SUSTAINABILITY, AGRICULTURE & ECO-PRAGMATISM

Did Organic Farms Cause Germany's E.coli Outbreak?

2011-06-21T09:06:00.006-04:00

I don’t know. The E. coli vector was sprouts from an organic farm, but how did the E.coli get in the sprouts?

I am not hoping to stomp on Small, Local or Organic today. I of course feel somewhat vindicated on my stance concerning the supposed clear superiority of these supposedly more “sustainable” methods. As I write this, there is news today that another outbreak has occurred in French Beef.

Yes, cute, protected, smaller scale, non- GMO –fed beef.

It’s not even the same strain of E. coli. So these are two entirely different accidents, but it’s not supposed to happen there, or so say the over-simplifiers among us in the SLO church (Small, Local, Organic).

But really, it could have happened to anyone. Most anyone, anyway. All reports indicated that this particular farm was an exemplar of hygiene that would put many American organic farms to shame.

So, what’s the deal?

First off, if your child gets one of these nasty strains of E. coli, and it also has genes for antibiotic resistance, this is a VERY big deal. It is so tragic. So tragic, that even though I was “safe” in the U.S.A. I wanted to boil everything I gave my daughter.

Yet, when you actually look at the number of cases truly virulent E.coli infection in the developed world, it doesn’t seem so scary at all.

The famous Jack-in-the Box outbreak that the T.V. news magazines had specials on that caused some people to yell that “Our Food System Is Broken!” – how many people died from that outbreak? Do you remember?

Four.

In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in the USA, only about 61 people die a year from E. coli infections from all sources.

That’s all.

“It could have happened to almost anyone you say?” Yes. Just about. Let me explain.

First off, E. coli is not some rare evil germ. Look at your tummy. There are billions of E.coli in there. In fact, they are beneficial to human health, pro-biotic, as they say, so don’t try to get rid of ‘em.

They are generally so beyond benign that they are a favorite for study in various fields of non-medical Microbiology. They are ubiquitous. Residing not only in you, but in your dog and horse. They are also in most farm animals and in species in the wild, and that is where we start to get into trouble.

The Great Thinkers of the Small and Organic movement seized on the very well publicized Jack in the Box outbreak as an opportunity to spread fear not only about health safety standards, but also to malign our entire food system as unsafe. Even the most basic understanding of the Biological systems that produce E. coli would have prevented all but the most cynical from this line of reasoning. Here’s why:

In Evergreen, CO eight children became sick from an E. coli infection that seriously confused local officials until they were all linked to a certain soccer field.

Elk droppings from the mountains were found to have contaminated the field with pathogenic E. coli. It was not because they ate meat that was finished in a big CAFO, and it wasn’t because they bought some cheese from hippies at a Farmers’ Market. It was really a freak accident.

E. coli infections have probably been with us for a very long time. But, long ago, conditions like those found in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle were quite common, partly because we were rather ignorant of the Microbiological factors in disease.

So, if this bug lives in our guts and it is in our dogs and cats, why does it cause disease sometimes? To put it simply: the VAST MAJORITY of E. coli does not cause any harm whatsoever, as I said above. But there are strains that have some bad traits; some E.coli produce toxins that are harmful to humans (but seemingly not to wildlife or livestock.) Also, the little guys need a gene to make a protein that allows them to stick to your gut to be extremely virulent. Worse, E.coli seems particularly adept at developing resistance to antibiotics, so what might have been a nuisance can become a tragedy. Having all three traits means big trouble.

But by far the vast majority of E. coli do not have these traits. And by far the majority of cases do not lead to death.

So, how do people come down with nasty strains of E. coli and what can be done to prevent it. If you listen to your average new urban romantic, the kind that wants everyone to become small scale artisans producing expensive goods for our neighbors, the answer is “by eating a hamburger produced in our awful food system, which may have meat from [X] many cows in it…” but it would seem to make the most sense that you are most likely to get some nasty E. coli from some “raw” milk or cheese, from an organic farmer that composted his manure for less than twelve months (see link to the right for related study).

(The Organic Standard is 90 days)

or a small scale artisan whose very smallness allowed him to slide under the health authorities’ radar (thanks new health safety law!)

In 1996, a small, local butcher in the quaint sounding town of Wishaw, in Lanarkshire, Scotland sold meat that killed 21 people, which was the worst recorded outbreak of pathogenic E. coli, ever.

Was Frontline doing an hour-long special on how small shops are killing us?

No.

Of course not.

Some raw cheese sold by an outfit called “Sally Jackson Cheeses” to Whole Foods caused a four-state pathogenic E. coli outbreak just a few months ago

They were, in fact, a Romantic’s Dream Farm, small and organic:

I’m guessing the Urban consumers who bought the supposedly more healthy and certainly more expensive cheese wrapped in Chestnut leaves felt a little ripped off, much like the folks who believed the world was going to end this year did…

But if you look at this farms’ website, the farm looks wonderful. Perfect. Looking at it, I feel sad that such a place had this accident. Really sad. But this goes to show that for all those people who go out to “Look at the farm” and . . . I don’t know, look the farmer in the eye, make sure he hates the legal entity known as the “corporation” ---doing so is likely useless without bringing various agar broths, petri dishes and polymerase chain reaction kits.

The truth is this: the organic farm that grew sprouts didn’t manufacture the pathogenic E.coli any more than Jack in the Box did. The question is where did the E. coli come from - and – did the food producers follow the rules to prevent an outbreak. No one actually knows for certain WHERE exactly the contaminated meat came from (which beef supplier) in the Jack in the Box outbreak. What was discovered was that the restaurant chain was not cooking its patties to an internal temperature of 155 degrees, the Washington State standard, and was, for taste reasons, only cooking to the FDA standard of 140 degrees.

If the outbreak had occurred elsewhere, they might not have been liable for the deaths.

Same goes with the German sprout farm in the quaint sounding town of Bienenbüttel. No one has likewise figured out how the E. coli got into the sprouts, but it is known well that Sprouts are a very dangerous vector for E. coli, organic or not.

Indeed, the issue is not small farm vs. large farm, organic farm vs. not organic farm,
local farm (but, maybe it is, somewhat.) versus distant farm; it is rather: do the people who supply our food comply with best safety practices? And, are they far from sources of external contamination?

Since beneficial E. coli is ubiquitous in the environment, it would likely be too onerous to close down all operations if some were detected. I am not sure, but I would guess that testing for the dangerous sub-strains of E. coli is rather expensive. Indeed, safety IS expensive, it is just not more costly than tragedy.

The question then becomes, can the people who supply our food afford to comply; can they still make a profit if they are held to a higher standard? In the case of producers and restaurants with large economies of scale, the answer is a resounding “YES!” – but for small producers, well, I just have to trust what their lobbyists told the government when they got exemptions from new food safety laws.

It would no doubt be harder for them, but I’m sure the government and most taxpayers would be glad to have less outfits to inspect.

Perhaps ironically, Jack in The Box (and this is not an endorsement, I’ve never eaten there) is now one of the safest restaurants in America.

They probably hadn’t much choice.

But despite our apparent inability to ensure 100% safety in our food, whether “conventional” or “organic,” far too little testament is ever paid to how SAFE our food systems are in the developed world, especially in the United States. Why? When one person dies, it can become a national news event.

I think two things can be blamed… one is savvy business practices from the organic food industry, who want more market share. The other is the invisible nature of things like E. coli, and radiation. When something is an invisible menace, people become even more fearful, and when children are dying… But, really, even though this is a problem we need to continue working on, more people in the USA die from lightning strikes

Or drown in bathtubs in a year.

The fact that humans are lousy at prioritizing risk is a different subject, and has been extensively written about. But it is worth a mention here. By the way, salmonella (remember that?) is a MUCH bigger killer in the USA.

As are swimming pools.

So, my advice for most of us is to just calm down. You probably should be very careful with hamburger meat and small children. It should be noted though, that “no fast-food hamburger-associated outbreaks have been reported since 1995, demonstrating that changes in the fast-food industry, such as carefully regulating cooking temperature of hamburgers, are both possible and effective.” That’s a quote directly from the CDC. Home cooked hamburger? That’s when you need to be most careful.

You should always thoroughly cook cabbage and sprouts. For the activists among us, I’d suggest they push for higher food safety standards across the board and not just for some producers and not others. Unfortunately, I think tougher standards will hurt the Local food movement the most, at least regarding livestock. Why? Because, and I am no epidemiologist, but from what I’ve read plus a dash of Common Sense suggests to me that the biggest problems with E. coli (along with Bird Flu and other killers) have to do with the intersections with domestic animals with wild animals, and with animals in general and human populations. You see a lot more pathogen infested groundwater in areas like in asia where you’ve got families with 2 cows on the property than you have in towns in Kansas five miles from a CAFO. Right now, towns are relaxing their livestock zoning restrictions due to political pressure nationwide. It might be smart to remember that those particular restrictions were enacted for a reason.

Epilogue:

For those of you who don’t want to believe a word of this, I’ve found the link for you. Apparently, some people think this German Outbreak is all a Big Food plot.

http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/weaponized-e-coli-used-to-destroy-organic-foods-a-detective-starts-a-‘food-safety’-investigation/

The author has apparently also never heard of horizontal gene transfer between bacteria. It’s been studied since the 1950s…. Ditto that France has already irradiates a whole bunch of food and they protect small farmers like no bodies’ business.

The High Cost of a Small-Scale Bias

2011-04-28T13:08:00.005-04:00

I hear often from people who earnestly believe that small-scale and "local" farming approaches are not only superior for the environment, but for consumers. I find in situations like this, it is very helpful to look at a case study, if one is available. So it was with great interest that I read in a November 2010 Economist article that the nation of Japan protects its small-scale farmers 5 times as much as the U.S.

Japan takes protecting small, local farmers very seriously. This is mostly because Japan has a LOT of small farmers, and they wield considerable political power. How much power? Well, Japan’s foreign minister, Seiji Maehara, was quoted saying that a tiny number of farmers hold the rest of the Japanese economy hostage. Oddly, small farmer income averages higher than large farmer incomes because price supports only apply to small farmers.

One of the effects of this is that Japanese pay twice as much for their food as they should, according to the OECD. From the above mentioned Economist article:

"Japan’s farmers are a protected class, treated twice as generously as Europe’s and five times as generously as America’s. Tariffs on polished rice are as high as 778%, and on butter reach 482%. Thanks to tariffs and other distortions, Japanese pay twice as much for their food as they should, according to the OECD."

Another effect is that farm sizes have stayed small --since it is quite lucrative to farm compared to other occupations, small land-owners have a disincentive to rent their land to larger, more efficient operators.

Compounding the effect of these price supports are sky high tariffs for agricultural staples such as rice (778%)!! and butter (482%). These tariffs hurt Japan in negotiating trade between other countries for manufactured goods, and the contribution to Japan’s cost of living discourages foreign investment.

These policies came into place partially to guarantee Japan’s Food security, yet experts
insist that this internal and external protection of small farmers undermines Food Security, prevents Japan from exporting agricultural products, and taxes citizens in various direct and indirect ways. Very undemocratic ways as well I would add! I found this information from a great online article from the East Asia Forum. The article notes:

"Japanese agriculture is in a free-falling decline. In the years between 1960 and 2005, the share of agricultural output in GDP dropped from 9 per cent to 1 per cent, the food self-sufficiency ratio from 79 per cent to 41 per cent, and agricultural land, indispensable for food security, from 6.09 million hectares to 4.63 million hectares.

Meanwhile, the ratio of part-time farm households, which derive more than half their income from non-farm employment, increased from 32.1 per cent to 61.7 per cent. The percentage of farmers over 65 years old also jumped from 10 per cent to 60 per cent.

[. . . ]
If the Japanese government were to abandon the production adjustment program and bring the producer price of rice down from the current 15,000 yen to 9,500 yen per 60kg, small-scale farmers would stop farming and start lending out their land. The government could then focus its support on full-time farmers so that they could pay their land rent (the government may pay the rent directly). Such plans would help concentrate limited agricultural land resources on full-time farmers, thereby expanding farm sizes and reducing production costs. Given the narrower target, the financial burden of such support would not exceed the current expenditures of the production adjustment program.
The price for Japanese rice has come down from 20,000 yen to 15,000 yen in the past decade, while the price of Chinese rice, which Japan imports, has risen from 3,000 yen to 10,000 yen."

So, what we have here is the dream vision of many in this country: lots of people farming, supported by the government -- and yet the result is disastrous for consumers -- and not really that great for farmers!

In addition, contrary to popular belief, small farms are often worse for the environment. More labor inputs per unit output combined with pressure to get the most out of a little plot of land leads in Japan to more environmental harm from small farmers:

The structural policy promoting large-scale farms can also bring environmental

benefits. Agricultural census data indicate that large-scale rice farms tend to have a higher

adoption rate of environmentally friendly farming practices. For example, while 73% of

rice farms that cultivated 15 ha of paddy adopted environmentally friendly farming

practices, only 44% of those that cultivate less than 0.5 ha of paddy did so (Figure 2.43).

Due to the fixed week-end time available for farming, small-scale side-business rice

farms limit their total labour input by substituting other purchased inputs. Moreover,

some large-scale rice farms, that market their own products, differentiate according to

environmental characteristics and food safety. Pesticides and fertilizer purchases per unit

of land for small-scale rice farms is significantly higher than that of large-scale rice farms

(Figure 2.44). (p. 99)

We have all heard about Europe’s protected small farmers, but since they are not as protected as the Japanese small farmer, the ill effects to European society as a whole are not quite as glaring. They are visible to all who care to look, but for those who only see romantic pastoral scenes and small fields of lavender, perhaps there is an incentive to not look carefully.

Why is this relevant here? There have been efforts toward “internal” protectionism for small farms in the USA. Most famous was the attempt by the Northern California Federal District court (yes, that one) to block the planting (and did, for a while) of GMO sugar beets, for fear that it would contaminate non-GM sugar beets -- this in spite of the fact that the product, sucrose, is a chemically identical product no matter the plant of origin. In fairness, the basis for the ban was to prevent corruption of the gene pool of organic products, but one has to wonder if this was just merely disguised anti-competitiveness ideology favoring less productive farmers.

