher place to work after the Massachusetts special election debacle.

A. The top priority is still passing strong climate and energy legislation. I certainly think that’s something that can be done in the next year. And it will have a powerful impact on a whole range of issues progressives care about.

Q. I talked to Bill McKibben this morning, and he told me he doesn’t see Congress acting until it perceives a much larger social movement demanding climate action. He thinks Congress members are pretty good at discerning whether there are people and pressure behind what they are being asked to do. There’s a different argument that lasering in on specific senators or on the filibuster is the way to go. What do you think?

A. I definitely agree with Bill. A focus of this movement should be to push all elected officials to make a stand and not to narrow our focus on one particular bill or a handful of senators. We have much deeper work to do over the next several months and years.

Q. Was there a moment of discovery when it became clear you wanted this job?

A. Two and a half years ago I was working with Sierra Club Books on publishing my book Coming Clean. I started looking more closely at the work the Sierra Club has been doing and the grassroots base that the Sierra Club is a part of. I think anybody that has been paying attention to the environmental movement over the last several years has to be impressed with the record of the Sierra Club in stopping new coal-fired power plants and in promoting far-reaching and progressive policy initiatives.

Q. What happens to Rainforest Action Network now that you’re departing?

A. RAN will continue doing its great work. We just launched a new campaign to change Chevron, to hopefully inspire California’s largest corporation to become a 21st century energy company. Chevron needs to clean up its mess in Ecuador and RAN and others will be at their heels continuously to push them to do that. On RAN.org, you can see an action that we did just yesterday to push General Mills and Cargill to stop converting rainforests into palm oil plantations. RAN’s probably going to have its best year ever. I’m just sorry I won’t be around to take all the credit.

——

Also check out Jason Mark’s analysis of what the leadership change means for the Sierra Club.

And watch a video about Brune’s work at RAN:

Related Links:

Messaging that can save the clean energy bill

Congressional coal ash defenders ignore damages back home

Will Google’s fight with China stymie climate negotiations?

by Rena Steinzor

A critical test of the Obama Administration’s commitment to reviving the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is teeing up behind closed doors at the White House.  Once again, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is cast in the role of regulation killer, supported by a slew of state and other federal agencies that are polluters in this scenario.  Other players include a nearly hysterical segment of the electric utility industry, which argues that labeling coal ash as a hazardous waste will prove prohibitively expensive, as well as a coalition of public interest activists that includes Robert Bullard, the father of the environmental justice movement.  The story has ample drama: a provable case of racial discrimination, companies as haughty as any on Wall Street, and an appealing heroine,  Lisa Jackson, the embattled EPA Administrator, who is the public face of this administration on the environment but, in a discordant replay of history, could be forced to fall on her sword by anonymous White House economists.  (Remember Bush II’s Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, pushed to resign by the machinations of Vice President Dick Cheney?  Jackson has less prominent opponents, but just as much on the line.)

An industry victory on the issue would suggest that presidential appointees, confirmed by the Senate and presented to the American people as accountable for everything from food and drug safety to toxic chemical exposures in the workplace, are not really in charge of their agencies but instead could be compelled to become puppets for a White House staff any time a powerful industry screams loudly enough.

The most recent chapter in this saga begins in Kingston, Tennessee three days before Christmas, 2008.  A six-story-high earthen dam used to contain a coal ash waste pond at a power plant operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) collapsed, releasing more than 1 billion gallons of jet black sludge laced with arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, selenium, and thallium.  By volume, the spill was more than 100 times larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster, covering more than 400 acres of homes, farms, businesses, roads, rivers, and irreplaceable wetlands.  (See table at end of this post listing the chemicals commonly found in coal ash and their negative health effects.)

According to EPA data, nearly 600 similar earthen coal ash dams are spread across 35 states, including 50 so-called “high hazard” dams holding back tens of millions of tons of coal ash waste. In 2009 alone, U.S. coal-fired power plants produced more than 136 million tons of coal ash waste—more than enough to fill the boxcars of a train stretching from Washington, D.C., to Melbourne, Australia.  By 2015, industry will produce 175 million tons per year.  And the kicker is that if you live within one mile of a coal ash disposal site, you are twice as likely to live below the poverty line as the average U.S. citizen and 30 percent more likely to be a person of color.

