Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Tom Laskawy

Barry Estabrook has a piece up on the Atlantic reminding us that agriculture practiced on any scale anywhere in this country relies heavily on migrant—usually undocumented—laborers to perform the hardest, riskiest jobs. And sometimes they die.

[A]t about 4:00 in the afternoon of December 22, José Obeth Santiz Cruz,
a 20-year-old youth from Las Margaritas in the state of Chiapas in
southern Mexico, died after becoming caught in a manure-removal
conveyer inside the barn of the Vermont farm where he worked. Because
he lacked documentation, it took more than a week for officials to
determine who he really was, how old he was, and where he came from.

Vermont likes to promote itself as a verdant, wholesome state with
picturesque black and white Holsteins grazing on hillside pastures. But
the postcard image hides an ugly truth. Santiz Cruz was one of 1,500 to
2,000 immigrant workers, most lacking legal papers, who toil invisibly
behind the scenes in the Vermont’s beleaguered dairy industry, working
80-hour weeks and living in total isolation, often sleeping in the very
barns with the cows they tend.

“Vermont’s dairy farms depend on
migrant workers,” said Brendan O’Neill, coordinator of the Vermont
Migrant Farmworker Solidarity Project. “But there is no dignity in
performing important work for that amount of time and having to hide
yourself, never seeing the light of day. These people live and work in
the shadows.”

Once again, we learn that cheap food can have a steep human toll. Now, this shouldn’t be seen as an “attack” on Vermont or on the dairy industry (goodness knows bad publicity is the last thing it needs). Rather, it’s another reminder that there are no real reforms to America’s food system that don’t involve labor.

Naturally, this isn’t an East Coast phenomenon. High Country News had a startling indepth piece last summer about the West’s undocumented dairy worker problem—a USDA sociologist estimates that half of all dairy workers there are immigrants and HCN found 18 deaths among Western dairy workers over the last 6 years. Even in the dairy industry, this is a national issue.

I have the feeling, of course, that higher prices in exchange for better working conditions and agricultural labor market reforms is not a trade that Congress (or even most Americans?) will willingly make. The good news? President Obama has apparently committed to pursuing comprehensive immigration reform, presumably including a guest worker program, which would provide workers like Santiz Cruz with more protections than they receive now. The bad news? Agriculture has a long history of getting itself exempted from labor reforms. See New York State.

Oh, and if the first part of Estabrook’s story didn’t make you feel bad enough, this part should:

As a further grim reminder of how dispensable laborers are to modern
agribusiness, there is some question about how the young man’s remains
will be returned home for burial—an effort that could cost as much as
$10,000. The Vermont Workers’ Center has started a memorial fund and is working with the Mexican consulate
in Boston and the office of Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), to get the body
back to Las Margaritas.

Got guilt?

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Chipotle Challenge: time to back up ‘food with integrity’

A parable on the National School Lunch Program

‘Nation’ misses golden opportunity to highlight workers’ voices

by David Roberts

“Climategate” or “Swifthack” or whatever you call the hubbub about the stolen climate science emails seems to have faded from public discussion, as I expected it would. Every time a new one of these frenzies gets started, climate activists panic, climate skeptics crow that they’ve finally won, and then the whole thing fizzles. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Anyway, though, if you’re still interested, NRDC has put together a brief video responding to the fuss:

As the video says, the basics of climate science have been well-understood and accepted for almost a century now. Along those lines, check out this amazing video Andy Revkin unearthed. He intros it like so:

The basic idea, of course, goes back more than a century, but the real number crunching started in the 1950s, and even drew the attention of the filmmaker Frank Capra, who produced a series of television programs on science (in the post-Sputnik days when science was a high priority), that included “The Unchained Goddess,” a remarkable 1958 film on weather and climate. It contained a section on greenhouse-driven warming:

Check out Andy’s post to see an NYT article from 1956 on the work of scientist Gilbert Plass, who was remarkably prescient.

Anyway, suffice to say, it was only when the modern corporatist right’s political agenda was threatened that it suddenly decided the science was suspect. If our political culture had a memory longer than a gnat’s, we wouldn’t be taking them so seriously every time they come up with a new pseudo-scandal.

Related Links:

Time to bust the filibuster

Senate’s chief climate denier makes Copenhagen cameo

Overwhelming U.S. public support for global warming action

by Clark Williams-Derry

NASA climate scientist
James Hansen has a new book out about climate policy, with excerpts in this
month’s issue of The Nation. And in my view, he’s got a pretty good policy
idea: tax carbon, and use the revenue to give out rebates in equal, per capita
shares to every U.S. citizen. It’s a twofer—the carbon tax helps drive down
emissions, and the rebate makes sure that it’s fair to middle- and lower-income
folks who’d otherwise bear the brunt of the tax.

If I were the globe’s
climate czar, Hansen’s tax-and-dividend plan is one of the top 5 to 10 ideas I’d
give serious consideration.

That’s the good news. 
The bad news is that Hansen has opted for the tone of a zealot: he doesn’t
merely extol the virtues of his favored policy, he actually lashes out at anyone
who prefers a slightly different alternative to his policy. Die-hard
environmental champions in Congress who support cap-and-trade instead of
Hansen’s carbon tax are, in Hansen’s view, merely representatives of a
government that’s lying to the people. Environmental advocates who’ve fought
for decades to protect the climate “have been in Washington a little too long.” 

Judean People’s FrontYou get the drift. Rather than turn his fire at the REAL enemies of a sound climate policy—the fossil fuel
industries that have stymied progress for decades —Hansen trains his fire at
his potential allies. The result: a circular firing squad that reminds me of
the scene in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, where the People’s Front of Judea declares its undying enmity for the scoundrels in
the Judean People’s Front. I’m sure the coal industry is
watching the spat that Hansen’s set in motion, and yucking it up big
time.

But what’s especially
nettlesome here is that Hansen opposition to cap-and-trade is based on two
fundamental misunderstandings. First, Hansen implies cap-and-trade and carbon
taxes are completely different systems. But (yes, I’ll say it for the
thousandth time)—they’re not!!! Economically, they’re really two peas in a
pod. Second, Hansen talks as if his carbon tax idea were completely
bulletproof—capable of passing both houses of Congress without getting watered
down. But that’s bunk!! For every potential weakness in a cap-and-trade
system, there’s a way to mirror that weakness in a carbon tax regime. The
problems that Hansen finds in the cap-and-trade bills being considered in
Congress are almost all about politics, not any “inherent” flaws in cap-and-trade.

Let’s look at Hansen’s
two misunderstandings in greater depth. 

First, economists are pretty unanimous in their belief that cap-and-trade and carbon taxes have very similar effects. In their ideal forms, they both put a price on carbon, which gives incentives for every actor throughout the economy to reduce carbon emissions. Economically, a carbon tax of $20 per ton has the exact same effect as a cap-and-trade system in which carbon permits sell for $20 per ton. More generally, at any given carbon price, there’s essentially no difference in the effect the two systems have on emissions. (To put us on record:  we like both cap-and-trade and carbon taxes, in large part because the systems are so similar—and can even complement one another.)

The real difference between carbon taxes and cap-and-trade—again, in their ideal forms—is in where they concentrate uncertainty. With carbon taxes, the government locks in the price of carbon, and the market decides how much carbon to emit. If fossil fuel prices fall, or the economy surges, or inflation runs hot, emissions can rise despite the tax. With cap-and-trade, on the other hand, the government locks in the carbon emissions, and the market decides what price carbon needs to be; ideally, emissions fall, slowly and steadily, no matter what happens to the rest of the economy. I tend to think of cap-and-trade as a variable tax: one that fine-tunes the price to guarantee a certain level of emissions.

Of course, there are ways of implementing cap-and-trade that make emissions uncertain. Price caps, poorly regulated “offsets,” and other loopholes can poke holes in the cap, weakening the guarantee of steady emissions reductions.

But that brings us to the Hansen’s other core misunderstanding: his apparent belief that his tax-and-dividend policy is immune from political compromise or troublesome loopholes: that somehow, both houses of Congress would agree to Hansen’s “perfect” policy, without any of the compromises that Hansen believes render current cap-and-trade legislation too weak to be worthwhile.