We seem to be able to recognize the value of having professionals handle things like healthcare, but we want everyone with any desire to grow a plant to be called a "farmer" and all treated alike? Bringing in a large crop at a good price for the consumer while protecting the environment takes great skill, strategic thinking and resources -- not just good intentions! Japan's example shows just how counterproductive it can be to focus on an idyllic image (small scale farming) rather than a desired outcome (cheap, abundant, safe and environmentally-conscious food production)

Food Insecurity: A Core Threat to Sustainability

2011-04-12T07:45:00.007-04:00

Have you been following the events in the Middle East? The so-called “Arab Spring” that has been a boon for forecasting pundits of various flavors and colors? Well, I am not going to make any predictions here but I’d like to write something informative about the woefully underreported, and possibly the strongest motive force behind the protests: The Arab Food Crisis.

Yes, this whole political eruption has very little to do with Presidents Obama or Bush, is not driven by a desire for democratic secular or Islamic government -- it is driven by hunger, by not being able to look their children in the eye because the money they make is not covering food expenses. Social media didn’t cause it either.

Indeed, contrary to most reporting, the man who burned himself alive and touched off the region's storm of protests was not “an unemployed university graduate”, but a poor food vendor.

Iran has shown that a bunch of discontented university students cannot stage a revolution without considerable help, this is a broader-based political crisis. Iran has sufficient oil-revenue to buy off Iran’s poor, at least for the time-being.

There is an old Russian phrase: Well Fed Horses Do Not Rampage. People are more like horses than they’d sometimes like to admit – their politics get mighty similar when stomachs start growling and when hunger keeps them from sleep.

Certainly there are many underlying problems and grievances that exist in the Arab world -- and in the rest of the world for that matter. The desire to change many of these things is indeed noble. I'm not commenting here on the rightness or wrongness of the social and political structures that are under attack: dictators, corruption, high unemployment, abuse of human rights, etc -- only making the point that these forces by themselves have not been enough to move people to the streets until you add in the difficulty of obtaining enough food. And that even if these other problems are addressed, yet there is still not enough food - no reform can last for long.

What I am trying to point out is that the Arab world is only self-sufficent in energy production, and in much of that world, they aren't even self-sufficent in that. Because they follow traditional practices in areas like Agriculture, they aren't self-sufficient in anything. Yet, people want to protect inefficient practices in the name of "sustainability" when being uncompetitive actually leaves people more vulnerable.

What has caused all this? There’s several factors that I’ve tried to condense for you:

The World Bank reports that Arab countries import over half their food.

Forty million Egyptians live on less than US$2 a day and 30% of Syrians make under US$1.60 per day.

The Arab population has surged ahead in recent decades. The population of Egypt, for example, has more than tripled in the last one hundred years, yet the entire region is entering a water crisis and still engages in very inefficient small holding farm practices, making it the world’s largest wheat importer.

An excellent report to give you more depth on this topic is the UN Development Programme's 2009 Arab Human Development Report. Look at p. 12 for the food insecurity section. Just one quotation of note from the report:

"The [Arab] region’s low self sufficiency rate in staple foods is one of its most serious development gaps"

Meanwhile a totally new threat to Arab security has arisen that is far more dangerous than Israel or al Qaida: the rise in relative wealth in Asian countries, which creates more inelastic demand pressure on commodities’ prices, which in turn, when supply is constrained, creates sharp price increases, price increases that Arabs in the populous countries very often simply cannot afford.

The well-informed power brokers in the region are hardly blind to this problem; there are voices in Washington calling for massive food aid to Egypt while Saudi Arabia is mostly taking care of its own, stockpiling grain and buying up sub-Saharan farmland leases.

Both countries know how explosive this could be; life in the Middle East is tragically cheap, hunger and humiliation makes it cheaper, and millions of people with nothing to lose, well, even bullets cannot control them.

So, why this downer of a blog post? Well, it doesn’t matter if you read the New York Times’ optimism or the far Right’s fears of Islamic take-over, the fundamentals have been woefully underreported.

In a society where many of the thinkers on sustainability care more about whether their salad greens are esoteric-sounding than nutritious and who believe that it is perfectly fine to insist that per acreage yields be sacrificed for food grown with “heirloom” seeds, accidental DNA, accidental chemistry, and little economy of scale ---- while millions more people are getting hungry --- well, people are a lot less informed then they think they are.

Lest you think I am not enough a “Live and Let Live” type of person, believe me when I tell you I would be perfectly happy if the folks who think that feeding their kids cookies with locally grown, organic ingredients as opposed to a carrot is a hallmark of good parenthood would just keep their policies in their own households -- but they don’t. In fact, they’ve done grave harm to the world’s poor people already with their good-intentioned ludditism, and they want to do more.

Much more.

In just one sad example of many: Something amazing happened following the Haitian earthquake. 135 tons of various vegetable seeds were sent to Haitian ports.

Marching Haitians carrying signs with anti GMO slogans on them welcomed the seeds. These marchers were stirred up by non-Haiti based international NGOs. Some readers no doubt are nodding their heads in approval, but consider three things:

The seeds weren’t even GMO, they were Hybrid; farmers have been using hybrid seeds for over 100 years.
2. Hybrid seeds produce “heirloom” seeds as their progeny. You only have to buy more hybrid seeds if you like them. Hybrid seeds are just heirloom seeds that have been crossed. Just like farmer Fred did in 1870.

3. These NGOs did not send the desperate people of Haiti any “organic” seeds, or any other kind of seeds for that matter.

This is hardly a fluke incident. I could write an entire post detailing similar irresponsible ideology-driven tomfoolery going on in Africa. If I get time, maybe I will.

Sustainability can't just be about personal preferences. To be truly sustainable, it must address the growing issue of food insecurity in the world and consider the consequences of promoting inefficient production systems as superior to technologically and scientifically based ones.

Organic Pesticides Part 2

2011-03-24T13:36:00.004-04:00

By Sara Hessenflow Harper

So, I've gotten some interesting feedback on my last post, Organic Farming's Pesticide Problem. As often happens when I write something that challenges the conventional thinking of those who view organic as the ultimate food goal for us all -- I was accused of being merely a paid gun for the (synthetic) chemical industry as a means to dismiss the facts and scientific bits I brought forward for their consideration. To be clear, I don't have clients from the chemical or seed company world and I get no compensation from corporations, or anyone else for that matter for doing this blog. That doesn't mean that I would be opposed to working with them or anyone else, if I like what they are doing regarding sustainability.

What really amuses me about this repeated tactic is that so often it is they (organic extremists) who make outrageous claims about modern, high-tech, highly efficient agriculture with no proof and seemingly, no need to provide any scientific context or support for things they "just know" to be true -- like natural pesticides must be better than synthetic. So often folks who value the system of organic farming seem to value the system itself as the end goal, rather than engaging with the broader agricultural community in support of goals we all share: maintaining a safe, healthy, sustainably grown food supply.

My science-loving husband sent me a great piece from a June 2007 posting in the Tierney Lab, a science blog in the New York Times on the cancer-causing affects of pesticides (organic vs synthetic) and why its so important not to get hung up on these descriptions when looking at safety and sustainability. I highly encourage you to read the full posting by clicking here.

A particularly important excerpt from the NYT science blog:

"Dr. Ames was one of the early heroes of environmentalism. He invented the widely used Ames Test, which is a quick way to screen for potential carcinogens by seeing if a chemical causes mutations in bacteria. . . .

But Dr. Ames began rethinking this war against synthetic chemicals after thousands of chemicals had been subjected to his test. He noticed that plenty of natural chemicals flunked the Ames test. He and Dr. Gold took a systematic look at the chemicals that had been tested on rodents. They found that about half of natural chemicals tested positive for carcinogencity, the same proportion as the synthetic chemicals. Fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices contained their own pesticides that caused cancer in rodents. The toxins were found in apples, bananas, beets, Brussel sprouts, collard greens, grapes, melons, oranges, parsley, peaches — the list went on and on [........]

He and Dr. Gold note that “many ordinary foods would not pass the regulatory criteria used for synthetic chemicals,” but they’re not advocating banning broccoli or avoiding natural pesticides in foods that cause cancer in rodents. Rather, they suggest that Americans stop worrying so much about synthetic chemicals:
Regulatory efforts to reduce low-level human exposures to synthetic chemicals because they are rodent carcinogens are expensive; they aim to eliminate minuscule concentrations that now can be measured with improved techniques. These efforts are distractions from the major task of improving public health through increasing scientific understanding about how to prevent cancer (e.g., what aspects of diet are important), increasing public understanding of how lifestyle influences health, and improving our ability to help individuals alter their lifestyles."

The point here, again, is that the distinction between "natural" and "synthetic" is ultimately far less important than what these chemicals do and how they act on us and the environment. To say that something is inherently better because it is natural is to really misunderstand nature, and chemistry.

Nature is not some warm fuzzy thing just waiting for big bad people to mess up. Nature is a system with many complexities -- and humans are part of nature, not outside of it. We do ourselves and the planet a huge disservice by believing that something as complicated as our natural system can be reduced to moral, human-created terms such as "good" or "bad." There are positive natural chemicals that can be used in ways that reduce the consequences we as humans find objectionable, but that is a far cry from giving everything that is "natural" a free pass from critical analysis. At the same time, just because human beings can make a chemical doesn't mean that its automatically a good or bad thing.

Critical analysis and scientific study, my friends, is the only way that we can be sure that we are making progress and to get a better understanding for the side-effects or consequences that just simply are a part of working within a complex system. Let's agree that no category is off limits from the scrutiny of study, ok?

I mentioned in my previous post that some of the natural pesticides used in organic farming can be quite toxic. Upon doing a little more research on the chemical of rotenone I discovered the EPA banned its use as an accepted pesticide for organic farming, or any other kind of farming a few years ago. Imagine that! In fact, a Feb 2011 National Institutes of Health (NIH) study found:

"New research shows a link between use of two pesticides, rotenone and paraquat [actually a non-specific herbicide], and Parkinson's disease. People who used either pesticide developed Parkinson's disease approximately 2.5 times more often than non-users."

So, prior to EPA banning rotenone, for example, organic farm workers pulling weeds where this natural chemical had been applied may now face a double than average risk of developing Parkinson's Disease!! This is a real occupational health threat, mostly because organic farming is more labor intensive - but you don't see big environmentalist ad campaigns out about it because . . . it's a natural chemical, used by traditional peoples, no less.

Just as there can be unintended consequences from using human-made chemicals, so too are there consequences for assuming the superiority of one chemical over another because it is made by nature to kill bugs, rather than by people -- to do the same thing.

When we apply critical analysis to all chemical use -- natural, or synthetic, we have the best chance of avoiding or minimizing unwanted side effects from their use. We are also in a better position to see the trade-offs that could come with making the choice to not use these chemicals at all -- which would likely be far less food production at a time when the world needs far more. Encouraging a policy choice with such big implications deserves more research and less automatic assumption.

Organic Farming's Pesticide Problem

2011-03-21T10:00:00.005-04:00

Philosophy and emotion have their place in our society, but it is dangerous to use deductive reasoning and feelings as the means of assessing something as complex as the sustainability of our agricultural system. People who narrowly define agricultural sustainability as "Slow, Local & Organic," often do so because they believe that these structures or means are superior without knowing the full scientific story.

Take the issue of pesticides . . . for a majority of the public, "organic" likely means "no pesticide was used" in their minds, but this is not the case. Life, and chemistry, is a bit more complicated than that.

Many organic crops use pesticides; some are quite toxic and their use can have more negative environmental impacts than some synthetic ones. The only thing that makes an “organic” product different than a conventionally grown crop, pesticide-wise, is a conceptual bright-line drawn between chemicals that were synthesized by a non-human organism versus ones made by mankind.

The problem with this bright-line is that when an agricultural chemical is made by people for human use, you can be pretty confident that the people making it have peoples’ interests in mind. When it is made by a different species, you can be pretty sure those things are not a priority at the time they were synthesized.

Now, I’m not trying to say that all organically produced crops have more or more dangerous pesticides in them. Blueberries, for instance, are now notorious for absorbing at least some pesticides -- but blueberries that are raised “wild” like lowbush varieties in Maine use virtually no pesticides. In cases like this, if you are worried about pesticides, buying Organic may make sense.

In many other cases, it does not.

Not yet at least. This is because of that conceptual bright-line mentioned above. Instead of organic growers asking Is this chemical more dangerous to humans? And does this chemical persist in the environment? -- they are asking first Was this chemical made by man, or by “nature?”

This is a philosophical and unscientific distinction.

In fact, it is a vestige of a materialistic vitalism wherein al-chemists believed that certain chemicals contained “vital force” that could not be synthesized by chemists. Oddly, the area of chemistry called “organic chemistry” also gets its name from these beliefs, and the name has stuck even well after scientists have discovered that one could synthesize these chemicals (one of the first of these was, coincidently, the fertilizer urea which is non-toxic and identical no matter where it comes from), and that many “organic” chemicals are in fact anything but life-bringing. (Such as VOC’s, Volatile Organic Compounds, the things that give you a headache when you paint a room.) So, while people have a mysterious “vital spark” that makes them live, chemicals do not, and chemists today consider the “organic” designation rather arbitrary, since they know they can synthesize any “organic” chemical from “inorganic” precursors.

Now, indeed, there are certainly things to fear about a world that is unregulated and ignorant of the dangers of chemicals. Up until the 1950s, arsenic (!) was the most widely used pesticide in the United States. Oh, it killed bugs all right!

And, don’t worry, it’s not man-made, it occurs naturally.

But the fact that arsenic is both persistent and also deadly to mammals eventually made it cede the ground to DDT when it gained in popularity in the 1950s due to the fact that DDT was much less toxic to humans than arsenic. In fact, Paul Hermann Mueller received a Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering how effectively DDT kills bugs; it was well-earned.

Not that I’m suggesting DDT is the safest choice. It has negative effects on humans and animals as it bioaccumulates. But for the time, it was a giant step forward.

