by Tom Laskawy
Anyone who has come home from school carrying a sprouting bean in a
foam cup can attest that growing plants has long been used as a
teaching tool.
—Kim Severson of the NYT slips a full-throated defense of school gardens into a profile of a new Brooklyn Edible Schoolyard Project
Related Links:
Lesson for schools: sweetened junk shouldn’t count as food
Anti–school garden campaigner Caitlin Flanagan, on Colbert back in ‘06
Failure to cultivate: Why school gardens ARE important
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 second in a six-part series of posts about what he saw. The first post is here. Cross-posted from The Slow Cook.
Tuesday morning I arrived in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke Elementary School and was surprised to find scrambled eggs on the steam table. How is that, I wondered, when so much of the food served to students starts in the freezer? I had not seen any fresh eggs—or even any egg products—anywhere in my travels around the kitchen. Plus, there is no cooktop in the school kitchen, only a convection oven and a steamer, meaning nowhere to scramble eggs.
I had a lot to learn about just how much our industrial food system can do with modern technology to eliminate the work we normally associate with food preparation, as well as the distance between the farms where food is grown and the people who eat it. In fact, the eggs had been cooked in a factory in Minnesota, then shipped frozen in six-pound plastic bags to the District of Columbia. Getting them to the breakfast line where they could be served to the approximately 150 students who participate in the school’s breakfast program was a simple matter of dumping the frozen eggs out of their bags and into stainless pans, then heating them in the kitchen’s commercial steamer.
The “scrambled” eggs come out looking more like pale yellow cottage cheese. According to the nutrition label on the box from Michael Foods in Minnetonka, Minnesota, they are made with “whole eggs, skim milk, soybean oil, modified corn starch, xanthan gum, liquid pepper extract, citric acid, natural and artifical butter flavor, lipolized butter oil, medium chain triglycerides, natural and artificial flavors.”
Kitchen manager Tiffany Whittington likes to stir cheddar cheese—pre-shredded by Land O Lakes in five-pound bags—into the scrambled eggs to boost the flavor quotient.
It’s not just scrambled eggs that seem to defy the usual laws of culinary physics. I noticed that the school sometimes serves egg salad. Being a fan of egg salad myself (I use a convoluted method for cooking the eggs so that they peel easily and maintain a pristine yolk), I asked Whittington where she got the hard-boiled eggs to make it. “Oh, the eggs come frozen, already diced,” she said with a wave of her hand. She just adds mayonnaise and seasonings to finish them off.
Recently I spent a week in the H.D. Cooke kitchen to observe how food is prepared. The company contracted to provide food for D.C. Public Schools, Chartwells-Thompson, part of a huge, international food service conglomerate called Compass Group, this year decided to eliminate pre-cooked, pre-packaged warmup meals from the school routine and introduce something they call “fresh cooked,” meaning meals prepared on-site in school kitchens. (The city’s charter schools contract independently for food service, usually with small catering companies.)
What I quickly learned is that “fresh cooked” does not mean “from scratch” or “fresh ingredients.” Indeed, most meals at H.D. Cooke are constructed around foods that have been heavily processed and reconstituted in distant factories, then shipped pre-cooked and frozen. Meal components have been industrially designed to require the least amount of time and minimal skill to prepare. It’s all part of an institutionalized effort to hold down costs—especially labor costs, which constitute half the cost of school food service—and squeeze school meals into tight local food budgets that hinge on subsidy payments from the federal government.
The result for a food manager such as Whittington is a kind of cook-by-numbers scheme that leans more toward kitchen administration than haute cuisine.
Whittington grew up in far Southeast Washington. After graduating from Ballou High School, she enrolled in a course with ServSafe, a national company that specializes in food service training and certification testing. She got a food service job in D.C. schools in 2001, and now supervises the work of two assistants who help assemble the food, serve it at the food line and maintain the kitchen and its equipment in immaculately clean condition.
Whittington keeps track of all the food, as well as a careful count of all the students who come through the food line. The numbers are critically important: for each student who qualifies, lunch is worth a $2.68 payment from the U.S. Deparmtment of Agriculture. Those federal payments cover most of the cost of food served in schools, or nearly half the total cost of food service operations. Local government picks up the rest.
Previously, meals for D.C. public schools were made in an off-site food factory and delivered to the schools in individual plastic containers, like airline food. When Chartwells switched to “fresh cooked,” it gave Whittington a recipe book for the new foods she would be serving. The book, a three-ring binder, contains dozens and dozens of single-page instructions for making large quantities of breakfast and lunch entrees, various side dishes and salads.There’s breakfast quesadilla, sweet and sour chicken, salisbury steak, Buffalo chicken wrap, “Big Daddy’s” cheese pizza, “fiesta rice,” glazed carrots, mashed potatoes, cole slaw, to name a few.
Most of the menu items consist of only a couple ingredients, and perhaps a three-step process for getting them to the steam table. For instance, lunch on Thursday was “Asian noodles” and “beef teriyaki bites.” The noodles were simply dry spaghetti pasta cooked in a steamer, then tossed with Kikkoman’s teriyaki sauce. The beef bites are small patties pre-cooked with an Asian-flavored glaze, imprinted with faux grill marks, then frozen by Pierre Foods in Cincinnati, Ohio. From their frozen state, they only need five minutes reheating in a 350-degree oven.
Sometimes the recipes are so simple that Whittington can put out breakfast for the entire school by herself. For breakfast grits, for instance, she heats a large pan of water to near boiling in the steamer, then stirs in Quaker “5-minute” grits from a box. While I watch her stir, I try to make conversation by talking about different styles of grits. Being from Chicago, I had never seen grits until I confronted them in the cafeteria at what was then the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, where I had a part-time job in college. Some people, I tell Whittington, like to cook their grits a long time from whole grains. Whittington looks at me with a quizical expression: She says she has not heard of long-cooked grits.
She finishes the instant grits by stirring in shredded cheddar cheese, which seems to be the go-to ingredient for flavor in the H.D. Cooke kitchen.
On Thursdays, Whittington sits down with her recipe book and the menu for the week ahead—the same menu for all of the school system’s elementary schools—sent via e-mail from Chartwells. After calculating the quantities of ingredients she needs, she fills out an electronic order form and sends it back to Chartwells. If all goes well, her order will be delivered the following Tuesday. The week I was there, there had been no delivery the previous Tuesday. Whittington did not know why, but it blew a huge hole in the published menu. Whittington simply improvised using the ingredients she had on hand.
One day the menu called for “Macho Nachos,” with turkey meat, corn chips and cheese sauce. Whittington had to substitute “beef crumbles” for the turkey meat, and she didn’t have the chips. I asked her why she couldn’t just call Chartwells and ask for an emergency delivery. She shook her head. “They would just have to find a school that has extra.” But not long afterwards she was on the phone with nearby Tubman Elementary School and arranged a trade: some of her extra cheese sauce for some of their chips. She drove off saying, “This better be enough!” and returned a short while later with three two-pound bags of corn chips and an eight-pound box of taco shells.
Add some Ore Ida “tater tots,” quickly heated in the convection oven, plus some Mission Pride fruit mix out of six-pound cans, and lunch was served.
The highly processed nature of school food concerns some food advocates. “Healthy Schools” legislation now pending before the D.C. Council would require the school system to publish the ingredients in all the foods it serves so that parents and others can see them. It would make a book: many of the nutrition labels on school food products read like chemistry experiments—only longer. You would also need an encyclopedia to know what the ingredients mean.
For instance, the toppings on one of the pizzas served at H.D. Cooke, something called “Smart Pizza” made by Schwan’s Food Service in Marshall, Minnesota, and shipped to the school frozen, lists the following ingredients: low moisure part-skim mozzarella cheese, mozzarella cheese substitute, cheese solids, modified food starch, rennet casein, sweet whey, non-fat dry milk, sodium aluminum phosphate, salt, carrageenan, magnesium oxide, ferric orthophosphate, modified food starch, sugar, dextrose, salt, spice, onion, dehydrated romano cheese, garlic powder, paprika, citric acid and beet powder.
“Teriyaki bites” on the school menu are made by Pierre Foods in Cinncinati, Ohio, which describes them as “fully cooked, flame-broiled, strip-shaped beef patties with teriyaki sauce.” The ingredients, which include commodity products from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, read as follows: ground beef, teriyaki sauce, sugar, water, distilled vinegar, modified food starch, pineapple juice concentrate, soybean oil, caramel color, xanthan gum, garlic powder, sodium benzoate, wine powder, natural rice wine flavor, textured vegetable protein product.”
On Tuesday the week’s provisions did in fact arrive and the freezer was suddenly full again—shelves filled with boxes, boxes stacked chest high in the row between the shelves. There was barely room to squeeze through. There were “turkey ham” slices, chicken patties and hot dogs, chicken nuggets and scrambled eggs. There were bags of sliced pepperoni for pizza, turkey sausage patties and boxes of potatoes in several different permutations: hash brown patties, potato wedges, tater tots, “breakfast cubes.” There was biscuit dough, pizza, muffins, juice cups and of course hamburgers with those familiar ersatz grill marks.