I have three responses to that:  Bull-pucky, the IRS, and France.

Bull-pucky first.  Virtually every problem that Hansen critiques in cap-and-trade could be injected into a carbon tax system. Worried that favored industries will get special treatment under cap-and-trade?  Well, congress could exempt big swaths of the economy from a carbon tax, or use tax revenues to create subsidies for favored industries. Worried about risky carbon “offsets”—like reforestation or sequestration projects that might not live up to their promise? Well, a carbon tax system could include refundable tax credits for risky carbon storage projects too. Worried that the cap is going to be set too high? Well, Congress could always set the carbon tax too low, or increase it too slowly, or not increase it at all. I could go on, but there’s no point: carbon taxes and cap-and-trade are such similar systems that even their loopholes match up.

IRS second. In their ideal form, carbon taxes are a bit simpler than cap-and-trade. By the same token, the ideal income tax form takes 3 minutes to fill out. But as anyone who’s tried to navigate an IRS instruction booklet knows, the tax code has a tendency to grow in complexity—sometimes for good reasons, but mostly because of the political impulse to provide special tax treatment to favored constituencies. I see no reason to believe that carbon taxes are magically immune from that impulse.

France third. It may not have made much news here, but the French supreme court just rejected France’s proposed carbon tax. The reason: according to Bloomberg News, “93 percent of all industrial carbon emissions in France would have avoided paying the full tax.” The French carbon tax was so riddled with loopholes that it ran counter to the principle of tax equality—and the French supreme court felt they had no alternative but to sink it. And if that sort of thing can happen in France, then it certainly can happen in the U.S. France’s experience suggests that carbon taxes are no more immune from politics than any other climate-protection system. Internationally, British Columbia’s carbon tax comes pretty close to being a model of transparency and comprehensiveness. But as Alan Durning argues, most of the globe’s carbon taxes—as important as they are—are actually quirky, and full of loopholes and favoritism. (Sigh.) That doesn’t make those taxes bad ideas, but does point out that carbon taxes are hardly immune from politics.

I have no idea if Hansen’s tantrum will have any effect on the prospects for climate legislation in the next year.  But I’m going to try to set a good example here, and put an end to the circular firing squad: carbon taxes are a good idea!! Hansen’s version of a carbon tax is a great one!! Congress should consider it!! If they were to pass it, the world would be a better place!!

But let’s not kid ourselves that scrapping cap-and-trade legislation now will automatically open up the field to Hansen’s pristine, un-game-able tax system anytime soon. The same federal legislators will still be there, with the same interests, and the same propensity to poke holes in any good idea that comes along—whether it’s cap-and-trade, a carbon tax, or any other awesome concept that a scientist-turned-policy-dabbler could come up with. In my view, the more energy we put into trashing our allies and their integrity, the more likely we are to end up in 2011 where we are today: with no federal climate pricing system whatsoever, and a fossil fuel industry that’s laughing all the way to the bank.

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

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

Sarkozy wants French carbon tax to take effect in July

France rejects carbon pricing policy

by Umbra Fisk

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

I consider myself to live simply and in an environmentally conscious way. I have been having trouble with those who also are “green” but seem to be smug about it, ostentatious even, maybe hypocritical when judging others who appear “un-green” based on superficial things like my clothes. How do I stop being judgmental of the judgmental?

Meghan
Burlington

A. Dearest Meghan,

Howsabout we spend less time being shocked by people’s green choices and more time getting good stuff done.I chose your letter to kick off the New Year because I think it reminds us all of an important rule to live by: Judge not, lest ye be considered a self-righteous eco-prig more interested in the appearance of greenness than in making true planetary progress.

Meghan, you have probably noticed that over the last two or three years “green” has taken on a certain trendiness. Celebrities parade about in “think green” T-shirts and electric cars, and stores push us to keep up with the fashions by buying eco-items we surely don’t need. But you must know that there’s a wide spectrum of green in the world, and there’s more to green than all this faddishness. Clothes may make the man, but they don’t make the man (or woman) green.

While your consciousness is apparently not elevated enough for those who are judging you, it is probably far higher than many others will ever achieve. But that is not the point. The very layeredness of your question—how to stop judging the judgers—suggests that we are all in danger of losing sight of the true reason for “being green” in the first place. It is not so that we might win a contest, or parade our virtues about, or be in a position to make snide comments about those who don’t appear to have seen the light. It is so that we might make this planet a healthier, happier place to live.

Far be it from me to judge you for judging. But may I gently suggest that one way to stop being judgmental of the judgmental would be to put your energies into something else instead. Go clean up your local park. Become a Grist Climate Citizen and fight for climate legislation you believe in. Get a home energy audit and take steps to weatherize your house or apartment. Write a letter to a corporation either lauding or lambasting its practices.

We all could stand to spend more time doing this sort of thing in the New Year, and less time playing the “who’s greenest” game. Let’s just agree to live and let vert—and let’s make 2010 a year to remember.

Bombastically,
Umbra

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Pollan on the Daily Show

Breathtaking last minute philanthropy ideas

by David Roberts

In response (I think) to my post on efficiency and economists, Matt Yglesias cautions against abandoning the presumption of rationality just because people don’t consistently maximize profit. It may be rational in some circumstances to sacrifice profit for gains in time and attention. There’s more to personal welfare than money.

Anyone who advocates efficiency runs across this point. Maybe people walk by some/all of these alleged $5 bills on the sidewalk because they have better things to do than watch the sidewalk all the time and bend over every few blocks. I agree, but I think the point ultimately works the other way than Matt intends it—it weakens, not strengthens, the presumption of rationality.

If welfare is some admixture of wealth, time, and attention, it’s many more things as well: physical health, familial and social ties,  health/car/life insurance, mobility, freedom of speech and association, etc. These are complex and murky issues about which people make dozens of small decisions a day. Some small fraction of those decisions is part of a conscious weighing of options and planning; most are reflexive. Why would we assume individuals have   reliable   insight about what best serves their own welfare? Self-destructive behavior is as human as desire, impulse, and limited information. We see through a glass, darkly.

Wealth—GDP at the national level, net assets at the individual level—is often used as a proxy for welfare, but this is problematic for any number of reasons. (Over a certain base level, wealth doesn’t track satisfaction.) Money is often used as a proxy for value:  what people will pay (or forego profit) for is what they value, their “revealed preferences.” But this way of looking at things verges on tautology. If rationality is satisfying preferences and preferences are reflected in what people do, then what is rational is what people do. That makes economics easier but it doesn’t really tell us what we want to know.

What we’d like to know is whether there can be a science of human welfare. Can we develop a reliable enough understanding of the conditions that lead to human flourishing to redirect public policy toward that broader goal rather than the narrow goal of maximizing GDP? Can policy improve upon spontaneous, distributed decisionmaking? Obviously efforts in the 20th century to plan entire economies proved disastrous, but it’s a long way from there to the laissez faire attitude of neoliberal economics. A better understanding of human behavior couid lead to policy that’s less intrusive but more efficacious (a la Nudge).

As I see it, the strong case against Gayer-style economics involves three claims:

Human welfare can be understood and measured, if not fully then enough to inform policy.
Systemic market and behavioral failures impede welfare in ways that can be understood and predicted.
These failures can be partially meliorated by public policy,  increasing individual and social welfare relative to the BAU case.

No. 3’s the sticky wicket. It’s one thing to say people don’t do what’s best for them, it’s another entirely to say that public policy— “government bureaucrats,” in teabag parlance—can improve on their decisionmaking. But we can’t get to a serious discussion of No. 3 until we get past 1 and 2, which are contentious in their own right. If people reliably understand and pursue what serves their own welfare, there ought to be a presumptive bias against active, progressive policymaking. If people are, in Dan Ariely’s words, “predictably irrational,” then public policy based on sound understanding of human behavior can increase welfare.

(By the way: Happy New Year! to all you Grist readers.)

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Economics as pathology, part two

Economics as pathology

Is the ‘climate debt’ discussion helpful?

by Tom Philpott

In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries.