Today’s pesticides are, according to the EPA, safe in the levels we ingest them, no matter whether it is an inspected crop from agribusiness or from a small organic farm. That is, if they fall under the same regulations, which small organic farmers have resisted falling under.

Why is this? Why should we assume that organic farmers that use Rotenone, a substance first used by South American Indians to paralyze fish to make them float to the surface -- and also a substance that a study showed small amounts caused Parkinson’s disease in rodents, are bringing a safer product to market? A more “natural” product, perhaps, to a tinieth degree, and most likely a safe one, but probably not a safer one.

And I care why? Because the organically grown one is a more expensive product, and people have a history of being fooled by deceptive marketing. If American consumers are spending more for products that are safer and better for the environment then I want those products to be safer and better for the environment.

See, meanwhile, many people are making the claim that "industrial ag" as they call it, is spewing chemicals and fertilizer all over the place. Bad Chemicals. Perhaps the most toxic they can find. The technological advances that they are sure are beneficial on a college campus are somehow a bad thing in the fields. Improving just about anything is just fine except when it comes to the chemicals we use to deal with life, these people are saying in effect.

Of course, the farmer is not their chosen villain in this story; it’s the dastardly chemical and fertilizer companies who have tricked the unwitting farmer into paying for these wasteful, unnecessary and environmentally damaging inputs. This belief forms the underpinning for why buying organic and local is so beneficial in their minds. Were these people all mere counterculturists of some kind, the effect of this ignorance would be limited. Unfortunately, many of these people are very competent in their chosen fields, mostly outside of farming and the hard sciences. Worse, sometimes they are even scientists and professors who are teaching our future leaders. This has a big impact on the world-view in our cities.

A chemist knows that chemicals produced inside living things do not have a soul or a halo of health about them that synthetic chemicals do not have. Chemicals are often dangerous. Period. A plant does not care if a chemical it produces is toxic to humans (or, it might even be pleased…) nor does it want the chemical to break down quickly. The truth that any microbiologist knows is that the most dangerous toxins known are produced by these natural, organic “chemists”; nothing is more toxic, by weight, than the toxins that cause tetanus or botulism, and both are made naturally within organisms.

In fact, the top ten most toxic chemicals are all made organically by organisms; ricin is made by a bean, others are made by coral, fungi and fish. But a human chemist wants something highly effective AND highly safe, since he is competing with all the other plant and human chemists who came before him.

The result of ignoring this basic science is a class of farmers who get a sort of “free pass” (organic farmers) regarding the environmental impacts of their pesticide use (because the chemicals they use, while toxic to a degree, are “natural”), and another class who are encumbered only by efficacy, safety and environmental impacts, not by ideology. So in effect proponents of organic farming are asking that farmers use “accidental” chemicals that can be less effective, used in larger quantities and have greater impacts on the environment and human health. We don’t restrict ourselves to “accidental” organic medicines, like penicillin; if a chemist comes up with a more specific or more effective antibiotic, we say “bravo!”

There are studies out there that illustrate these very points. Here’s one that shows that many more applications of a cocktail of organic pesticides must be made to achieve the effect of just one application of a low-impact synthetic pesticide:

And here, a study showing that some organic pesticides not only don’t work as well, but also had greater environmental impacts when compared with some synthetic pesticides:

Another issue proponents of local agriculture in particular fail to consider is an entirely different kind of toxin. A toxin that is rather unacknowledged but is especially relevant to the “local” part of the SLO (small, local, organic) movement, because “local” usually means “near urban centers” since that is where we find big markets for food.

This “stealth” toxin is lead. Urban garden plots are often full of it. When Michelle Obama planted her garden outside the White House, things got off to a slow start because someone had the foresight to check for lead. There were elevated levels --nothing too scary -- but still over the legal limit in the Netherlands. This is sometimes a far more dangerous problem for local gardeners whose urban plots have lead levels damaging to small children.

Lest you think differently, I am all for the evolution of conventional agriculture to move more towards “working with nature,” which they often are already doing. Absolutely. I think all farmers look forward to continuing to learn and adjust towards this goal in the coming years. I just want this process to be real progress, and not just some brand of reheated mysticism.

Ultimately, the point here is the same resounding point I usually try to drive home: it is about finding a balanced approach, not a short-cut (like only buying organic) that assumes one system is always inherently better than another without the facts to back up that belief.

In terms of the sustainability issue, if we are looking for ways that enable us to feed the world with the least impact on the planet, why would we take highly scientific, targeted chemical tools off the table in favor of accidental "natural" options that may cause more damage? Is that really sustainable?

Shifting Winds on Sustainable Ag

2011-03-03T15:47:00.005-05:00

By Sara Hessenflow Harper

Redefining a topic takes effort and multiple messengers. Once people have a belief or perception in their head, its hard to replace it -- even with facts, sometimes especially with facts. So it is with the term "sustainable agriculture" and "sustainable food." But there are some indications that a new, more pragmatic way of thinking about these issues is making its way into the mainstream media.

Many people seem to have come to the belief that only small scale, local and organic production is sustainable. One of the points I have tried to drive home is that aside from being factually debatable that these practices are in and of themselves sustainable; these practices certainly are not the answer to our global sustainability challenges as we face some 3 billion more people joining the planet by 2050. This inconvenient fact often gets lost in the shuffle of folks feeling good about buying organic -- but the ugly truth is that if most American farms switched to organic, there would be far less available food at a time when the world already has trouble keeping pact with the existing population.

As I have seen in numerous discussions with folks who earnestly believe they are doing the better thing for their health and the planet by buying SLO (small-scale, local, organic), this theory falls apart if they are forced to consider the needs of millions of poor and starving people (and the millions more on the way) around the world. If we are all "voting with our forks" as people are encouraged to do by organic proponents, then stop to consider thefull ramifications of what you are voting for. You are voting for the production of less food overall for the planet and its people will certainly suffer greatly for that choice.

Ok, its all fine and good for me to keep saying that - and for most of you, my dear readers who usually agree with me as well; but now we are starting to see a new messenger bringing forth a call for common sense and sanity. Yes friends, some environmentalists are now brave enough to say what we have known for some time. I say they are brave because it is always brave to go against the grain of your own community.

Yesterday, I was happy to read on the New York Times sustainability blog, Dot Earth, about a "hybrd path to feeding 9 billion people on a still-green planet." The post details the work of environmentalist Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund to try to help find solutions to the global challenges to natural resources that come with needing to feed everyone. I was particularly pleased to see a positive discussion of the role that genetic engineered and hybrid seeds will play in getting us to a place where we can meet humanity's needs without gobbling up every square inch of land for use in agriculture:

"The genetic work he describes includes all uses of genetic research to improve plant productivity or farming efficiency. Genetic modification, the realm of the GMO’s that are anathema to some environmentalists and much of Europe, is a subset of that arena. [At the Climate, Mind and Behavior Conference of the Garrison Institute on Thursday, Clay laid out the logic behind working with big corporations to foster food production that can fit on a finite planet. He made a point that he stressed at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of science: "In the next 40 years we're going to have to produce as much food as was produced in last 8,000."]"

Jason lays out his thinking in more detail in a draft paper describing constructive ways for us to meet the daunting needs of future generations while balancing conservation and preservation of the planet that is home to us all. You may not agree with everything he says, but you should greatly appreciate the approach he is taking. By that I mean that he is offering pragmatic solutions to get to where we all ultimately want to be: in balance. It is really refreshing to see this kind of thinking come from an environmentalist working for a major national group -- to see that there is recognition from some within that sector that the challenges we face are too large to be petty and parochial. There is no better way to open the minds of those who look down on the technology and efficiency ag uses than to show them that it is not just the ag industry that understands its value, but increasingly there are informed environmentalists with a global view that value efficient ag as well.

In perhaps another sign of the shifting winds on this topic, I saw a very interesting piece today in the online version of The Atlantic magazine by contributor James McWilliams, history professor at Texas State University that provides a critical look at what he refers to as the "elitist fetish" of the foodie / sustainable food movement:

"Essentially the message sustainable foodies end up of delivering goes something like this: Only a few can eat the way we eat, but the way we eat is the best way to achieve social and environmental justice. Join us if you can. If you can't, that's too bad for you, because we're eating high on the hog and, in so doing, saving the earth."

McWilliams details a number of examples that show there is more behind the foodie movement than food - that in fact, there are a whole host of psychological and social elements that are helping to construct what a small but growing segment of people believe to be the best way to grow food. By exposing that some of what's going on here is the age-old desire for humans to make themselves superior to others rather than a real fact-based focus on food and how its grown; the author helps bring an opportunity for self-reflection for the foodies out there. Of course, such opportunities are often not welcomed, but they have a funny way of re-shaping public opinion over time.

"Foodies never—and I mean never—ask the critical Kantian question: what if everyone in the world consumed these supposedly sustainable alternatives to conventional food?"

What I find refreshing is that in the span of the last two days, there are pieces in the New York Times and The Atlantic that showcase a common sense perspective that is quite different from the usual coverage of sustainable food and sustainable agriculture. Could it be that the winds are shifting in favor of a more pragmatic focus on agricultural sustainability issues? I hope so!

Sustainability's Life Blood: Transparent Data

2011-02-22T21:39:00.010-05:00

By Sara Hessenflow Harper

Data can be a funny thing. With it, we can begin to get an objective picture of a problem or a solution. But how clear that picture is depends on the quality of the data and the full transparency of its assumptions and error range. Without data to show the true progress, complexities and trade-offs surrounding a given choice, people put forward their own beliefs about which practices are superior. It is not just nature that abhors a vacuum, people do to! These beliefs have a funny way of growing stronger and becoming part of the identity of those who espouse them; dangerously inviting people to promote and believe their own biases rather than being open to where the facts may lead. Because these beliefs become interwoven with a person's identity, trying to challenge these beliefs with fact is often interpreted as a personal attack. The result is a an atmosphere that dampens or even prevents the objective search for truth in favor of protecting people's feelings.

Enter a group of farmers who are developing data sets on nutrient management, crop protection and yield enhancement practices that are specific to their own farms and fully transparent (in the aggregate). Called the On-Farm Network, this effort is helping farmers to more efficiently use fertilizer (among other inputs) which helps prevent non-point source runoff that contributes to water quality problems and also saves the farmer money since fertilizer is expensive and using it more precisely means less likelihood of over-application. Farmer participants are applying scientific inquiry on their own lands so they are not only developing farm-specific data which will enable them to make better decisions for their triple bottom line (profit, people, planet), they are also presenting a very helpful model for navigating the often emotionally fraught process of assessing sustainability. While this is not their goal, it can be an outcome nonetheless.

I spent yesterday in central Iowa at the 2011 On-Farm Network conference which featured presentations from soil scientists and the network's environmentalist partner who have conducted trials on farmer participants lands looking at a range of practices that together help comprise something called adaptive management. (Check out some of the webinars from the 2010 conference by clicking here.)

The On-Farm Network approach is based on an understanding that research into things like nutrient management and pest control is only as good as the inputs assumed and that because of the high variability involved in soils, farm practices and weather; state-prescribed averages rarely hit the mark on individual farms.

The process usually involves farmers signing up to be part of a trial on a given practice, like applying a certain amount of hog manure at a certain time of the year, say Spring to see if results are better than the general prescribed state average they usually follow. Farmers will conduct this test practice on a 3 strips within one of their fields. At the end of harvest, soil and plant tests are done, aerial images evaluated and yield differences measured to detect change from the farmers usual practice (done on the rest of the field). To get a better understanding of this process, take a look below at a list of steps they go through as part of testing nutrient management for corn:

Evaluate the current practice (example: corn stalk test for existing nitrogen levels)
Evaluate uniformity of application of existing practice
Evaluate rate of current nitrogen or manure application
Evaluate the alternative or test practice
Evaluate the rate of the alternative practice (strip trials in the field)
Evaluate the potential for spatial variation
Evaluate the overall difference between current and alternative practice

The On-Farm Network started as a project of the Iowa Soybean Association to test out different farming practices and their effects on farm profitability and the environment. Key to the effort's success has been the network's partnerships. The network benefits from the participation of numerous soil scientists and nutrient management experts from a multiple universities that conduct the research. Importantly, the network also has a partner from the environmental community -- gaining technical expertise, environmental credibility and funding from its partner Environmental Defense Fund.

This impressive network of farmers has spread from Iowa to now include the states of Minnesota, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, North Carolina and Virginia.

What's really interesting about the On-Farm Network example is that it demonstrates so clearly that the economic bottom line and environmental protection are often directly linked in farming. Since this is a natural resource business, protection of the environment becomes part of protecting the underlying business assets: the land, water, air -- all of which need to be in long-term good condition to support continuous sustainable growth.

Too often, proponents of sustainability want to make the case that profit leads to environmental degradation. While that may be true in some sectors, it is not as true in farming. For example, if a farmer cares only about this year or next year's harvest and doesn't take proper care of the land, he/she will pay dearly for that in lost yield over time as the land is less able to perform. The most successful farmers have long realized that their profitability is directly tied to the quality of the resources they manage and therefore have both emotional (family-owned land) and economic incentives to care for it well.

The public, is often unaware of this dynamic. When farmers are called "corporate" and "industrial" by some environmental activists, the intended implication is that large, efficient farms can't be a good thing precisely because they are big. I used to angrily feel that these aspersions were made by people who knew better but had an agenda to push. With more experience and thought, I've come to understand that people who hold this point of view, usually do so because they have NO experience with farming beyond the local farmers market which they adore. They are merely applying what they think they know about corporate corruption to all businesses of any size without understanding the intense difference that exists when your businesses is the land.

As the On-Farm website notes:

"Being a part of this proactive approach to environmentalism gives growers solid scientific data they can use to demonstrate that they are managing their resources properly and in a way that minimizes negative environmental impact."

Efforts like this are critical for farmers to save money, for improving one of the most challenging water quality challenges the U.S. faces and for setting the right tone on sustainability assessment. The data this process is uncovering is showing just how difficult it is to find the right balance of which fertilizer or manure type to use and when to apply it because of the complexities and multiple weather-related variables involved in how nitrogen breaks down in the environment.

