Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Geoffrey Lean

It was one of the biggest surprises in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit, and it may be one of the best reasons for hope now that the meeting has ended in disappointment. Rapidly industrializing developing countries are pressing ahead with their plans to reduce the growth in their carbon emissions, despite the failure to reach a substantial international agreement in the Danish capital.

One by one, as last month’s Copenhagen summit approached, the main developing countries—China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, and Indonesia—announced surprisingly ambitious emission targets. Indeed, measured against what the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says will be needed by 2020, they did much more to fulfill their side of the bargain than rich countries. An analysis published during the summit showed that every one of their offers fell within the range of what would be required of them—with Brazil and Indonesia even surpassing that range—while only two of the developed country commitments, from Norway and the E.U., did so.

And the momentum appears to be continuing, even though their governments balked at endorsing global targets for emission cuts at the summit itself.

Little more than a week after leaving Copenhagen, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed a law to require a 39 percent reduction on forecast emissions for 2020. His environment minister, Carlos Minc, commented that this showed the country’s determination to respect its pledges: “It doesn’t matter if the Copenhagen summit did not get the results we wanted,” said Minc. “We will still meet our goals.”

Indonesia’s forestry minister then announced a plan to plant more than 52 million acres of forest by 2020, cutting the growth of its emissions by over 26 percent.  At present, Indonesia’s deforestation, according to a World Bank study, makes it the third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States. And South Africa is aiming to submit a plan by the end of this month for curbing its emissions growth by 34 percent by 2020.

Even India and China, which proved the most resistant to international targets in Copenhagen—and who, apart from the obstructive Saudi Arabia, expressed most pleasure at its limited achievement—have pressed ahead.

Indeed, India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, was contradicted by his boss after he expressed satisfaction with the results: Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh insisted that “no one was satisfied with the outcome” [of Copenhagen], adding, in a flourish of hyphens, “There is no escaping the truth that the nations of the world have to move to a low-greenhouse-gas-emissions and energy-efficient-development path.”  India, he added, “must not lag behind” in adopting low-carbon technologies. Sure enough, environment minister Ramesh then announced that the country would go ahead with its plans to cut its carbon intensity—the amount released per unit of GDP—by 20 to 25 percent by 2020. And this without awaiting international financial help. “We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do,” said Ramesh. “We will have a low-carbon growth strategy.”

And China, which is already taking big steps to moderate emissions and develop clean technologies, has, if anything, stepped up the pace, despite having done more than any other country to block progress in Copenhagen. China is confident that it will, this year, meet its current target of reducing its carbon intensity by 20 percent in just five years. The country is also drawing up tough new goals for 2015. It is widely expected to exceed its formal pledge of a 40 to 45 percent reduction on 2005 levels by 2020.

Already the world’s leading manufacturer in solar cells—a position achieved in just two years after a standing start—China, last week, signed a deal with a California company to build a series of solar thermal power stations. China’s windpower is expected to exceed its 30,000 MW target by 2012, eight years ahead of schedule. It has just tested the world’s fastest train, as part of a high-speed rail program. And it is increasing sales of electric cars to the United States.

India has invited China, Brazil, and South Africa to meet with it next week to coordinate future strategy. And the E.U. is proposing pursuing a new climate agreement through the G20—which includes such leading developing countries—rather than through the unwieldy United Nations negotiating system. But all this momentum holds real dangers.

Keen though they are to press ahead with their national strategies, the rapidly industrializing countries are reluctant to be bound into agreements with developed countries. Why? They are uneasy, at the best of times, about being placed under an international, legally binding obligation to curb their pollution, and they balk at any suggestion that developed nations would be telling them what to do. And their wariness is increased because rich countries have so far offered to do less than their share of the job and have a poor record of meeting the targets they set themselves under the Kyoto Protocol.

Besides, a deal between developed and fast-growing developing countries would bypass the U.N., with its universal representation, and thus exclude those nations most likely to be victimized by climate change.  Such an agreement would, effectively, be struck among the polluters. This would mute demands from more than 100 countries, including a call for the world to aim at a 1.5 degree centigrade rise in global temperative rather than a 2 degree one. And it would breed resentment amongst those left out of the bargaining.

Such resentment among poorer and most-vulnerable developing nations emerged as a major problem in Copenhagen. Any way forward will have to address this.

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Climate success in 2009 should inspire the new year

by Miles Grant

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.)At first it seemed like simply one bad idea from Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). But now we know the real story—a tangled web of public officials, polluter lobbyists, and efforts to gut the Clean Air Act. 

And every day it seems we’re learning more—more about the revolving door between the Bush administration and polluter lobbyists; more about their influence with senators and their staffers; and more about who’s really pulling the strings on efforts to block climate action—Big Oil’s MVP, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.).

Some of the best reporting this week has come from Juliet Eilperin at the Washington Post’s Post Carbon blog. Earlier this week, Eilperin had reported that polluter lobbyists were helping Sen. Murkowski’s staffers write legislation to strip environmental protections:

The maneuvering comes as The Washington Post has confirmed that two Washington lobbyists, Jeffrey R. Holmstead and Roger R. Martella, Jr., helped craft the original amendment Murkowski planned to offer on the floor last fall. Both Holmstead, who heads the Environmental Strategies Group and Bracewell & Guiliani, and Martella, a partner at Sidley Austin LLP, held senior posts at EPA under the Bush administration and represents multiple clients with an interest in climate legislation pending before Congress.

And today, even more about the close working relationships between polluter lobbyists and Senate staffers:

More details have emerged about the involvement by two lobbyists—who were senior Environmental Protection Agency officials during the George W. Bush administration—in crafting an amendment Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) tried to offer in the fall in an effort to bar the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases on its own.

Murkowski’s staff director on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, McKie Campbell, and her energy staffer Colin Hayes, convened a meeting on Sept. 23 with aides to a handful of centrist Democrats to brief them on the final version of the amendment, according to participants and sources familiar with the session. The two lobbyists, Bracewell & Giuliani’s Jeffrey R. Holmstead and Sidley Austin’s Roger Martella Jr., called in by phone and walked the staffers through the changes that had been made to text, to reassure the staffers that Murkowski’s amendment would not block the EPA from issuing new curbs on greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles in 2010 even as it would bar the agency from imposing those limits on power plants. […]

The meeting, which took place in Hart Senate Office Building 370 at 8:45 a.m., included two aides to James M. Inhofe (Okla.), the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Before leaving the room, participants were asked to turn in the documents Murkowski’s aides distributed, confirmed Inhofe spokesman Matthew Dempsey.

Holmstead and Martella dominated the opening of the meeting by describing how the revised amendment had answered the attacks lodged by some Democrats and environmental groups, a source said.

The two men are both experts in the Clean Air Act, and represent clients with a financial stake in climate legislation moving through Congress.

Why did Murkowski’s aides not want the documents to leave the room? And why, later in the article, does Holmstead issue a classic non-denial denial? “I have no memory of playing a major role in that call.” Not I did not play a role, but I don’t remember—leaving himself lots of wiggle room to revise his story later.

The stories shed new light on Sen. Murkowski’s push to strip the EPA of its Congressionally-granted, Supreme Court-approved authority to regulate global warming pollution. As Joe Mendelson, global warming policy director for the National Wildlife Federation, told Greenwire (sub. req.), the Murkowski amendment was “crafted by big polluters
for big polluters.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)Why would a senator from Alaska, called the poster state for global warming, put polluters’ interests ahead of her home state’s climate concerns? In the current campaign cycle, Sen. Murkowski is Congress’ #1 recipient of electric utilities’ money and the #4 recipient of Big Oil money. And Greenpeace is now calling for an investigation of Murkowski’s lobbyist ties.

Despite this week’s revelations, Senators Inhofe & Murkowski could still try to bring to the floor their amendment to gut the Clean Air Act. Your senators need to hear from you. Email your senators right now and ask them to stop this polluter-fueled push to undercut the EPA’s efforts to protect people, wildlife, and our natural resources from the worst effects of global warming.

Cross-posted from the National Wildlife Federation’s Wildlife Promise.

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by Grist

 

DETROIT—Small, hybrid, and electric cars took center stage at the Detroit Auto Show this week, as automakers adapt to the changing demands of a market ravaged by recession and soaring fuel costs.

A clutch of manufacturers also displayed fuel-efficient cars with designs inspired by Europe, in stark contrast to the traditional gas-guzzling behemoths favored by American motorists in a bygone era of cheap gasoline prices.

Chevrolet unveiled its Aveo “subcompact” and Spark cars, while Ford revealed the much-anticipated update to the Fiesta. Fiat, which took over Chrysler last year, has presented both the standard and hybrid version of its 500, due to arrive in the U.S. market by the end of 2010.

Hyundai USA Vice President David Zuchowski said the trend of smaller cars in Detroit reflected the changing face of the marketplace as tighter federal fuel-efficiency standards loomed ever closer. “The composition of our market is going to change quickly because of the federal mandate,” Zuchowski told AFP. “Our industry is going to become more like the European industry in the next couple of years, with smaller cars, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they have to compromise on performance.”

Ian Robertson, vice president of BMW, added that the market in small cars was expanding worldwide, noting the success of the rebooted Mini, whose biggest market remains the United States. An electric Mini is on show in Detroit.

But Christian Klingler, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Volkswagen, said he doubted “that tomorrow everyone in the United States is going to be driving small cars.”

Ford, meanwhile, urged visitors to its Detroit displays to “Drive Green,” showcasing its hybrid Fusion, crowned North American Car of the Year. Ford also announced more than $500 million of investment in green vehicles in the United States.

Several automakers used Detroit as a shop window for their new hybrid models, notably Honda’s CR-Z coupe or prototypes such as Toyota’s FT-HS, Volkswagen’s CC compact coupe, or Hyundai’s rechargeable Blue Will hybrid.

Despite the drive toward smaller, hybrid, and electric cars, the unit sales “will still be modest,” said Jeremy Anwyl, analyst with Edmunds.com. “Consumers will be influenced by environmental issues, and also by the cost. Pricing will be the key.”

Electric cars, meanwhile, were available for a test drive at a tree-lined basement track and were parked on the Detroit Auto Show’s “Electric Avenue,” where pint-sized vehicles from firms such as Korean company CT&T and Commuter Cars are on display.

Commuter Cars’ tiny electric car, the Tango, is a slimline two-seater in which the passenger rides behind the driver.

Toyota is showing off its tiny urban electric FT-EV (Future Toyota electric vehicle), while U.S. carmaker Tesla trumpeted the success, range, and reliability of its Roadster electric sports car by driving the vehicle cross country some 2,700 miles from Los Angeles to Detroit.

Nissan, meanwhile, displayed its four-seater all-electric Leaf, which has a maximum range of about 100 miles per charge.

—by Agence France-Presse

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by Kurt Michael Friese

In the latest edition of The Atlantic magazine, Caitlin
Flanagan has written a surprisingly harsh critique of the
popular and growing movement to include gardens in our public schools.
In a nutshell, she states that pursuing this activity over and above
the three R’s will turn our children into illiterate sharecroppers. 
Right from the start, though, she gets it wrong.

She has the reader picture the son of undocumented migrant workers
entering his first day at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley,
home of the well-known Edible Schoolyard project, “where he stoops
under the hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.”  Her callous disrespect
for labor only begins there, but the real problem with her argument
lies in her stubborn refusal to accept that a good idea may have
sprouted from an ideology other than her own.  She goes so far as to
describe it as:

…A vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing
an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might
other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math
(attaining the cultural achievements,  in other words, that have lifted
uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily
scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt).

Flanagan has chosen to ignore the core purposes of these
gardens, only one of which happens to be cultivating a respect for hard
work, and only one other of which is a healthy respect for real food.
While she notes that the work of the garden has migrated into each of
the classrooms, she ignores the obvious point that this demonstrates:
There is nothing taught in schools that cannot be learned in a garden. 
Math and science to be sure, but also history, civics, logic, art,
literature, music, and the birds and the bees both literally and
figuratively. Beyond that though, in a garden a student learns
responsibility, teamwork,  citizenship, sustainability, and respect for
nature, for others, and for themselves.