It looked like next week’s menu was assured. Now we just had to get through the rest of this week.
Tomorrow: Calling all vegetables.
Related Links:
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
Why you should go see ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’
by Amanda Little
U.S. Climate Envoy Todd Stern.A
month after he rode herd at Copenhagen’s COP15 climate talks,
Todd Stern is exhorting participants to make the outcome of the conference
meaningful. “Life needs to be breathed into the Copenhagen Accord,” the State
Department’s special envoy for climate change tells Grist. He insists that the three-page
document represents a “very, very important step forward,” and he’s now pushing major
developed and developing countries to make clear public pledges for reductions
in emissions or energy intensity by a Jan. 31 deadline, to substantiate the Accord.
But
even as he touts the successes of the Copenhagen conference, Stern is tamping
down expectations that a legally binding global climate treaty will be reached at
the next big climate meeting, COP16 in Mexico in December 2010: “there’s a fair
amount of distance between where we are now and then.”
Stern
also talks candidly about his qualms with the U.N. conference process. “You
can’t negotiate in a group of 192 countries. It’s ridiculous to think that you
could,” he says, while also stressing that “it is certainly premature to write
off” the U.N. process. His concerns echo those of his colleague Jonathan
Pershing, who argued last week for a focus on a narrower group of negotiating countries rather than the U.N.‘s
everybody-in approach: “We expect there will be significant actions
recorded by major countries,” Pershing said. “We are not really
worried what Chad does. We are not really worried about what Haiti says it is
going to do about greenhouse-gas emissions. We just hope they recover from the
earthquake.”
I
spoke to Stern, formerly an advisor to President Bill Clinton and senior
counsel to Sen. Patrick Leahy, in a stark, fluorescent-lit conference room at
the State Department to get his take on the ups and downs at Copenhagen and
what to expect on climate policy in 2010.
——
Q. What
was the most gratifying moment for you in the morass of Copenhagen?
A. Getting
the thing done. And being part of what President Obama and Secretary Clinton
brought to it, because they were instrumental to that moment of getting [the
Copenhagen Accord] done.
Q. Can
you set the scene of that moment?
A. It
was literally the 11th hour, 11:30 p.m. Thursday [before the last scheduled day
of the conference]. A lot of leaders including Secretary Clinton came together
in a room—it was a pretty extraordinary tableau. You had Gordon Brown [prime
minister of the U.K.] and Angela Merkel [chancellor of Germany] and Kevin Rudd
[prime minister of Australia] and Nicolas Sarkozy [president of France] and
Lula [president of Brazil] and Jacob Zuma [president of South Africa] and
Mohamed Nasheed [president of the Maldives] and Meles Zenawi [prime minister of
Ethiopia] and everybody sitting around this table. It was an up-and-down
process over the course of 20 hours or so, but eventually the leaders are
rolling up their sleeves and negotiating language of this thing back and forth,
completely unscripted. That’s not the way presidents and prime ministers
generally go into meetings these days.
It
was quite an impressive and successful performance by Secretary Clinton and
then by President Obama, who arrived on Friday morning.
Q. What
was your most frustrating moment in Copenhagen?
A. There
were so many to choose from. It was a very difficult conference—constant
procedural wrangling, constant tie-ups, repeated efforts by various parties to
try to get the main players—including those representing smaller and poorer
countries—to engage on the main issues. There were any number of times when
the effort to engage on the issues got procedurally blocked.
Q. Describe
the procedural blocks.
A. You
can’t negotiate in a group of 192 countries. It’s ridiculous to think that you
could. And yet when Denmark [the nation chairing the conference] would over and
over again try to pull together some group based on each country bloc choosing
their own representatives, not in any way cherry-picking who was going to be
in, some parts of the developing-country groups would block it.
Q. How
would you rate the success of Copenhagen on a scale of one to ten?
A. I’m
not going to give you a number. I think it was a very, very important step
forward, and actually quite a good accord, given what it includes on
mitigation, transparency, funding for poor countries, and technology.
Q. What’s
your response to the widespread criticism of the outcome?
A. People
seem to forget that just 36 hours before the conference was set to end, we were
headed for collapse. Instead, we got this three-page document. It isn’t
everything that people wanted, but it includes meaningful elements.
Q. Do
you agree with the perception that China stalled and blocked at COP15?
A. I
don’t want to try to characterize whether they were blocking or not. I think
they had certain objectives in mind, which were not necessarily the same as
ours. But at the end of the day I think Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and President Obama, along with the other
leaders, found a pretty good common-ground position.
Q. There’s
a lot of speculation that the UNFCCC [U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the foundational climate treaty]
is fundamentally ineffective. Do you think it has a future? Are there more
effective forums for negotiating climate treaties, like the G20 or the Major Economies Forum?
A. When
we first came to the table a year ago, we felt that it would be important to
have a smaller set of countries that could be not negotiating the text of the
agreement but discussing views on the big issues and working on some technology
stuff. You can’t effectively negotiate unless you have the capacity to work in
a smaller representative group where you can have a discussion that doesn’t
occur in a much larger group.
Q. What
would the smaller set of countries be?
A. The
Major Economies Forum last year was 18 countries and served a real purpose. You
had the same set of people that met virtually every month and there’s a certain
level of trust and camaraderie that builds up. The group of countries that came
together at the UNFCCC on that Thursday night into Friday was 28 or so—mostly
the MEF countries with some others like Ethiopia, Granada, and Bangladesh.
I’m
not sure whether we’ll negotiate in the MEF context or what the smaller group
process is going to be this year, but there certainly needs to be one. The
UNFCCC is an organization that has some historical credibility, but it had a
lot of problems in Copenhagen—many days of potentially negotiating and making
progress that just got locked up.
Q. Could
you have definitive success without the UNFCCC? Could the smaller groups alone produce
a meaningful outcome?
A. It
is certainly premature to write off the UNFCCC. There is a credibility that is
provided by the full group. So on the one hand, I don’t think you can negotiate
in that grouping, but on the other hand, it’s good for there to be a larger
grouping that the smaller representative group can come back to.
Some
of the rules [of the UNFCCC] can be difficult. If you’ve got 185 countries
wanting to do something and a handful that don’t want to, that blocks
everything.
Q. In
the ten months leading up to COP16 in Mexico, what needs to happen?
A. Life
needs to be breathed into the Copenhagen Accord. The formal adoption of this
accord by the COP was blocked by Cuba, Nicaragua, five or six countries, and
the ultimate decision was to take note of the thing as opposed to adopt it. So there’s a process going on now where countries need to associate
themselves, affirmatively tell the UNFCCC secretariat that they want to be part
of this.
Step
No. 2 is that the major developed and developing countries decide to list or
inscribe their targets or actions. That’s supposed to happen by the end of the
month. If a month from now all of that’s happened, the plane will have taken
off from the runway.
In
addition, the Copenhagen Accord includes a number of important elements that
need to get fleshed out more. There’s a provision to set up a new global
climate fund [to help vulnerable developing nations]. There’s a provision to
set up a new technology body. There’s some good language on transparency and verification,
and a provision for that to be further spelled out in guidelines. I would hope
that gets worked on this year.
And
there will be efforts to press forward toward a legal treaty, presumably by
COP16 or perhaps thereafter.
Q. What
realistically do you expect to come out of Mexico?
A. I
think that you could have decisions made to further implement the Copenhagen
Accord. And the maximum amount of progress toward a legal agreement—and maybe
even all the way there. But there’s a fair amount of distance between where we
are now and then.
Q. So
it’s hard to expect anything out of COP16?
A. No,
no, I’m not saying that at all. The objective should be this year to flesh out
and implement the Copenhagen Accord. And we should be working toward a legal
agreement in addition.
Q. What
happens if we don’t see progress toward climate action in the U.S. Senate? And
if the EPA’s authority to regulate CO2 is blocked?
What would a double-whammy failure in U.S. domestic policy mean for COP16?
A. I’m
not going to speculate on stuff like that. I don’t think that the EPA authority
is going to be stripped away, and I’m hopeful with respect to domestic
legislation. I think the partnership between Sen. John Kerry [D-Mass.] and
Sen. Lindsey Graham [R-S.C] is a really good sign.
Q. Can
we get a legally binding global treaty in Mexico without success in the Senate?
A. Is
it absolutely necessary? I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary, but I think
it would be pretty important.
Q. Will
the outcome of Copenhagen help climate legislation in the Senate?
A. I
think so. I think the fact that China, India, Brazil, South Africa, the big
countries, agreed to things that have never been agreed to before by major
developing countries was a breakthrough. And the fact that there’s agreement to
a kind of international review with respect to implementation—never happened
before. So if you’re a senator and you’re trying to get a bill done, what
happened was absolutely a net plus.