For those who want to apply simplistic prescriptions or certifications of sustainability on complex issues like this, the On-Farm data shows just how detrimental to the environment that approach can be. Only by doing careful, direct research have farmers found better ways to target their nutrient use. These practices are leading to overall reductions in the use of too much nitrogen that ends up running off into waterbodies. Because of the massive variability in conditions (soil, weather) from one farm to the next, true sustainability requires a targeted, site-specific approach that often doesn't translate well into broad sustainability score which must make simple assumptions about complex issues.

The desire for greater sustainability by the public is a good thing, but the attempt to slap a "sustainable" or "unsustainable" label on highly variable systems like growing food can actually undermine the stated goals.

Efficient, Intensive Farms Good for Climate?

2011-02-11T15:18:00.005-05:00

By Sara Hessenflow Harper

My husband often scoffs when he hears people talk about certain energy-saving home improvements. For example: putting an expensive solar array on their homes. It’s not that he isn’t environmentally minded; ask him and he’ll say something like most of their energy bill is from climate control. If they have big energy bills now, trying to heat with solar will be like trying to heat a bus kiosk with a curling iron. He’ll then go on to bemoan the fact that caulk isn’t sexy enough for some people.

His spirit was vindicated when I found a report by McKinsey and Company that draws a Global Greenhouse Gasses Abatement Cost Curve for various ways the world could reduce its emissions. The graphic shows there are many things society is aware of that will reduce the amount of emissions (like caulking) without impacting quality of life (like turning down the heat in winter, which he also does). It shows that there are many emissions-reducing things out there that more than pay for themselves --- and there are things that are downright expensive. We’re not talking “capital intensive” here; many things with high upfront costs will pay for themselves quite soon, and keep on paying for themselves.

The report makes mention that it is not interested in the debate about climate change or its impacts. It remains officially agnostic about that.

To give you a sense of the sorts of things that are on the extremes of the Cost Curve, the things that remove the most tons of CO2 equivalent from the atmosphere per buck spent are: more efficient lighting, electronics, retrofitting insulation (caulk!) and climate control systems ---- while the things that remove very little per dollar spent are: various power plant carbon capture technological retrofits which don’t come anywhere near paying for themselves, and alternative energy (like solar!). The McKinsey report created the cost curve because the writers feel that by focusing on first implementing the measures that are productive in themselves (by saving money) we can then focus on things that actually cost more than they save, like solar arrays.

So, how does this all apply to agriculture? Well, McKinsey has identified agriculture as one of three major areas where major reductions in emissions can total 38 Gigatons CO2 equivalent per year in 2030 relative to annual “business as usual” emissions of 70 Gigatons CO2 equivalent per year.

Some of these agricultural changes will be expensive to society; some will actually save society money, or, in other words, make society wealthier.

What are the changes we should be making right now to both reduce our emissions and save money? According to the McKinsey report the biggest bang for our buck would be Better Cropland Nutrient Management followed by better Tillage and Residue Management. Some large-scale farmers are already far ahead of others with these best practices, and they are often rewarded with more profit. Unfortunately, because we currently don't have a way to rate the sustainability of commodities, there's no way to know if the corn, wheat or soy in your processed food is grown in this very responsible way. Unless you know farming pretty well, you may not realize that large-scale farmers are doing many of these types of emission saving practices that also provide water quality and quantity savings, expand wildlife habitat and increase soil fertility over time.

Some of the biggest ag emissions reducing costs to society are reducing the amount of land converted to intensive agriculture* and the related various ways that land can be taken out of agricultural use and turned back into bog, grassland and forest. Needless to say, agriculture will need to squeeze as much food out of an acre as possible to take land out of production, since the trend, especially in places like South America, has been putting new land into production. Here again, the average consumer is often unaware of the link between overall global environmental preservation and intensive, efficient U.S. production on existing farmland.

It’s a really neat report. Just about everything you need to know about its 189 pages is summed up in the cost-curve chart. The recommendations on agriculture start on page 123.You can easily down load the full report by clicking here.

*It should be noted that land that has already been converted to intensive agriculture does not seem to have any continuing adverse effects after the first years, i.e., turning prairie into farmland has some negative effects initially, but keeping the land non-prairie does not.

Bottom line: spread the word that some key practices used by efficient and successful U.S. farmers can be a big part of reducing GHG emissions in some of the most cost effective ways possible. The more that large, efficient farms stay highly productive here, the less new land will be converted into new farmland abroad -- something that creates high GHG emissions. And that's just a byproduct of producing some of the healthiest, most nutritious food on the planet!!

Shangri-La And A Hungry Planet

2011-02-08T17:04:00.005-05:00

An opinion piece in the February 2nd Wall Street Journal recently caught my attention. It called for a re-start of the Green Revolution. Why?

“The U.N.’s food price index has hit an all-time high. Food price hikes are widely understood to be a trigger of Egyptian upheavals in a country that imports a large share of its grain. Some blame Ben Bernanke. Some blame the Chinese for gobbling up too much of the world’s resources. Not enough attention is focused on the forces of stagnation loose in our world. Agricultural output has been falling behind population growth for almost two decades, and so has productivity.”

What does the author single out for blame for both the long term and short term effects? Mediterranean (a la Greece and Italy) style shielding of small-scale industry from competition in the form of now unsuccessful efforts to ban the use of gene splicing in alfalfa to protect organic farmers! The problem, I would argue, is bigger than that, but he makes a convincing case that such behavior is a part of the problem – a problem that is getting ever more frightening.

Now, the Green Revolution was the increase in mankind’s food security through the use of new technologies that included hybridized grains, infrastructure improvements, and, most especially, artificial inputs that are derived from fossil fuels. It was epitomized by the IR8 strain of rice that, with those artificial inputs, produced ten times the rice compared to rice grown from traditional efforts. Dubbed the “miracle rice”, IR8 brought India from the brink of famine to a new status as a major rice exporter.

What is termed the Green Revolution is really just a small part of a larger revolution that is still occurring: the Fossil Fuel Revolution. The Fossil Fuel Revolution has done a great deal to promote human rights, minority rights and child and animal welfare since the human and animal energies that formerly were a necessary input to virtually all human productivity have been replaced first by coal and later by oil and natural gas. How do I justify this theory? The fact that an unprecedented and extremely rapid rise in rights coincided with an equally unprecedented and rapid flowering of labor saving technology that enabled the developed world to free children first from cottage industry and later from the mills, mines and farms, putting them in school.

Coal was first used extensively in England. In 1700, 5/6 of all coal mined was in England. By the early 1800s, England passed the first laws limiting child labor and “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” and “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen” the first such treatises, were published before the century was over. Just as coal saved the trees of Europe, the distillation of kerosene from petroleum in the 1850s* saved the whales . . . and, it turbocharged workers’ rights. Less than ten years later the United States would be fighting its biggest war in history over the legality of slavery, and by 1900 most of the world had abolished it. Coincidences? Perhaps. But follow the trajectory of labor rights, the shortening of the workweek, and the empowerment of women and minorities, and you will find the same clear correlation I have. Simply put, humans were freed from many of the most labor-intensive parts of life by fossil fuels and as a result, had the capacity for the change that eventually occurred. Eventually, even the horse was freed. If you have a better explanation, please let me know.

We tend to focus entirely on the bad elements of fossil fuels these days -- the pollution, even roping in the unsavory business practices of the Rockefellers and the Sheiks, while totally taking for granted all that we have because of fossil fuels. The Time, the Freedom, and the lack of Want. Meanwhile, we talk as if there existed viable full-scale replacements for fossil fuels when there are not. This does not mean that we shouldn’t be looking to reduce and replace our fossil fuels consumption; what it does mean is that fossil fuels should be given their due instead of thought of as Original Sin.

I'm not trying to say that fossil fuels have no problems. Too often in discussions about complex matters, advocates want to push the subject material into easily defined Black Hat and White Hat actors. Sure, there are trade-offs to using fossil fuels and we should continue to use technology to mitigate, reduce or replace them as we can. But it is technology that will enable the next phase of human development, not wishful thinking.

As often happens with us, two things have occurred because of fossil fuels bounty: 1. Huge population growth resulting from the benefits of the technology and the ability to grow substantially more food. We’ve become victims of our own success. 2. We don’t appreciate what we’ve got; in many ways the developed world’s middle class live much like the wealthy of centuries ago. Certainly a far larger percentage of people live in relative comfort than ever before.

Oh, and a lot of us are getting fat -- another luxury problem people didn't used to have.

But, America, we might have a problem. There are several corners of the intellectual world warning that we cannot rely as much as we have on fossil fuels. The Big Ideas out there are of course that we are changing the climate (for the worse) and that we will run out of fossil fuel.

If either of these ideas is true, we are in big trouble. Simply put, we are nowhere NEAR having the alternatives to our present food system. Talk of switching from annuals to perennials for our caloric base, moving to entirely non fossil fueled sources of nitrogen, and anything else, leaves a huge, scary deficit in the equation that equals the calories seven billion people need to survive, not to mention the three billion more people expected to be around by 2050.

But this I know for sure, meeting these challenges will come out of human ingenuity and the new technology that results -- just as it did with the development of fossil fuels and genetic engineering of seeds.

So, I am willing to meet both the environmental and the resources Malthusians half way; the costs may reach a crisis point. But I am not willing to seriously entertain a back-to-the-land “food democracy” of small-scale farmers the kind that populated the plains before the dust bowl, nor a return to a mythical “golden age of agriculture” where man lived “in harmony with nature” as potential solutions. Small organic farms as a food source for the masses were not only famously unreliable, the tilling necessary tended to make anything larger than a garden prone to significant erosion and environmental impact.

Some thinkers have focused on a very creative way to revolutionize agriculture: crossbreeding the annual crops we farm to survive with unproductive perennial varieties, or breed perennials until they get something as productive as wheat. This would solve a lot of our agricultural environmental problems (to which organic farming contributes), but because they are unwilling to use new genetic modification techniques, even the perennials proponents admit they will need decades before they reach a breakthrough.

Given that amount of time, other solutions may be developed first, or one or another Malthusian crisis may arrive. In the meantime, I’ll take the proven incremental productivity gains of GM crops and advances in fertilizer application and utilization. To denigrate the capacity of these technologies in light of no other readily available alternative is like those who demonize the oil industry -- but drive a car to the protest.

So, we don’t need a “new” Green Revolution, we just need to not abandon the one that is continuing in the present day. The most productivity gains are currently being made with gene splicing and more effective applications of fertilizer, pesticide and herbicides. These right now are the Low Hanging Fruit. We can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good -- and too often sustainable agriculture proponents seem to take that approach.

So, who is against this? A lot of folks. They often think they are taking a holistic view of things, but their thinking is clouded by dreams of “food democracy,” and Paradise Refound. It may be true that large-scale agronomists will need to look more closely at how natural ecosystems flourish to lessen environmental impacts, but a return to the pre-dust bowl slogans of “Every Man A Landlord” would herald a disaster if followed through on. Why must the solution be to abandon technology which has made life freer, easier and given us the time to pursue things like literature, art and organics?

It is hard to debate seriously the facts with someone once they have got “religion.” One must wade through all sorts of high-minded platitudes, (“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings." says Masanobu Fukuoka) to confront them with the facts that demand some kind of realistic compromising “that sounds nice, how are we going to feed seven billion people with this philosophy?” Yet even then, there is never any guarantee you will get anywhere.

What I have learned from engaging in many discussions on these issues with folks that often disagree with me, is that context is incredibly important. If you can place the current set of circumstances in its proper context, and informed by facts that can be as close to objective as possible, you have a whole new opportunity to find some meeting of the minds.

Technology, whether it be in the form of a new fuel or a new seed, has been and will continue to be critical for meeting sustainability challenges. Turning our back on it out of some false sense of superiority or glorification of the past, would be a terrible mistake, especially in light of news that China, the world's largest wheat producer may be facing a major drought.

Let the progress in renewables continue, while we remember that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

*This liquid is the future wealth of the country, it's the wellbeing and prosperity of its inhabitants, it's a new source of income for the poor, and a new branch of industry which shall bear plentiful fruit. - Ignacy Łukasiewicz (1854)

Big Farm Philanthropy: A Secret that Shouldn't Be Kept!

2011-02-02T11:56:00.003-05:00

Last week I was on a panel talking about agriculture, sustainability and the role of the commercial producer at the Tomorrow's Top Producer Seminar in Chicago. One of the points I and others made is that sustainability is a multi-faceted concept and includes the things that farmers do to care for their community and for communities far away as well as what they do to care for the land and the surrounding environment.

At the seminar, I heard about the Farmers Feeding the World campaign, which is a Farm Journal Foundation initiative that teams up with Heifer International to help impoverished families break the cycle of poverty by providing them with livestock, education/training and organizational development assistance. Their approach is summed up in the founder, Dan West's oft-used saying "Not a cup, but a cow," similar to the whole "teach a man to fish . . ." saying. The group provides poor populations with a gift of livestock as a means of creating personal wealth for their family and ultimately, their community as they are able to expand their small farm business.

This effort is indeed a noble one - being supported by many large-scale and small scale farmers who no doubt, will not get a press release passed around explaining the good they are enabling. I know that is not why they are doing it -- and the farm culture tends to generally frown upon putting out too much publicity or "bragging" about these things, but it is important for the public to know that today's large-scale, efficient agricultural operators are not only providing us with a healthy and abundant supply of food -- but they are also in many cases, deeply connected in the process of helping the less fortunate both here and around the world.

Even if you do hear about the occasional big campaign like the one I just described, chances are you won't hear about the amazing individual efforts that farmers have enacted as policy on their farms. I only know about some of these actions because I work with a group of amazing farmers on sustainability issues -- and in the process of cataloging what it is they do that contributes to their overall sustainability, I have learned a great deal.

Take for example, one of the farm operations I work with that has a policy to provide college scholarships for all the children of their employees who have been with them for 5 years or longer. Or the operation that gives generously to the local rural hospital and community college enabling the creation of a heli-pad with life flight service to the surrounding rural areas and the ability for the community college to continue serving as a rural training outpost. Then there are the farmers I know that serve as members of the school board, donate to their county fairs and the local school projects every year, provide scholarships for ag-related careers and have a "buy local when possible" policy in place. These folks are large-scale agricultural producers -- and their success means the community around them succeeds too.