The disdain for the left-of-center viewpoints of those who started
the Edible Schoolyard is evidenced in her description of Chez Panisse,
the restaurant of Edible Schoolyard’s founder Alice Waters, as “an
eatery where the right-on, ‘yes we can,’ ACORN-loving,
public-option-supporting man or woman of the people can tuck into a
nice table d’hôte menu of scallops, guinea hen, and tarte tatin for a
modest 95 clams—wine, tax, and oppressively sanctimonious and
relentlessly conversation-busting service not included.”   Flanagan’s
attempt at snob-bashing populism and appeal toward the sensitivities of
those on the right is misplaced, however, because these school garden
ideas, while begun in this particular case by those with left-leaning
tendencies, actually hold appeal across the political spectrum.   They
not only encompass a love of nature and the kind of touchy-feely
sensitivities that give conservatives the willies, but also the bedrock
principles of tradition and ownership and self-reliance that would be
equally at home at a hippie commune or a tea party rally.

While it is rightly noted that the grades at the school quickly
improved, the contention that “a recipe is much easier to write than a
coherent paragraph on The Crucible”  is not only insulting to
professional chefs and food writers (like,  well, me), but also
is patently false. There is a world of difference between writing a
recipe and writing one well, as anyone who as ever come across the
words “but first” in a recipe will attest.   The more important point
though is the one that Flanagan glosses over:  that the passion for
learning developed in a garden, driven home by the lightening-bolt of
awareness when a kid bites into a vine-ripened tomato she grew herself,
is worth essays on ten plays even if Arthur Miller or Shakespeare
wrote them all.

Where the argument really goes off the rails though is when Ms
Flanagan posits:

Does the immigrant farm worker dream that his child will learn to
enjoy manual labor, or that his child will be freed from it? What is
the goal of an education, of what we once called “book learning”? These
are questions best left unasked when it comes to the gardens.

Not “enjoy,” Ms, Flanagan, respect. This, as I mentioned,
is where her disdain for manual labor, something that everyone on the
planet (beneath the upper 2 percent or so of income earners) contends with
every day, becomes instructive.  It is predicated on the idea that
labor is something to be freed from,  ostensibly through strict
adherence to “book learning.”  Worse,  it perpetuates the misguided
dogma of the last several decades that distances us from our food and
insists that cooking is a chore, like washing laundry or windows, which
should be avoided at all costs as if it were beneath us. This in turn
not only makes her seem elitist herself, but also leaves
Flanagan’s ideas of education as merely a means to create consumers,
rather than citizens.

What follows in the essay is a misuse of statistics that boggles the
mind, where she blames a decline in math and English among Latinos at
MLK on the gardens. In legal-ese (and Latin) this is referred to as a Post
hoc ergo propter hoc argument, “It follows therefore was caused
by.”  Another example of this would be that since all addicts were once
babies, then mother’s milk leads to heroin addiction.

This is followed up by an argument that the rampant increase in
childhood obesity and early-onset diabetes is not caused by a lack of
access to healthy food nor the prevalence of sugary, fat laden food in
schools. Rather she cites, ironically,  George Orwell, to argue that
it’s because poor people prefer that food. Please. And for
the record, her research into two grocery stores in Compton as proof
that poverty and food deserts do not go hand-in-hand is blindingly
shortsighted.

There are more errors of reason,  but let me cut to the chase. Flanagan sums up by saying this:

(W)e become complicit— through our best intentions—in an act of
theft that will not only contribute to the creation of a permanent,
uneducated underclass but will rob that group of the very force
necessary to change its fate.  The state, which failed these students as
children and adolescents,  will have to shoulder them in adulthood, for
it will have created not a generation of gentleman farmers but one of
intellectual sharecroppers,  whose fortunes depend on the largesse or
political whim of their educated peers.

The belief that we will create better citizens by teaching to the
test (an idea she advocates for repeatedly and vociferously) is one
that will lead to a generation of closed-minded automatons incapable of
learning, thinking, or fending for themselves.  We are far better off
with a generation of citizens who understand that sustenance comes not
from factories or laboratories but from the soil and from hard working
hands, both of which deserve the respect garnered from experience. We
need citizens who are healthier than the generation before them;
throughout most of human history the rich were fat and the poor were
skinny, yet today in America it is quite the opposite.  Fixing that
requires direct experience and interaction with our food,  something no
schoolroom lecture can provide.

This is not advocacy for some weird Maoist Great Leap Forward where
everyone must leave the cities and go farm. It is knowledge of one of
the truest clichés known:  You are what you eat. And as one of
Flanagan’s carefully-book-taught computer programmers would point out,
Garbage In—Garbage Out.

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The moral equivalent of slavery

by Tom Philpott

Hands-on education at Berkeley’s Edible Schoolyard. Photo: Edible SchoolyardFor several years starting in the early ‘90s, I worked as a remedial math and writing teacher at Austin Community College. At that time—and, for all I know, now—the Texas public education system was mercilessly stratified: high-income districts lavished resources on schools, while their counterparts in low-income districts scraped by on bare-bones budgets. Predictably, college acceptance rates were much higher in the high-income districts.

That brazenly unequal system churned out plenty of customers for our remedial services. What struck me about many of my students was that they seemed to have never really been engaged before in a classroom: they expected rote, mechanistic, abstract assignments. And they expected to do poorly on them.

So I tried to engage them—cast around for topics they were interested in, concrete things, and use them to explain math concepts, or inspire an essay. And, more often than not, it worked—the students and I would hit upon something, amid much back and forth, that sparked genuine interest, and then they would be off and running, giddy in the pursuit of ideas. Which, of course, is exactly the kind of teaching that goes on in lots of private schools—the ones that routinely send students to esteemed universities, and not remedial programs at community colleges.

It’s not exactly a radical idea. Teaching is a form of communication; and focusing on concrete things has long been a favored communication strategy. In their celebrated guidebook to writing The Elements of Style, Strunk and White advise, “use definite, specific, concrete language.” The advice seems impeccable.

The Edible Schoolyard program, launched in Berkeley public schools by Alice Waters, is an attempt at putting that principle in action. It makes food, a material reality that everyone interacts with daily, an object of hands-on study. See that lettuce on your plate? Where did it come from? How do seeds germinate? What variety of lettuce is it? Why this variety and not another one? Why are only one or two available at the grocery store? Who owns grocery stores—and who decides what they offer. What makes plants grow? And so on.

The idea of having kids grow and cook food as part of the curriculum seems brilliant: a way to make concrete such potentially abstract topics as biology, chemistry, history, economics, and botany. It also promises leverage in another direction: in an age of de-funded, low-quality school lunches and surging diabetes rates among children, Edible Schoolyard has the potential to transform kids’ dietary habits.

Has it worked in practice? That’s a fair question. The program has been around for nearly 15 years now—it started in 1995 at Martin Luther King public middle school in Berkeley, and has expanded to affiliates in New Orleans, among other places across the country. Similar programs have sprouted up elsewhere, inspired by its example. Has it succeeded in catching students’ interest and making them better learners? Has it helped them develop healthier eating habits?

In a scathing piece in The Atlantic, the writer Caitlin Flanagan raises those questions but doesn’t answer them. Or, more properly, she declares the program a disaster—the piece is titled “Cultivating Failure”—without even coming close to driving home her case.

In her 3500-word polemic, the only hard evidence she brings to bear for her verdict of failure is this:

Indeed, Hispanic students do particularly poorly at King Middle School. According to the 2009 Federal Accountability Requirements, statewide, more than 39 percent of Latinos are proficient in English and 44 percent in math, but at the King school, those numbers are a dismal 30 percent and 29 percent, respectively. Where do Berkeley’s African American and Hispanic middle-schoolers do well? At a gardenless charter school called Cal Prep, where 92 percent of the students are black or Latino, where the focus is on academic achievement, and where test scores have been rising steadily.

So at King, Latinos are underperforming on standardized tests, while over at Cal Prep, “test scores have been rising steadily.” You don’t need to be a social-sciences graduate student to marvel at the logical gymnastics on display here. Correlation does not show causation; students could be underperforming at King because of the garden program—or because of some other reason. And so on. The numbers she cites may call into question the efficacy of Edible Schoolyard, but they by no means settle the case.

And that’s her last nod to bringing empirical evidence to bear. (In another jaw-dropping section, she seeks to debunk the concept of food deserts—the idea that residents of low-income areas tend to have less access to fresh food—not by scrutinizing the considerable academic research on the topic, but rather by making a 20-mile trip to “the most famous American hood [sic], Compton,” to check out the grocery scene.)

Her point seems to be this: working the land and cooking are lowly tasks, work that should be fled and not aspired to. It’s unconscionable to urge Latino students, some of whose parents may work as migrant laborers, to garden as a form of learning. Students, particularly those struggling with basic reading and math, should be forced to hit the books, not weed the carrots.

That line of reasoning seems brutally reductionist—and certainly doesn’t reflect my own experience as a remedial teacher. More importantly, Flanagan makes no effort to actually engage the program she is trashing (or, indeed, the book she’s ostensibly reviewing—her piece is ludicrously packaged as a review of Thomas McNamee’s 2008 biography of Alice Waters).

And the idea that farming and cooking—and even getting one’s hands dirty in the garden—are beneath respectable middle-class aspiration is deeply problematic. Such thinking reinforces an unjust food system that exploits cheap labor as a matter of course, propped up by a largely invisible army of migrant workers who do the dirty work of tending fields,  slaughterhouses, and kitchens.

The sustainable-food movement has matured enough and gained enough force that it’s coming under withering criticism from a variety of quarters. That’s good for the movement—hard questions need to be asked, assumptions questioned, received ideas reconsidered. And authors who perform those tasks will find a market from editors desperate to generate attention with contrarian poses.

But I wish we could expect more thoughtfulness, and less hack work, from such critics.

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Taking distributed energy seriously

by Tom Laskawy

The FDA’s new report on the safety of endocrine-disrupting chemical bisphenol A is months overdue and there is still no sign of when or if the agency will release the report. Perhaps they are waiting for that piece of “smoking gun” evidence that BPA represents a clear and present danger to human health? Well, thanks to researchers from Peninsula College of Medicine in Britain, we just may have it.

In 2008, the group looked at data from the 2003-2004 US National Health and Nutrition
Examination Survey (NHANES) which included urinary BPA levels for the first time. The results:

[A] quarter of the population with the highest levels of BPA were more than
twice as likely to report having heart disease or diabetes, compared to
the quarter with the lowest BPA levels. They also found that higher BPA
levels were associated with clinically abnormal liver enzyme
concentrations.

At the time, even the researchers admitted the possibility that it was a statistical fluke. But the same team has now analyzed the 2005-2006 NHANES, which used an entirely different group of people, and guess what? The association between BPA exposure and heart disease in humans is as strong as ever (via Toronto’s Globe and Mail):

According to the new research, 60-year-old American males with the
highest amounts of bisphenol A in their urine had about a 45 per cent
greater risk of cardiovascular disease than men the same age with lower
exposures, confirming the results of a previous study on the topic
released in 2008 and based on a different sample of people.

This comes despite the fact that median BPA levels dropped by 30 percent between 2004 and 2006 to around 2 parts per billion. Even with the lower exposure, however, odds of heart disease were still significantly higher. Note that the researchers performed rigorous calculations to ensure that they isolated the effect of bisphenol A and weren’t getting correlations with other factors (you can dig into the statistics here).