Related Links:
Last decade was the warmest ever, says NASA
New Sierra Club chief brings confrontational style to the job
Who will make the first move toward a clean energy future?
by Terry Tamminen
Last week several hundred investors huddled together at the U.N. with government officials and non-profit groups to discuss one thing—carbon. They heard from U.S. climate change negotiator Todd Stern, international political royalty, and a host of economic prognosticators about topics including the recent talks in Copenhagen, potential Congressional action, and whether new clean tech would set us free from our fossil fuel addiction. And what was the take-away? That everyone expects someone else to make the first move.
To put this in perspective, Al Gore spoke about how investors put money to work based on assumptions. In the sub-prime mess, for example, he pointed out that we all assumed home values would keep rising to cover loans that people couldn’t afford and that securitizing such loans would spread the cost of a few defaults over a portfolio of generally good assets so investors would be OK. Once those assumptions were no longer true the markets crashed. He likened that debacle to the climate crisis, saying we assume today that oil and coal will always be plentiful and cheap and that carbon emissions will always be free.
Given that we now fight wars over declining oil reserves and can see the end of “cheap” coal (climate change, mountain top mining, air pollution, and mercury emissions are just a few of the costs that King Coal will soon have to absorb), the time when those assumptions fail may now be upon us—but investors are just as ill-prepared for this fundamental shift as they were for the sub-prime meltdown.
Mindy Lubber of CERES underscored Gore’s point by sharing a survey showing that almost half of the world’s leading money managers do not consider carbon risks when making investments. Although Copenhagen failed to get a global agreement on carbon pricing, the E.U. already imposes those costs and over half the states in the U.S. are poised to do so by 2012, so that omission is astonishing to say the least. Abbey Joseph Cohen of Goldman Sachs put an exclamation point on this myopia by saying her firm would gladly arrange financing for a new coal-fired power plant if the numbers made sense today—despite the fact that such an investment is a 50-year wager full of carbon-related uncertainty.
Against this backdrop, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said that governments hesitate to regulate carbon because they fear the new clean technologies are too costly under the current economic conditions. He urged investors to put up more money to mass-produce solar, hydrogen powered cars, and other technologies to lower costs, essentially saying that companies and their bankers would have to move to a low carbon economy before global governments could take meaningful regulatory action.
But Kevin Parker of Deutsche Asset Management said investors are waiting for government. He said they need “TLC” from government—transparency, longevity, and certainty—before they could shift money from high-carbon old technologies to the new, low-carbon ones. A statement issued by the investors’ network that hosted the event confirmed this game of chicken, saying, “Investors remain committed to taking action, but for us to deploy capital at the scale needed to truly catalyse a low-carbon economy, policy makers must act swiftly.”
So is the investment community engaged in a game of chicken or are they simply a bunch of carbon chickens? The U.N. event revealed the very real opportunity to profit while the majority are still making long-term bets on the carbon equivalent of sub-prime mortgages—giving too much debt to borrowers, who won’t be able to repay it, and hoping that bundling high-carbon investments in mutual funds or other derivatives will disguise the truth until its too late.
A smarter investor might do well to invest in companies and technologies that will be in big demand in a few quarters (not years) as global economies rebound and the demand for clean energy increases—and divest rapidly from those investments that depend too much on someone else going first.
Related Links:
Messaging that can save the clean energy bill
Copenhagen Accord is the priority, says U.S. climate envoy. But what about a binding treaty?
Senate needs to get back to work on clean-energy bill, says Washington rep
by Agence France-Presse
PARIS—World talks on climate change may not yield a legally binding pact by year’s end, U.N. climate pointman Yvo de Boer said on Wednesday, in his first public assessment after last month’s turbulent Copenhagen summit.
De Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said he had taken stock among a number of countries after the Copenhagen meeting. The mood among them was to forge an agreement this December on how to tackle climate change and then discuss further how to “package that outcome” as a treaty, he said in a webcast press conference from Bonn.
Last month’s marathon talks yielded the “Copenhagen Accord,” a non-binding document crafted by a small group of countries that account for around 80 percent of global carbon emissions. The accord was written by a couple of dozen leaders on the final day of the talks as the two-week meeting, hamstrung by textual wrangles and finger-pointing, faced collapse.
The failure to achieve a binding treaty disappointed those who had expected Copenhagen to crown an arduous two-year process with a treaty to roll back the threat posed by greenhouse gases and provide funds to poor and vulnerable countries.
Mauled by the experience, the U.N. forum is due to resume in the coming months, culminating this year with a ministerial-level meeting in Mexico in December.
“My sense, having spoken to about 15 or 20 countries so far, is that generally people want to reach a conclusion on the [twin negotiating texts] in Mexico and then they will be in a position to decide on how they want to package that outcome in legal terms,” De Boer said.
He also made clear that the Copenhagen Accord was not a substitute for the UNFCCC’s negotiation template. “It’s a political tool that has broad support at the highest possible level and that we can very usefully deploy to resolve the remaining issues that we have in the negotiating process,” he said.
The Copenhagen Accord set a broad goal of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), but did not specify the staging points for achieving this goal or a year by which greenhouse-gas emissions should peak.
Instead, countries are being urged to identify what actions they intend to take, either as binding curbs on emissions or voluntary action. $28 billion in aid has been pledged by rich countries for 2010-2012.
De Boer said he had asked countries to spell out by Jan. 31 whether they intended to be “associated” with the Copenhagen Accord or what sort of measures they envisaged. This was not a coercive deadline, he said, but simply intended to help him write a report on the outcome of Copenhagen.
“You can describe it as a soft deadline, there’s nothing deadly about it,” he said. “If you fail to meet it, then you can still associate with the accord afterwards. In that sense, countries are not being asked to sign the accord, they are not being asked to take on a legally binding target, they will not be bound to the action which they submit to the [UNFCCC] secretariat. It will be an indication of their intent and … [an] important tool to advance the negotiations.”
Related Links:
Last decade was the warmest ever, says NASA
The Climate Post: Asian ice granted temporary stay of execution
New Sierra Club chief brings confrontational style to the job
by Agence France-Presse
GENEVA – An estimate on the fate of Himalayan glaciers that featured a benchmark report on global warming has been “poorly substantiated” and represents a lapse in standards, U.N.‘s climate scientists said on Wednesday.
Charges that the reference was highly inaccurate or overblown have stoked pressure on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), already assailed in a separate affair involving hacked email exchanges.
The new row focuses on a paragraph in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in 2007, a 938-page triple-volume opus that warned climate change was on the march and spurred politicians around the world to promise to take action. In the contested section, the report declared that the probability of glaciers in the Himalayas “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.”
The IPCC said in a statement that the paragraph “refers to poorly substantiated rates of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.”
It added: “The Chair, Vice-Chair, and Co-Chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance. This episode demonstrates that the quality of the assessment depends on absolute adherence to the IPCC standards, including thorough review of ‘the quality and validity of each source before incorporating results from the source in an IPCC report.’”
The statement noted that the reference was not repeated in an important “synthesis report” of the 2007 assessment, and stressed the IPCC’s “strong commitment” to thorough, accurate review of scientific data.
The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its reputation of scientific rigor, caution, and fact-checking. Under this process, data are peer-reviewed by other scientists and are then meant to be double-checked by editors.
On Monday, a leading Austrian glaciologist, Georg Kaser, who contributed to the 2007 report, described the mistake with the 2035 date as huge and said he had notified his colleagues of it months before publication.
Despite the controversy, the IPCC on Wednesday stood by the overall conclusions about glacier loss this century in major mountain ranges, including the Himalayas. “This conclusion is robust, appropriate, and entirely consistent with the underlying science and the broader IPCC assessment,” it said.
The report concluded that “widespread mass losses from glaciers and reductions in snow cover over recent decades are projected to accelerate throughout the 21st century.”
This would reduce “water availability, hydropower potential, and changing seasonality of flows in regions supplied by meltwater from major mountain ranges (e.g. Hindu-Kush, Himalaya, Andes), where more than one-sixth of the world population currently lives,” it added.
The Indian scientist at the centre of the row, Syed Hasnain, has denied that he mentioned the 2035 date in a magazine interview more than 10 years ago, the apparent original source for the prediction.
IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri on Tuesday defended the panel’s work, a position shared by other scientists, who say the Fourth Assessment Report’s core conclusions about climate change are inconvertible. “Theoretically, let’s say we slipped up on one number, I don’t think it takes anything away from the overwhelming scientific evidence of what’s happening with the climate of this Earth,” Pachauri said.
Skeptics have already attacked the panel over so-called “Climategate,” entailing stolen email exchanges among IPCC experts, which they say reflected attempts to skew the evidence for global warming.
The row came as the U.N. panel began the marathon process of drafting its Fifth Assessment Reports, inviting nominations of scientists to lead its work.
The reports, due out in 2013 and 2014, will focus on sea-level changes and the influence of periodic climate patterns like the monsoon season and El Niño, and will aim to forge a more precise picture of the regional effects of climate change.
Related Links:
Last decade was the warmest ever, says NASA
The Climate Post: Asian ice granted temporary stay of execution
New Sierra Club chief brings confrontational style to the job
by Tom Philpott
Such scenes would not be possible without government policies that encourage cheap corn. Why do conservatives fetishize indsustrial food, again? Wikimedia commonsBack in 2002, in the right-wing National Review, Rod Dreher declared the rise of the “crunchy cons”—political conservatives who had come to value alternative food systems and reject the dreck served up by corporate giants.