Too often, there seems to be a default assumption by those championing the cause 0f the environment, that small must always be better and big is akin to bad. I challenge my friends who think that way to get to know some of these people and what they are doing for their community. You might just find that the same skills that make these folks successful businesspeople are also being used quietly to help spur rural community investment and wellness.

I'm not trying to say that all large farms are always model community supporters. There are always good and bad actors in all areas of life. But more often than not, large-scale or commercial ag producers are very invested in their communities because they know that this is both smart business as well as the right thing to do. Large scale producers grew up in these small towns and have a lot to do with why many rural areas are still able to exist.

When thinking about what makes agriculture sustainable, please remember the charitable and community focused support that the ag industry has a long history of providing.

Is “Grass Fed” Beef Sustainable?

2011-01-31T08:23:00.005-05:00

By Sara Hessenflow Harper

Most people stumbling upon this blog know that there has been a move by a group of consumers towards desiring an ideal beef that comes from a cow that has foraged its whole life on a diverse diet up to the day it meets its end.

Why is this desirable? Well, the thinking is manifold. It is assumed that “grass-fed” beef is healthier, the cows were happier and healthier when they were alive, and there is less of an environmental impact when cows are munching on fibrous weeds the day before they are turned into a steak.

I am going to focus on environmental impact here, though anyone who truly cares about the environment must also take a holistic approach. I’ll do that too.

First off, there seems to be a MAJOR misconception amongst the “Small, Local, Organic” crowd about “Corn-fed” cattle. These folks, who can hardly be blamed for their cultural rearing which is totally disconnected from agriculture, believe that beef cattle mostly are born penned behind a trough of corn, and spend their whole lives force-fed grain.

This image is almost completely false.

In reality, “Grass-fed” and “Corn-fed” cattle should really be called “Grass-finished” and “Corn-finished” (or, better yet, Grain-finished, but we’ll get to that later), since, for the majority of every beef cow’s life, it grazes on pasture.

Since the days of pre-history, animals have been fed a rich diet shortly before the slaughter, as anyone who is familiar with the “killing the fatted calf” metaphor knows. It was known by small scale ranchers in ancient times that feeding pasture raised animals a richer diet during the pre-slaughter months yielded more, and tastier, meat.

So it is with modern feed-lots. Cows who have spent most of their lives grazing on pasture are brought to feed lots to increase per-cow meat yield, which is especially important during the winter months, when foraging is “slim pickings.”

So, enough background; does Grass-finished beef beat Grain-finished in either land use or energy use metrics?

No.

In fact, I was a little surprised to learn this myself, but grain-finished beef blows grass finished out of the water by both measures. This was shown in a Washington State University life-cycle analysis that found grass-finished cattle took more than twice as much energy and three times the land to produce, per pound. Also, in terms of “cow lives” grass finished takes 4 lives for every 3 that grain finished does to produce the same amount of meat.

Also, the Program on Food Security and the Environment and Stanford university has calculated in a study published in the Protocols of the National academy of sciences that yield intensification in agriculture generally has "avoided emissions of up to 161 gigatons of carbon [greenhouse gas] into the atmosphere since 1961."

Knowing a little history, these results shouldn’t be too surprising for most of human history is filled with the reality of pasture land being one of the world’s most valuable, and fought-over resources. This has even been the case recently in places like Africa. It only stands to reason that our ancestors would have long ago set to figuring out how to most efficiently use this very limited (esp. in ancient times) resource.

Also, a good proxy for how much energy something costs is price. Look at how much grass-fed beef costs, and how much the regular corn-finished beef at your local supermarket costs. Got it? Now, try not to dismiss this as unimportant. Many people will say “I’ll pay more to save the environment.” -- well, just make sure you aren’t being ripped off.

There are of course many, many environmental groups who want things both ways. They want to be champions of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but when the folks who can best do this are large scale producers, they for some reason don’t advocate for it, choosing to focus on hormones or aesthetic considerations. But it should be clear from a reading of just the two studies above that a major move toward grass-finishing would require clearing a lot more land and energy for grazing, even if world-side beef consumption remains static.

Something worth considering is what all that demand for grass-fed beef will do to sensitive eco-systems like the rainforests of Brazil? Is creating demand for clear cutting forests in order to graze larger numbers of cattle really more desirable than feeding them corn in one of the most efficient animal agricultural systems? Or could it be that many of the folks who passionately buy grass-fed beef have a nostalgic, but completely uninformed view of this industry and believe that feeding cattle grass must be better for the environment as well as for themselves?

Okay, now, how about the product itself? If you don’t really care about the relative environmental sustainability of your beef, but do about nutrition and taste, which should you choose?

While it has been proven by Kansas State University that grass-finished beef has higher amounts of certain beneficial fats and anti-oxidant precursors, like Omega-3 and beta carotene for example, price-sensitive customers should note that even grass-finished beef is still not a very good source for anything other than what is also in the less expensive grain finished variety, namely protein. Nutritional considerations for the price-sensitive quickly become of the “penny wise, pound foolish” variety since vegetables and wild fish are far better sources for these more beneficial substances.

Regardless, there are in fact ways to improve the nutritional profile of grain finished beef. Both alfalfa and flax are more nutrient rich than is grass, and research has shown that feeding cattle a 10% flaxseed blend with grain can not only provide us with a grain finished beef that is higher in omega-3s and CLAs than grass-fed, but improves the weight, health and quality of the cow over conventional feed lot diets.

So, it is possible to get a lot of the nutritional benefits of grass-finished beef with the energy efficiency, and reduced cost, of grain-finishing. Good news for the consumer and the environment!

What about taste? Well, simply put, 80% of consumers prefer the taste of Corn-finished beef

This is likely due to the fact that grass finished beef is leaner. As anyone who has tasted venison can attest, that ultimate free-range (and for most people, least efficient) food source (Which is often, but not always, paradoxically derided by the very same anti large-farm partisans.) does not have sufficient fat in the muscle to have as desirable a taste. Buffalo is like this too, the meat tastes a bit like the less-expensive leaner cuts of grain-fed beef that are used for stewing. When I cook buffalo burgers, I am always sure to add lots of flavor inside the patty, and to use lots of vegetable oil to keep the meat from drying out, otherwise, you get a sort of cardboard effect.

Do a blind taste test for yourselves, and tell me what you find!

Just like the old saying, "Don't judge a book by its cover," we need to do a better job as a society of really thinking through issues rather than reacting to some aesthetic or emotional appeal. For those of you who still prefer grass-finished beef, that's fine -- just know the whole story behind what you are buying -- and that there are consequences to the environment and the planet for making that choice. And please, stop demonizing a very efficient system that can provide needed protein in a sustainable way to the world's growing population.

The question now becomes whether people who simply didn't know that grass-fed beef was so inefficient and of the true beneficial qualities of our corn-finished system, will now be willing to alter their opinion? That is perhaps one of the hardest thing for any person to do -- change your mind or admit you might have been wrong when confronted with new information. But if we are to truly find our way toward sustainable global systems, then we must all be willing to search for new answers -- and accept new paths toward sustainability when informed by science.

Here's wishing you a nice corn-finished steak as part of your next sustainable meal!

The Danger of Half Truths

2011-01-26T10:56:00.003-05:00

One of the great things about trying to educate the public about agricultural sustainability is the pushback I get when I try to explain the basic science that needs to be consulted when making sustainability calculations. This helps me understand where various groups are coming from when they voice opposition to my core belief that efficiency is the fundamental value in feeding a very populous planet nutrient dense food with minimal environmental impact.

There appears to be a meme (narrative) going around that one or another of Monsanto’s Genetically modified seeds produces a crop that “sterilizes the soil, and turns it into dry sand.”

It is pointless to try to find out where the origin of this belief originated; what we really need to know is whether it is true or not.

In my researching yesterday, I tried to put aside the logical argument of “Why would a company sell a product that would ruin its customers, and make the company a lawyer-magnet?” After all, dangerous products have been sold before, like asbestos.

Well, I have not yet been able to “prove a negative” I have not found any authoritative, independent third party source that categorically states “we have found no GMO that is capable of turning a field to dust.”

But what I HAVE stumbled over is some incredibly irresponsible journalism.

Take for example this article that appeared on Grist and the Huffington Post websites.

The article is essentially an outrage piece decrying an ad campaign by Monsanto touting the sustainable aspects of what they do to earn a living. The gist of their criticism is that Monsanto has chosen an image that looks too much like a small- scale farmer when they should show an image of someone who looks like a large-scale farmer. I guess the anger that the “Small, Local, Organic” partisans feel is because Monsanto, Chief Devil in their battle of Good vs. Evil moral play, is stealing their iconography.

Fine so far, right? But then the writer goes on to describe the supposed evils wrought by the large-scale farmers that use Monsanto’s technology, which culminates with “Agribiz may be helping to create a 21st century Dust Bowl.”

Whoa! Paydirt! The author does not state that Monsanto is turning fields to dust, but is merely saying that “Agribiz” (which farms are not also businesses? I’ll have to research this….) may be doing so. They also have a link to back up that statement, apparently.

But when you read the Mother Jones article it links to you, find out that it is an article about the drying of California’s Central Valley -- which Mother Jones blames not on farming of any kind, but rather the diminishing Sierra Nevada snowpack. In fact, the people they profile in the article blame the federal government for not diverting a greater percentage of the water from the snowpack east to the central valley to protect the habitat of a Smelt fish. So, depending on your politics, you could blame carbon admissions, or Washington D.C.’s priorities on the plight of California’s Central valley -- but the only way you can blame the farmers is for choosing to farm there in the first place, since the area is naturally quite dry and was only made productive through aqueducts from other regions.

Call me naïve, but this is frankly bizarre. How could the author DARE impugn farmers with a link to an article that doesn’t even speculate that the farmers are to blame? Unfortunately, one can imagine the science illiterate, who maybe already childishly (or cleverly, depending on your viewpoint) refer to “Mon-Satano,” reading this article, not checking the sources, and -- because it is an article about Monsanto – make the intuitive leap that GMOs are drying up the landscape. So, they now have one more feather to plume their headdress, or so they think.

Nonsense like this is hardly sustainable.

The next article I found was actually helpfully provided by an anti-GMO partisan himself, to show me exactly why it spelled doom for African farmers if they were allowed to use their technology: GMOs were “drying up Indian cotton farms and driving them to suicide.” (!!!) To show me this wasn’t his opinion, he referenced that trusted source for gossip and libel lawsuits, the Daily Mail.

In the referenced article, Monsanto is indeed blamed for cotton crop failures (“The GM Genocide.”) It makes for painful reading, as does any description of farmer suicides.

This somehow didn’t ring true to me; Indian farmer suicides have been endemic for a long time in the more marginal arid regions. Meanwhile cotton production in India has soared since the year 2000 to a level that puts India above the USA in the number two biggest cotton producer spot. Read all about it by clicking here.

So, delving into this issue yields two different narratives: some Indian cotton farmers are doing great using GMO cotton, some are not.

First off, the GMO in question, Bt Cotton, has a gene in it that causes the cotton to produce a narrow spectrum anti-bore worm pesticide that is has long been used by organic growers because it is a natural pesticide, to spray their crops (yes, organic farmers use pesticides!) That is a far cry from being a soil “sterilizer” and in fact is naturally produced by soil organisms worldwide.

Errr… that’s it.

No “I’m thirsty” gene is implanted, no “Sterilize the soil” one either, just one that allows the farmer to forgo spraying pesticide on the crop by producing a natural, readily biodegradable pesticide in the plant’s stalk.

Yet, the number of Indian farmer suicides has soared recently. Why? Well, two things have happened:

1. In 1999 India agreed to freer trade under the world trade organization, opening up Indian cotton farmers to competition from Cotton from the USA (which is almost all Bt cotton), which has driven down the price farmers get for cotton -- and oh yeah, drove down the price consumers had to pay as well.

2. At the same time, an economic boom has pushed the cost of living up in India generally.

So, imagine a farmer who has only 5 acres of marginal farmland where he was barely able to subsist before he had to compete with large-scale Bt cotton producers. He is now losing his shirt growing “heritage” (non-organic – these farmers usually use deadly pesticides) cotton, so he takes a chance trying to modernize his operation (like, buy the technologies his competitors use), which means high-interest loans from shady lenders. Now, if he has a bad season, he not only loses his crop and has a very lean time for the year, he now also loses title to his land because of debt.

Sadly, suicides soar.

It would seem that because GMOs play a part in this drama (by making wetter, larger farms much more productive per acre, mostly) some cynical people are trying to blame the whole thing on GMOs, without a shred (that I can find) of evidence.

Other folks are blaming the Indian government for not providing these farmers access to non-predatory lending and subsidized insurance, or a way out of the farming life for those that do not own viably competitive farms.

For a GREAT description of the dire situation these farmers face, read this UN report on the problem, which gives great background and context focusing on the Indian farmer crisis that is ground zero for what is actually an international small farm crisis.

Anyhow, next time you hear an extraordinary claim, even if it fits an emotional narrative you already possess -- let me suggest that you do what scientists are supposed to do – demand extraordinary evidence.

The moral of this story is that there is a LOT of misinformation out there pushing people who already have a negative or ill-informed view of agriculture and the technology that makes all our lives better -- into an even more negative place. When people with no ag or science background hear that a large corporation is putting out a product that sterilizes the soil -- that is a mighty scary thing.

We simply can NOT afford to let this unbalanced, untrue drivel go unchallenged. The consequence for Monsanto might be lost profits, but the consequences of public distrust of ag technology is starvation and environmental ruin for us all. We all have something at stake and its about time we are more vocal about it.

Does Healthy Need to be Expensive?

2011-01-24T22:19:00.003-05:00

I read a truly bizarre article today asserting that fresh fruits and vegetables should be made more expensive -- so that people will value them more. Specifically, that Wal-mart’s plan to make fresh fruits and vegetables less expensive in their stores was a sure-fire plan to paradoxically tank demand for fresh fruit and vegetables.