It’s true that the earlier relationship between BPA and diabetes and BPA and liver function were less present in the new data. But Dr. David Melzer, the lead author on the study, believes this is a result of the lower human BPA levels measured. As he put it to me:

The 2005/6 data for the liver enzymes and diabetes are also
statistically consistent with the 2003/4, although not significant on their
own, probably because of the fall in BPA levels. Note that the new data do not statistically
contradict the 2003/4 data on diabetes or liver enzymes: overall they add to it
although the sample size is too small at these lower BPA levels to get a
definitive result for 2005/6 on its own.

Overall this clearly takes the hypothesis of a BPA—adult
heart disease association through to the level of evidence.
Given the obvious concern that BPA might be directly driving these health
effects, we now need to urgently clarify the mechanisms behind these
associations.

Indeed, Dr. Melzer believes his study is underestimating the effect of BPA due to the relatively small sample size—he believes further study will revise the effect of BPA on heart disease upward.

The Globe and Mail article offered this response from a spokesman for industry lobbying group the American Chemistry Council:

“The study itself does not establish a cause-and-effect relationship
between BPA exposure and heart disease,” commented Steven Hentges, a
spokesman for the group.

But what he doesn’t say is that the only way to “prove” that cause-and-effect, in other words to isolate BPA’s role beyond doubt, would involve conducting a controlled clinical trial, i.e. exposing humans to BPA and seeing who dies. That, of course, isn’t science, it’s homicide, which is why toxic chemical research is mostly performed on rats. And the evidence from rats on BPA, despite industry attempts at obfuscation, is already overwhelming.

These kind of population studies—analysis in effect of the natural experiment industry is performing on us—represents the best evidence we could reasonably hope to get. These results go far beyond what’s required by any meaningful precautionary principle. This is now about saving lives. Yes, as the scientists observe, more research is needed to understand the precise physiology through which BPA causes heart disease and to determine the risk factor with greater accuracy. But whether that increased risk end up at 30 percent or 60 percent or somewhere inbetween, the FDA now knows all it needs to know to conclude that even low exposure to BPA represents a serious risk to human health.

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by Peter Sinclair

If you’ve poked around on the web for information on climate change, you
probably heard the meme – “32,000 scientists signed a petition debunking
global warming.”
32,000 of the world’s leading scientists? 
Is that really true?
Well, no…

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by Ashley Braun

University of Washington researcher Dr. P. Dee Boersma has spent nearly 40 years following her passion to learn about and protect penguins.Courtesy of Dee Boersma/Penguin Sentinels www.penguinstudies.org

There once was a Michigan schoolteacher who gave her little girl a butterfly net and a suggestion: Every kid should have a hobby, could collecting insects be yours?

The little girl, driven by curiosity and a sense of duty, embraced her mother’s words so completely that, for a long time, the schoolteacher believed that her daughter had caused the crash of butterfly populations across the entire Midwest.

Of course, the real threat was pesticides such as DDT.

The little girl grew up and moved on. Now, she chases penguins, whose numbers are also spiraling downward. This time, climate change is one of the culprits.

The butterfly-and-penguin chaser is Dr. P. Dee Boersma, a preeminent penguin researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she holds the Wadsworth Endowed Chair in Conservation Studies. A 2009 winner of the prestigious Heinz Award, Dr. Boersma has spent nearly 40 years studying penguins from the Galapagos Islands to Argentina. I sat down with her to chat about penguin commute times, the human population problem, and why you should have a TV.

People love penguins because penguins are like people

Dr. Boersma first fell “madly in love with penguins” when she was doing her PhD research in the Galapagos Islands in the 1970s. Since then, she’s moved further south and for the past 27 years, she and her research crews have been following Magellanic penguins along the temperate southeastern coast of Argentina.

Perhaps Dr. Boersma keeps these model penguins in her University of Washington lab as a reminder that penguins are a lot like people: both are struggling with climate change.Photo: Ashley BraunWhy bother studying the same group of penguins for so long? Because long-term research like Dr. Boersma’s comes in extremely handy when looking at what an increasingly warmer world does—if anything—to the creatures that live in it.

Magellanic penguins, for example, can swim more than 100 miles each day in search of a nice fish dinner. After eating it (and hopefully leaving a good tip), they book it back to the nests to feed their fluffy chicks before the food is digested in their own stomachs.

“It’s not that different than [human] parents that are trying to raise their kids,” noted Dr. Boersma. (Except that your parents probably didn’t regurgitate into your sippy cup.)

Analyzing satellite data from tagged penguins Dr. Boersma discovered that climate change is forcing these penguins to swim twenty-five miles farther each foraging trip to find food than they were traveling a decade ago. A situation Dr. Boersma compared to a human family where mom’s office has moved from San Diego, where the family still lives, up to San Francisco, where mom now works. The longer commute means mom spends more money on fuel and less time and energy at home. It’s basically the same for a penguin family. Except penguins can’t store extra food in the fridge, and if papa penguin also leaves the nest for food, the kids might get eaten by an armadillo.

“Penguins … [are] having to commute farther to be able to find fish,” said Dr. Boersma. “That’s the price they’re paying for the change and variability of climate.”

Courtesy of Dee Boersma/Penguin Sentinels www.penguinstudies.org

Staring down a changing world without knowing it

Dr.
Boersma observed firsthand another deadly example of the effects of climate variation. On
the Antarctic Peninsula, she saw a “rain-on-snow” event, an elusive
phenomenon that occurs when sudden bouts of warm air cause falling snow
to turn to rain or slush. Some experts think warmer temperatures could increase the frequency of these events.
That is especially bad news for penguin chicks. Their downy feathers
are adapted to keeping out the cold of frozen snow. However, when snow
turns to rain, young penguins get drenched and freeze to death. 

Not all the effects of—or research on—a
changing global climate are so glaringly obvious to the general public.
“As one guy said to me, ‘Well, you believe in climate change,’” Dr.
Boersma mentioned. “And I said, ‘I don’t believe in climate change. The scientific evidence is overwhelming. Climate has
changed. We’re continuing to see more rapid changes.’ He said, “Well, I
don’t believe in climate change.’ And I said, ‘Well, you don’t have to.
You can believe in how many angels dance on the head of a pin. That is
a belief. But the scientific evidence is really very clear on all of
these things.’”

This evidence of global environmental changes often is “difficult
for us to even see in our lifetime, but if we take an historical
perspective, the changes have been monumental,” she said. “In the last
two generations, we went from mostly having a wild world to mostly now
having a human world.”

Both a threat and a savior

Indeed, though climate change presents a grave threat to penguins, “the greatest threat” of all, said Dr. Boersma, is the human race.

“We have 6.7 billion people in the world, and we all want to consume more,” she said. “As long as people aspire to the standard of living of Americans, we don’t have enough resources. What we should really be talking about is how are we going to get a world population of about 2 billion, and how are we going to get the most consumptive countries to reduce their consumption.”

Outside of mandated population controls, how does she propose we get from here to there?

“It starts a person at a time,” Dr. Boersma said. “I have no children. And I have certainly done that intentionally because I think there are too many people in the world.”

That’s what the Discovery Channel is for

Dr. Boersma emphasized the importance of connecting with the natural world, something she and her graduate students get the chance to do at her research station in Punta Tombo, Argentina, where she’s been studying penguins the last 27 years. Recently, they befriended a lone male penguin they call “Turbo.” Turbo doesn’t have a mate to make him raise a chick or take out the trash and instead has taken to paying visits to their research station. He knocks on the door with his beak and waddles right inside.

“I think people have to have that sort of experience with something that’s other than human,” said Dr. Boersma. “And if they do, it can change their life.” 

That experience can even be vicarious.

“It’s one of the reasons it’s important to have not only television so you have the Discovery Channel … but also zoos and aquariums,” Dr. Boersma said. “Not everybody’s going to be able to go to Africa, or to Peru.”

A magazine can work toward that end as well. In 2001, she launched Conservation Magazine. Its mission, says Dr. Boersma, the magazine’s executive editor, is “to get the news out so that anybody who is interested in conservation can read interesting ideas, stimulating science that they can understand.”

Scientists who do extra credit

While Dr. Boersma has been an outspoken advocate of the Wildlife Conservation Society for years, she acknowledged that the type of passionate activism practiced by NASA researcher James Hansen is a step beyond what most scientists find comfortable.

“I think Hansen’s been an amazing advocate for something he cares deeply about,” she said. “He’s taken on activism to try to alert the public to what he sees are fundamental problems. Sometimes scientists don’t want to go quite as far as he does, but I think we all have an obligation to communicate what the loss is going to be and what scientific experiments we’re running with humans as the guinea pig.”

If penguin stalking were an Olympic event, Dr. Boersma would have taken home the gold.Penguins have clearly been the cause in Dr. Boersma’s life. Her devotion earned her a 2009 Heinz Award. Teresa Heinz established the award in honor of her late husband, U.S. Senator John Heinz. She bestows it on select individuals each year for their “extraordinary accomplishments” in areas that were particularly near and dear to him.

The prize comes with a $100,000 gift and a big, shiny medal—the part Dr. Boersma secretly is most excited about receiving. Her plans for the money don’t involve any trips to a magical children’s theme park. Instead, she’ll spend it on her three passion projects: The Penguin Sentinals, Conservation Magazine, and Global Penguin Society.

“As I was kidding a friend, it’s not enough to buy a coastline in Oregon to retire to,” Dr. Boersma said. “So I think I’ll continue to try to work on changing the world.”

 

——————————————————

Correction: This story originally stated that Magellanic penguins are swimming 25 miles farther to find food each day, rather than each foraging trip. The author regrets the error.

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by Eric Burkett

Piled on my desk on either side of my computer are several packages of convenience foods and one chocolate bar. The foods range from instant macaroni and cheese and cornbread mixes to canned soup, canned tuna, canned beans, and a Styrofoam container of instant, microwaveable macaroni and cheese. Of the eight items, only two – the tuna and the chocolate bar—have sodium levels in the single digits. Of the double-digiters, only two have sodium levels less than 20 percent.

I’m looking at sodium content not because I’m watching my salt intake—although that’s hardly a bad idea—but because I wanted to see exactly what the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (the name brings a smile to my face every time I read it) is up to. In case you haven’t heard, the agency—along with more than 40 other government agencies and health organizations—issued a call Monday for the nation’s food producers to reduce sodium levels in their products by 25 percent by 2015. The 43 entities have joined together in an effort they’re calling the National Salt Reduction Initiative.

They have their work cut out for them.

Salt, of course, is everywhere. It’s a vital component of life; it’s a preservative for food. Most notably, it brings out the flavors of the food we eat. Given the ersatz nature of many of those products—I’m reluctant to call some of them “food”—salt plays an even bigger role, not just in enhancing flavor, but in providing it. Take the bright yellow container of Velveeta Shells & Cheese immediately to my left. It contains 640 milligrams of sodium; that’s 27 percent of the recommended daily allowance of salt based on a 2,000 calorie diet. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, however, suggest that 1,500 milligrams is probably the most reasonable amount for most adults. Americans consume almost twice that each day. We really only require about 500 milligrams, or roughly half a teaspoon.

Rich in such ingredients as glycerol monostearate, an emulsifier, acetylated monoglyceride, another emulsifier, and modified food starch, Kraft’s microwaveable cheese food product and pasta needs plenty of back up to boost what little real flavor it might actually have.

There is also a can of Cambell’s condensed chicken noodle soup, featuring 25 percent less sodium than their regular chicken soup. That’s good news until you read the label: it still contains 660 milligrams of sodium, or 28 percent of the RDA. Even more startling is that those are the levels per serving. The label says there are two-and-a-half servings per can. Eat the whole thing, as most folks will, and you’ve overshot the CDC’s recommendations by 150 milligrams and that’s assuming you’re not eating a sandwich or dressed salad along with it.