Dreher’s epiphany came when he got hold of a lefty Brooklyn neighbor’s weekly CSA share one day.
Who knew cauliflower had so much taste? It was the freshness of the produce, not its organic status (of dubious nutritional advantage), that we were responding to. But you can’t get produce that delicious in grocery stores here, so when this summer rolled around, we signed up enthusiastically. Now, Julie picks up our weekly delivery in her National Review tote bag.
Dreher reported at the time that his conversion to locavorism struck a chord among readers, hundreds of whom emailed to say that they loved Rush and loved real food, too.
The development seemed to hold great promise for food-system reform. Here was a food regime, propped up by government subsidies and one-size-fits-all regulations, that failed just about everybody, save for shareholders in a few corporations. The food being churned out by our factory system delivered sorry flavor and dubious nutritional value—and its environmental impact even spooked “creation care” types.
Meanwhile, libertarians had thundered for years against commodity subsidies and the crony capitalism practiced by agribusiness giants and their kept politicians. Significantly, the best thing ever written about how Archer Daniels Midland fattens itself on taxpayer cash is probably this 1995 exposé from the libertarian Cato Institute.
So why not a right-left coalition against Big Food and in favor of alternative food networks?
Sadly, such a coalition has never really gained traction—at least not in any way that’s evident to me. And the right-wing media machine has been revving up in delibfense of Big Food and Big Ag.
Last summer, The American, an American Enterprise Institute-funded journal influential among conservative intellectuals, ran a long attack on the sustainable-food movement entitled “Against the Agri-Intellectuals.” (I responded here.)
Meanwhile, the Cato Institute may deplore Archer Daniels Midland’s political influence and ability to raid the Treasury; but it lionizes Norman Borluag, intellectual father of industrial food.
And Forbes Magazine, play toy of conservative icon Steve Forbes, has been cranking out ringing defenses of the agri-food industry. Recently, Forbes declared agrichemical and GMO seed giant Monsanto “company of the year,” echoing company talking points in a fawning profile.
And now Forbes has a column essentially refrying the above-mentioned American piece, complete with denunciations of “agri-intellectuals.”
These articles tend to fetishize corporate food and acknowledge none of its faults. Most absurdly, they contradict libertarian ideology by completely ignoring the federal government’s central role in developing and maintaining the industrial food system, ably documented by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker.
Currently, Congress is preparing to consider school-lunch reauthorization; and in just a couple of years, it will be time to revisit the Farm Bill. Both pieces of legislation will have a dramatic effect on the kind of food Americans eat over the next generation. Will conservatives follow the path of the “crunchy cons” and fight for new food systems—or the path of Forbes and fight to prop up the old one?
Related Links:
Tales from a D.C. school kitchen: How food service turns a green school into an enviro hog
Why you should go see ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’
Tales from a D.C. school kitchen: What kids will do to avoid vegetables
by Agence France-Presse
LONDON—Installing wind turbines and solar panels in people’s homes is “eco-bling” that will not help meet Britain’s targets on cutting carbon emissions, engineers warned Wednesday.
In a new report by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE), Professor Doug King said it was better to adapt buildings to make them more energy efficient than try to offset energy use with “on-site renewable energy generation.”
The leader of Britain’s main opposition Conservative party, David Cameron, is among those who have installed wind turbines, fixing one onto the roof of his home in the plush west London district of Notting Hill.
“Eco-bling is a term I coined to describe unnecessary renewable energy visibly attached to the outside of poorly designed buildings,” King told the Daily Mail newspaper ahead of the report’s publication.
“It achieves little or nothing. If you build a building that is just as energy-hungry as every other building, and you put a few wind turbines and solar panels on the outside that addresses a few percent of that building’s energy consumption, you have not achieved anything.
“It’s just about trying to say to the general public that ‘I’m being good, I’m putting renewable energy on my building’.”
In existing buildings, which account for the vast majority of those in use in 2050, King suggested low cost alternatives such as installing thermostats on central heating systems or using low-energy light bulbs.
The report said it was also vital to engineer buildings to minimize energy demands in the first place, including using masonry to store heat or ensuring a good use of natural light in homes and offices.
“Before renewable energy generation is even considered, it is vital to ensure that buildings are as energy efficient as possible, otherwise the potential benefits are simply wasted in offsetting unnecessary consumption,” it said.
However, it warned a lack of skills in understanding energy use in buildings meant the construction industry would struggle to meet government targets to make all new buildings “zero carbon” by 2020.
Related Links:
NREL study shows transmission costs for big wind are low!
Last decade was the warmest ever, says NASA
by Jon Isham
So was that it? With the stunning Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts, have we already reached the end of the Obama era? After all—play dramatic cord—the Democrats no longer have 60 votes!
I say good riddance. Sure, if you’re a climate-movement activist, it’s not hard to be bummed, big time, by Brown’s victory. Here’s a guy that went from a supporter of the Northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative—“Reducing carbon dioxide emissions in Massachusetts has long been a priority of mine”—to Limbaugh-lite— “I think the globe is always heating and cooling. … It’s a natural way of ebb and flow.” Mitt Romney, Scott Brown—what is it about these Massachusetts Republicans? Could it be that they are actually … politicians?!
Well, yes. As it turns out, most politicians do actually change with the electoral tides. And this time, the regular ebb and flow of Massachussets voter sentiment was swamped by the real emotions of these tough, tough times: There’s a tsunami of voter anger out there about jobs, Wall Street, and political business as usual. Scott Brown needed to only slightly alter his course to catch this wave.
So how can this anger actually help rally the country in support of climate legislation? Think of the Brown mandate not as the triumph of the Tea-Baggers, but as a 2010 call for change on top of 2008’s still-very-real call for Obama-fired change. For when Jesse Jackson and the rest of the nation shed joyful tears as we watched Obama’s victory speech 14 months ago, we weren’t celebrating the fact that Democrats would have 60 votes in the Senate. Far from it—we were rejoicing in the idea that America was poised to help “build the world anew.”
Guess what? It hasn’t happened yet, and as we saw yesterday from all parts of Massachusetts, voters are angry (or indifferent—I’m sure that polls will show that the core Democratic base was simply not inspired by this race).
And that fact, I think, actually augurs well for climate-change legislation. For here, in a nutshell, is what voters are angry about:
The economy has not recovered Wall Street is still having its way The Democratic leadership is out of touch
As quoted it today’s New York Times, here’s 73-year-old Marlene
Connolly, a lifelong Democrat who voted Republican for the first time. “I’m hoping that it gives a message to the country. … If Massachusetts
puts Brown in, it’s a message of ‘that’s enough.’ Let’s stop the
giveaways and let’s get jobs going.”
Even more than the now-teetering health-care bill, the current global-warming legislative strategy—Waxman/Markey/Boxer/Kerry/Graham/Lieberman—is about giveways, literally. In order to get—play that same dramatic chord again—the 60th vote, thinking to date has been to give away revenues generated by capping greenhouse-gas emissions to beltway powers-that-be: electrical utilities, labor, industry, coal, and—in part because the whole thing rests on a complex trading scheme—Wall Street. Billions of dollars per month into the hands of clients of K Street, Wall Street, and Don Blankenship’s coal-paved Easy Street. Want to know just how anti-consumer the current formulation is? Check out the good work of Tyson Slocum and his colleagues at Public Citizen.
I have the greatest respect for green leaders and climate-friendly politicians of all kinds (it is significant that the current bill is being shaped by a Democrat, a Republican, and an Independent). For over a decade, they have worked so hard to get us where we are: a global-warming bill passed last summer in the House and one had a good chance of passing in the Senate—well, maybe until about 9:00 p.m. last night. We owe hard-working staffers who have helped get us this far the greatest thanks and respect. And moreover, we will need their wisdom and wherewithal to get us to the next level.
But ultimately, these leaders cannot outfox the times. And these times do call for something new, an approach that is anti-giveaway and pro-pocketbook, an approach that is not built for special interests and Wall Street but rather built for Main Street.
And we’ve got it in the CLEAR Act. If there was ever a piece of legislation that celebrates simplicity and transparency while promoting the fortunes of the average American household, this is it. It’s simple to explain. Senator-elect Brown, check this out:
Put a cap on sources of global warming pollution as they are introduced into the economy Give 75 percent of revenues generated from that cap to Americans with a Social Security number, equally, a few hundred bucks a year to every kid and adult alike
Invest the remaining 25 percent in clean-energy and sequestration stuff that we need—and that will help us take on the Chinese and others in the job-creating green-arms race
Pretty simple, huh? Pretty cool.
Survey after survey—even after all of the Climate Cover-Up pushback—shows that Americans do want to fight global warming and they do believe in the prospects for green jobs and clean energy. But hard as it is for us climate junkies to admit it, something trumps even this: the desire for straight-shooting from our leaders, the desire for integrity. And this is what I and so many others see in the Cantwell-Collins CLEAR Act (see this good recent analysis from Michael Livermore): a built-in integrity that has a real chance to connect with restless, even angry, voters—and to give each family of four, on average, about $1100 per year.