————-

Few who saw the documentary Food Inc. will forget the scene involving Beef Products Inc., a South Dakota company that makes a widely used hamburger filler product.

No other industrial-meat company allowed director Robert Kenner to enter the shop floor with his cameras. In sharp contrast, a Beef Products executive invited the Food Inc. crew to record his company’s inner workings. The man is clearly proud of his company’s product. “We think we can lessen the incidence of E. Coli 0157:H7,” he says.

The scene, a clip of which appears above, features the Beef Products executive talking over a scene straight out of Chaplin’s Modern Times: a vast network of steaming tubes, with people in protective gear and face masks wandering about fussing with dials. Evidently, scraps of cow flesh, swept up from slaughterhouse floors and pulverized into a kind of paste, are moving through the tubes, subjected to a lashings of ammonium hydroxide to kill bacteria.The scene ends with those heavily protected workers carefully packing uniform flesh-colored blocks into boxes. “This is our finished product,” the executive declares. He then claims that the product ends up in 70 percent of hamburgers served in the U.S. “In five years we’ll be in 100 percent,” he predicts.

The brief scene seems to me to be a more accurate document of our material food culture than 1000 hours of the Food Network. “I’m a mechanic, that’s what I am,” the exec says over the whir of the machines. I don’t think anyone had been mistaking him for a chef.

What the company essentially makes is hamburger filler. Companies like McDonald’s and institutions like the National School Lunch Program buy it and mix it into fresh ground beef to make burgers. The selling point is this: while conventional beef-processing plants routinely churn out meat tainted with the deadly  E. coli 0157:H7 and with antibiotic-resistent salmonella, this stuff has been sterilized and is thus infection-free.

Except…not so much. In one of the most important articles published in 2009 on the scandal-wracked meat industry, New York Times reporter Michael Moss revealed that BPI’s blocks of burger filler often do carry E. coli and salmonella. Indeed…

With the U.S.D.A.‘s stamp of approval, the company’s processed beef has become a mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

Ouch. Bending to Meat Wagon tradition, I ran that factoid through our proprietary mathematical model and found that last year, public-school cafeterias procured enough ammonia-treated beef product to serve the equivalent of 22 million Quarter Pounders.

But all of that ammonia evidently doesn’t always do the trick of killing deadly pathogens. Writes Moss:

[G]overnment and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment. Since 2005, E. coli has been found 3 times and salmonella 48 times, including back-to-back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated. The meat was caught before reaching lunch-rooms trays.

To grasp the full extent of regulatory negligence on display here, you have to read the full article.

But I think it’s high time to start asking: do we as a society really want to be feeding children the lowest-quality food on offer? processed in a manner so industrial that handlers need to wear protective gear and face masks, and so ineptly that deadly pathogens routinely survive the chemical onslaught?

An excellent question for the new year.

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Pollan on the Daily Show

Boring conference food: our culinary future?

by Glenn Hurowitz

Generations from now, long after the last Twitter follower has unfriended the last Facebook user, this decade will be remembered and felt for its impact on Nature: the species that were saved and those that were lost; the heating of the planet; the forests cut down and those that remain to provide oxygen to our children’s children, and the first halting steps toward a clean energy future.

By those standards, this decade has been one of great beginnings, tragic ends, and the uplifting possibility of a new relationship between man and Nature.

To be sure, these were years of fire and devastation:  

In the last decade, more than 200 million acres of rainforest have been cleared and burned, sending an amount of pollution into the atmosphere equivalent to seven times the United States’ annual emissions. It’s as if all the vegetation in the states of Montana, Colorado, and New York combined had been torched.

The burning of coal, oil, and forests has added more than 250 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, helping make this decade the hottest on record—with corresponding increases in desertification, drought, and extreme weather events such as Hurricane Katrina.

To me, however, the saddest symbol of what has happened to Nature during this decade is the fate of the baiji, the white river dolphin found only in China’s Yangtze River. The baiji was a playful animal that dined on the Yangtze’s once plentiful fish and was traditionally venerated by the region’s people. Hunting and overfishing caused a drastic decline in the baiji’s population, and there were only a few hundred survivors at the beginning of the decade.

Then China, in its thirst for energy, completed its notorious Three Gorges Dam, and the fate of the baiji was sealed. The dam caused a build-up of pollution and a further reduction in fish populations that doomed the baiji. The species was declared “functionally extinct” in 2007 when an expedition failed to spot a single living baiji. The baiji became the first whale or dolphin in history to be killed off by human activity. The world will always be a little bereft without it.

But this decade also saw some tentative first steps toward a true balance between Nature and humanity.

The United States government protected more than 50 million acres of old growth forest from logging. It also declared an area the size of Spain off limits to fishing in an effort to preserve the ocean for future generations.

Recognition of the consequences of burning fossil fuels for energy has led to extraordinary growth in clean energy alternatives: more than 15 times the amount of solar energy is generated today than was generated in 2000, with much greater growth projected for the future.

Of course, these flashes of progress are nowhere near enough—yet—to make up for the immense damage being wrought by a growing population with higher and higher consumption levels.

But what can give us hope going into 2010 is the environmental revolution of the mind: the widespread realization that protecting the environment is the path, not the obstacle to prosperity. During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, when candidates talked about creating jobs, they more often than not did it against a backdrop of wind turbines.

The culmination of this decade’s green revolution was to have been the passage of energy and climate legislation in the United States and the completion of a binding international agreement in Copenhagen. Both would accomplish something extraordinary: finally tying the universal human quest for a better life to protection of the Earth’s natural resources, not their destruction.

That new way of life hasn’t been realized—yet. But despite the damage done to our planet in these last ten years, the first decade of the 21st century may one day be seen as the wellspring of its salvation.

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by David Roberts

One of the purported advantages of a carbon tax over cap-and-trade is that it would be simple, as simple as grandma and apple pie and just as hard to frak with. That view has taken a bit of a blow from the latest news out of France.

The French Constitutional Council has rejected a tax on carbon emissions strongly backed by President Nicolas Sarkozy that was to take effect Friday. But his ruling conservative party said the measure would be redrafted so it could be passed into law next year.

The council, which evaluates the constitutionality of proposed laws, ruled late Tuesday that the bill contained too many exemptions for polluters, broke with past practices and threatened to make tax collection unfair.

Sarkozy could make the tax more, er, simple, but “it remains unclear how the bill could be modified to meet the demands of the council without fierce objections from French industry.”

I guess implementation is rough all over.

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Sarkozy scrambles to salvage carbon tax

by Tom Philpott

John Mackey: will the unfettered market bring him down? Photo: JOEM500, via Flickr

Author’s note: In the original version of this post, I mistakenly wrote that Mackey had resigned from the Whole Foods board. Actually, he resigned from the chairmanship of the board, but retained his seat on the board. I regret the error.

—————-

Under pressure from a variety of shareholders, Whole Foods founder John Mackey has stepped down as chairman of his company’s board of directors. He will continue serving as CEO.

Just before the announcement, The New Yorker ran a long and entertaining profile of Mackey by Nick Paumgarten. The two events—the publication of the New Yorker piece, quickly followed by Mackey’s board resignation—may not be coincidental. In recent years, buffeted by self-generated controversy, Mackey has sought to exert careful control over his media image. He makes a game effort with Paumagarten. “I no longer drink alcohol around journalists,” Mackey tells him. He adds: “I am not going to talk about my sex life,”  even though Paumagarten had not asked.

Despite those undoubtedly wise precautions, Mackey emerges from Paumgarten’s gentle piece as a bit of a nut.

We see him engaging in new-age babble, declaring “I am self-actualizing myself” and subjecting himself to something called “the Course.” We find him behaving like a jerk, alienating underlings (“executive-retreat volleyball games had to be scrapped, owing to Mackey’s intensity and his ill-disguised scorn for less capable teammates”) and sending fellow executives into grumpy exile. Mostly, we find him justifying his Randian faith in hyper-capitalism, as zealous as a Christian’s belief in the Resurrection.