Now, she undoubtedly learned from a business class that there actually is a paradoxical effect where people do not want to pay too little for some things, like heart surgery, spokespeople, branding specialists, tax lawyers -- you know, high stakes services where paying too little can be a fatal mistake.

But in a market where a carrot is, mostly, a carrot, someone is not very likely to “value” the carrot more if it is $5 a pound than if it is $2 a pound. This is the exact reason why you don’t find things like fresh Chilean Sea Bass, Persian Caviar, Saffron or expensive exotic fruits in your local Wal-Mart: High price makes their customers buy less, just like you’d think. They may buy relatively expensive beer there, but they are unlikely to guzzle the stuff, more have it to offer to guests or celebrate a good meal; during the football game, the case of the cheap stuff comes out.

Do Wal-Mart customers typically head straight to the rib eye when they need meat? I don’t know, but I’d be willing to guess that they are a little more price sensitive than that, and that that behavior would be more common at Whole Foods.

Think of it another way, for people who already value a carrot, will they value it more if the price goes up? Will they switch to parsnips? Does someone who needs a screwdriver value it more if it more expensive? Does he buy a hammer instead if the screwdriver is too affordable?

If Perrier or Gerolsteiner raise the price of their water, it may indeed increase units sold of those brands at Whole Foods for a certain highly manipulable segment of the middle class, but the average Wal-Mart customer would likely think those people are stupid. And, consider this; would one brand raising the price of water cause people in general to drink more water? I don’t think so. Water is certainly valuable, but people don’t pipe it into their homes because it is expensive.

Keri Kennedy, manager of the West Virginia’s health department's Office of Healthy Lifestyles was interviewed after Huntington, West Virginia was ranked Least Healthy in the whole USA. Her insight as to why people don’t eat well in West Virginia’s largest city: People don’t think they can afford to eat well; people who are watching prices are not only sensitive to price, but to convenience as well, so they really go for the various “value meals” that are offered at the take-out windows of the chain fast food restaurants because they see the compare the price of fresh broccoli, meat, etc, and compare it to the price and convenience of the value meal and they find the fresh ingredient route lacking, so, the I think the author’s theory is utter nonsense. Getting that yet?

I’m sorry if I am coming across as the Queen of Obvious here. But these people are out there, and they apparently have M.B.A.s.

But perhaps the writer is not as crazy as she seems, we learn at the end of her article that she would like to be the conduit of healthy food to markets, especially in New York City, and the idea of Wal-Mart not only moving into "her" territory but also making their food more affordable and healthy probably deeply depresses her, since Wal-Mart is, shall we say, notorious for giving their customers what they want, and being very good at what they do. Not something against which someone who practices business in a “how can we make products more unaffordable to the middle class?” sort of way would enjoy competing, no doubt.

Small Scale Food & Big Germ Concerns

2011-01-23T20:13:00.004-05:00

By Sara Hessenflow Harper

I continue to ponder the “sustainability” of locavorism, and the articulate criticisms of the thesis that the Local Foods movement is math illiterate regarding energy use (If you haven’t read “Math Lessons For Locavores” yet, please read it first by clicking here.)

Some proponents of the local food movement will say that even if it is not the most energy efficient means of producing food, it has multiple other benefits that make it more "sustainable" or worthwhile.

Take for example the thoughts of Western Region Director at Food & Water Watch, Elanor Starmer writing on the environmentalist website Grist that Budiansky's (Math Lessons for Locavores author) piece is essentially off-base because the REAL issue is public health (of the microbiological variety), and not energy use.

Specifically she says this:

“… when I buy local food, energy use is not the driving rationale (no pun intended). I buy from a variety of local farms when at all possible because if I don't, I will probably be eating from a stream of food that has passed through the hands of a tiny number of massive companies. And if those companies' hands have salmonella all over them, well -- look out, world [….]

What does it mean when so few companies control so much of our food? It means that unless we happen to live in a place with a lot of local farmers and the infrastructure to process and distribute their products, we have virtually no control over what we're eating or feeding to our kids. If these companies choose to raise meat using hormones and antibiotics (and they do), or grow corn from genetically-modified seed (and they do), then that's what we'll have access to. And if one thing goes wrong at one of those companies, we all risk being affected.

So here's my message to Mr. Budiansky: The local foods movement is not so much about choosing between what's grown here and what's grown elsewhere. It's about having any sort of choice at all.”
You can read Starmer's full piece by clicking here.

Now, as someone whose thinking leans conservative/libertarian, I am sympathetic to the idea of “choice,” especially if you can self-finance your options (as the middle class in San Francisco can like very few others.)

But I think she conflates a few issues, and makes some incorrect assumptions. Namely, that “all small farms are clean” and that “big farms can get away with anything.”

My husband asserts that even though he was raised on factory farm food that was admittedly processed into unhealthy meals, he NEVER got food poisoning until he visited France for the first time (which has a famous “small is better” ethic), and he even was greatly embarrassed when a French family brought him to a beautiful four star restaurant in the French country side, with a rainbow of different colored cows and sheep and goats on the foothills making a picture perfect backdrop to the patio meal. He ordered a four-cheese dish that was heartily approved of by his hosts, as the cheeses were all local. When he saw that one of the cheeses was crawling with maggots, he desperately wanted to hide the fact from his hosts, not wanting them to be angry with him, for unintentionally wounding their pride. He swears he has never so much as seen a maggot in another restaurant, anywhere.

Colorful, but mere anecdote, to be sure. My point is: small farms have an esthetic appeal even if rusting antiquated implements and flaking lead-based paint is part of the tableau, but this is NO indication of the level of quality control over what is essentially a cottage industry. Indeed, the latest food safety laws have exempted small producers from the standards demanded of the large producers, (see related WSJ story by clicking here) and this is (besides the lobbying done by various “SmallAg” lobbyists) essentially structural; the big guys can AFFORD to comply in ways the little guy can’t, just like a huge multi-national car company can afford to make cars with airbags, etc, in a way a cottage industry that makes only 100 cars a year could never match.

She also seems to miss the fact that fewer farms are easier to inspect than many small ones. Not only does more acres per farm mean that you can have more in-house health specialists, it also means that you can have less inspectors.

There do exist die-hard locavores that are willing to actually visit some of the farms that they patronize, but I would bet that the vast majority of (mostly urban) locavores are willing to give the small farmers the benefit of the doubt as long as their operations are not found to be lacking in “smallness” – and even the die-hard ones aren’t asking that “Flannel Frank” allow them to take samples of what is in their tanks, and soil.

Before I get into the specifics of the recent food health problems, I’d like people to give me the benefit of the doubt and understand that I am not only a person, but a mother too, and care as much about food safety as just about anyone. In fact, I’d like to see the food safety regulations enforced more, and more universally.

But, and here’s the meat of my rebuttal, even when things go wrong with US large scale farming, they are not nearly so bad as things have been throughout human history, which has been mostly small-scale. People focus on the bad, missing what incredible safety the U. S. farming industry has achieved.

I have chosen to focus on the Salmonella part of the anti-large scale argument, because it is the most prevalent danger.

If the reader doesn’t already know, there are two fundamental things to understand about Salmonella. 1. It is a zoonosis, meaning it is not something that develops on a farm, but rather something that comes from the wilderness, like “beaver fever.” If you were to eat a wild turtle, or duck, you could get salmonella; it has nothing to do with the size of the food producer, which leads us to 2. Microorganisms do not care if they are in Farmer’s Market, a Supermarket, a small farm or a big one, but Salmonella sure do love non-mechanically refrigerated food items at farmer’s markets.

In fact, prevalence tends to be higher in poor countries (that have a lot of small scale agriculture) and lower in ones with high degrees of standardization and scale, such as Sweden:

http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/MEETING/004/AB456E.HTM

Also, think of it this way: Who do you think has a greater incentive to cut corners, a small farmer who is trying to support his family on an operation that makes him $25,000 a year, or a larger farmer making $250,000 a year? The small farmer often has a higher input to yield ratio (he makes less profit per unit) and his net profit is less. Cutting a corner on safety would be more appealing to someone who needs the money more – the inefficient, small-scale operation. Meanwhile, a problem arising from large-scale farming can not only ruin a huge, valuable operation, but also seriously hurt an entire industry. There is comparatively little incentive for large operations to cut corners. That is not to say it doesn’t happen.

That’s why we need inspectors.

The point of this post is not to say that buying local is a bad thing - but rather, to encourage those who feel convinced of small and local's superiority to really think through the issues involved. There are small operations that do a great job of providing a healthy product, no doubt - but it is not BECAUSE they are small or large that leads to this result. To give a blanket pass on food safety to a certain type of small production process merely because it meets a nostalgic emotional need is not sustainable and it is no more healthy in the long run.

Buying local, in-season foods to supplement conventional food purchases can be a great way of adding fresh and local flavor to your diet and getting to know some of the producers in your area. Why can't that be enough? Why turn local and conventional agriculture into either/or choices -- when the most sustainable path is likely a blend. And why expect less from local than we rightfully expect from conventional?

Healthier Food: Who is Responsible?

2011-01-20T19:20:00.006-05:00

By Sara Hessenflow Harper

Today, Wal-Mart launched a policy they will employ on their private label foods to cut the amount of salt, sugar and trans fats by various amounts over the next 5 years. Below are a few snippets from today's New York Times story:

January 20, 2011
Wal-Mart Shifts Strategy to Promote Healthy Foods
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON — Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, will announce a five-year plan on Thursday to make thousands of its packaged foods lower in unhealthy salts, fats and sugars, and to drop prices on fruits and vegetables . . .
In addition, Wal-Mart will work to eliminate any extra cost to customers for healthy foods made with whole grains, said Leslie Dach, Wal-Mart’s executive vice president for corporate affairs. By lowering prices on fresh fruits and vegetables, Wal-Mart says it will cut into its own profits but hopes to make up for it in sales volume. “This is not about asking the farmers to accept less for their crops,” he said . . .
Wal-Mart is hardly the first company to take such steps; ConAgra Foods, for example, has promised to reduce sodium content in its foods by 20 percent by 2015.
But because Wal-Mart sells more groceries than any other company in the country, and because it is such a large purchaser of foods produced by national suppliers, nutrition experts say the changes could have a big impact on the affordability of healthy food and the health of American families and children.
You can read the full article by clicking here.

There are SO many things we could talk about regarding this announcement: the market power of Wal-Mart and their continuing push toward sustainability, the health impacts of eating more processed foods vs fresh food or "homemade" food -- and the sustainability impacts of that trend, or the whole divisive political angle: just who does any company think they are deciding what is healthy for me?

What has been sticking in my mind as I thought about this issue is something I heard Dr. Robert Paarlberg (author of Food Politics - refer to my previous post for background) say at a recent talk. Paarlberg said that he thought it would be wise for the agricultural industry to create some distance in the minds of the public, between producers who grow the raw ingredients that often get combined into our food -- and food companies or the food industry that makes the decisions about how much salt, fat, sugar, etc to put into processed foods. His point was not to demonize the food industry - but to say that there are some real health issues that our country is facing, that increasingly more consumers are becoming aware and concerned about these issues. All too often, growers are lumped in with food processors as all part of the same sector.

While growers and processors are certainly linked, it is worth pointing out that often the healthiest parts of processed foods are grown by agricultural producers -- who took great care to create nutritious products. However, those ingredients are often overwhelmed or over-processed by things like salt, sugar, fat and a whole array of other preservatives and texture-adding substances. What's more, the producers who grew the raw ingredients had no say as to how their product is ultimately processed -- something that often escapes the public's notice. So when we talk about "unhealthy" foods and the marketing of them, this is not an issue that agricultural producers should take the blame for - if there is blame to be taken (I know, that is a controversial issue in and of itself).

Part of what I have seen happening with my urban friends is a growing trust gap that they feel exists between them and the people who make their food. This has spurred many of their decisions to buy organic or "all natural" or "sustainably grown" food. They feel that these labels provide a trusted filter that bring to them the kind of food they can feel good and healthy about eating. Ask yourself why they feel they need a filter? Yes, there is the growing urban-rural divide . . . and yes, some of it connects to differing political identities - but not all of it. Assigning blame for who lost the public's trust (or part of it) on food is not the point. Rather, it is important to find ways to re-connect and re-assure the public about the safety and healthfulness of conventional agriculture -- through completely truthful means. One way of doing this, Paarlberg suggests, is for the growers who do in fact grow healthy products, to stop being so defensive against pro-health food initiatives. It is often this defensiveness -- which shows up as anger against specific foods being described as unhealthy rather than focusing solely on personal responsibility, that reinforces negative perceptions urbanites have about agriculture.

Case in point, look at one of the comments on the NYT story:

"This is fantastic news. I just moved back to the US after 7 years in England. The store brands in British grocery stores have the least added junk. You can get bread, peanut butter, soy milk, and tomato sauce that's not loaded with sugar. You can get fresh food without preservatives, cheese without orange dye, organic jams that are store brand -- and it's all the cheapest stuff and the best tasting. It's a wonder any brand names succeed there at all, but I guess there are suckers for advertising anywhere.

It has been painful to come home to find out that I have to pay twice as much for a third of the ingredients. You have to go to a fancy shop to find peanut butter with just peanuts in it, but in Britain everyone has access to food that's only made out of food. Walmart has the ability to help so many by reducing the junk in their cheapest goods. Cheers to them."

Increasingly, consumers want more of what you (producers) grow and less of the "bad" or filler stuff. I think it would be a mistake and a lost opportunity for agriculture, for consumers like this to view organic as the only way they can get away from preservatives or over-processed foods. Just think how much could be done to increase the understanding of truly sustainable conventional agriculture if consumers looking for healthy choices had healthier conventional as well as organic options to choose from. I know this is already happening with individual products, but something to consider before reacting negatively to what Wal-Mart is doing might be the effect of making conventional processed food -- all of it, healthier.