Sodium itself, of course, appears in probably thousands of guises. The salt we encounter most frequently is sodium chloride, or common table salt. Look at the label on that can of soup again. Salt appears in at least five different forms: lower sodium natural sea salt (“contains less sodium than regular salt”), salt, monosodium glutamate, yeast extract (another name for MSG), and sodium phosphate. That last ingredient isn’t there for flavor; it’s being used as an emulsifier (it also works as a leavening agent).

Is the New York health department being realistic? Corporate responses seem to be slow in coming, although both Cambell Soup Company and Con-Agra have responded by reiterating their own sodium reduction campaigns.

“Their [New York City’s] sodium reduction vision is laudable,” said Chor-San Khoo, vice president of Campbell’s Global Nutrition and Health, in a release.“However the targets proposed are quite aggressive and difficult to achieve, particularly in the recommended timeframes.”

And particularly when so much of today’s food depends upon salt, instead of wholesome ingredients, for flavor. 

 

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[UPDATED:] FDA’s food safety blogger doesn’t think meat safety is a problem

by David Roberts

When it comes to energy, policymakers are often confronted
with human behavior that seems irrational, unpredictable, or unmanageable.
Advocates for energy efficiency in particular are plagued by the gap between
what it would make sense for people to do and what they actually do. Efforts to change people’s behavior have a record that
can charitably be described as mixed. (See my post, Making
buildings more efficient: It helps to understand human behavior.)

Many of the experiments that have cast the most light on
what does (and doesn’t) drive behavioral shifts around energy have been run by Dr. Robert Cialdini,
until recently the Regents’ Professor of Psychology and W.P. Carey
Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Arizona State University (he retired in
May of last year). Cialdini’s professional focus is not just on energy but on
behavior more generally, and the ways behavior is influenced. His seminal 1984
book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, is used in business and
marketing schools across the country, and his most recent book, Yes! 50
Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive (co-authored with Dr. Noah
Goldstein and Steve Martin), was a New York Times bestseller.

Robert Cialdini. Photo courtesy wikimedia commonsCialdini describes six “weapons of influence”:

Reciprocity: people will repay favors.
Commitment and Consistency: people will stick to
commitments made publicly.
Social Proof: people will do what other people
do.
Authority: people obey authority figures.
Liking: people are more influenced by those they
like.
Scarcity: people desire what is perceived as
scarce.

He consults for a variety of organizations, exploring how
these mechanisms can be used to produce positive results. Maybe the clean
energy crowd should listen in!

———

Q. What is social psychology?

A. Social psychology is the study of everyday behavior—behavior that has some kind of a social context—and the factors that change
and influence it. How do people think about social interactions, and how do
those social interactions change the way they think?

Q. There seems to be an uptick in interest about the
application of social psychology to energy policy. What’s bringing it about?

A. It’s the least capital-intensive way of making change.
I’m speaking of both kinds of capital here: financial and social. Technology
costs a lot. Incentive programs cost a lot (and as soon as they’re discontinued
the behavior flops back). Legislation, legal constraints, taxes, penalties of
one sort or another—those are costly in terms of social capital, which
organizations and governments are loathe to spend these days.

What you have with social psychology is a set of procedures
that are essentially costless to enact but produce levels of change that are
comparable to those other mechanisms.

Q. What can social psychology contribute to energy policy?

A. It can help understand a set of motivations that are
based on social interactions and social rules. I’ll give you a great example. An
economist at Harvard decided to see how much money it would take to get people
to let him skip ahead of them in line. Sure enough, according to economic
understanding of human behavior, the more he offered to pay them, the more
willing they were to let him cut ahead of them in line.

Then he found something that flew in the face of what an
economist would say: people wouldn’t take his money. It was the offer itself
that told them how socially responsible they were to let this guy skip ahead of
them, because he must have a need. There’s a rule called the “norm for social
responsibility” that says we are obligated to help those people who are
dependent on us for aid. The money he offered them was a signal for how great
his need was. It wasn’t about an economic exchange at all, it just looked like it
was.

Q. It seems like fine-grained understanding of how people
interact. How do you scale it up as policy, to get substantial effects?

A. As I argued in Influence, I’ve tried to identify the universals of human experience—those things
that produce assent across the widest range of situations and settings and
practitioners. You follow an authority; you pay back those who have given to
you; you seize scarce or dwindling opportunities; you follow the lead of others
like you and what they’re doing; and so on.

Take an example. The fastest growing development within
marketing right now is called “social cause marketing”—it’s even
outstripped sports sponsorship. It involves some entity, usually a corporate
group, saying to its customers or its market, “if you purchase our product or
employ our services, we will donate so much money to a good cause.” They’re
banking on an understanding of the rule of reciprocity: people want to give
back to those who have given to them in a meaningful exchange.

Well, we put signs in hotel room bathrooms—this isn’t
published yet—that said, “[Re-use your bath towels] for the environment.” That
was the control group. The other sign said, “If you [re-use your towels], we’ll
donate a percentage of the savings that we get at the end of the year to an
environmental cause.” That didn’t produce any increase in towel reuse.

But if we said, “We’ve already donated to an
environmental cause in the name of our guests,” now we get reciprocity.
That produced, I think, a 28 percent increase over either of the other
strategies. You can apply this to social cause marketing: if you’re going to
give a donation anyway, you should give it first.

So it is possible to employ these principles in broad-gauged
ways to produce large-scale change. And it’s costless— that’s the
thing.

Q. Have any policy-makers contacted you? Are you aware of
any efforts to systematize this stuff into policy?

A. Yes. Interestingly enough, in the U.K. I’ve been
asked to speak at 10 Downing Street about this three times now, and I’ve spoken
to congressional committees here in the United States as well. [See “The
Contribution of the Social Sciences to the Energy Challenge,” a 2007
hearing of the House Committee on Science and Technology.] I’m hopeful that
there is a movement toward evidence-based decision-making, an attempt to
undertake actions that incorporate what social scientists have learned.

Q. Can you point to particular policies that have
incorporated these insights?

A. I can give you some evidence of what happened in the
presidential campaign, where the Democratic National Committee used this
information in very effective ways to get out the vote. They recognized that it
was a serious mistake to do what they had been doing in previous elections,
saying to registered Democrats, “So many Democrats failed to vote in 2004
that it caused this terrible country.” Instead, they changed the wording
to, “So many Democrats voted. Join them!” There’s a recent article in
the Journal of Politics that showed that those two strategies had
dramatically different effects on voting behavior.

Notice what the Obama campaign did when it announced the
donations it had received the previous quarter. It was brilliant: they didn’t
just list the amount of money they had received, they listed the number of
contributors who had donated. The multitude became the message. People want
to be with the crowd. It tells them something not only about what’s
appropriate, but what’s possible for them.

If we send people in San Diego a message saying the majority
of your neighbors are conserving energy on a daily basis, that has more effect
than telling them to do it for the environment or to be socially responsible
citizens or to save money. If your neighbors are doing it, it means it’s feasible.
It’s practicable. You can do it—people like you.

It was very important that we say “people in your
neighborhood.” If we said “the majority of Americans,” that
wasn’t effective. If we said “the majority of Californians,” that was
more effective. If we said “the majority of San Diegans,” that was
more effective. But the most effective was “the majority of your
neighbors.” That’s how you decide what’s possible for you: what people in
your circumstance are able to do.

Q. How do you respond to the notion that there’s something
vaguely Orwellian about the government or corporations using this information
to change people’s behavior?

A. I’ve heard it from certain commentators on the right;
Glenn Beck was one of them. There are even legislators in Congress who are
complaining about certain aspects of the energy bill on this. It’s a
know-nothing argument; what you are railing against is honest information. What
is tricky about telling people about what their neighbors are doing and letting
them adjust to whatever extent they want? There’s no penalty. There’s no
constraint. There’s no government incentive. You’re going to tell me you’re
against giving people information?

Q. Liberals still tend to think that if you give people
plain facts, action follows.

A. In our San Diego
study, we went door to door and put hangers on people’s doorknobs with various
messages. We had a control group where some homes received no door hanger, no
message. We had another control group where they received a message that told
them that saving energy was a good idea and urged them to do it. Those two
control groups were equivalent in energy savings at the end of the month.
Information and exhortation was the same as nothing.

Changing people’s knowledge, changing people’s attitudes,
changing people’s beliefs are all on the surface of changing their behavior. So
let’s cut to the chase: Let’s change their behavior. There are techniques for
doing it that don’t involve having to change any of those [other] things.

I saw an article a while ago about Washington, D.C.‘s inner-city
parents—the extent to which exposure to fast food advertising and promotions
affected how much they took their families to fast food restaurants. Sure
enough, the more promotion and advertising they were exposed to, the more they
ate fast food. But those promotions didn’t change their attitudes about
fast food or their belief that fast food was bad for them. It only changed
what they thought their neighbors were doing.

Q. One of the toughest nuts to crack is energy efficiency—there’s all this potential, but people just don’t do it. Any thoughts on how
these insights could be applied to efficiency?

A. You could ask people to indicate the extent to which they
think energy efficiency is a good thing, and make it a public, active
commitment—then they’re going to be more likely to be consistent with it.
You can tell them what stands to be lost instead of what stands to be gained.
You can tell them what their neighbors are doing. You can tell them what
experts are saying about this. Each one might have an additive effect; you’re
going to clip 3 or 4 or 5 percent off with each one. But if you add them up,
now you are talking about something that’s much more than a minor deflection.

Q. How much government R&D funding goes to this kind of
thing vs. technology development?

A. It’s miniscule. [Rep.] Brian Baird [D-Wash.] has a bill in
which he recommends that the Department of Energy have a branch devoted to
behavioral science research. That’s what produced the “nanny state”
objection in Congress. He’s had to withdraw the bill and try to make it an
amendment to something else.

Q. It’s weird how long we’ve lived together as a species, yet
still we know so little about why we do what we do.

A. Nobody would be surprised to read that these are
universals of human behavior. What’s surprising is how little people know how
to activate and amplify them.

There’s research that shows that if a waiter leaves a mint
on the tray with the bill, his tips go up 3.3 percent. If he leaves two mints
on the tray, tips go up 14 percent. What’s the message? It’s that people give
back to those who have given to them. The majority of people would say, well, I
knew that. I have to say, if people know that, how come in 50 percent of the
restaurants I go in there’s no mint? How come in the 50 percent where there
are, half of the time the mints are in a basket by the door, where nobody
inside the restaurant benefits? So people know these things at a surface level,
but they don’t know how to activate them systematically.

Q. I saw that you retired from academia. What’s next for
you?

A. I retired in order to write a couple of books I had in my
head. I think the greatest disservice that social scientists have performed to
the public at large is to keep their information pretty much to themselves.

Q. I find that very frustrating. Environmentalists are
constantly having tortured discussions about how to influence people. Everybody
has their own folk theory or intuition. But where is the empirical knowledge
about this stuff?

A. In the academic journals. In places where people wouldn’t
ever be able to find it, and if they could, they couldn’t parse it—it’s
jargon laden. This is a soapbox issue for me. The work I’ve done and my
colleagues have done is supported by the non-academic community, either through
research grants or tuition payments. The public is entitled to know what we
found out with their money, about them and how they work, and we keep failing
to come through on our end.

I owe it to people to write some books. We have over 50
years of research into the psychology of persuasion. We know a lot.

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Taking distributed energy seriously

Economics as pathology, part two

Rationality, welfare, and public policy

by Terry Tamminen

Americans pride themselves on being ________ (fill in the blank with something like “biggest,” “best,” or “first”). Especially in California, we think we lead the world on carbon-reducing advances like ________ (fill in blank with “solar power,” “energy efficiency,” or “suntanned, body-builder, movie star, Austrian-born governors”). Given Obama’s U.N.-busting initiative in Copenhagen last month, our country may soon have more to brag about in the low carbon economy of the future, but for now, we might be smart to follow a few examples from India, Italy, and Brazil.