In green circles, the money shot is probably the bit about climate change—it turns out the founder of the iconic “certified organic supermarket” is a bit of a denier (don’t tell Paumgarten’s colleague Michael Specter). Paumgarten writes:

One of the books on the list [of what Mackey was reading] was “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming-the Missing Science,” a skeptical take on climate change. Mackey told me that he agrees with the book’s assertion that, as he put it, “no scientific consensus exists” regarding the causes of climate change; he added, with a candor you could call bold or reckless, that it would be a pity to allow “hysteria about global warming” to cause us “to raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty.” One would imagine that, on this score, many of his customers, to say nothing of most climate scientists, might disagree. He also said, “Historically, prosperity tends to correlate to warmer temperatures.”

In one deft paragraph, Paumgarten skewers Mackey’s unfortunate recent foray into healthcare punditry, as well as his long-time hostility to labor unions:

It sometimes sounds as if he believed that, if every company had him at the helm, there would be no need for unions or health-care reform, and that therefore every company should have someone like him, and that therefore there should be no unions or health-care reform. In other words, because he runs a business a certain way, others will, can, and should, and so the safeguards that have evolved over the generations to protect against human venality—against, say, greedy, bullying bosses—are no longer necessary. The logic is as sound as the presumption is preposterous.

I think this captures the quintessence of Mackeyism: an earnest faith, backed up by his own personal virtue, that unfettered capitalism paves the way to social utopia.

No doubt, Mackey himself is a benevolent corporate chief. The market values Whole Foods at $4 billion, yet the total value of Mackey’s Whole Foods shares is just $31 million. Nearly all founders of corporate empires manage to grab a much larger share of the loot than that. His annual salary as CEO: $1. And he has imposed a kind of austerity on his fellow execs: “No one at the company can have a salary more than nineteen times what the average team member makes,” Paumgarten reports. “On average, an S. & P. 500 CEO makes three hundred and nineteen times what a production worker does.” And for Whole Foods employees, “The health and retirement benefits are relatively generous.”

Yet those policies are driven not so much by the market as by Mackey’s own personal beliefs—and the market could soon crush them. Mackey is losing control of the company; other, less loftily idealistic capitalists are moving in. As CEO, he’s the functionary of a corporate board he no longer dominates—one bound by law not to serve Mackey’s ideals, but rather to
maximize shareholder profit. Writes Paumgarten:

Last fall, as the recession deepened, Whole Foods’ sales, and its stock, suffered badly, and the company was forced to raise capital. Leonard Green & Partners, a private-equity firm, bought seventeen per cent of the business, and got two seats on the board. Yucaipa, a firm run by the grocery billionaire and Democratic Party donor Ron Burkle, bought a seven-per-cent stake and has been looking over Mackey’s shoulder.

Thus while Mackey the capitalist ideologue does his best to take care of his workers, the capitalist sharks are circling. “We’re trying to do good. And we’re trying to make money,” Mackey tells Paumgarten. “The more money we make, the more good we can do.”

But the investors now taking control of Whole Foods are likely more interested in the money than in the good. When profits falter, the “power of conscious capitalism” (the subtitle of Mackey’s book) succumbs to the power of unfettered capitalism. If I were a Whole Foods “team member,” I’d be seriously considering starting a union to protect wages and benefits. And as a backup plan, I’d be agitating for universal health care.

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by Lester Brown

Photo courtesy Kanko* via FlickrSome 3,000 years ago, farmers in eastern China domesticated the soybean. In 1765, the first soybeans were planted in North America. Today the soybean occupies more U.S. cropland than wheat. And in Brazil, where it spread even more rapidly, the soybean is invading the Amazon rainforest.

For close to two centuries after its introduction into the United States the soybean languished as a curiosity crop. Then during the 1950s, as Europe and Japan recovered from the war and as economic growth gathered momentum in the United States, the demand for meat, milk, and eggs climbed. But with little new grassland to support the expanding beef and dairy herds, farmers turned to grain to produce not only more beef and milk but also more pork, poultry, and eggs. World consumption of meat at 44 million tons in 1950 had already started the climb that would take it to 280 million tons in 2009, a sixfold rise.

This rise was partly dependent on the discovery by animal nutritionists that combining one part soybean meal with four parts grain would dramatically boost the efficiency with which livestock and poultry converted grain into animal protein. This generated a fast-growing market for soybeans from the mid-twentieth century onward. It was the soybean’s ticket to agricultural prominence, enabling soybeans to join wheat, rice, and corn as one of the world’s leading crops.

U.S. production of the soybean exploded after World War II. By 1960 it was close to triple that in China. By 1970 the United States was producing three fourths of the world’s soybeans and accounting for virtually all exports. And by 1995 the fast-expanding U.S. land area planted to soybeans had eclipsed that in wheat. 

When world grain and soybean prices climbed in the mid-1970s, the United States—in an effort to curb domestic food price inflation—embargoed soybean exports. Japan, then the world’s leading importer, was soon looking for another supplier. And Brazil was looking for new crops to export. The rest is history. In 2009, the area in Brazil planted to soybeans exceeded that in all grains combined.

At about the same time the soybean gained a foothold in Argentina, where it staged the most spectacular takeover of all. Today more than twice as much land in Argentina produces soybeans as produces grain. Rarely does a single crop so dominate a country’s agriculture as the soybean does Argentina’s. Together, the United States, Brazil, and Argentina produce easily four fifths of the world’s soybean crop and account for 90 percent of the exports.

During the closing decades of the last century, Japan was the leading soybean importer, at nearly 5 million tons per year. As recently as 1995, China was essentially self-sufficient in soybeans, producing and consuming roughly 13 million tons of soybeans a year. Then the dam broke as rising incomes enabled many of China’s 1.3 billion people to move up the food chain, consuming more meat, milk, eggs, and farmed fish. By 2009 China was consuming 55 million tons of soybeans, of which 41 million tons were imported, accounting for 75 percent of its soaring consumption.

Today, half of all soybean exports go to China, the country that gave the world the soybean. Soybean meal mixed with grain for animal feed made it possible for Chinese meat consumption to grow to double that in the United States.

Since 1950 the world soybean harvest has climbed from 17 million tons to 250 million tons, a gain of more than 14-fold. This contrasts with growth in the world grain harvest of less than fourfold. Soybeans are the second-ranking U.S. crop after corn, and they totally dominate agriculture in both Brazil and Argentina.

Where does the 250-million-ton world soybean crop go? One tenth or so is consumed directly as food—tofu, meat substitutes, soy sauce, and other products. Nearly one fifth is extracted as oil, making it a leading table oil. The remainder, roughly 70 percent of the harvest, ends up as soybean meal to be consumed by livestock and poultry.

So although the soybean is everywhere, it is virtually invisible, embedded in livestock and poultry products. Most of the world harvest ends up in refrigerators in such products as milk, eggs, cheese, chicken, ham, beef, and ice cream.

Satisfying the global demand for soybeans, growing at nearly 6 million tons per year, poses a challenge. The soybean is a legume, fixing atmospheric nitrogen in the soil, which means it is not as fertilizer-responsive as, say, corn, which has a ravenous appetite for nitrogen. But because the soy plant uses a substantial fraction of its metabolic energy to fix nitrogen, it has less energy to devote to producing seed. This makes raising yields more difficult.

In contrast to the impressive gains in grain yields, scientists have had comparatively little success in raising soybean yields. Since 1950, U.S. corn yields have quadrupled while those of soybeans have barely doubled. Although the U.S. area in corn has remained essentially unchanged since 1950, the area in soybeans has expanded fivefold. Farmers get more soybeans largely by planting more soybeans. Herein lies the dilemma: how to satisfy the continually expanding demand for soybeans without clearing so much of the Amazon rainforest that it dries out and becomes vulnerable to fire.

Amazon deforestation. Photo courtesy leoffreitas via Flickr The Amazon is being cleared both by soybean growers and by ranchers, who are expanding Brazil’s national herd of beef cattle. Oftentimes, soybean growers buy land from cattlemen, who have cleared the land and grazed it for a few years, pushing them ever deeper into the Amazon rainforest.