EPA has fiddled with the coal ash problem for a quarter of a century.  In 1980, Congress enacted an exception to the tough federal statute directing EPA to regulate hazardous waste.  So-called “Bevill wastes” were exempt from regulation until EPA studied their characteristics comprehensively.  EPA was instructed to report back on coal ash by 1982.  Throughout the 1980s and 1990s EPA extemporized, studying the problem, venturing the opinion that no strict regulation was needed, reversing itself and promising to regulate coal ash as a “contingent” hazardous waste, and ultimately shelving these efforts during the Bush II Administration.  Years of work and millions of dollars later, we have amassed rock solid evidence that when coal ash waste is collected in unlined pits in the ground, it is extraordinarily dangerous to people, livestock, and wildlife, not to mention water quality.  The record includes EPA studies and a report by a blue ribbon panel of scientific experts at the National Research Council.  For an excellent summary of the issues, see congressional testimony by Earthjustice attorney Lisa Evans.

EPA Administrator Jackson, who has embraced environmental justice as one of her top priorities, promised to break this gridlock and propose a rule controlling the disposal of coal ash by the end of 2009.  She sent the draft over to Cass Sunstein’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) at OMB.  The draft was never released to any member of the public, although I suspect that industry lobbyists have a copy because they have already invented multiple toothless counter-proposals.  As we have reported before in these pages, Sunstein’s staff commenced a marathon of meetings with coal industry executives, their paid experts and lobbyists, state highway administrators who want to spread the stuff in road beds, and other opponents of the EPA rule—21 meetings at last count, more than on any other subject that has engaged OIRA’s attention for many years.

Obviously and sensibly embarrassed by how all this looks from the outside, the OMB issued a statement last week asserting something as silly as it is untrue:  “By executive order,” the official fantasized, “if a stakeholder on a proposal asks to meet with OMB (OIRA), they are required to take the meeting.”  Pressed on the point, OMB asserted that the executive order in question was EO 12866, which says nothing of the sort.

In fact, the order, issued by Bill Clinton in 1993 and continued through the Bush II Administration, is scrupulous about demanding that the lead agency in charge of a regulatory proposal (that would be EPA in this instance) afford the public an opportunity for “notice” (by publishing the proposal in the Federal Register) and “comment” (by receiving and reviewing all the written comments anyone may care to submit during a 30 to 90 comment period).  Sometimes, lead agencies even hold public hearings on particularly controversial proposed rules.  But this rule has not yet been proposed.  If it had been, EPA would be obligated to hear from all the stakeholders in the debate, but not OIRA economists, until it had decided what it wanted to do.  Not even the Bush Administration’s OIRA offered such a novel and absurd interpretation of its obligations.  If it had, it would have been a green light to industry to schedule meetings 24/7 for the rest of the administration’s term, thus delaying action forever.

I wish Jackson the best of luck in this grueling battle, as should anyone who hopes that the nation’s environmental policy will be crafted with a minimum of special interest politics, by experts who have spent a lifetime studying the science and law of these issues.  She does not deserve to get sandbagged by OIRA, and if she does, the American people, especially those living near coal ash catastrophes-in-waiting, will have much to lament.  If OIRA establishes its primacy over EPA, we can look forward to many more such intrusions in the future—a very discouraging omen, indeed.

Human Health Effects of Coal Combustion Waste Pollutants

Aluminum

Lung disease, developmental problems

Antimony

Eye irritation, heart damage, lung problems

Arsenic

Multiple types of cancer, darkening of skin, hand   warts

Barium

Gastrointestinal problems, muscle weakness, heart   problems

Beryllium

Lung cancer, pneumonia, respiratory problems

Boron

Reproductive problems, gastrointestinal illness

Cadmium

Lung disease, kidney disease, cancer

Chromium

Cancer, ulcers and other stomach problems

Chlorine

Respiratory distress

Cobalt

Lung/heart/liver/kidney problems, dermatitis

Lead

Decreases in IQ, nervous system, developmental and   behavioral problems

Manganese

Nervous system, muscle problems, mental problems

Mercury

Cognitive deficits, developmental delays, behavioral   problems

Molybdenum

Mineral imbalance, anemia, developmental problems

Nickel

Cancer, lung problems, allergic reactions

Selenium

Birth defects, impaired bone growth in children

Thallium

Birth defects, nervous system/reproductive problems

Vanadium

Birth defects, lung/throat/eye problems

Zinc

Gastrointestinal effects, reproductive problems

 
 

 Source: Earthjustice

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Will Google’s fight with China stymie climate negotiations?

The Climate Post: The only good strategy is a dead strategy

by Tom Philpott

For those nostalgic for Gourmet Magazine, a group in which I count myself, here’s a kind of cheerful wake: a video symposium (impossible to embed, damn it) on the fallen magazine featuring editor Ruth Reichl, restaurant critic Jonathan Gold, and senior editor Laurie Ochoa. Watch it and chuckle a bit at the earnestness, and weep a little about the demise of the glossy food magazine that took social and environmental issues seriously.

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Why are libertarian right wingers defending a dysfunctional, state-engineered food system?

Anti–school garden campaigner Caitlin Flanagan, on Colbert back in ‘06