A company in India that once made plastic bags now recycles them for both environmental and economic gain. K.K. Plastic Waste Management has built about 700 miles of roads around Bangalore, mixing 3,500 tons of plastic waste with asphalt to form “polymerized bitumen.” These plastic roads withstand monsoon rains better, reduce tire resistance (which improves fuel economy), and last longer than traditional paving. The U.S. recycles a lot of plastic, but lately has had little use for it. If state and federal highway authorities mandated use of things like plastic roads, we could __________ (fill in the blank with “save lots of money,” “cut carbon emissions,” or “recycle my faded lawn flamingoes productively”).

In 2001, Italy’s dominant electric utility, Enel, launched a five-year program to install smart meters for some 40 million customers. By 2006, that $3 billion investment, including meters using technology from California’s Echelon (ELON), enabled the utility to offer variable pricing for different times of day, energy management information to consumers, and grid connection of solar power. Enel reports it is already saving about $750 million from the smart meters and will therefore payback its investment in four years. American utilities are just beginning to experiment with smart meters, but the Italian mass-marketing effort shows that the U.S. could _______ (fill in the blank with “use smart meters to cut carbon up to 30 percent,” “enable average customers to become renewable energy entrepreneurs,” or “make tons of money for American smart meter manufacturers such as General Electric (GE), Itron (ITRI), and Sensus Metering Systems”).

Finally, Brazil recently discovered massive oil deposits beneath 20,000 feet of ocean water and a layer of salt. Energy expert Daniel Yergin says this will be one of the most complicated projects in the history of oil extraction and may never get done because of the technical challenges, but the Brazilian government is going to be sure domestic workers and businesses profit from this discovery. Brazil has mandated that its government-owned oil company, Petrobras, own/operate the field and use mostly Brazilian oil rigs and other contractors to commercialize the resource. If the U.S. did something similar, we could _______ (fill in the blank with “put billions of dollars into American companies and stimulate economic recovery,” “generate tax revenues to balance state/federal budgets or to invest in low carbon alternatives to oil,” or “violate numerous global trade and tariff agreements and hope no one notices or cares”).

Americans have many reasons to be proud, but no matter how much we know, there’s always someone who can teach us new tricks. As Congress takes up climate legislation again in the New Year, it may be worth remembering that other countries could help us fill in a few blanks in ways that benefit both the environment and the rebounding economy.

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Developing nations continue to lead post-Copenhagen

by Tom Laskawy

The WaPo and the NYT are now reporting that Michael Taylor has been officially named deputy commissioner for foods at the FDA. What remains fascinating is that both articles, like Taylor’s blog post at the Atlantic, continue to ignore meat safety. It’s only mentioned in passing in the context of Taylor’s past stint as head of USDA food safety during the Clinton administration.

The WaPo’s piece even implies that Taylor all but solved problems with meat safety some 10 years ago. Meanwhile the NYT claims that this move plus new legislation that gives more power to the FDA represents the administration’s attempts to repair our “fractured” food safety system. And yet neither paper observes that Taylor’s appointment gives him no power over meat and poultry and that the food safety legislation has been stripped of any provisions that affect the meat industry. In other words, system not repaired! Very very strange. The American Meat Institute must be doing cartwheels this morning.

Michael Taylor, the FDA’s special adviser for food safety and one of the administration’s most public food safety officials, now blogs at the Atlantic. He hasn’t said much to date. But today he tried to get us all psyched for a big year for food safety:

This nation is at an historic tipping point when it comes to food
safety. Congress is on the verge of passing legislation to usher in a
new era of food safety in this country, with the fundamental goal of
preventing food contamination and illness. The president, the public,
and the industry have united in support for a stronger FDA. And our
commissioner, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, has created a new Office of Foods to help unify and be accountable for all FDA foods efforts.

Awesome, right?! One problem—neither the FDA nor the pending food safety bill have anything to do with ensuring the safety of what is turning out to be our most dangerous foods: meat and poultry. That aspect of food safety is controlled by the USDA. And to paraphrase Obamafoodorama’s tweet of the other week, the USDA (and the country) has been without a head of food safety for 1 year and 25 days. Meanwhile, the revelations mount. USDA presumptions about the safety of common meat products prove horribly wrong. The tough policy decisions pile up. And yet, USDA chief Tom Vilsack refuses to put someone in charge—nor has he stepped into the breach with any meaningful reform proposals of his own.

To be clear, nowhere in Taylor’s post, which purports to be a description of food safety priorities for the entire administration, are the following words mentioned: meat, poultry, USDA, school lunches, ground beef. Even his litany of last year’s failures that will not be repeated includes only the vegetarian’s delight of peanut better, sprouts, and cookie dough. The hundreds of thousands of pounds of recalled contaminated meat go unmentioned. It’s as if meat simply is not on Michael Taylor’s menu radar.

In fact, the main priorities he discusses are all process-oriented: better communication, cooperation, preparedness, and data analysis. That’s all well and good, but are those really the greatest shortcomings for food safety in this country? Or is it rather that—thanks in large part to lax, underfunded and outdated regulations—a surprising number of corporations don’t seem to have any qualms about releasing contaminated food into the system? Let’s do something about that, shall we?

I, for one, had a theory about all this. My theory was that Taylor, being himself a former Under Secretary of Food Safety, was pulling the strings at USDA on food safety—and possibly even positioning himself to be named to the post again. But reading his blog post, now I’m not so sure. Now I’m worried that the lack of progress at USDA regarding food safety will continue—and thus continue to present a very real danger to the food system and to us. So, apologies Mike if I’m not so psyched about what 2010 will bring on food safety. I’ve had more than enough paralysis and inaction already.

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Mom-powered politics

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by Hannah McCrea

Co-written by Doug Kendall,  founder and president of the Constitutional Accountability Center.

For good reason, many climate activists view 2009 as a
disappointing year, filled with bad news coverage and missed
opportunities. The Senate seems a long
way from passing a clean energy jobs bill, and the long-anticipated U.N. summit
in Copenhagen has come and gone, producing only an unambitious,
non-binding agreement among world leaders. Moreover, late last year, the climate movement suffered a blow to its
image following the “Climategate”
hacking scandal and reports that, for the first time in years, a decreasing number of Americans believe in human-made climate change. As we enter 2010, many climate activists say
the situation is bleak.

But looking more closely at what transpired in 2009, and by
focusing on actions by the Obama EPA, the states, and the courts, we can see
that real progress was in fact made last year.
A year ago, Warming Law published a four-part
blog series entitled “President Obama’s Roadmap to Cap-and-Trade,” the
general thesis of which was that the Obama administration could and should use its
authority under the Clean Air Act to introduce greenhouse gas regulations
without congressional approval—partly to prod Congress into passing a
tailor-made climate bill, but also to serve as a critical regulatory “back-up
plan” in the event Congress fails (as it has done so far) to pass
legislation. We also argued that action
by states could serve a similar dual function of prodding Congress to act and
supplying a layer of climate regulation that would limit greenhouse gas
emissions until Congress gets its act together.

It is no small feat that many of our recommendations and
predictions from the “Roadmap” have been realized: despite other setbacks, the U.S. has now
adopted its very first nationwide auto emission standards for greenhouse gases,
and is poised to adopt its first set of mandatory, federal power plant
regulations specifically targeting greenhouse gases. Ongoing state action has resulted in the
country’s first mandatory cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gases, and a
significant revival in tort-based climate litigation may soon lead to yet
another source of protection from (and pressure on) firms that emit greenhouse
gases.

These changes are very important. Not only are they
successfully increasing pressure on Congress to address climate change
legislatively, but they are reducing emissions now and setting the foundation
for more comprehensive reductions in the future. Below, we will briefly review the successes
of 2009, and explain why together, they indicate we are in a much better place
at the start of 2010 than some might think.

Raising auto emissions standards

Almost immediately upon taking office, the Obama team began
working feverishly to strengthen the federal response to climate change, making
the first and biggest strides in auto emission standards. Last January, President Obama ordered the EPA
to reconsider its decision to deny the state of California a long sought waiver allowing it
to implement strong auto emission standards for greenhouse gases. The president followed this up in May with an
announcement that he had reached a deal with
California and floundering automakers, not only to grant California its desired
waiver but also to adopt the state’s proposed standards nationwide. This deal will soon result in the country’s
first nationwide auto emission standard for CO2, and will bring the minimum fuel
efficiency standard to 35.5 mpg by 2016 while producing an estimated 30 percent
reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from new vehicles. 

As part of its deal with California, the White House also
secured the automakers’ pledge to drop numerous legal challenges against states
that had adopted California’s standards, which the industry previously argued
were “preempted” by federal law. This
prompted California Air Resources Board Chairwoman Mary Nichols to state within
hours of President Obama’s announcement that California would immediately start
developing an even better set of emissions standards to begin phasing in
starting in 2016—once the new round of standards is fully in force. In addition, the day after announcing the
deal over auto emissions, President Obama issued an executive order formally reversing his
predecessor’s position on preemption, ordering all government agencies to
review regulations issued in the previous ten years and “scrub” them of
unjustified pro-preemption language. President Obama’s decision to grant California’s waiver, and his further
action on preemption more generally was thus a critical shift from the Bush administration’s aggressive stance toward federal “preemption” of state
environmental policies, signaling Obama’s clear support for states’ historical
role as policy innovators and “laboratories of democracy.” This is a huge victory for progressives.

Complying with Massachusetts v. EPA

The Obama administration has also taken significant steps in
the past year to comply with Massachusetts
v. EPA, in which the Supreme Court held that CO2 qualifies as an “air
pollutant” under the Clean Air Act. The
Court’s decision, as we argued in last year’s “Roadmap,” remains among the most
important milestones to date in compelling a government response to climate
change, as the Court effectively created a mandate for the EPA to investigate
the impact of CO2 on human health and welfare, and, if that impact were deemed
dangerous, to use its authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate CO2
emissions.

Within weeks of her confirmation, Obama-appointed EPA
Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that the agency would begin preparing the
“finding of endangerment” required by the Clean Air Act.  Last month—coinciding with the Copenhagen
summit—Jackson announced that the process had been finalized, clearing the
way for the agency to begin regulating CO2 emissions.  In addition, in September, the EPA appeared
to foreshadow greenhouse gas regulations when it proposed the “tailoring rule,” which
stated that with respect to greenhouse gases a source would not qualify as a
“major emitter” (and therefore would not be subject to certain regulations)
unless it emitted more than 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide, or carbon
dioxide-equivalent gas per year. (For
most pollutants regulated by the Clean Air Act, a source is considered a “major
emitter” if it emits greater than 100, or in some cases 250, tons per year of
an air pollutant; thus the tailoring rule allows the agency to promulgate rules
for greenhouse gases without affecting the millions of small farms and businesses
that emit relatively small amounts of carbon.)
With these developments in place, the EPA is now free to regulate nearly
70 percent of the total greenhouse emissions from stationary sources nationwide.

These changes in position by the federal government deserve
to be both applauded, and defended, by the environmental community. President Obama has strongly signaled that he
will make good on his campaign promise to regulate greenhouse gases using the
Clean Air Act if Congress fails to act within 18 months of his coming to
office. Indeed, our nation may see its
very first set of targeted greenhouse gas regulations for power plants in place by the end of 2010.

There is also no doubt that industry and Congress have been
moved by the president’s actions. A
shift in industry attitudes was evident last year when several high-profile
companies announced their departure from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce due to its unwavering opposition to a climate
bill, while a growing list of
industry leaders have expressed—at least in name—their support for a
bill. And since the announcement of the
endangerment finding, Republicans in Congress, led by Senator Lisa
Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Representative Joe Barton (R-Texas), have stepped up efforts to remove
EPA’s Clean Air Act authority to regulate greenhouse gases, signaling their
fear of the EPA’s recent moves to comply with Massachusetts v. EPA. These
developments reveal that progress over the past year is having the desired
effect of prodding Congress to start addressing global warming, as well as
laying the groundwork for a layer of regulation that will have real impacts on
emissions.