The Amazon rainforest sustains one of the richest concentrations of plant and animal biological diversity in the world. It also recycles rainfall from the coastal regions to the continental interior, ensuring an adequate water supply for Brazil’s inland agriculture. And it is an enormous storehouse of carbon. Each of these three contributions is obviously of great importance. But it is the release of carbon, as deforestation progresses, that most directly affects the entire world. Continuing destruction of the Brazilian rainforest will release massive quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, helping to drive climate change.

Brazil has discussed reducing deforestation 80 percent by 2020 as part of its contribution to lowering global carbon emissions. Unfortunately, if soybean consumption continues to climb, the economic pressures to clear more land could make this difficult.

Although the deforestation is occurring within Brazil, it is the worldwide growth in demand for meat, milk, and eggs that is driving it. Put simply, saving the Amazon rainforest now depends on curbing the growth in demand for soybeans by stabilizing population worldwide as soon as possible. And for the world’s affluent population, it means moving down the food chain, eating less meat and thus lessening the growth in demand for soybeans. With food, as with energy, achieving an acceptable balance between supply and demand now means curbing growth in demand rather than just expanding supply.

 

For more information and resources, please visit http://www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2009/update86

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by Sara Peach

Ruchi Jain, 23, was working as a marketer in Mumbai, India, when she left her job to become a full-time climate activist. Today she works with the Indian Youth Climate Network and 350.org, and she traveled to Copenhagen in December to participate in the climate talks.

I followed Jain during the two-week conference as she rallied other youth activists and testified before UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer. I found out why she gave up her marketing career and why – like many youth around the world – she now has her eyes on the United States Senate.

Sara Peach reported from Copenhagen thanks to a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

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The earth’s decade

by Agence France-Presse

LONDON—From foie gras produced without making birds suffer to “sustainable” fish, British retailers and restaurants are fast embracing politically correct food, helped by celebrity-fueled pressure.

Faux (false) gras is the ethical answer to the foodstuff which has been the bane of campaigners for decades for the way it’s produced: force-feeding ducks or geese to create engorged livers that yield the creamy pate.

Waitrose, House of Fraser, and Tesco are among a growing number of major British retailers who are now refusing to stock real foie gras after protest campaigns.

Even Selfridges, one of the main attractions for discerning shoppers on London’s Oxford Street, decided in November to take foie gras off its shelves after a protest fronted by former James Bond actor Roger Moore.

Classic foie gras. “Faux gras” promises to replace this unethical delicacy. Photo courtesy ilmungo via Flickr“It’s torture in a tin,” said Moore, who appeared on pre-Christmas posters urging Selfridges to halt its sale, stating: “Force-feeding birds is not Yule, it’s cruel.”

The foie gras ban has even gained the royal seal of approval after Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, ordered it off menus for royal functions.

Waitrose developed the faux gras version—produced without force-feeding the birds—and calls it an “ethical alternative to traditional foie gras.”

A darker colour than the real thing, faux gras is made from about 50 percent liver from free-range poultry blended with goose or duck fat.

Two years after its launch, Waitrose customers appear to be increasingly happy to substitute faux gras for the real thing at Christmas and New Year.

“Faux gras is still one of our most popular festive foods,” said a Waitrose spokeswoman, who added that sales of the new product surged by almost 60 percent in 2009.

Such is the popularity of the new, more “ethical” version of the product that lawmakers have backed a motion calling for restaurants to adopt the new version and ditch the real foie gras.

“It is only a matter of time before foie gras is relegated to the history books where it belongs,” said Sam Glover of lobby group PETA.

While the day that five-star establishments abandon such foods seems some way off, restaurants in England do seem to be turning towards “green” alternatives.

Acorn House, in the King’s Cross district of London, claims to be the “first truly eco-friendly” restaurant in the capital.

The duck it serves comes from birds raised in a “positive” way, without cages and without antibiotics added to their food; its food deliveries are made in vehicles using biofuel, 80 percent of its waste is recycled, and its roof is a herb garden.

“Acorn House is set to alter the image of the restaurant industry as well as transform the way in which people eat out,” is the bold claim of its co-founder Arthus Potts.

While most restaurants are not adopting such a radical approach, many are trying to adopt a more ethical approach to their food.

French celebrity chef Raymond Blanc, the holder of two Michelin stars at his renowned restaurant Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons near Oxford, has embraced a campaign to use fish certified by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC).

This label guarantees that the fish has been obtained from sustainable stocks.

“By supporting MSC, I am ensuring that, as a chef, I am helping to ensure that fish stocks will be replenished for generations to come,” said Blanc, a well-known face in his adopted country thanks to regular TV appearances.

There are 14 MSC-certified restaurants in Britain and although the number remains relatively low, the non-profit organisation argues that its campaign is putting pressure on other restaurants to change their ways.

The main target of the protesters is Nobu, the global chain of chic Japanese restaurants which have the financial backing of Hollywood star Robert De Niro and a strong following among the rich and famous.

Nobu’s Michelin-starred London branch is refusing to remove bluefin tuna, an endangered species, from its menu.

Supermodel Elle Macpherson, actress Sienna Miller, and comedian Stephen Fry all added their names to a petition protesting against the restaurant’s use of the endangered fish.

The restaurant responded by adding an asterisk next to the dish on its menu, directing diners to a footnote saying: “Bluefin tuna is an environmentally threatened species. Please ask your server for an alternative.”

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by David Roberts

I’m technically on vacation, but the wife and kids are watching Chicken Little up in the hotel room right now, so I’m going to sneak in here for a quick post.

Ted Gayer—senior fellow and co-director of the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution—has an article in Forbes today, ostensibly about coming EPA CO2 regulations, but really about the existence of cost-effective CO2 reductions. He doesn’t believe they exist:

… Krugman oversells the [emission reduction] affordability claim by linking to a widely cited report by McKinsey & Company. The main point of the McKinsey study is provided in their Exhibit B, which illustrates a rather peculiar finding that there are a significant number of pollution abatement options that can be achieved at “negative cost.” This finding violates the basic principles of economics. If firms (or consumers) could reduce emissions at negative cost, then they would do so. To say otherwise is to say that they are willingly or ignorantly passing up profits.

This is, about as bluntly as I’ve ever seen it stated, the core of neoliberal economics and the reason that economics has had a mostly deleterious effect on the policy discussion around energy and climate change.

Consider what follows from Gayer’s premise:

• McKinsey is one of the most respected consulting firms in the world; they make their clients lots of money. Nobody has done more to study efficiency technologies and deployment than McKinsey researchers. Yet their entire body of work, spanning over a decade and thousands of pages, is negated by a “basic principle of economics.” (Why didn’t they think of that?! If only someone at McKinsey had taken Economics 101.)

• Companies like Dow Chemical and BP that have made hundreds of billions of dollars by investing in efficiency are unique, like snowflakes. None of their competitors could make money through similar investments. If they could, they would, but they’re not, so they can’t! QED.

• Carbon intensity—CO2 emissions per unit of GDP—varies widely across states and countries. Again, this is because every state and country is unique like a snowflake. There’s nothing those with high carbon intensity could learn from those with low carbon intensity. Every state and country has the carbon intensity that perfectly rational investment yields, because if there were cost-effective opportunities to lower carbon intensity that hadn’t been exploited, that would be irrational, and people are rational, so there aren’t any. QED.

• The burgeoning field of behavioral economics, which studies the way humans actually behave in the field, is based on a mistake. What’s the point of studying? We already know they behave rationally. That’s a “basic principle of economics.” The rash of recent books showing ostensibly irrational behavior on the part of consumers and business executives—Predictably Irrational, Nudge, Sway, Blind Spots, The Myth of the Rational Market, etc.—is full of mistakes. The behavior they discuss isn’t irrational, because people did it, and people are rational, so the behavior is rational. QED.

• Not only are people rational, but energy markets are too. There are no market barriers or failures that might obscure or discourage profitable efficiency investments. This paper from the folks at Resources for the Future, which reviews “the range of market barriers, market failures, and behavioral failures that have been cited in the energy efficiency context,” is nothing but a parade of errors, each one refuted by “basic principles of economics.”

• All the businesses that prosper by helping others save energy (and thus money) are … chimera, I guess. You can’t help people do things they’re already doing!