Another angle of interest to me on this came from an email exchange with one of the producers I talk often with and whom I highly respect. He noted that indeed the quality and combination of ingredients is important -- but that unless consumers make the choice to prioritize these things, they will not magically appear or be sustained in the marketplace. We have the food we have now because it is popular -- it is cheap, tastes good and is convenient -- all things we have had greater and greater desire for over time. If consumers begin to ask for and seek out these products, the food industry will (and is beginning) to respond.

I thought these were excellent points and get to the heart of the issue about just whose responsibility is it to make healthier food choices. Of course, where you come down on this has a lot to do with how you view the world and, I would argue, your political lens. For example, as a conservative, I believe that ultimately, it is each individual's responsibility to educate him/herself and make choices -- and live with the consequences. So, I understand some of the defensiveness or potential anger that the ag sector may feel about efforts such as this. I can hear the accusations of "nanny state" and "what about personal responsibility?" being tossed around. And while I generally agree with those concerns, a key difference here is that this step is being taken by a private company -- likely based on some pretty good consumer research, and it will only succeed if the bet they are making about consumers wanting healthier food, is right.

It is not the government telling Wal-Mart to do this, even though they have talked with the first lady about it. This gets directly to the question about markets that my producer friend raised. Isn't it interesting that the private marketplace is navigating these waters far more successfully and quickly than waiting for some political/legislative agreement. Another added benefit of this issue playing out in the marketplace, is that it preserves consumer choice. As this experiment unfolds, if people are determined to stay hooked on salt, sugar and fat, for example -- we will clearly see that in the purchasing choices/changes they make -- away from Wal-Mart's brand, or towards it. Unlike a legislative edict or government regulation handed down from on high, this initiative will involve interaction with the public -- and will ultimately fail or succeed based on how consumers respond.

The health challenges our country faces right now - specifically the obesity and diabetes epidemics, present us all with an opportunity to re-evaluate our lifestyle, educate ourselves about proper nutrition and make more healthful choices. Wal-Mart's move today provides a new array of choices to aid in this process. It also provides conventional ag with an opportunity to demonstrate that its product's healthful properties are every bit as good as organic when processed with that priority in mind.

Conventional agriculture has nothing to fear from this endeavor since they were never really part of the problem -- and are a huge part of the solution. In fact, if the ag sector sees this as an opportunity to educate consumers, it can also be a positive step forward in closing the trust gap.

Local Is Not Necessarily Sustainable

2011-01-18T16:23:00.005-05:00

By Sara Hessenflow Harper

Awhile ago I read a terrific op-ed in the New York Times (see below) about how the emerging fashion of preferring all things local was not a good deal for the environment in many cases. This story really gave voice to what I had been struggling to explain to many of my friends outside of agriculture -- that efficiency, scale and growing things in the most optimal soil, weather, etc provides both economic and environmental benefits.

The local farmer's market is a fine thing. But for some in the environmental community, "local food" has become the new "organic" in terms of its trendiness and believed superiority to our conventional food system. Yet, when you really examine the issue, you find that in fact, if we tried to make all or most of our food purchases strictly from local vendors, then we would be significantly increasing the environmental footprint of our food along with its cost -- and oh yeah, reducing our food choice options significantly in some areas of the country.

One of the great points made by this piece is that what may "seem" or "feel" green at first blush, isn't necessarily the best option for the environment or the people living in that environment. If you treat environmental policy as a religion or a political ideology rather than a scientific pursuit, it becomes all too easy to make the wrong policy choices or even individual choices. When I say "wrong choices" I mean wrong for the environment as well as wrong for people or the economy.

More often than activists want to admit, the welfare of people, the planet, animals and the economy are all wrapped together in complex ways. Out of some desire to be anti-corporate, a person can actually support inefficient practices or growers who cause greater environmental impact. That's not always what happens - but it can happen when a person allows themselves to be blinded by bias, opinion and culture.

Read the story below and then check out some of the responses and alternative thinking about this issue on the Grist website by clicking here. It is important to stay informed about how many environmentalists and celebrities think about these issues as they often have outsized influence on the vast "middle-of-the-road" consumer. In future posts, I will address some of these arguments as well.

New York Times
August 19, 2010
Math Lessons for Locavores
By STEPHEN BUDIANSKY
Leesburg, Va.
IT’S 42 steps from my back door to the garden that keeps my family supplied nine months of the year with a modest cornucopia of lettuce, beets, spinach, beans, tomatoes, basil, corn, squash, brussels sprouts, the occasional celeriac and, once when I was feeling particularly energetic, a couple of small but undeniable artichokes. You’ll get no argument from me about the pleasures and advantages to the palate and the spirit of eating what’s local, fresh and in season.
But the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas. Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use.
The result has been all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.
The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus. This is particularly the case with respect to the energy costs of transporting food. One popular and oft-repeated statistic is that it takes 36 (sometimes it’s 97) calories of fossil fuel energy to bring one calorie of iceberg lettuce from California to the East Coast. That’s an apples and oranges (or maybe apples and rocks) comparison to begin with, because you can’t eat petroleum or burn iceberg lettuce.
It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown that whether it’s grown in California or Maine, or whether it’s organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.
It takes about a tablespoon of diesel fuel to move one pound of freight 3,000 miles by rail; that works out to about 100 calories of energy. If it goes by truck, it’s about 300 calories, still a negligible amount in the overall picture. (For those checking the calculations at home, these are “large calories,” or kilocalories, the units used for food value.) Overall, transportation accounts for about 14 percent of the total energy consumed by the American food system.
Other favorite targets of sustainability advocates include the fertilizers and chemicals used in modern farming. But their share of the food system’s energy use is even lower, about 8 percent.
The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far.
A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the farmers’ market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil fuel energy. Just running your refrigerator for a week consumes 9,000 calories of energy. That assumes it’s one of the latest high-efficiency models; otherwise, you can double that figure. Cooking and running dishwashers, freezers and second or third refrigerators (more than 25 percent of American households have more than one) all add major hits. Indeed, households make up for 22 percent of all the energy expenditures in the United States.
Agriculture, on the other hand, accounts for just 2 percent of our nation’s energy usage; that energy is mainly devoted to running farm machinery and manufacturing fertilizer. In return for that quite modest energy investment, we have fed hundreds of millions of people, liberated tens of millions from backbreaking manual labor and spared hundreds of millions of acres for nature preserves, forests and parks that otherwise would have come under the plow.
Don’t forget the astonishing fact that the total land area of American farms remains almost unchanged from a century ago, at a little under a billion acres, even though those farms now feed three times as many Americans and export more than 10 times as much as they did in 1910.
The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow lettuce, oranges, wheat, peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they grow best and with the most efficient technologies — and then pay the relatively tiny energy cost to get them to market, as we do with every other commodity in the economy. Sometimes that means growing vegetables in your backyard. Sometimes that means buying vegetables grown in California or Costa Rica.
Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself. The relative pittance of our energy budget that we spend on modern farming is one of the wisest energy investments we can make, when we honestly look at what it returns to our land, our economy, our environment and our well-being.
Stephen Budiansky is the author of the blog liberalcurmudgeon.com.

The Importance of Explaining Science

2011-01-17T17:24:00.005-05:00

By Sara Hessenflow Harper

I am still getting angry responses on my Linked-In discussion on GMOs as potentially being a part of a sustainability strategy for Africa (click here to see my earlier post). Some of the "arguments" are that comparing genetic engineering to the cross breeding of plants that humans have been doing for years is an inaccurate description of the science.

This brought to mind countless discussions I've had with environmentalists and foes of climate change science alike about science and the role it plays (or should) in helping to inform policymaking. Everyone says they are for "sound science" -- until there is some scientific study that tells them or their industry what they don't want to hear. Maybe this is human nature, but science is supposed to help us get past our personal biases -- to help us find objective truth.

The trouble, it seems, is that so often the truth is very complex and varied depending upon which elements you are testing, which assumptions you are making, etc. What is very worrisome to me about environmental policy these days is that so often, people on both sides will throw out opinion or even just something they heard somewhere -- but treat it as if it had the weight of a National Academy of Sciences review.

Take the case of GMOs and the argument that plant breeding is so different from genetic modification or engineering. Well, if you don't know much about the science of plant breeding, that might be an easy thing to just rattle off -- but that doesn't make you right, and it certainly doesn't make your opinion into "science." There is a dangerous level of scientific illiteracy out in the world today -- made worse by the pseudo-science that is often merely a step away from political science that people wrap themselves up in as part of being able to be right vs being open to exploration.

Leaving aside the fact that agrarians have been “Genetically modifying” organisms for thousands of year through selective cross-breeding, there is nothing in itself alarming about inserting DNA from one species into another when the goal is to produce something positive.

The first thing to understand is simply this: As far as the components go, DNA is DNA; all DNA, from whatever source, resembles DNA, which resembles all other DNA.

DNA is a marvelously simple molecule, given that it can contain infinitely varied information. To illustrate, imagine that you have an alphabet, but this alphabet is merely four gumdrops, one yellow, one blue, one red and one green. That’s it! Think of any characteristic of ANY organism from a bacterium to a orca --- you can code for it using only these four “letters” which are known as the “Base Pairs” of DNA.

So, when we are talking genetic material, we are very much talking “software” as opposed to hardware. When your operating system wants you to update it by downloading new software, or you want to add some, say Microsoft Word of Mac, it is not at all like adding a component from a different computer, just more or different software that then allows your computer to act slightly differently, sometimes.

The entire reason splicing a gene from one species into another works in the first place is because the two species’ DNA is identical, apart from the ordering of the “gumdrops.”

In the case of DNA removed from one organism and put into another, that DNA is merely coding for a protein, not an ear, or anything recognizable from the host organism. Provided that the protein is not poisonous, it won’t be detrimental if it is in the newly modified organism, or the original one. On the contrary, it will often be beneficial to end-user. Even if the gene is taken from a species that is in some way poisonous to humans, like a toxic mushroom, as long as that gene does not code for the proteins that make the mushroom toxic, it can be put into an edible organism without worrying about the mushroom’s dangerous characteristics.

Could GMO have negative effects? Certainly, if the intension is to have negative effects, just like any other technology!

Perhaps if more people with concerns about GMOs could hear the basic science underpinning it in a way that they can easily understand, there could be more understanding on the topic?

Overall, the point that has stuck with me about these discussions is how important it is to engage in explaining science as clearly and concisely as possible. This is particularly true of agricultural sciences because such a small percentage of the population is exposed to this type of academic pursuit in high school or college these days.

When you are in a heated argument with someone about technology, organics, GMOs or some other ag-sustainable related issue, a good tactic to consider might be to take a step back from the anger and bring out your basic biology book.

People fear what they don’t understand. Grounding our thoughts about agriculture and sustainability in the science we know is not enough, we also have to communicate what that science is in a way that does not condescend, but tries to live up to the best definition of education.

Efficient & Science-Based: The Other Sustainable Ag

2011-01-13T16:22:00.006-05:00

By Sara Hessenflow Harper

I am reading a terrific book that I highly recommend to you: Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know by Robert Paarlberg. This book tackles almost every issue related to food you can imagine from sustainability to obesity, from ag subsidies to hunger issues and everything in between. The author is a professor of political science at Wellsley College and also teaches a seminar class at Harvard. You can read his full biography by clicking here.

One of the key issues that has jumped out at me while reading this book is Paarlberg's description of what kind of agriculture is considered environmentally sustainable. He notes,

"Environmental activists and agricultural scientists answer this question in dramatically different ways. Environmentalists prefer small-scale diversified farming systems that rely on fewer inputs purchased off the farm, systems that imitate nature rather than seeking to dominate nature. Agricultural scientists often believe there will be less harm done to nature overall by highly capitalized and specialized high-yield farming systems employing the latest technology. Increasing the yield on lands already farmed allows more of the remaining land to be saved for nature.

Environmentalists invoke the damage done by modern farming, whereas agricultural scientists invoke the greater damage that would be done if the same production volume had to come from less productive low-yield farming systems."

When I read this, it struck me that part of the divide between environmentalists and ag folks comes seems to come from a core difference in how each side thinks about science and technology. Many environmentalists point to science when they want to prove the existence of a problem or quantify the damage done by human action or industry, but as a group, they often are not willing to embrace the positive effects that can come from human invention and technology brought about by science - at least, not when it comes to food, fiber and fuel. It's as if there are two very different world philosophies at play.

Environmentalists, and I would argue, urban culture world-view seems to be distrustful of people -- seeing their impact as inherently negative on the surrounding environment. For these people, nature seems to be some pristine, perfect place that you visit on the weekends and that can never be wrong - so using science to tame or manipulate nature is an anathema. However, for the farmers, ag scientists, and I would argue rural culture that has grown up in nature and seen first-hand how hard it is to make a living off the land, there is a welcoming of any help that science and technology brings to this task.

Understanding that each side is drawing off of their own personal experience to then project how policy should be, it seems that a whole lot of good could be accomplished by spending more time in educational exchanges and urban-rural cultural exchanges. Only then can some of the urban folks come to see that farmers and ag scientists care as deeply about nature as environmentalists -- they simply approach the issue from a different perspective, one that may make more sense to the Harvard student who has never seen a farm after making a real-life personal connection with an actual farmer.

When I hear the arguments so many environmentalists throw at the ag sector about moving away from high productivity, high efficiency and high technology, it really stuns me. I try to make the point to them that they would never think of giving up their smart phones and going back to the land-line with the curly cord because that is a slower, more sane lifestyle. I don't think too many of them would give up the cancer fighting drug for their family member that resulted from the entirely UN-natural process of creating or using high-tech BIO-tech medicines.

Cancer is natural. Death is natural -- but it seems to be ok to fight that kind of nature, but not ok to introduce technology into a field that does what nature has done for billions of years but only significantly faster.

I think part of the problem is that there is still this hyper-romanticized view that surrounds the idea of growing food. When urban folks or those not familiar with agriculture push the idea of getting rid of science-based technology (because that is what modern day tractors, pesticides, seeds and fertilizers are), farmers feel the agenda is simply to put them out of business. The more I talk with people who think like this, the more I believe that they simply don't understand what it takes to feed billions of people -- and that you can't do it without technology -- just as you couldn't run a modern-day business today without the internet. (Another piece of technology I don't see my urban friends giving up anytime soon).