States & courts

Last year also saw the country’s very first mandatory
cap-and-trade scheme take effect:  the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or
“RGGI.” (Pronounced “Reggie.”) This
program, which covers major power plants in 10 northeastern states, entered its
first mandatory compliance stage in January 2009. Though RGGI has a modest goal
of achieving a 10 percent reduction in greenhouse gases below 2008 levels by 2018, it
will prevent carbon emissions in the Northeast from rising, and its relative
stability, low allowance prices, and significant revenue for state governments
have made it a model for lawmakers in Washington. RGGI
remains an important limit on greenhouse gas emissions in the Northeast, as
well as a reminder to industry and national lawmakers that states can and will
address greenhouse gas pollution if Congress does not.

Finally, perhaps the most surprising development over the
past year—and one that has nothing to do with President Obama’s election—is
the revival of tort-based climate litigation. At the start of 2009, most experts predicted that “nuisance” lawsuits—in which victims of global warming sue industries for the “nuisance” of climate
change—would go nowhere. At least
three federal lawsuits had been filed by states, cities, environmental groups,
and even Katrina victims seeking damages from energy and auto companies, and
all three had been dismissed. Yet in
September, federal Courts of Appeals surprised just about everyone by reversing
the dismissal of two key nuisance cases. Though the next steps for the cases
remain uncertain, these important decisions have put industry polluters on
notice that they may soon have to defend their global warming behavior in a
court room, and have given Congress yet another reason to pass a climate bill
that would displace expensive tort-based litigation. 

Of course, as is illustrated by the “nuisance” cases,
progress in climate policy over the coming years will depend in part on the
individuals who are nominated and confirmed to sit on the federal courts, where
they will have the power to undermine or uphold federal and state action and
other efforts to address climate change. Industry has already filed federal lawsuits challenging the EPA’s
endangerment finding and the California waiver, lawsuits that should remind
both the White House and climate activists that judicial nominations are a key
component of a successful strategy to address global warming.

—-

The developments listed above reveal that, despite setbacks,
the country is in the best shape climate policy-wise than it has ever
been. Climate activists reeling from the
apparent failures of 2009 should be rallying behind these victories and
encouraging more of them, as they foreshadow even greater action in the coming
year—particularly with the potential adoption of EPA regulation of carbon
emissions. These victories mean the
prospects for eventual, meaningful congressional action will only continue to
improve, and that even without such action, real limits on greenhouse gas
pollution may soon be in place. 

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by David Roberts

This week, Seed magazine hosted a discussion on the Copenhagen climate talks—the outcome and the lessons learned—called Good Cop, Bad Cop. Contributing were
  K.C. Golden, environmental non-profit policy director, Mike Hulme, climate change scientist, Michael Levi, energy security expert, and yours truly. Click over to Seed to see all the contributions. Here’s mine, focused on the new dynamic between the U.S. and China.

———

The US and China Pursue Inverse Strategies

The heart of the Copenhagen climate talks was a clumsy pas de deux between the U.S. and China, part of an ongoing dance with enormous consequences for the battle against climate change. From where I’m sitting, it looks like the US is getting badly out-performed.

The UN climate process is currently governed by the Kyoto Protocol,  which contains a sharp distinction between developed and developing countries; it calls on the former to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions but requires nothing of the latter.

China is classified under Kyoto as developing, but the designation is increasingly ridiculous: China’s economy is expected to overtake Japan’s this year, making it the world’s second largest, and it recently passed the U.S. to become the world’s top emitter. The central dilemma of international climate politics, which has the leaders of rich nations chewing their nails, is how to draw China (along with “developing”  countries Brazil, South Africa, and India) into the international effort in a serious way.

It’s not clear how to do so. The Chinese Communist Party is overwhelmingly focused on maintaining the country’s rapid economic growth, which for now is largely powered by coal. Unlike poor and small island nations, it doesn’t particularly need monetary aid; it has said publicly that it won’t try to tap into any adaptation financing from industrialized countries. In short, as long as China is protected by Kyoto, it seems to have no incentive whatsoever to commit to anything beyond what it plans to do for purely internal reasons.

And that’s more or less what came out of Copenhagen. China agreed to what it was already planning: a 45 percent reduction in “carbon intensity” that would leave its emissions rising for at least 20 years.  The one concession it made is to report on those efforts to the international community every two years (which isn’t nothing, as we’ll see below).

The way it’s usually presented, the US and China are using each other as an excuse not to act. But that’s not exactly true; in fact,  the countries’ strategies are the inverse of one another.

The US is talking big talk in international negotiations but doing very little back home. Obama is achieving what he can via executive branch actions, such as boosting fuel-efficiency standards, but serious action awaits legislation. As it happens, a climate bill has finally reached the US Senate. China’s intensity pledge and concession on reporting may be enough to goad that sclerotic, dysfunctional body into passing it, but given the bruising experience with healthcare reform,  it must be considered unlikely. Even if it does pass, it’s a fairly weak bill, with a tepid short-term target (putting carbon emissions 4 percent below 1990 levels by 2020), a plethora of loopholes, and in all likelihood a boatload of subsidies for oil and coal.

China, by contrast, is a determined minimalist in international negotiations, as Copenhagen demonstrated, but it’s taking extensive action back home. It has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in advanced research, clean-energy industries, and low-carbon infrastructure from smart grids to high-speed trains. It is striking bilateral deals with the US that would allow it to benefit from American energy research and learn from the EPA about how to track emissions. Reports from inside China say the government expects to easily exceed its 45 percent intensity target.

In short, the US is over-promising and under-delivering; China is doing the opposite. The US can look forward to being vilified as a destroyer of hope, while China can look forward to eating America’s lunch on the most important growth industry of the 21st century.

By now, members of the international community should have learned two things. One is that targets, timelines, and declarations don’t mean much in the absence of national commitment to real action on the ground. The other is that national efforts to combat climate change are an economic and political advantage, not something to be accepted grudgingly at the end of a protracted game of You Go First.

There are increasing indications that behind its placid, implacable,  and often maddening facade, China has learned those lessons. I’m not sure the US has.

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Climate success in 2009 should inspire the new year

by Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON—The world faces environmental havoc unless people shift from a culture where success is measured by the accumulation of goods to one where people are admired for living sustainably, experts warned in a report published Tuesday.

“It’s no longer enough to change our light bulbs; we must change our very cultures,” said Erik Assadourian, project director for State of the World 2010, released by the Worldwatch Institute, an independent research organization.

The culture of consumerism “has taken root in culture upon culture over the past half-century … [and] become a powerful driver of the inexorable increase in demand for resources and production of waste that marks our age,” says the report. But consumer cultures are unsustainable and are driving the planet toward a “great collision between a finite planet and the seemingly infinite demands of human society,” the report warns.

“More than 6.8 billion human beings are now demanding ever greater quantities of material resources, decimating the world’s richest ecosystems, and dumping billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere each year,” it says.

American consumers have too many choices. Photo courtesy Orin Zebest via Flickr.The numbers will continue to rise, as people in developing nations aspire toward the same consumer lifestyles as their peers in the West, the report says, calling for a “wholesale transformation of dominant cultural patterns” to “prevent the collapse of human civilization.”

“This transformation would reject consumerism—the cultural orientation that leads people to find meaning, contentment, and acceptance through what they consume—as taboo, and establish in its place a new cultural framework centered on sustainability,” the report says.

In more human terms, the shift would mean that “machismo is not about the size of your car, but the fact that you don’t have one at all,” said Assadourian.

To achieve the shift, everyone from religious leaders, governments, and educators to everyday citizens will have to play a role, the report said.

“The good news is, this is not only possible, but already happening: from incorporating ‘earth rights’ into the constitution of Ecuador, to schools integrating ecologic awareness,” Assadourian said.

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Grist exclusive: A fiery battle over land in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest

by Jonathan Hiskes

Author Stephen Solomon recently suggested we need an “Al Gore of water”—a public champion to raise the profile of water scarcity threats and opportunities, as Gore has done for climate change. Solomon, an economics journalist, makes a bid for that role himself with his new book Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization. It’s one of the first Big Important Books of 2010, a 496-page survey of water’s role in shaping civilizations throughout history, from Roman aqueducts to the oceanic “moat” that protected a young United States.

Solomon argues that water is poised to resume its place as the world’s most important natural resource, a position only briefly (in the long view) held by oil. He says the world’s booming population will bring water back to the forefront, while an increasingly unpredictable climate will make freshwater all the more difficult to manage. Here’s an edited version of our recent conversation.

Q. We’ve just finished the exhausting Copenhagen process, the economy’s still tanked, and it’s the middle of winter. How dare you raise another sucky global problem?

A. Yes, of course.

Q. Let’s talk about how freshwater scarcity and climate change relate and build off each other.

A. They’re totally inseparable. Climate change turns what are water crises into catastrophes. Climate expresses itself through extreme precipitation events—extreme droughts and flooding. Storms that are more intense but also more unpredictable and out of season.

One thing that leads to is national security and failed state issues. I’ll give you one example: Pakistan, where the U.S. has invested enormous resources, is a nuclear-armed state with a rift with the Taliban, and it’s already a bit of a failing state. Soon it’s going to have one third of its water from in the Indus River—its main water lifeline—dry up from the lost glacier melt. At the same time, its population is increasing by 30 percent. So in the next 15 years, we can imagine a country that’s already on the brink, dealing with a loss of 30 percent of its water while the population increases by 30 percent.

The United States understands the problem because it agreed in December to pump in $7.5 billion to Pakistan. Half of that is going to water-related projects—storage, irrigation, and hydropower.

Q. You describe water scarcity as a justice issue, between haves and have-nots. With climate change, too, the most harmful effects happen in the countries that did the least to cause them. Is this a helpful way to look at these issues?

A. Economic justice isn’t the only way to look at these issues, but I think it’s a valid way. It’s often the poor within a country who are most remote from water resources. In a city like Delhi, for example, there are subsidies for piped drinking water, but the poor don’t get the advantage of it because they don’t have pipes. So the rich get subsidized by the poor. Plus the poor have to figure out how to forage each day for water, which is a timely and costly enterprise.

In our country, we subsidize irrigated agriculture, especially from the big dams in the West. Those agribusinesses pay virtually nothing for their water, in many cases, while the people in cities and other industries are paying 10 or 15 times the amount.

Water has to reflect its true value, because if it doesn’t have an economic value that reflects its scarcity, it’s going to be misallocated. Free market economies are very efficient in certain things, such as wealth creation. They are also notably not so good at distribution. And water is a form of wealth.

Q. So the solution you’re led towards is pricing water for its full cost, its true cost, and then letting the market figure out who wants to pay for it?

A. You have to do two things at the same time. I put this in free market terms: Task one is to deregulate the subsidies that are out there. The privileged sectors, the invested interests—mainly agribusinesses. Then water can reflect its true value and there can be fair competition between users so it gets allocated for sensible things. And even when the farmers use it, they use it not to grow water-thirsty crops in the desert because they’ve got too much water, but to grow value-added crops. That’s fine.

Second, we need a golden rule: You return the water to the ecosystem in the same condition that you got it. So if the next guy down the stream gets it on the same terms you did more or less. And that of course means pollution laws have to be enforced comprehensively.

Solomon.Courtesy HarperCollins/Claudine MacéQ. You also write about the economic opportunities that come with smarter water usage.

A. If we would be a little more intelligent in agricultural water use, the United States could unleash an incredible amount of water for many uses that are now constrained. The same thing has begun happening around the world for all sorts of reasons. The benefits and the incentives are different for a water-scarce country like Australia, which is really up against a wall. They’ve used tradable water rights and they’ve managed to get through a terrible drought as a result. It’s a matter of survival. The same thing is true in Israel.