I could go on, but I’m on vacation, dammit. Suffice to say, Gayer’s premise that businesses exploit all profitable investments would only be plausible to someone who’s never been in the business world. And sure enough, a glance at his background reveals that he has been working in academia, government, or think tanks his entire professional life—rarefied environments where the “basic principles” of Economics 101 can be sheltered from the complicating exigencies of the real world.

The point is not just to pick on one stupid article. Gayer’s formulation is particularly clownish, but in more subtle forms it is absolutely ubiquitous in climate policy discussions. It is the core reason why reductions in greenhouse gases are always framed as a burden and an expense—after all, if they could be reduced profitably, they already would be, right?

Who you gonna believe, basic economic principles or yer lyin’ eyes?

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by Agence France-Presse

PARIS—French President Nicolas Sarkozy faced an embarrassing setback Wednesday after the high court struck down a planned carbon tax to fight global warming, just days before it was to kick in.

The constitutional court ruled that too many exemptions to the tax on carbon dioxide emissions created inequalities and unfairly placed the burden of cutting down wasteful energy use on a minority of consumers.

Sarkozy had fiercely defended the measure in the face of strong public opposition, calling it a “revolutionary” approach in the fight against climate change and making it a pillar of his 2010 budget.

The court ruling was seen as a severe blow for the French president, coming less than two weeks after world leaders failed to reach a binding deal on climate change at the Copenhagen summit.

The right-wing government was forced to quickly go back to the drawing board and Prime Minister Francois Fillon announced that a new bill on the carbon tax would be submitted to cabinet next month.

“France has shown that it is a leader in the fight against climate change and it will remain at the forefront by presenting new legislation on Jan. 20,” said government spokesman Luc Chatel.

In its ruling Tuesday, the Constitutional Council said the “large number of exemptions from the carbon tax runs counter to the goal of fighting climate change and violates the equality enjoyed by all in terms of public charges.”

The Council said more than 1,000 of France’s top polluters would have been able to dodge the tax and that the legislation did not apply to 93 percent of emissions from industrial sources.

The new levy on oil, gas, and coal consumption set at 17 euros ($25) per ton of carbon dioxide emissions was aimed at encouraging French consumers to adopt good green behaviour and stop wasting energy.

The legislation did not apply to electricity, which in France is produced mostly from nuclear reactors that are not a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

France would have been the biggest economy to have applied a direct carbon tax when it was to come into effect on Jan. 1, mirroring measures that exist in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland.

Socialist opposition leader Martine Aubry called the court decision a “major setback” for Sarkozy and said the government must now “draw the necessary consequences from this fiasco” before presenting a new bill.

The Socialists, who had asked the court to rule on the legality of the carbon tax, had argued that the flat levy on fuel unjustly penalized low-income families, especially those in rural areas who have no choice but to use cars.

The Greens, who had argued from the outset that the measure did not go far enough, applauded the court decision, saying it had confirmed that the entire scheme was a “fraud.”

Consumer groups had complained that the new tax would have hit rural households harder along with cash-strapped families who are unable to afford the energy-saving home renovations that could make a difference.

In practice, the tax would have raised household heating bills by up to 174 euros a year and pushed up the cost of petrol at the pump by about 4 euro cents per liter.

Polls showed two-thirds of French citizens opposed the carbon tax.

The government had anticipated revenues of 4.1 billion euros from the tax next year, but the funds were earmarked for redistribution in the form of tax breaks and “green checks” to families that cut down consumption.

“France poorly prepared the carbon tax,” acknowledged Jean Arthius, a centrist lawmaker and president of the Senate finance committee.

“Before the Copenhagen summit, we tried to be pioneers … but this is an issue that must be dealt on a supra-national level. We should have held talks with neighboring countries,” he said.

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by Agence France-Presse

BRAZIL—President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva signed a law Tuesday requiring that Brazil cut greenhouse gas emissions by 39 percent by 2020, meeting a commitment made at the Copenhagen climate talks.

Brazil announced at the summit a “voluntary commitment” to reduce CO2 emissions by between 36.1 and 38.9 percent in the next 10 years.

The new law, however, is subject to several decrees setting out responsibilities and regulations for the farming, industrial, energy, and environmental sectors.

Lula is expected to sign the decrees in January after consulting scientists and other experts, officials said.

Despite its ambitious targets, Greenpeace’s top representative in Brazil, Sergio Leitao, called it merely a list of good intentions and accused Lula of using double standards in environmental issues.

“Brazil usually makes good speeches on the international stage, as in Copenhagen, but in practice it doesn’t keep its word,” he told reporters.

Before signing the new law, in fact, Lula vetoed three of its provisions, including a reference to “promoting the development of clean energy sources and the gradual phasing out of energy from fossil fuels.”

Environment Minister Carlos Minc said he was was pleased with the new law because it showed Brazil’s determination to respect the pledges it made in Copenhagen.

“It doesn’t matter if the Copenhagen summit didn’t get the results we wanted. We will still meet our goals,” he told reporters.

The climate change conference held in the Danish capital ended last week with a non-binding agreement that exposed the stark divide between rich and developing nations.

A total of $30 billion was pledged from 2010-2012 to help poor countries in the firing line of climate change, and rich nations set a goal of providing $100 billion annually in aid by 2020.

It established a goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), but did not impose binding targets to reduce the emissions of gases that scientists say are heating up the world’s atmosphere to dangerous levels.

The Copenhagen agreement was put together by leaders of the United States, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and major European nations, after it became clear the 194-nation summit was in danger of failure.

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by Grist

 

The way of all cuisine? This is a guest post by David Gumpert, author of the Raw Milk Revolution.

——————-

When a good Jewish mother or grandmother knows she’s going to have a big group of special guests, she shifts into high gear to prepare meals. (Yes, I’m definitely stereotyping here, but bear with me.) She phones her butcher for the best cuts of meats.  She visits her vegetable market for the freshest veggies and fruits.  She buys the best eggs and cream cheese and lox and bagels she can find. And, for sure, she begins baking her richest and most delectable desserts.

When Hazon, a Jewish environmental organization, began planning its annual food conference   last spring, to be held at Asilomar overlooking the Pacific near Monterey, over Christmas (a very quiet time for most Jews), it made Tracy Lerman of Santa Cruz-based Organic Farming Research Foundation   its Jewish mother in charge of procuring the best food possible.

“My role was to source food from organic and sustainable farms,” she recounted to a group of attendees on Saturday, as she attempted to provide a behind-the-scenes sense of her challenges. “I have a lot of contacts with local farms” in Northern California.

“We spent a lot of time trying to get farmers to donate food … For example, we got 25 dozen of the best eggs in the country,” she recounted.

There was just one problem when she had completed her work on the eggs: “You are not eating any of those eggs.”

It was the same story for a farm prepared to donate 500 pounds each of apples and cabbage, another farm wanting to donate 200 pounds of butternut squash, another with 40 pounds of sugar pie pumpkins, and another with 325 pounds of fresh trout, among others. All told, nine farms had their donations rejected. And maybe saddest of all, there were dozens of pasture-raised chickens, slaughtered under kosher supervision, which a group of Hazon conference attendees hand plucked the feathers out of at a nearby farm, as required under kosher rules. They were to be the centerpieces of a Friday evening Sabbath dinner. Rejected, and in their place, kosher chickens provided by a factory-farming type business.

The problem was food safety, or more precisely, the food safety regulations of the mega corporation that runs Asilomar’s food service-ARAMARK . Its corporate food safety regulations require that the company inspect each provider of food being served at Asilomar, to determine whether it has a HACCP plan (for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points), traceback records (to determine where all ingredients originate), a certain level of insurance, and other such “credentials.”

The rules are not unlike those close to being enacted by Congress under new federal food safety legislation. They put the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in charge of verifying the HACCP plans that will be required of all food producers in the U.S., down to the smallest maker of artisan cheeses and jams and jellies. Some farms will be caught up in the new web as well, if they are judged to be involved in processing and packaging.