In the quest for the 60th health-care vote, the Obama revolution did not arrive. Nor will it arrive, for better or worse, in the quest for a 60th cap-and-trade vote. But perhaps, in the words of my favorite kick-ass tune, the revolution starts now—in a simple, clear piece of legislation that favors Main Street over Wall Street and special interests, that is pro-jobs and pro-family, not pro-lobbyist.
What do you think, all you good climate activists in Massachusetts—ready to try all of this on Scott Brown?
Related Links:
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by David Roberts
It has been taken for granted on the left that if Congress doesn’t pass clean energy legislation, the EPA will step in to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The threat of that eventuality was supposed to bring intransigent industries and legislators to the table. Only it hasn’t really worked as intended— prospects for legislation are looking increasingly dim, particularly with Brown’s win last night in Massachusetts.
Does that mean EPA regulations are inevitable? Har har. Nothing in politics is inevitable. If legislation goes down in flames, expect a huge fight.
[Want to catch up on the why’s and wherefore’s of EPA regs? Read this post.]
Thus far the fight against EPA is being led by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who has emerged as a key figure in efforts to block or delay Democratic clean energy initiatives, despite her purported concern over climate change. (On the interwebs, they call such folks “concern trolls.”) Let’s take a look at a few of the weapons in Murkowski’s arsenal.
1. Appropriations rider
Last year, Murkowski threatened to attach a rider to the annual EPA funding bill that would block funding for implementation of GHG regs. It would have been a political disaster, blocking not only regulations on power plants and factories (so-called stationary sources) but the auto efficiency increases that have already been carefully worked out between EPA and the Dept. of Transportation. Reid managed to talk her out of it, but she’ll be emboldened by the loss of the Democratic supermajority and Reid, well, he’s got lots of problems on his hands these days. Her office has said she’s considering trying it again.
I wrote about this tactic in a previous post—the idea is to piggyback on an appropriations bill, which requires only a bare majority to pass. Since appropriations bills contain all kinds of goodies for all kinds of congresscritters, there’s lots of pressure to vote for them. This is how Republicans blocked Clinton’s efforts to boost CAFE standards for almost five years.
2. Amendment
Today, Murkowski may or may not introduce a more carefully tailored amendment that would block the EPA only from implementing regulations on stationary sources (it will be attached to a bill on raising the debt ceiling). She’s been wavering on whether to put forward the amendment, which her ally Sen. Chuck Grassley conceded on Monday has little chance of passing. She caught a ton of heat last week when it emerged that she’d written it in consultation to a pair of dirty energy lobbyists at Bracewell Giuliani, and it’s only been building. See:
That will probably burn her enough to make her back off this time. But the same amendment could be attached to any number of bills going forward.
3. The Congressional Review Act (CRA)
This is the nuclear option. It would rescind the EPA’s endangerment finding entirely and thereby eliminate its authority over both mobile and stationary sources. Furthermore, the administration would be prohibited from passing a regulation “substantially the same” as the one overruled, so the constraint on the EPA would effectively be permanent.
The little-known 1996 law, part of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America signed into law by Clinton, permits Congress to review new regulations passed by the administration and, by passage of a joint resolution, overrule them. The joint resolution can not be filibustered—debate is explicitly limited to 10 hours. It must be passed by majorities and both houses and signed by the president to go into effect. It was successfully used just once, by the Bush administration in 2001, to overrule some Clinton ergonomics regulations.
As detailed in “The Mysteries of the Congressional Review Act,” in Harvard Law Review, there’s no obvious justification for the law—after all, if you’ve got majorities in both houses and the president on your side, why not just pass a new law? There are fairly limited circumstances, usually in the transition between administrations, when the planets would align for the law to have even a chance of success, and they are not now so aligned. So why has Murkowski been threatening to use it? Read on.
Can these efforts succeed?
Odds are that none of Murkowski’s efforts will become law, at least not under the current administration, for the simple reason that any one of them would have to be passed by the House as well, and signed by the president. Obama could veto, and however unpopular EPA regs may be, there’s no way opposition will muster a two-thirds vote to override a veto.
But Murkowski could make a great deal of mischief. No. 3 requires only a bare majority to pass the Senate. Similarly, only a bare majority is required to pass an appropriations bill with a rider. Even if blocked by the House or vetoed by the president, such a public, bipartisan slap at the administration would be highly embarrassing and demoralizing. It would mean at least ten conservative Democrats washing their hands of the administration’s initiative. (Virginia Sen. Jim Webb just came out against EPA regulations yesterday.) It would mean wavering members of Congress forced to take a public stand on a divisive issue.
And remember, this is a measure that top Democrats, up to and including Obama, have been badmouthing for a year. At every turn, they have stressed how inflexible and inefficient EPA regulations would be relative to cap-and-trade legislation. Getting stuck fighting for those heavy-handed, socialistic “command and control” regulations against a bipartisan coalition of “centrist” Senators would put Democrats on terrible political terrain, particularly in the run-up to mid-term elections.
That, ultimately, is Murkowski’s political goal: to hang unpopular regulations as tightly as possible around the necks of Democratic leadership. Democrats have two choices: they can run away from Obama’s administration like puppies scared of their shadows—which appears to be how they’re electing to respond to Brown’s win in Mass.—or they can get serious about winning a PR battle for once. The Clean Air Act is actually incredibly popular, but right now nobody is making the case to the public that it can work on greenhouse gases. The opponents of clean air and clean energy are practically alone on the field. No wonder Murkowski is romping around with such abandon.
UPDATE: Kate Sheppard reports:
We’ll find out tomorrow precisely which strategy Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) plans to use in her mission to bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. Her press office just announced that the senator will give a floor speech tomorrow in which she’ll indicate whether she plans to tack an amendment blocking EPA regulations onto debt-ceiling legislation, or whether she’ll offer a separate “resolution of disapproval” barring any EPA restrictions on carbon emissions.
UPDATE 2: Ben Geman reports:
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) told reporters Wednesday that she is working with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) on Murkowski’s efforts to block EPA from regulating greenhouse gases under the agency’s current Clean Air Act powers.
Murkowski’s spokesman recently said Murkowski’s effort had attracted a Democratic backer—the aide didn’t say who—and that she is reaching out to other Democrats too.
“I am considering that right now,” Landrieu said when asked whether she backed Murkowski’s plan. “I have been working with her on it.”
Landrieu said she is not yet ready to announce anything but believes the Clean Air Act is not meant to be applied to carbon dioxide emissions.
UPDATE 3: E&E reports ($sub) that the number of Senate Dems supporting Murkowski is up to three:
Three moderate Senate Democrats said today that they have discussed measures to limit U.S. EPA climate regulations with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).
Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Jim Webb of Virginia said today that they have discussed congressional efforts to limit the agency’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions with Murkowski.
Related Links:
Murkowski’s floor speech on EPA regulations was full of deceptions
The Climate Post: Asian ice granted temporary stay of execution
An argument against Murkowski’s radical attempt to overrule EPA scientists
by Jonathan Hiskes
Seattle Times environmental reporter Craig Welch profiles one of the more puzzling characters in recent urban politics, Seattle’s now-former mayor, Greg Nickels. The piece treads some of the same ground as my profile of Nickels last month: after demonstrating national leadership in rallying mayors on climate change, Nickels received no political credit back home. Seattle, a supposedly green-minded city, tossed him out in a primary race last August and elected regional Sierra Club leader Mike McGinn instead.
Welch points out that Nickels’ home record on sustainability included some real accomplishments:
He fought sprawl by building up, added more bike lanes and tried reducing the ease of parking to discourage driving. He essentially doubled recycling rates and started a national conversation about waste, leading the charge to reduce landfill-clogging plastic by pushing (unsuccessfully) for the city to charge for disposable grocery bags. The city partnered with Nissan, which is making Seattle a test market for a new electric vehicle, installing more than 2,500 charging stations around town.
And last summer, Nickels’ light-rail dream started rolling, just as the Natural Resources Defense Council named Seattle the nation’s most sustainable city.
On the biggest urban threat to the health of Puget Sound—stormwater runoff—the city became a leader, increasingly turning to green roofs and cisterns and bio-swales to filter pollutants from rain water to slow their release into storm drains.
In my piece, I wondered whether Nickels didn’t get more credit because Seattleites are ready for more and bolder leaps toward carbon-free living.
Welch explores whether it was Nickels’ style, not the substance of his actions, that was too abrasive for this famously polite city. Residents saw an increase in large, tall infill developments, they were asked to approve a fee on disposable bags, yet—the argument goes—Nickels failed to explain how all this was adding up to something bigger.
“While [Nickels’ climate-change program] was celebrated across the country and while Al Gore came to Seattle to sing its praises, it was not adequately laid out to local people as something that was to their advantage,” SeattlePI.com political columnist Joel Connelly told me last November. “Hence, you had a ‘nanny state’ reaction to it.”