For the U.S., it’s a matter of deciding to slim down. We have a lot of water in this country, even in the West where there are limitations, but we also have the opportunity to become a mini Saudi Arabia of water. We have five times more water per capita than China, for example. Six times more than India. The Middle East is bone dry. These countries have to import food. So if we really took our water productivity seriously, we could use that for growth. You talked about the problem of no growth in the economy; we’re sitting on an engine that we’re not using. A productive engine.

Q. You’re not talking about exporting water?

A. No.  Let’s take California for example. It’s a state that agriculture produces a very small fraction of the wealth, but it uses about 80 percent of the water. For other industries, whether they are services where people live or they are in Silicon Valley, we really would like to tell those guys, “We’ve got plenty of water for you so you can continue to grow and produce your high value returns to the state. Create jobs and wealth.”

But now you have to say, “I’m sorry guys, we don’t have enough water so you guys can’t really locate here.” If you increase the effectiveness of where water is going to the most efficient uses, you increase overall wealth, jobs, and prosperity. And because we are a water-rich country, we would produce a tool that the United States can use not just to grow our own economy but to help strategically to feed the world and make our industries more competitive

Q. And what about individual water users? What can Johnny Q. Flusher do? (Sorry.)

A. Well, first, people should be angry about what’s happened with drinking water. Something like 40 percent of our groundwater is now contaminated because of a lack of EPA enforcement of the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act over the past ten years. It was one of the great policy successes in the last 40 years, and we’ve been backsliding. Twenty million people get sick as a result. Cancers of breast and prostate have risen, which have been tied to water problems. It was a decision made somewhere in the Bush administration not to enforce regulations that were on the books. We should be mad about that, and we should also be mad that in the meantime we haven’t updated the Clean Water Act for new chemicals that are being dumped into our water system.

You can deal with your town and city councils, but in the meantime, you should also test your own water supply. And not just by the tests that meet EPA standards because we know the EPA standards have not been updated. It’s crazy to get bottled water in this world for many reasons as we know, but if we could trust the drinking water, you wouldn’t need it. So that’s one thing.

The other big thing is toilets. They use something like half the water in your house usually, even with more efficient models. Some of the systems in Europe have a two-tiered system. They have low-flow flush for wet waste and … lawn watering is another big issue.

Q. What part of reporting the book left the biggest mark on you?

A. I spent time in Kenya with my wife and daughters, who were in high school at the time, going on to college. You need about $200 dollars to go to high school in Kenya, although the university was free. I met a young man whose family could not afford that $200. So he was studying at night, with no electricity, on the remote chance that he was going to get a scholarship to go to the university in Nairobi. I realized this guy was smart, he was energetic, he was a lovely guy, he had every right to have as much chance as my own kids did, to have that opportunity. It was certainly in the interest of his country to have people like him becoming educated so they could increase their human capital.

He was stuck in this village and I realized that that if there was reliable water when he was younger, they could have used it for small irrigation projects. They could have raised crops and sold enough and this guy probably could have gotten his $200 and probably could have gone on to get his opportunity. A little thing like water means so much. It means women and children don’t have to walk four or five hours a day. It means you might get an extra $200 dollars of income so you can go to university. Talk about inequity. That was a striking feeling—to wonder why this guy, because he’s born in Kenya in a southeast rural village, should be denied what my kids are not and what I’m not. And I realized that we are water. We are 70 percent water. We need it.

 

Here’s Solomon’s Jan. 5 appearance on “Morning Joe”:

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by Brenda Baletti

On the Arapiuns River, barges of illegally taken timber smolder after being set aflame to protest logging in Gleba Nova Olinda, Amazon Rainforest. All photos: Brenda Baletti

While world leaders were meeting in Copenhagen to address the challenge of climate change last month, indigenous and traditional Brazilians in the Amazon region were gathering to defend one the globe’s most important climate-stabilizing resources: the rainforest.

The protesters are battling against the evisceration of their homelands by illegal logging. At the root of the conflict lie two competing conceptions of the rainforest: 1) it can be a place that supports traditional communities and a variety of plant and animal specis; or 2) it can be a source of cheap wood, soy, and beef for global markets.

Just as the Copenhagen effort ended in a frustrating stalemate, the success of this uprising remains very much in doubt. But while the Copenhagen drama involved heated meetings and street protests, blazes are being set and shots being fired in the rainforest.

Showdown on the River

Early one morning in late November, a group of 30 people set out by motorized canoes from the community of Santa Maria of Uruará, in the lower Brazilian Amazon to the junction of the Tamataí and Uruará Rivers, at the boundary of the Extractive Reserve Renascer. The group set up a camp on the riverbank in order to do what the government has not—block illegal loggers who have been taking wood from inside the reserve.

In June of 2009, after more than a decade of conflict between the traditional riberinho (river dweller) communities of the region and loggers and commercial fishers, the Renascer Extractive Reserve was created, albeit at half of the size that the communities had requested. The size was limited in order to accommodate logging and mineral interests, according to government officials involved with the process.

But the creation of the reserve changed nothing—illegal loggers protected by armed gunman have continued to extract timber from inside the reserve’s boundaries. The state and federal government agencies (SEMA and IBAMA respectively) say they have no resources to monitor and enforce restrictions inside the reserve. In fact, after the creation of the reserve, the number of timber barges leaving the area actually increased; until the locals started blocking shipments of logs, up to five barges per day were floating down the river with a total of up to 5,000 cubic meters of wood illegally logged from the reserve.

Indigenous river dwellers Gleba Nova Olinda, at the site of the protest. The camp that started in late November quickly grew to hundreds of people, blocking passage of river barges and waiting for government agents to come and negotiate with them. What started as a few hammocks strung up in a muddy, mosquito-ridden forest has grown to a village. They cleared out the brush, and each family built a makeshift house from plastic and wood and dug a fire pit. They take turns fishing, and periodically one of them sacrifices a cow to feed the group.

Because the protesters prevented barges from floating down the river for more than a month, the thwarted loggers began to retaliate.  Their planes periodically make threateningly low flyovers; loggers in passing boats yell threats. One night, five men set fire to brush next to the camp.

The Jaurú logging company attempted to bribe the community members to let wood pass down the river. When their offer was rejected, the company hired gunmen to accompany their barges to market. In the early morning of Jan. 3, five log-laden barges set forth, accompanied by 40 armed men. When they reached the encampment, they opened fire on the sleeping, unarmed protestors. Two people were shot. The victims were rushed to the hospital; they survived.

Loggers Call the Shots

The demonstration at Renascer was in part inspired by action taken a month earlier and 100 miles to the west, in an area called Gleba Nova Olinda at the source of the Arapiuns River. On Nov. 12, people from over 40 indigenous and traditional communities—frustrated after more than a decade of failed negotiations with the state for territorial rights, and increasingly suffering threats and attacks against their leaders—closed the Arapiuns River to logging traffic and sequestered two barges full of timber. The protestors camped on the river’s edge for a month as they waited, to no avail, for state and federal governments to arrive and address the problem. Finally, they set fire to the 2,000 cubic meters of wood on the barges. The fires blazed on for three days.

Over the last 10 years, logging has increased dramatically in the west of Pará, where both of these conflicts are located. Pará is a state in lower Brazilian Amazon that is larger than most countries and is notorious for violent land conflict. The incursion of logging into their territories there has resulted in traditional and indigenous people demanding land rights as a way to protect their communities. But the people have grown increasingly frustrated at the government’s unwillingness or inability to protect their homelands; often, land rights are not granted, reserves are not protected, and laws and management plans are not enforced. 

In some cases, the government is asking for GPS coordinates and photos to prove that illegal logging is taking place—a totally unrealistic request of people who have on average studied to a fifth-grade level, live from subsistence and small-scale market agricultural production, and have only recently gotten gas-powered motors that provide electricity to their homes.  Even when NGOs and outside researchers collect this data, it frequently comes to naught, because officials never follow up and because laws are written or circumvented in favor of logging interests.
 
So the river dwellers and other indigenous people are taking matters into their own hands, trying to stop the injustices committed against their communities.  Ironically, they’re now the ones being branded as criminals.

In the case of the Renascer encampment, the loggers got a municipal judge to issue an order saying that the camp must be disbanded or the people imprisoned.  Two weeks ago, the police began an action to put six of the leaders from the Arapiuns in “preventative prison,” which would lock them up indefinitely until they are exonerated of all charges. Such imprisonment is normally imposed on people who are at risk of fleeing or who lack physical addresses and jobs, neither of which applies to these leaders.

Illegally logged wood inside of the Renascer Extractive Reserve.This sort of punitive action accomplishes two things—it robs the movement of its leadership, and it diverts the movement’s time and energy into a legal battle, distracting from its larger goal of fighting for land rights and curbing illegal logging.

Thus are the power relations in rapidly industrializing Brazil. For people in the United States, tussles over territorial rights and protest camps can seem provincial and distant—regrettable, yes, but in a world overflowing with injustice, not cause for excessive concern. 

But the Amazon is not your average disputed territory.  In recent decades, tropical forests have absorbed 20 percent of global fossil-fuel emissions, and the Amazon has been the biggest carbon sink of them all, absorbing nearly 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year.  The river dwellers aren’t defending a vision of the rainforest as a pristine carbon sink, but rather as a homeland that can support a broad range of species and vegetation, including humans. That might not be what Western environmentalists what to hear, but it’s surely a more ecologically responsible vision than clear-cutting followed by vast soybean monocrops.

As climate change charges forward, illegal logging in the Amazon doesn’t just harm the rainforest’s indigenous residents. It imperils us all.

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by April McGreger

Kimchi: king of condiments. Photo: April McGreger

I love how my cooking business binds me to the seasons. The seasons change, and I fall in line. August provides me more work than I can complete in a day; late January cuts me some slack. Every year I seem to overdo it as the busy harvest season runs right into the busy holiday season, and I end the year utterly exhausted and frazzled. And then, at last, January brings the cold and darkness t that I have come to crave.

Winter is also the season for comfort food, but all too often our favorite comforts foods leave us feeling sluggish and, well, uncomfortable. It can be a struggle to find foods that are deeply satisfying as well as nourishing. As we are experiencing record-breaking low temperatures in the North Carolina piedmont this week, I find myself turning again and again to foods that warm me from the inside out—garlic, ginger, spices, and steaming bowls of noodle soups and stews. No meal answers the call better than kimchi stew.

In Quite a Pickle
If this is the first you’ve heard of kimchi, you’re in for a treat. Kimchi at its simplest is a Korean fermented vegetable pickle, in the same family with sauerkraut. It is most well known as a red, spicy Nappa cabbage pickle seasoned with garlic, ginger, onion, Korean red pepper flakes, and fish sauce. Kimchi can be made, however, from a wide variety of vegetables, such as Korean radishes, cucumbers, scallions, or even fruits like Asian pears.

Kimchi has been around since ancient times, as long as 3000 years ago, and is still eaten daily in most every Korean home and increasingly, in non-Korean homes as well. Kimchi was originally a way to preserve vegetables for consumption during cold winter months and still wintertime produces the widest varieties of kimchi in Korea. Many continue to put up large quantities of kimchi for winter consumption, but the traditional method of storing the kimchi underground in a huge stone pot has given way to modern kimchi refrigerators.

The health benefits of eating kimchi have been widely heralded. Delivering a jolt of immune-boosting and circulation-increasing garlic, onions, and ginger, kimchi is a raw, fermented food full of beneficial enzymes and probiotics, which make for a happy and healthy digestive tract. It is also high in fiber and contains lots of vitamin C and vitamin A, which have traditionally been scarce in winter.

Kimchi is available at many Asian markets and health food stores, but it’s not too difficult to make your own. The process requires a fair amount of time, but the payoff is considerable. With its bracingly tart, spicy crunch, kimchi can transform a simple plate of rice and beans into an extraordinary meal—and work the same magic on everything from eggs to pizza.