For both ARAMARK and the U.S. government, the underlying driver in all this is fear—as in fear of tainted ground beef, spinach, peanut butter, peppers, and all the other foods that have been involved in recalls and illness over the past few years. Not surprisingly, small sustainable producers haven’t been implicated in any of these recalls, and are rarely sources of food-borne illness, but that doesn’t matter in the new climate of fear and concern about being sued.

Here’s how Jack Burkam, the Resident District Manager for ARAMARK at Asilomar, put it to attendees as the same panel discussion at which Tracy Lerman gave her Jewish mother explanation of the situation: “As a company that feeds as many as 1,200 at a sitting, you need to know the sources of the food you are getting…It’s a dilemma for us and everyone involved in the business. Our brand is known for food and we are known for safety.”

To purchase from “unknown sources” (even those Tracy Lerman could attest to) “is a huge risk. It’s a risk not many companies can take” in the current fear-based food-safety climate.

He added: “We source from as many local sources as possible. It’s a complicated process. We have controls that keep us from obtaining large numbers of items from sources we don’t know.”

So, one might say, better to be safe than sorry. But the reality is that none of the nine farms that had its products rejected had any known history of problems with unsafe products.

Still and all, you might say, the decision of whether they want to comply with all ARAMARK’s regulations is up to the companies. There are plenty of markets out there that don’t require HACCP plans and other such official niceties.

But before long—possibly a matter of several weeks or months, when Congress is expected to pass major food safety legislation, which President Obama has promised to sign—the choice option will disappear, since all food processors (the distinction between farmer and processor can become dicey, since washing and packing certain foods on a farm can be considered processing) will need to comply with regulations much like ARAMARK’s. HACCP plans, frequent records inspections, and very tough penalties (possibly $10,000 a day) for being judged not in compliance will go into effect, administered by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

How might life be different once the new food safety legislation becomes law? Well, if the experiences of the 600-plus attendees at the Hazon Food Conference is any indication, we could lose access to access to some significant number of smaller producers. The nine producers rejected by Aramark were nearly half of the nineteen that wanted to donate food (ten were accepted by Aramark).

And as far as food quality and variety are concerned, let’s just say that a good Jewish mother or grandmother would not have been happy about the unevenness of the meals. For example, ARAMARK ran out of main courses at the first dinner (an uninspired mix of tofu and green beans)—latecomers wound up with an even less inspired plate of barley and canned mushrooms. Similarly, a breakfast of lox and bagels was missing the bagels—many attendees were clearly unhappy with the rice crackers that substituted…and the lox ran out after about 20 per centof the guests had been served—the rest had to settle for smoked trout.

The chicken at the Friday evening Sabbath dinner was okay, but certainly not nearly as good as the local pastured chickens would have been. Interestingly, many of the chicken thighs and legs were undercooked, which is a great way to spread salmonella. And let’s just say the chocolate pudding dessert would have embarrassed moms of all religions—it was grainy and had attendees making some serious sour faces. Granted, making pudding without milk or cream is a challenge (no dairy products are allowed to be served with meat at kosher meals), but one can ask in response whether pudding was the best choice.

There were a few excellent meals. One lunch salad of wild salmon and greens was very well done, as was a breakfast of French toast stuffed with apples and blueberries.

But by and large, attendees were disappointed that a foodie conference’s food would be so ordinary and institutional. The last day’s lunch plate of a scoop of mashed potatoes next to a scoop of rice with lentils seemed to put an exclamation mark on the frustrations of trying to serve local produce when half your vendors are disqualified under arbitrary safety regs. As a rabbinical student put it to me: “It all had a very corporate feel to it.”

As the food safety zealots take over, our food options in any number of places could have much more of a corporate feel.

 

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by Grist

The following was submitted by Environment Washington.

Today, Environment Washington is releasing our annual scorecard on Washington’s congressional delegation—documenting the lawmakers’ environmental votes over the past two years.  These scorecards are an important tool to educate the public about the voting records of their elected officials and to help citizens learn who is an environmental champion and who is a natural disaster.

Washington’s congressional delegation was successful in getting legislation enacted to create the first wilderness area in the state since 1984. Above, Sky Peaks in the Wild Sky Wilderness.Nordique via FlickrEnvironment Washington tracked the votes cast on seven key environmental bills in the Senate, ranging from an economic recovery bill that allocates $80 billion to clean energy investment to legislation that protects our coasts from offshore drilling.

In the House of Representatives, decisions made on 15 environmental bills were scored, including legislation to protect the natural beauty of Washington’s own Wild Sky Wilderness area, as well as the iconic Great Lakes to the East.

Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, along with Reps. Jay Inslee, Brian Baird, Rick Larsen, and Norman Dicks of Washington’s House delegation voted for the environment 100 percent of the time in the past two years.  Not only is Washington fortunate enough to be represented by six environmental champions, but Washington’s delegation is also free of any natural disasters—i.e. lawmakers who took the anti-environment stance on every vote tracked.

With the help of these decision makers, the 111th Congress is making progress in several key areas.  Already, we’ve seen the historic passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act through the House, putting America on track to repower the country with clean energy and limit global warming pollution.

Washington is one of 14 states that can pride itself on having a fully stocked Senate, one where both senators are environmental champions.  We will need these environmental powerhouses to champion strong legislation in 2010 as the Senate continues to consider legendary environmental legislation, especially the critically necessary climate bill.

At the national level, 40 senators and 144 representatives took the pro-environment position on every vote tracked for the 2009 Scorecard.  Unfortunately, 26 senators and 17 representatives consistently took the anti-environment stance.

We urge other members of Washington’s congressional delegation to be green—join with these environmental champions and work together to strengthen our environmental laws to stop global warming pollution, move America towards a cleaner energy future, and clean up America’s most treasured waterways.

Decisions made in the next six months will reveal how progressive the 111th Congress has become.  Will America forge a national commitment to tackle the problem of global warming pollution and will the critical protections of the clean water act be restored?

Your voice can make the difference between a champion and a disaster, have it heard here.

The scorecard and key to the votes scored within can be viewed online here.  Environment Washington is a nonprofit, nonpartisan environmental advocacy organization.

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by Geoffrey Lean

The holidays are supposed to be the season of goodwill. But that has been in short supply over the past week and a half as governments and environmental groups blame each other for the disappointing outcome of the Copenhagen climate summit.

Did the messy outcome at Copenhagen make it less likely that world governments can reach a deal next year in Mexico?The blame game began with Europe-based environmental groups pointing the finger at President Obama and the United States. Greenpeace International said the U.S. had “dragged the talks down,” while Christian Aid singled out Obama for special condemnation and decried rich countries’ “strong arm tactics and intransigence.” President Lula of Brazil joined in, blaming Obama for offering “too little” when it came to pledges to cut emissions.

Then it was China’s turn. Writing in The Guardian, UK energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband condemned China for vetoing emission targets supported by “a coalition of developed and the vast majority of developing countries” and suggested the country had “hijacked” the negotiations. He was supported by the writer and journalist Mark Lynas, who had been at the heart of the bargaining as an adviser to the Maldives. Lynas took to The Guardian’s pages with a detailed, first-hand account of how the emerging superpower had “wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an ‘awful’ deal so that western leaders would walk away carrying the blame.”

China, predictably, hit back, calling Miliband’s comments “unfair and irresponsible” and accusing him of “trying to shirk the obligations of developed countries.” China had “performed no worse than any others,” its officials insisted.

Then the European Union weighed in, saying it was “obvious” that both China and the United States “did not want more than we achieved in Copenhagen.” It, in turn, was heavily criticized for joining U.S. opposition to the continuance of the Kyoto Protocol and for failing to rally other countries to ambitious emissions targets. Just about everybody blasted the Danes for their how they chaired the conference, while many identified widespread failures in the UN negotiating system, which British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called “at best flawed, at worst chaotic.”

If success has many fathers, as the saying goes, failure breeds a host of unpleasant, caught-out children, all trying to shift the blame to a sibling. And there is plenty to go around.

For what it is worth, China deserves most of it. It led the disruption in plenaries that made it impossible for the conference to get down to serious negotiating, took the targets out of the “accord” that finally resulted and has expressed more pleasure at the emasculated outcome than any other country.