I think there’s a danger in journalists demanding better “narratives” from politicians, as if the main problem is that our leaders aren’t eloquent enough. Still, Connelly is on to something. Nickels’ loss speaks to the need for green leaders to sketch out what they want us to move toward. The sustainability movement has got to be about more than absence (of dangerous greenhouse gases, of toxic pollutants in the air and water). There needs to be a positive vision of the future for voters—more pleasant places to live, easier commutes, stronger communities.
Related Links:
Top Obama admin. officials tout clean energy in Seattle
America’s greenest mayor, laid off and looking on
by Tom Laskawy
Michelle Obama’s anti-childhood obesity agenda would have kids a little less round ‘round the middle.White House Flickr streamWhile we await Michelle Obama’s speech this Wednesday to the United States Conference of Mayors that will likely launch her new campaign against childhood obesity, I thought I’d offer a little perspective as well as a few bits of research that shed light on the enormity and complexity of the obesity epidemic.
First off, let’s be clear: The First Lady will, of course, do everything she can to avoid picking a fight with Big Food—I wouldn’t be surprised to see corporate partnerships coming out of her efforts. Indeed, her team’s first foray into the food policy arena, which included rumors of a White House embrace of former FDA Commissioner David Kessler’s “junk food addiction” model for obesity, the president himself raising the possibility of a soda tax and the somewhat defensive posture of her policy team in an interview with NPR, were overshadowed by industry objections.
Even the most common-sense advice from her (drink water not soda, eat less processed food) prompted howls of outrage from food companies. We’ll know for sure next week, but school food will probably be the focus of all her efforts. After all, school food is already the government’s responsibility and even in the “reform-proof” Senate there is a fair amount of momentum for reducing access to junk food in the lunchroom and improving the quality of school food.
Unfortunately, the school environment is not the only one at issue for kids. I wrote back in September about a Temple University study which showed corner stores to be a scourge to school nutritionists:
[R]esearchers perform[ed] voluntary
inspections for students’ purchases—most obesity studies rely on
self-reporting, which is notoriously unreliable. And what’s inside
those before- and after-school shopping bags is pretty depressing. One
researcher saw an eighth-grader’s $1.80 haul—a Coke, chips, and piece
of chocolate cake. 500 calories—calorically (though not
nutritionally) equal to the lunch served that day at school. These
lunches are free to most students as the school in question
participates in Philly’s Universal Feeding program. As the article
points out, the hard work that went into getting junk food out of these
Philly schools is being almost totally undermined.
But it’s not just corner stores. A study just published in the American Journal of Public Health surveyed all kinds of non-food stores in 19 US cities—small, medium and large—to see how many sold calorically-dense snack foods.
Snack food was available in 41 percent of the stores; the most common forms were candy (33 percent), sweetened beverages (20 percent), and salty snacks (17 percent). These foods were often within arm’s reach of the cash register queue. We observed snack foods in 96 percent of pharmacies, 94 percent of gasoline stations, 22 percent of furniture stores, 16 percent of apparel stores, and 29 to 65 percent of other types of stores. Availability varied somewhat by region but not by the racial or socioeconomic characteristics of nearby census tracts.
Junk food really is everywhere! The researchers noted that people don’t reduce their overall eating patterns to account for snacking and thus the more “eating occasions” a person has, the higher their caloric intake will be. They also observed that FDA regulations allow anyone to sell candy, soda, and salty snacks. But if you want to sell fruits and vegetables? You need a permit. Big Food strikes again.
And yet, even attacking calories consumed (as the First Lady will undoubtedly do) may prove insufficient. There are more and more indications that the industrial chemical soup that surrounds us plays a role as well. There is strong evidence that phthalates, an ingredient in soft plastic toys as well as in personal care products, are a factor in the obesity epidemic, especially in low-income communities.
And now a new study finds that Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) such as certain pesticides as well as chemicals like dioxin and PCBs, when consumed at levels commonly found in food, can cause insulin resistance (which can lead to diabetes, obesity and liver disease). Many kinds of POPs have been banned here and abroad but they can persist for decades in the environment and in our food. We’ll be eating PCBs for a long time to come. It’s the first study that has established this link experimentally. Here’s how they did it:
Adult male rats were fed for 28 days either crude or refined fish oil obtained from farmed Atlantic salmon carcasses.
The
crude fish oil contained the levels of POPs that people are typically
exposed to after eating the fish. The refined fish oil contained no
POPs and was fed to the control rats. The levels of fat in both diets
were the same.
Adult rats exposed to the crude fish oil—which contained the POPs
mixture—put on belly fat and developed insulin resistance and liver
disease. The rats could not regulate fat properly. They had higher
levels of cholesterol and the fatty acids triacylglycerol and
diacylglycerol in their livers.
In contrast, none of these changes were seen in the rats that ate fish oil without the POPs.
Although
blood levels of insulin and sugar were similar among rats with either
diet, the rats exposed to POPs had impaired insulin action. The POPs
also altered the expression of number of genes involved in metabolism,
which could explain the changes in fat and sugar regulation.
Let’s parse this. They fed the rats fish oil “obtained from farmed Atlantic salmon carcasses.” You, too, could perform this experiment on yourself—go to the supermarket and buy Atlantic salmon. Then eat it. Congratulations! You just exposed yourself to Persistant Organic Pollutants! Now, you can argue that people don’t eat just crude fish oil for months at a time—but POPs bioaccumulate in all sorts of foods. And it’s very interesting that both sets of animals displayed similar blood sugar and insulin levels—it was how their bodies responded to the insulin that changed.
Of greatest concern was the evidence that the POP exposure “altered the expression of number of genes involved in metabolism.” Scary stuff—these pollutants are affecting us on a genetic level. And no doubt, some people will respond differently to these pollutants than others based on their genetic makeup.
In fact, I recently ran across a study of the link between pesticides and Parkinson’s disease that demonstrated this affect. According to the study, a particular gene has now been linked to increased risk from developing Parkinson’s after prolonged exposure to organophosphate pesticides. This may seem obscure (and unrelated to the subject of this post) but it has serious implications. There’s nothing in our toxic chemical regulations that would account for increased risk via genetic predispositions in a particular population. What if a chemical is benign to most people but a serious health risk to others—and we have no way of knowing who’s at risk? What do we do then? Under current regulations, the government is unlikely to act.
So, we’re left with an obesity epidemic which has certainly been caused in part by increased caloric intake, but increasingly appears to have been caused in part by our genetic response to all sorts of environmental factors. I’m as curious as anyone to hear the elements of the First Lady’s plan to combat childhood obesity and I expect to hear good ideas about getting junk food out of schools and enlisting parents in the work of establishing good nutrition. But I also hope she’s thinking about how to deal with the chemicals in our food which may be altering our childrens’ genes as well as their weight.
Related Links:
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by Tom Philpott
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries.
————-
Massive burger recall: what would Meat Wagon be without one? The Obama administration still hasn’t chosen a director of the USDA’s FSIS—the office charged with overseeing the safety of the nation’s meat supply.
Meanwhile, the new year is off to a rollicking start on the E. coli-tainted-beef front. A California company named Huntington Meat Packing has had to recall 864,000 pounds of ground beef last week, after USDA inspectors found it laced with the deadly E. coli 0157 strain.
According to Meat Wagon’s proprietary mathematical models, that’s enough dodgy burger to make 3.56 million Quarter Pounders, or a scary Quarter Pounder for every resident of Chicago (population 2.8 million), with 756,000 extra burgers for folks to have seconds. Wow.
It should be noted that Huntington Meat Packing is a relatively small beef packer in an industry dominated by giants. These days, three companies—Tyson, Cargill, and JBS—slaughter about 75 percent of cows raised in the United States. With their massive market shares and global-spanning scale, these corporations are masters at churning out profit by doing everything as cheaply as possible; and forcing any smaller company that wants to compete with them to do the same.
When your main incentive is to do things cheaply, as opposed to doing them right, food-safety problems are all but inevitable. Relatively small packers like Huntington are hardly the only ones prone to churning out tainted meat. Last year, a plant owned by Cargill—the globe’s largest agribusiness firm, which packs about a quarter of the beef consumed in the U.S.—had at least two massive recalls (see here and here).
The beef industry’s steady trickle of recalls is surely expensive and embarrassing; but it isn’t doing much to change practices—or else there wouldn’t be that steady trickle of recalls. It must be cheaper to endure recalls than to stop practices that cause them in the first place.
Indeed, the business model of modern beef production hinges on two practices that seem to ensure that the resulting product will be laced with pathogens. Both are related to the feedlot, not the slaughterhouse. The first is feeding corn and corn byproducts to ruminants that evolved to eat grass—a feeding regime that seems to have created E. coli 0157, which is innocuous to cows but potentially deadly to humans. As Michael Pollan wrote a few years ago:
The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand around in their manure all day long, eating a diet of grain that happens to turn a cow’s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can’t survive long in cattle living on grass.)
The second highly questionable practice is to regularly dose cows with antibiotics, which probably explains the rise of antibiotic-resistant salmonella in hamburger meat.