Kimchi 101
Kimchi is endlessly versatile, so when you make it yourself, you can have it just the way you like it. If you are vegetarian, leave out the fish sauce or replace it with about 2 Tablespoons light soy sauce. You can leave the sweetener out as well if you prefer, but your fermentation might be a bit slower since sugar feeds the process. There is no rule that kimchi has to be spicy either.

White kimchi, or kimchi without any red pepper at all, is very popular and one of my favorites. In fact, the popular addition of red peppers to kimchi is thought to be a relatively recent (circa 1500) development since chili peppers are a New World ingredient and would have been introduced sometime after European contact with the Americas.

This recipe is the kimchi that I make most often and is the best-selling variety at my farmer’s market stand. Here I call for making a rice paste or slurry from sweet rice flour and water that you mix your spices into. A lot of recipes, even traditional recipes, leave that paste out so feel free to skip it if sweet rice flour is hard to find. The paste is especially helpful, however, when making stuffed-cabbage kimchi because it sticks well between the leaves of the cabbage. I also like that the rice flour acts as a thickener when used in kimchi stew.

There are several ingredients, like the Korean red pepper powder and the glutinous rice flour, that are difficult to find unless you visit an Asian, preferably Korean, market. Most metropolitan areas have one. I seek them out in every city and suburb I can find them in because they are full of delicious ingredients and provide endless hours of education and entertainment. If you cannot find an Asian market near you, no need to fret. You can simply skip those ingredients and you will still be able to make delicious kimchi. Just be careful when substituting chili or red pepper flakes found in most supermarkets. They are generally made from the much hotter arbol chiles, so add sparingly.

Basic Kimchi

Ingredients
Vegetables for Brining
1 large head Nappa cabbage (about 4 pounds) OR you can substitute 3 pounds of Daikon or Korean radish OR 3 pounds of Apples or Asian Pears OR use your imagination
Sea salt (about 1/2 cup)

Paste
1 cup water
2 tablespoons sweet (or glutinous) rice flour (not the same as regular rice flour)
Seasonings (to be added to the Paste)
4 tablespoons fish sauce
1 cup Korean hot red pepper powder; or 2 teaspoons crushed red pepper; or to taste
1/4 cup sugar, honey, or agave nectar
1 tablespoon Lemon juice or rice vinegar
1 heaping tablespoon grated ginger
4 cloves garlic, smashed and finely chopped
1/4 cup grated white onion (or ½ onion ground up in food processor)
1 cup finely julienned Daikon radish
1 cup finely julienned Carrots
1 generous bunch of scallions, thinly sliced on a diagonal

Other Possible Additions:
Apples or asian pears, optional, julienned                       
Greens—watercress, mustards, or collards, thinly sliced
Seaweed, chopped or crumbled into small pieces
Peppers—red, green, sweet, or hot, sliced
Chestnuts, Walnuts, or Pine nuts, chopped
Raw Ooysters, chopped
Chinese chives or leeks

To make Nappa cabbage kimchi, you have the option of chopping the leaves into bite size pieces or cutting the cabbage in half and stuffing the filling between the leaves of the cabbage. The latter, called whole cabbage kimchi is considered superior, but requires a bit more time, and means that you will have to cut your kimchi later before serving. You decide.

For whole cabbage kimchi, cut the cabbages in half. Rinse the cabbage halves in cold water, then sprinkle them all over with salt. Be sure to salt between each leaf and to salt the thicker core of the cabbage more heavily than the leaves. It should take about ½ cup of salt. That may seem like a lot, but you will rinse the cabbages before combining them with the seasoning paste.

Sit the cabbage aside in a large bowl for two hours. After two hours, turn the cabbage and let it sit for two hours more for a total of four hours.

For chopped cabbage or any other vegetable, cut into bite size pieces. For the cabbage, cut the head in half. Then cut each half into thirds. Then cut those thirds into 2-inch slices. For radish or apple kimchi, 1-inch cubes are best. Toss the pieces with ½ cup of salt and set aside for two hours. Toss again, then set aside for two hours more.

While your vegetables are brining, prepare your other ingredients. First, in a medium sized saucepan, whisk the sweet rice flour into 1 cup of water until dissolved. Bring to a boil over medium high heat, whisking constantly. When thickened and translucent, remove from heat and pour into a large mixing bowl. Set aside to cool.

Peel your radish and carrot for your seasoning vegetables. Julienne the vegetables by cutting them into thin vertical slices, then stacking those slices and cutting them into matchsticks. Next, rinse your scallions and cut them into thin slices on the diagonal. Combine these vegetables and set aside.

Next prepare you finely chopped garlic, ginger, and grated onion. If you have a food processor, it will save time by using it to grind these ingredients together. Set aside.

Now that your rice paste has cooled, mix in your Korean red pepper powder. If you are sensitive to spice, place it safe. You can skip the spice altogether, or you can add more later. If you were not able to find Koran chili powder, use your chili flake very sparingly. It is generally MUCH hotter than Korean chili powder.

To you rice-pepper paste, stir in the fish sauce, sugar or other sweetener (you can skip that altogether if you insist), lemon juice, garlic, ginger, and onion paste. Next, stir in your radish, carrot, scallions, and any other vegetable seasoning that you wish. Your seasoning paste is now complete. Set aside.

After a total of four hours, you will notice your cabbage or other vegetable looks soft and shrunken. It will also have produced a fair amount of brine. Rinse the salted cabbage, radish, or other vegetable with cold water 3 times to remove the salt and place in a colander to drain off the excess water.

Now it is time to either stuff your cabbage, or simply toss your vegetables with your seasoning paste.

To stuff the cabbage, spread the kimchi paste thinly onto each leaf of the cabbage individually, and a little extra on the outside of the cabbage. Work gently to keep the cabbage whole and in tact. Place the seasoned cabbage into an air-tight glass jar. Sit the kimchi out on the countertop at least overnight and up to 4 days depending on how sour you want it, then refrigerate it. I like it best after about two days. It will continue to ferment slowly in your refrigerator. Most kimchi will keep for months in the refrigerator. Saltier and sourer versions keep longest.

You can use your kimchi to make kimchi stew at any time, but traditionally it is made with kimchi that is older, a little too sour or that has lost its crunch.

Kimchi stew: defeats even the coldest of winter nights.Photo: April McGregerKimchi Stew
Kimchi stew can be simply kimchi cooked with a flavorful stock seasoned with a bit a sesame oil and a pinch of sugar. Here I have called for a few additions that I really like—pork and Korean rice cakes, which seem to perfectly complement the spicy and acidic kimchi. This is my husband’s all time favorite meal, and one of my favorites as well. We always serve it with a side of rice and a cold beer. You can adapt it to suite your taste as well as to what ingredients you have on hand. Look for rice cakes in the freezer or refrigerator section of Korean markets. They are shaped like flat footballs and often labeled “rice ovalettes.” The Korean word for them is ddeok, which is pronounced sort of like “dock,” but asking for rice cakes for soup should get you pointed in the right direction.

Ingredients
4 cups rich pork stock or chicken stock, mushroom stock, seafood stock, or beef stock
1/2 pound of not-too-lean pork, cut into 2 inch chunks; or, equivalent amount of chicken, seafood, beef, or a few handfuls of mushrooms
Salt and pepper
2 cups kimchi, chopped with juice
1 white sweet potato, optional, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes
1 large handful Korean rice cake ovalettes (ddeok), optional but delicious!
1 teaspoon Soy sauce
1 tablespoon sugar, honey, or agave nectar
1 cup sliced green onion
3 tablespoons sesame oil
1/2 package cubed soft organic tofu

In a medium saucepan, heat 2 tablespoons sesame oil over medium heat. Lightly salt and pepper your pork or other addition, and add to the sesame oil. Cook for about 5 minutes, until brown all over, then add your stock and chopped kimchi (both cabbage kimchi and radish kimchi make wonderful soup). Cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Add the sweet potato cubes, if using and simmer until tender. Then add rice cakes that have been softened first in cold water (according to package directions), soy sauce and sugar. Simmer another 3-5 minutes until rice cakes are tender, then add diced tofu, green onion, and sesame oil just before serving. Serve with a side of rice, which can be added to the soup to temper the spiciness. 

 

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The Ford Fusion Hybrid. Photo courtesy Ford Motor Company via FlickrNo green spin necessary, the Ford Fusion Hybrid sedan was soundly voted the 2010 Car of the Year. While not the first-ever hybrid vehicle to win this award (even for Ford), it is notable that the 2010 North American Car of the Year (NACOTY) was given to a U.S. automaker for a hybrid amidst one of the worst times to be selling any kind of car, much less a hybrid. And yet, the Fusion Hybrid helped Ford set record sales in hybrids in a year when overall industry demand for gas-electric cars tanked, bolstering the appearance that Ford is doing something right.

The Fusion Hybrid beat out its non-hybrid version, the Fusion sedan, as well as three other 2010 green cars on the market: the Honda Insight, the Toyota Prius, and the Volkswagen Golf/GTI/TDI (a clean diesel Green Car of the Year Finalist). So what does the Fusion Hybrid deliver? As NACOTY juror Csaba Csere said, “Though not the first hybrid on the market, or even the second or third, the Fusion Hybrid is simply the best one ever built. In addition to delivering terrific mileage, it looks and drives like a regular car—and a very good one indeed.”

The only other hybrids to win this non-eco honor were the Toyota Prius in 2004 and the Ford Escape Hybrid (Truck of the Year) in 2005.

I learned more about the Fusion Hybrid at a press event last April, which included a good old-fashioned test drive and a close-up look at some of the features that buff the car’s eco-cred.

Photo courtesy rumblestripradio via FlickrMuch of the excitement about the Fusion Hybrid centered around Ford’s innovative approach to the type and amount of information communicated to the driver. Ford called this instrument cluster the “Smart Gauge with EcoGuide,” [PDF].  The driver sees two in-dashboard LCD screens which, at a glance, tell the driver (nicely) whether to ditch the lead foot or keep the good times rollin’. The idea is that the EcoGuide is a friendly coach, rewarding the driver’s efficient driving behavior with lush digital green vines and leaves. Obviously, the more leaves, the better.

Photo courtesy karend via FlickrIt is designed to benefit the regular driver, who can learn how to improve mileage on daily commutes, and is aided by a summary screen of information at the end of each trip. I was skeptical of the “green leaves” cliche, but it turns out that people preferred this imagery in tests because it is easy to understand and doesn’t distract or overwhelm the driver with excessive data (a wee bit of a problem when you’re cruising 65 miles per hour).  And there are other settings, aside from the leaves, to display the same instantaneous fuel economy statistics.

EPA ratings put the Fusion Hybrid at 41 miles per gallon (mpg) city and 36 mpg highway, although some test drivers report more than 50 mpg.  Nancy Gioia, Ford director of Global Electrification, pointed out, “Driver behavior counts … when you get it right, the car lets you know.” Aggressive drivers may see fuel economy increases of up to 15 percent as compared to the more conscientious drivers, who may only see a 3 percent increase.

In addition to fuel economy, the “fun to drive” factor and smooth transition between electric and gas engines contribute to the Fusion Hybrid’s popularity. In fact, it outscored every other Ford vehicle ever in customer satisfaction. But does the car give up any efficiency to get that extra juice on the highway?

“We haven’t sacrificed anything for the additional horsepower,” claims Gioia. “What we’ve really done is optimized both the engine and the electric machines to work in combination delivering that fantastic, fun-to-drive experience … What we’ve tried to do is take a mid-sized sedan and make it, as it is, the most fuel-efficient mid-sized sedan in North America.”

Fifty top automotive journalists in North America agree that this makes the Fusion Hybrid the Car of the Year.

As for me, while it was fun to zoom around in a peppy, smooth-rolling hybrid, with green leaves spilling off the dashboard, I’ll still be waiting for the day when the Car of the Year is awarded to my favored vehicle of transport—the bus.

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