The United States certainly made mistakes, particularly in its approach to China. But in the weeks preceding Copenhagen, the Americans moved quite far (despite political pressures from a wary Congress), and President Obama worked hard to rescue some sort of a deal at the actual gathering. The environmentalists’ failure to recognize this suggests that deep-seated anti-Americanism continues even after the departure of the much-loathed Bush administration. And though the EU should have taken more of a lead and was foolish to join in attempts to undermine the Kyoto Protocol, its leaders led the last-minute rescue missions in Copenhagen.

The Danes were undoubtedly not up to the job of charing the gathering. Indeed, the accord only won arms-length acceptance from the plenary after the Danish prime minister, Lars Løkke Ramussen, was quietly ejected from the chair. This type of situation probably won’t be a problem next December in Mexico, not least because a developing country will be presiding. And the shambolic failure of the UN system, not just in Copenhagen but over the whole of the last year (leading even one of its stalwarts, Malta’s Michael Zammit Cutajar, to confess “its tough to keep the belief in it”) is leading to an unprecedented drive for reform.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced he was setting up a “high-level panel” to see “how to streamline the negotiations process,” adding that he wanted to discuss “how we can do better” with governments and civil society. And that was just one sign of the most remarkable development of the last ten days. For even as the blame flew around, the key participants—far from taking refuge in it, and scaling down their commitments—were actually underlining their determination to do more.

Obama reemphasized his resolve to get a cap-and trade bill through Congress, insisting that clean energy will “drive economic growth for decades to come.” Gordon Brown said he would be stepping up efforts to get a climate treaty. And France’s Nicolas Sarkozy offered to host a summit this spring of the leaders that signed the Copenhagen accord, while Angela Merkel’s Germany will host a ministerial meeting in June.

Mexico pledged to press for the most controversial international commitment of all—a 50 percent global emissions cut by 2050—as part of “a binding international agreement” under its chairmanship. Brazil announced it would stick to its own ambitious targets. India—whose celebration of the Copenhagen’s failure was second only to China’s—launched a plan for special “green economic zones.” And China announced new regulations to increase the use of renewable energy.

Welding all this into a new treaty remains a formidable task, probably more so than before the Copenhagen summit opened. But there is still much to work with, if only governments can start working together.

The first step is to move beyond the finger-pointing. As Yvo de Boer, the UN official in charge of the negotiations, pointed out last week: “These countries will have to sit down together next year, so blaming each other for what happened will not help.”

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by Kit Stolz

The columnist George Will recently wrote about the new movie Up in the Air.

While breezily discoursing on the emotional pain of the worst unemployment record in decades,  Will happened to mention that the “opening soundtrack” to the movie, featuring a new version of Woody Guthrie’s classic This Land is Your Land, was (and I quote) “weird.”

Check out the song for yourself, via the interesting free music site LaLa:

Will, the bow-tied baseball-ed embodiment of white-bread conservatism, is about as stuffy as a man can be, so it’s no surprise that he completely misses the point of this funkified classic by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.

Jones sounds like a young Aretha unleashed. She and the Dap-Kings turn out to be a fascinating story in their own right, a collective devoted to the classic funk of the James Brown style.

Their sound is brassy and tight, but without synthesizers or digital gear, giving their songs an analog funkiness that’s timeless, sexy, and in your face. They even turn out to be the secret weapon behind the huge success of Amy Winehouse and her hits “Back to Black” and “You Know I’m No Good.”

But the truth is, of course, that George Will could never in a million years say anything good about this greatest of all American folk songs, funkified or not, because the lyrics challenge the unbounded faith in private property espoused by him and other American conservatives.

In the glossy, funny, but not phony movie, we only hear the first of Guthrie’s words. and then an up-dated fade-out of the song from the band, mentioning locales such as Houston and L.A.

Is it possible that after all these decades, the lyrics are still too radical for most movie-going Americans? Take a look or a listen, and decide for yourself …

As I went walking, I saw a sign there
And on that sign it said “Private Property”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothin’
That side was made for you and me !

by Todd Woody

‘Tis the season for the annual year-in-review column,
beloved by writers and editors desperate to fill pages and screens of blank
space during these slow news weeks. 

I’m going to forgo that annual holiday journalism tradition—sort of. While perusing various year-end and year-ahead trend story pitches
that had popped into my in-box since Thanksgiving, I came across one from the
United States Environmental Protection Agency that caught my attention.

The EPA was releasing its annual enforcement stats for 2009.
Usually that’s a big yawn, given that for most of the past decade prosecuting
polluters was not high on the must-do list of the former administration. But in
2009 not only was there a much more enforcement-minded EPA administrator in
Washington (in the person of Lisa Jackson), the agency for the first time created a Google
map mashup of its enforcement actions for the year.

The map lets you zoom in on your city, county, or state and see the civil and
criminal cases filed by the EPA for violations of its clean air and water laws and other
environmental statutes. Click on the air, water, land, and criminal buttons and
colored markers start to populate the map showing you the location of various violations.
When you click on a marker a link to detailed information about the case pops
up. You can also review any past violations.

The EPA’s new interactive enforcement map could launch a new era of digital transparency.

“EPA mapped the locations of more than 90 percent of the
facilities that were the subject of enforcement actions last year,” the agency
said in a statement. (Note that you won’t find any drinking water treatment
facilities hit with lawsuits or complaints; the EPA did not map them “due to
potential security concerns.”)

Clicking around the EPA map, I learned that in Alameda County, Calif., where
I live, an Oakland recycling company called California Waste Solutions paid
fines totaling $172,200 for failing to comply with storm water permits at two of
its local facilities. (The Bay Area was relatively law-abiding compared to,
say, greater Seattle, where the map was purple with environmental violations.)

Okay, so why does this matter? Knowledge, as the saying
goes, is power and the average citizen is unlikely to sift through thousands of
pages of government data to find out if local companies or government
facilities have been polluting their air and water in violation of
environmental laws. And as metropolitan newspapers continue to gut their staffs
and environmental reporters become an endangered species, you’re unlikely to
read about such transgressions unless they reach oil-spill proportions or
involve big money.

In contrast, the EPA’s new map and its successors will allow a quick visual
comparison of the government’s enforcement actions from year to year. In fiscal
2009, the EPA said it filed 387 new criminal cases—the most in five years—and reached settlements that require polluters to spend $5.4 billion to comply
with environmental laws.

Still, the new interactive map is a work in progress. First, it is not comprehensive. “While these large cases are a vital part of our work to
protect public health and improve compliance, they do not reflect the totality
of the annual environmental enforcement activities,” the agency said.

Second, the information that is available on
violations is inconsistent, ranging from detailed to sketchy. Click on a big enforcement action
or high-profile case, and you’ll get plenty of data. But many other cases just offer
cryptic references to violations of environmental statutes, making it difficult
to ascertain if a company is guilty of dumping toxins into a local waterway or just bad record-keeping. I couldn’t tell, for example, what that Oakland recycling
company had done to violate its storm water permit.

I had a similar experience when I came across an air
violation by an Alameda County Trader Joe’s, that Costco for the bobo set. When I tried to get details on the violation I came up short. Clicking on the map marker took
me to an “Enforcement Case Report” that listed the violation as “Air Emissions
Not Otherwise Specified.”

After a few minutes of clicking around the EPA database I
found that the violation was deemed “minor” but no other information was
available.  (The EPA could take some cues
from The New York Times’ ongoing investigative series on water pollution that features an
interactive database that lets readers identify polluters near their
homes.)

Making the map a real-time snapshot of environmental cases
as they are filed rather than a static end-of-year review would make good on the
EPA’s promise to “increase transparency, improve access to data, and provide the
public with the bigger picture of enforcement activity occurring in communities
around the country.”

The ‘09 map mashup could just be the start of a new era of digital
transparency. One can imagine an app that would tap the iPhone’s GPS to geotag
polluters or issue alerts of enforcement actions.

Better yet, if the EPA really wants to tap the power of social media in the new year, let people create their own mashups. Just imagine an army of iPhone-toting citizen enforcers geotagging and reporting suspected environmental violations to a database monitored by their local EPA office.

 

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