Here’s what I think is going to happen: Rather than change these two practices, the industry and its government overseers will grope for a techno-fix—some sort of post-production sterilization that will (ostensibly) clean up the pathogen messes that start in the feedlot. I’d wager we’ll soon be hearing about irradiation as a “solution” to tainted burger; or perhaps a vaccine.
Such fixes perpetuate the problems they seek to “solve”—and generate new problems that will also need techno-fixes. It should remembered that “pink slime” —the ammonia-treated slurry of defatted slaughterhouse scraps that now ends up as a filler in 70 percent of U.S. hamburgers—itself started as a techno-fix to the pathogen problem. It was supposed to be so full of ammonia that it would sterilize hamburger mixes at 15 percent concentrations. We now know that far from sterilizing ground-beef mixes, pink slime often adds to the pathogen load in the hamburgers it graces.
The poultry industry already uses post-slaughter sterilization to reduce pathogens. Did you know that the U.S. poultry industry subjects the chicken it sells to a chlorine bath? And that Russia has banned imports of U.S. poultry because it disapproves of the process? Russia has also “banned pork from all but six U.S. processing plants for excessive antibiotic residues,” Reuters reports.
Whether the chlorine bath leaves traces on the treated chicken and harms consumers is an open question. One thing seems clear: it doesn’t prevent chicken on the market from containing pathogens. From the CDC Website: “In 2005, Campylobacter was present on 47 percent of raw chicken breasts tested through the FDA-NARMS Retail Food program.”
Despite the recent unpleasantness, the industrial-meat giants look set for a mighty stock market rebound in 2010, reports CBS MarketWatch. In fact, their shares have already been rallying over the past three months:
Tyson Foods shares are up 12 percent, while pork producer Smithfield Food Inc. is up 19 percent. Chicken supplier Sanderson Farms Inc. is 21 percent higher in the same three-month period.
Speaking of industrial-scale slaughterhouses, Missouri is now in the business of subsidizing them.
ConAgra Foods will receive state tax credits to help create new jobs and investment at the company’s meat and poultry processing plant in Trenton, Mo. The Missouri Department of Economic Development (MDED) said in a news release that it has approved $247,285 in tax credits over a five-year period to add 10 new jobs and $9 million in new investment to expand the Trenton facility.
I’d bet that investing that same $247,285 in slaughterhouses designed for small, pasture-based farmers would create more jobs, and more economic activity, than handing it to ConAgra.
Related Links:
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Industrial farming head just says ‘no’ to call for civility
by Ed Bruske
Ed Bruske spent a week in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke Elementary School here in the District of Columbia observing how food is prepared. This is the first in a six-part series of posts about what he saw. This piece was cross-posted from The Slow Cook.
The lunch menu said chicken patty on a bun, but there was a problem: ingredients for the week had never been delivered. Tiffany Whittington, food service manager at H.D. Cooke Elementary School, conducted a quick mental inventory of ingredients she had on hand and decided to improvise lunch for the school’s 326 students.
She opened the door to the walk-in freezer and grabbed several 5-pound bags of something called “beef crumbles,” then pulled a 10-pound box of curly egg noodles and two 6-pound cans of tomato sauce off a shelf in dry storage. The pre-cooked “beef crumbles” would be heated in a steamer; the egg noodles as well. Then Whittington would slather the beef with the canned tomato sauce, spice it up with a little garlic powder, and finally stir in the noodles and some pre-shredded cheese.
Voila: “Baked ziti!” Whittington declared.
So began my week as an observer in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke in Adams-Morgan, the school where my 10-year-old daughter attends fourth grade. I was anxious to see how the kitchen operated because until recently, school meals in the District of Columbia had been made offsite by an industrial vendor and sent to the schools pre-cooked in individual plastic packaging. It was kind of a sorry sightpa, watching kids line up for those plastic-sealed packages—too much like airline food.
The food service operator for D.C. Public Schools, Chartwells-Thompson, decided to ditch the plastic meals and replace them with something called “fresh cooked.” Under the new regime, D.C. students would eat food prepared in their school’s own kitchen, or, if the school didn’t have a kitchen, at the nearest high school and delivered.
This sounded like a step back to the future, more like a time not too distant when school meals were made from scratch mostly by ladies who knew something about cooking. In the case of H.D. Cooke, it meant a brand new kitchen as well. The school recently underwent a multi-million-dollar renovation, including the addition of a full-scale commercial kitchen with walk-in freezer and refrigerator, gleaming stainless steel pot sinks and work tables, and lots of brand new equipment. There’s a huge hood with fans in the ceiling to ventilate a double Blodget convection oven and a set of Cleveland commercial steamers. A Winston holding cabinet keeps food warm after it’s been cooked.
Presiding over the operation is Whittington, a Ballou High School graduate who took a job with D.C. Schools in 2001 after finishing a course in food service. Cooking out of a real kitchen was a change for her. “They just gave me a recipe book and said, ‘Here you go!’ So here I am.”
Over the next few days I’ll be describing in detail what “fresh cooked” means. One of the first things you notice in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke is a big empty space under the ventilation hood where a cooktop and range would be. Whittington explains that a stove has been promised for some unspecified date in the future. But the way food is prepared in D.C. schools, a cooktop—an appliance most of us would consider essential in our home kitchens—is completely unnecessary. There are no pots to boil water or cook food in. That’s all done in the steamer using stainless steel pans.
Since nearly all of the ingredients for school meals in the District arrive frozen or canned, and in many cases already cooked, they are quickly prepared in the convection oven or in the steamer. Some things, such as the “cheese sauce” used on lunch nachos, aren’t even removed from the plastic bags they arrive in before they are heated in the steamer. They are then emptied into a stainless pan and placed directly on the lunch counter to be served.
The system is precisely designed for optimum efficiency, convenience, and economies of scale. As I discovered during my week in the H.D. Cooke kitchen, “fresh cooked”—the food our children are served here in the nation’s captiol every day—is a perfect reflection of the prevailing industrial methods that rule our nation’s food supply. Meal components are highly processed and reconstituted, some with ingredients provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s commodities food program, and come from factories all over the country. Human intevention has been reduced to an absolute minimum. It’s cheap, it’s fast, and it’s easy. Whittington and her two assistants spend more time serving and cleaning up than they do actually preparing the food.
The cooking regime has been so simplified, I can’t help asking Whittington what she did with her time before the advent of “fresh cooked,” when all the meals arrived pre-assembled in packages. “We had to warm it up,” she replied.
What’s missing are fresh, whole ingredients. Children receive fresh fruits and vegetables as morning snacks. Sometimes salad is served in the lunch line, and occasionally whole fruits are offered with lunch. But this represents a world of difference from the food service Mattie Hall remembers. Nearing retirement, she now assists Whittington. “In the ‘80s we did it all,” she says. “Grits, sausage, pancakes. We made bread rolls from scratch, baked in the oven.”
Also missing is flavor. “I don’t like most of the food because it doesn’t taste good,” says my daughter. Still, Whittington serves about 280 lunches each day, most of those fully subsidized by the federal government to the tune of $2.68 per meal. D.C. schools offer free breakfast to all students. About 150 children at H.D. Cooke participate. In all, Chartwells feeds about 30,000 of the approximately 40,000 students enrolled in the the D.C. Public Schools system on any given day, making it the biggest feeding program in the city. Another 20,000 students attend public charter schools, which hire their own food providers, usually small catering companies.
Most of the children at H.D. Cooke qualify for free lunch based on family income. Some qualify for partially subsidized meals. A few must pay. They have accounts with the kitchen that they occasionally pay into. Money rarely changes hands in the food line, but in order to keep accounts straight and collect the federal reimbursements, Whittington must keep careful track of who is taking meals. She sits at one end of the food line with her computer, making a note of each student with a click of her mouse. “I know every kid in the school—unless they’re new,” she says.
Based on the number of needy students Whittington serves, the school also qualifies for donations of commodity foods—meat, poultry, cheese, for instance—from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The school system uses the donations like credit to purchase finished food products from suppliers, which helps hold down costs.
When I first arrived at the H.D. Cooke cafeteria, or “Kid’s Stop Cafe,” breakfast was just ending. Slices of French toast—delivered cooked and frozen, then reheated—were displayed on the steam table. There were also individually packaged “whole grain” strawberry-flavored Pop Tarts available, as well as individually packaged Goldfish “Giant Grahams,” fruit mix from a can, and a choice of four milks in eight-ounce (one cup) containers: regular low-fat, regular non-fat, chocolate and strawberry-flavored.
Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, Whittington was preparing vegetables for lunch. The mix of green beans and lima beans, corn, and carrots had arrived at the school frozen. It was then placed in the steamer, a unit that looks like a windowless stacking oven, but circulates steam to heat and cook food. Into the vegetables Whittington stirred scoops of “Smart Balance Buttery Spread.” According to the label, it was made of a “blend of palm fruit, soybean, canola and olive oils” plus “natural and artificial flavors” and “beta carotene color.”
She then started on her “baked ziti.”
At first I couldn’t tell what the “beef crumbles” were, even though they were plainly visible in their plastic packaging. They look like Sloppy Joe mix without the sauce. But because of their dull, greyish-brown color, I first thought of baker’s chocolate. Reading the label, I saw that the contents were in fact “beef, vegetable protein, caramel color” along with a list of chemical flavorings and preservatives. It came from a company in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was supplemented with “USDA commodities.”
The canned spaghetti sauce was made by Giovanni Food Co. in Liverpool, N.Y. It was not as red as the spaghetti sauce I am used to and I found the pale color a bit odd and off-putting. The label said it contained “tomato paste, dextrose/and or high fructose corn syrup, potato or corn starch.” Perhaps what it needed was more tomato.
After mixing the beef, the sauce, the noodles and some garlic powder, Whittington added two cheeses: Land O Lakes brand shredded mozzarella and shredded cheddar from five-pound bags. Whittington gently stirred the mix again with her gloved hands, then into the holding cabinet it went. Whittington said she likes to add cheese to a lot of the food she serves because it adds flavor. “I think the kids really like it.”
Rounding out the day’s lunch menu: Del Monte diced peaches from six-pound cans, sweetened with corn syrup. As you will see in the days that follow, there’s one thing beside cheese the kids at H.D. Cooke are rarely lacking: sugar.
Tomorrow: How industrial methods make school food fool-proof and cheap
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by David Roberts
A couple weeks back, I covered a new paper in Science that constitutes the most comprehensive survey yet of existing scientific data on mountaintop removal mining. The conclusions were so stark and, frankly, horrifying that the scientists involved went the unusual extra step of calling for an immediate moratorium on the practice.
Trust Stephen Colbert to take that horror and make it hilarious. Here he is with the lead author of the paper, Margaret Palmer:
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by Jay Inslee
Copenhagen may not have been a giant leap for mankind, but it was a step forward.
So as the Congress returns to work this year, its post-Copenhagen duty remains the same as its pre-Copenhagen responsibility: to pass an energy bill that both jump-starts the United States’ economy and screws down the nation’s carbon pollution. There are two obvious reasons we must pass energy legislation, one pertaining to our self-interest, and the other to the world’s.
First, our economic self-interest demands action on energy, independent of any international framework on carbon reduction. Job creation in clean energy remains job No. 1 for this country. Those jobs will not magically spring into existence; they will be created only if the United States Congress passes bold energy legislation.
Did China abandon its plans for a massive buildup of clean energy technologies for lack of a treaty coming out of Copenhagen? Did it cancel its plans to build 30 gigawatts of wind energy in the next decade? Did it shut down its electric-car manufacturing plants in Tianjin? Did it shutter its efficient lighting research in Hong Kong? Did it reduce its development budget for lithium-ion batteries to power electric cars? Of course it didn’t.
Just three weeks after the world failed to reach a binding agreement in Copenhagen, China announced its intentions to build the world’s largest solar-powered electrical generating facility in western China, a plant capable of powering 3 million homes using a vast array of photovoltaic cells. The juggernaut of Chinese investment in these clean energy technologies rolled along without Copenhagen even being a speed bump. China continues to invest $12.6 million an hour in an effort to create whole new clean energy industries.
Why would a country continue on this path in the absence of a treaty out of Copenhagen? The answer does not lie in some noble and selfless Chinese effort to bail the world out of its predicament as recompense for China’s less than stellar performance at Copenhagen. The answer lies in China’s smart, insightful, and visionary recognition that there will be billions of dollars and millions of jobs to be had in the next several decades in the new clean energy economy.
The Chinese recognize that the nation that gets a jump start in these fields will have the “first mover” advantage and that it will be difficult for the second players to catch up. The Chinese want to be first, biggest, and most globally competitive from the get-go. The Chinese recognize that the absence of a binding treaty doesn’t belie the fundamental economic facts; if you don’t move on clean energy now, you will be left at the starting gate, with a 20th century economy in a 21st century world.
Our national economic self-interest was the same both before and after Copenhagen. It is in our country’s best interest to lead the world in technological innovation, as it always has. The outcome at Copenhagen should not blind us to both the economic opportunity of action and the economic threat of inaction on the energy front.
We are fully capable of building a new domestic clean energy economy, something I learned while co-authoring Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy. The number of businesses in this country ready to take off in clean energy ought to give everyone confidence.
We should also recognize what really happened in Denmark. For the first time, the United States, long the world’s leading emitter, engaged with the rest of the world on climate. For the first time, other major emitters publicly declared their intentions to cut either their emissions or their energy intensity. For the first time, the developed and developing world had an honest discussion about mitigation. We now can explore new approaches in bilateral agreements, or within assemblages of developing countries that now represent the bulk of the emissions.
All of us ought to hope the Senate is able to move forward and do the work necessary to forge a clean energy bill this year. I understand it is difficult. I know the Senate may be weary after dealing with health-care legislation. But the emerging clarity of the economic opportunities before us, and the urgent need for action on climate change, do not permit delay.
Given the terrifying new evidence of the increasing rates of climate change and ocean acidification, the question before us is the same one that melancholy Dane asked in Elsinore Castle years back, just a few miles from Copenhagen. As Hamlet said, the question is, “… to be or not to be.”
Only this time, it is all of us in deep trouble, not just an indecisive Danish prince.
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by Agence France-Presse
BERLIN—Germany, the world’s biggest market for solar cells, is poised to slash its subsidies for solar power by as much as 17 percent, Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle said on Tuesday.
“I envisage an order of magnitude of 16 to 17 percent,” Bruederle said at an energy conference in Berlin.
Electricity produced by solar power in Germany is sold at a minimum price guaranteed by the government to help producers compete with firms using fossil fuels and nuclear power that can produce power much more cheaply.
This guaranteed price has already been reduced gradually—the subsidy was already cut by 10 percent from January 1 this year—but pressure has grown on the government to accelerate the process.
Experts say the subsidy fails to spur competition in the industry, which represents less than one percent of the total electricity production in Germany, Europe’s top economy.
The solar sector itself has said it is prepared to accept a cut in the subsidy, but that anything above 10 percent would be intolerable.
After years of dazzling results, Germany’s solar industry has succumbed to the gloom enveloping the broader economy, with competition from Asia also taking the shine off the sector.
The world’s top solar cell maker, Q-Cells, saw its turnover plunge by over 40 percent in the first nine months of 2009.
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by Agence France-Presse
PARIS—The U.N.‘s panel of climate scientists said on Monday it would probe claims that its doomsday prediction for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers was wrong, even as an expert said he had warned of the mistake.
The new controversy focuses on a reference in the IPCC’s landmark Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 that said the probability of glaciers in the Himalayas “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.”
Over the weekend, Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper reported that this reference came from the environmental group WWF, which in turn took it from an interview given by an Indian glaciologist to New Scientist magazine in 1999. There is no evidence that the claim was published in a peer-reviewed journal, a cornerstone of scientific credibility, the paper reported.
“We are looking into the issue of the Himalayan glaciers, and will take a position on it in the next two or three days,” IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri said in an email to AFP.
In an interview with AFP, a leading glaciologist who contributed to the Fourth Assessment Report described the mistake as huge and said he had notified his colleagues of it in late 2006, months before publication. Loss of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 would take two or three times the highest expected rate of global warming, said Georg Kaser of the Geography Institute at Austria’s University of Innsbruck.
“This number is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude,” said Kaser. “It is as wrong as can be wrong. To get this outcome, you would have to increase the ablation [ice loss] by 20 fold. You would have to raise temperatures by at least 12 degrees” Celsius, or 21.6 degrees Fahrenheit. “It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing … I pointed it out.”
Asked why his warning had not been heeded, Kaser pointed to “a kind of amateurism” among experts from the region who were in charge of the chapter on climate impacts, where the reference appeared. “They might have been good hydrologists or botanists, but they were without any knowledge in glaciology,” he said.
The Fourth Assessment Report said that the evidence for global warming was now “unequivocal,” that the chief source for it was human-made, and that there were already signs of climate change, of which glacial melt was one. The massive publication had the effect of a political thunderclap, triggering promises to curb greenhouse gases that had stoked the problem.
Kaser said the core evidence of the Fourth Assessment Report remained incontrovertible. “I am careful in saying this, because immediately people will again engage in IPCC bashing, which would be wrong,” he said.
But he acknowledged that the process of peer review, scrutiny, and challenge which underpin the IPCC’s reputation had “entirely failed” when it came specifically to the 2035 figure.
The 2035 reference appeared in the second volume of the Fourth Assessment Report, a tome published in April 2007 that focused on the impacts of climate change, especially on human communities.
Part of the problem, said Kaser, was that “everyone was focused” on the first volume, published in February 2007, which detailed the physical science for climate change. Work on this volume was “much more attractive to the community” of glaciologists, and they had failed to pick up on the mistake that appeared in the second, he said.
The question of glacial melt is a vital one for South Asia, as it touches on flooding or water stress with the potential to affect hundreds of millions of lives.
Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has repeatedly challenged the IPCC’s claims.
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