But here again - food, these folks feel, should be exempt from all that. We should still have mom and pop out on the farm - technology-free and loving it. It just doesn't work that way and for those who care about sustainability, it is the least sustainable model for food that I can imagine for a planet that is projected to have 3 billion more people on it by 2050.

One way for some to get a better understanding of just how vital technology and science are to the agricultural sector is to look at the green revolution. Many of today's most vocal critics about agriculture also opposed (or still oppose) the original green revolution. Again, Paarlberg's book provides some wonderful thoughts on this:

"The original green revolution was an introduction of newly developed wheat and rice seeds into Latin America and into irrigated farming lands of South and SE Asia in the 1960s and 1970s.

The plant breeders, by crossing different varieties, managed to incorporate dwarfing genes into plants, producing short stiff-strawed varieties that devoted more energy to producing grain and less to straw or leaf material.

Wheat farmers in India began planting these new varieties in 1964, and by 1970, production had nearly doubled. The new rice seeds gave an equally spectacular performance. In India, rice production doubled between 1971 and 1976 in the states of Punjab and Haryana.

Overall, more than 8,000 new seed varieties were introduced for at least 11 different crops. Robert Evenson, an economist at Yale University concluded in 2003 that if these modern varieties had not been introduced after 1965, annual crop production in the developing world would have been 16-19% lower in the year 2000."

Here is proof positive, for anyone interested in really exploring the matter, that agricultural technology has helped humanity tremendously in the past. Another exemplar worth looking at is a part of the world that has largely not taken part in the green revolution or advanced agricultural technology: Africa.

If environmentalists who believe agriculture should be free of technology are right -- that it is truly sustainable to rely only on all things natural, then Africa should be an abundant place of harmony with nature and man. Unfortunately, Africa is not such a place -- and if we were to give up on agricultural technology, much of the rest of the world would face some of the same devastating problems we see there. As Paarlberg puts it,

"Most smallholder farmers in Africa today practice something that seems suspiciously close to pure agroecology: They use traditional seeds, plant their crops in polycultures, harvest rainfall, purchase almost no inputs such as nitrogen fertilizers or pesticides from off the farm and work from dawn to dusk. The result is that their cereal crop yields are only 10-20% as high as in North America, they earn only $1 a day on average and 1/3 are undernourished."

What so many who propose "natural agriculture" don't understand is that this equates to poverty -- poverty for the farmer, poverty for the consumer and ultimately, poverty for the environment - since the society does not have the resources to properly care for it.

I'm not trying to say that modern conventional agriculture is a perfect model. Very few things in life are perfect. I'm trying to say that the worldview that thinks agriculture should be exempt from taking advantage of all that science-based technology has to offer is not sustainable!

If we can get consumers, retailers and yes, environmentalists to understand this point, we get much closer to being able to work together on today's real environmental challenges.

Is blocking GMO from Africa really adding to global sustainability?

2011-01-12T14:48:00.006-05:00

By Sara Hessenflow Harper

I have found myself drawn into a discussion in one of my Linked-In networks about the value (or lack thereof) of genetic engineering (or genetic modified organisms, GMO) with regard to Africa and sustainability in general. Below this post is a story that prompted the discussion - and details an effort by a number of environmental groups to put pressure on the Gates Foundation to drop their support of genetically engineering for Africa.

I thought it would be valuable to share some of the charges against GMOs and my responses on this forum as well as a means of both addressing the topic, but also - illustrating the kind of thinking that is going on in "sustainability circles" about this technology. So below is the back and forth between me and a few well-intentioned, but I contend, wrong-headed folks. I have not included names - since the point is what they said, not who they are.

Person 1 commenting on the article (below):

This is great news, as the era of reliance on manufactured and mined fertilizers is going the way of the buggy whip. Genetically engineered crops are merely a way of increasing yeilds--for Monsanto. Make no mistake about it.

My response:

This is TERRIBLE news. African agriculture is ALREADY slow, organic and local and the result has been starvation and poverty for decades. If Monsanto is all about making money, why on EARTH are they GIVING AWAY the seeds to a continent that will likely not be able to afford their technology for decades to come?

Get real! As Stewart Brand, noted environmentalist has pointed out in his recent book Whole Earth Discipline, "I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we've been wrong about. We've starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool."

Person 2:

I find this confusing. I've read reports that seem reasonably well constructed that demonstrate that we can use--globally, not just in the U.S.--organic methods without GE crops to feed the human population quite comfortably if we employ appropriate techniques for each local and introduce reproducible and sustainable approaches for the given culture and site. Why the backlash against this idea?

I've also seen great success stories of small communities in China that abandoned their GE crops and Monsanto fertilizers/pesticides, because the costs were bankrupting the community. They moved back to more traditional methods of inter-planting different crops and/or different species and were able to significantly increase their yields, reduce pest and disease problems, dramatically lower costs, and--bonus--reduce their carbon footprint.

I don't think all GE solutions are bad, but we need to be very careful with them and test them rigorously (which is often not as well done as it could or should be). And, before we go running to a GE solution--which might then lock a community into a specific vendor relationship and fertilizer/pesticide process--we should look at the process in place and see if it actually makes sense for the culture and locale . . . (continues on a bit)

Person 3:

Poor communities can not afford to be tied to GMO and the necessary fertilizers and pesticides they depend on. GMO crops perform poorly in long term yield results and tie farmers to seed purchasing. The truth is poor communities can not afford GMO - it's not sustainable.

My response:

Do you really believe that what is happening in Africa today (without GMOs) is sustainable? With some 60% of the population involved in subsistence-level farming and poverty rates soaring? I'm not saying GMO is the only answer, but clearly, keeping this technology out of the continent -- as it has been, largely because of Euro-centric and environmentalist imposed viewpoints has not solved their problems!

Explain to me how a product that creates greater yield, uses less pesticide, has greater drought resistance and can be made to create greater nutritional value is such a bad thing for a continent that is starving and set to add billions more people??

I urge you to read Stewart Brand's chapter on genetic engineering where he interviews numerous biologists who make the point that genetic engineering is not very different from the old fashioned breeding programs humans have been engaged in for centuries.

Person 3's response:

Sara - how will these poor farmers pay for GE seeds year after year?

Subsistence-level farmers have no money to purchase seeds and traditionally depend on seed saving for next years crops. Making them dependent on external sources for seeds is no way forward. Money would be much better spent on giving them training in permaculture.

The old parable - “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime” - rings true here.

Person 4:

Sara, I have been looking for examples where GMO had a positive impact in the long run for local communities, and couldn't find a single one. They not only make farmers dependant, they also ruin the soil and distroy bio-diversity. Places where GMO's are massively used (US, Argentian, Brasil...) have become "deserts" where only the selected crops are growing and nothing else. Is this a good solution? Can this be healthy? Most local farmers are against it, but most of them have been either "bought over" by big farming companies or forced to leave. There are so many reports about, it. Look at the number of indian small farmers who suicided. I think that putting "patents" on seeds is already a wrong approach of long term view.
Permaculture on the contrary offers a solution in respect with human, nature and bio diversity. and it is perfectly applicalbe naywhere on earth.

My responses:

If you can't find a single example of how GMO has had a positive impact, you must be looking in a very limited pool of research. If GMOs are so destructive, farmers would stop buying them. I work directly with a number of farmers that use GMO seeds and have reported significant increase in yield, reduction in fertilizer use, greater ability to withstand drought and on and on with the positive impacts. These are folks that have been farming for generations, have done their research and have seen direct benefits on their farms.

Lest you think I have some financial stake in GMOs, I do not. I have no biotech clients, I have simply been immersed in ag policy and ag technology for several years and have had exposure to farmers who have chosen to use this technology because it pays off for them in the long run.

So, this idea that GMOs are this universally bad thing, but farmers are just too stupid to recognize what is in their (and their lands) best interest holds no water. I simply know too many high tech, well-educated, science-based farmers to believe that these people would pay money for technology that in the end, does not allow them to increase their overall profitability and their land's sustainability -- since at the end of the day, it is the land they must protect to continue their business.

AND

A few quotations from Stewart Brand's book, Whole Earth Discipline on genetic engineering . . .

"From my biology background, I knew that genes have always been intensely fungible, especially in microbes. We weren't creating a new technology so much as joining an old one, using the very techniques that microbes have employed for 3.5 billion years."

"Asking around over the years, I've found that professional biologiests are universally unalarmed about genetic engineering. Most are adopting it in their own work because it is transforming every one of the biological disciplines."

Brand also provides a copy of the protest letter that green activist and scientist, Paul Ehrlich wrote to Friends of the Earth in 1977. These same concerns apply today . . . [below quotes are from Ehrlich's letter to FOE]

"One must always remember that any labratory creations would have to compete in nature with the highly specialized products of billions of years of evolution -- and one would expect the products of evolution to have a considerable advantage.

In addition, there is evidence that bacterial species have been swapping DNA among themselves for a very long time and perhaps even exchanging with eucaryotic (higher) organisms.

If recombinant DNA research is ended because it could be used for evil instead of good, then all of science will stand similarly indicted and basic research may have to cease. If it makes that decision, humanity will have to be prepared to forego the benefits of science, a cost that would be high indeed in an overpopulated world utterly dependent on sophisticated technology for any real hope of transitioning to a 'sustainable society'"

AND

From Stewart Brand's book - quoting a 2007 article in Britain's Prospect magazine:

"The fact is that there is not a shred of any evidence of risk to human health from GM crops. Every academy of science, representing the views of the world's leading experts -- the Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Brazilian, French and American academies as well as the Royal Society, which has published four separate reports on the issue -- has confirmed this.

In 2001 the research directorate of the EU commission released a summary of 81 scientific studies financed by the EU itself -- not by private industry--conducted over a 15-year period, to determine whether GM products were unsafe or insufficiently tested: none found evidence of harm to humans or the environment."

-----
Environmentalists are FOREVER accusing opponents of climate change of being anti-science - but when the science of genetic modification comes in, they choose to ignore it and still act as if they are doing so on behalf of the planet.

Yes, GM technology costs money that poor African farmers don't have right now. You could make that claim about most of the other problems facing their cultures too. What I know is that seed companies right now are donating seed working with the Gates foundation to see if this technology can assist in turning around the poverty and starvation of an entire continent. How is that a bad thing?

If African farmers were so much better off being advised on conventional "permaculture," why hasn't it worked? There have been many attempts no doubt. Nothing is holding back such outreach -- go ahead, do it!

Ultimately, farmers in Africa, just like farmers in America will make choices based on what brings them the most return on investment. If permaculture is such a superior alternative, it will have no problem competing against GMOs. That is, if its supporters are willing to submit to a real contest.

Just don't pretend that preventing biotechnology from taking hold in Africa is helping the Africans . . . or any of the rest of us for that matter.

Organic Food News Today
Gates Foundation Urged to Back Away From Pushing GE Crops, Industrialized Agriculture for Africa
December 14, 2010
EINNEWS, December 14--- A coalition of 100 groups has written to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, urging the foundation to refocus its activities in Africa away from genetically engineered crops and industrial agriculture.

The groups signing the letter included environmentalists, academics and groups opposed to genetic engineering of food crops. They said they are concerned the foundation's grants are "heavily distorted in favor of supporting inappropriate high-tech agricultural activities, ignoring scientific studies that confirm the value of small-scale agro-ecological approaches."

Led by the Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice (CAGJ), the coalition said the foundation and its private sector partners are pushing industrialized agriculture and genetically engineered crops at the expense of small farmers and the environment.

The Gates Foundation has made agricultural development one of its priorities in recent years, launching the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) with the Rockefeller Foundation in 2006. It spent about $316 million in 2009 on agricultural development.

The letter, signed by 100 organizations and individuals from 30 countries, was released to coincide with protests at the UN climate talks in Cancun.

Understanding Sustainability

2011-01-11T13:10:00.000-05:00

The term sustainability means whatever the person using it wants it to mean. The term's broad meaning has left room for many players to define the term. This is not necessarily a bad thing if it brings more people and industries to the table, however, the lack of a uniform meaning can often create confusion.

In surveying how corporate America has engaged in setting sustainability and corporate responsibility policies, I have been impressed with the ability to use the need to be sustainable as another important tool for good corporate governance and efficiency. Examples are everywhere of companies that embarked on sustainability programs and ended up saving money by finding excess waste they could avoid creating or materials that could be re-used or more efficiently sourced. For corporations like those on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, implementing sustainability policies ultimately meant focusing more on increasing efficiency, making internal communication more effective and learning how to do more with less.

It strikes me that many of these same lessons have been learned by many of the folks in agriculture - although they have not called it sustainability as such. The increasing demands of the marketplace have driven those who have become the most successful in the sector to be as efficient as possible in order to survive. This means that successful farmers realize the need to protect the quality of the land they manage since failing to do so returns less yield over time. Successful farmers also recognize the need to wisely manage the amount of water they use as well as the drive toward ever more use of precision agriculture to only apply fertilizer or pesticides where absolutely critical and at the right time. On the livestock side, successful operations recognize that when an animal is under stress from mistreatment, it does not gain weight efficiently, and therefore, fails to return the maximum profit on the investment. As a result, successful livestock operations have had a market reason to treat their animals well for some time.

This isn't to say that all farmers everywhere are already sustainable and there is no need for improvement. However, many of the most successful farming and ranching operations have earned their success because they realize that doing what is good for their land, their community and their bottom line are all inextricably linked. There are far more sustainable agricultural operations out there than the public knows about and this is becoming a problem. As marketing for "green products" continues at a break neck pace, consumers can often easily be confused by various competing claims about which product is made in the most environmentally and socially sustainable way.

A point I think is incredibly important as the sustainability issue continues to evolve is the need to keep our eye on global sustainability, not just "my backyard" sustainability. By this I mean that what is considered sustainable may change if we factor in developing countries and the nearly 3 billion extra people expected to join the planet by 2050. If that inescapable fact is considered, then it becomes even more important to keep large-scale, efficient agriculture in tact and thriving in the U.S. unless you want to see far greater losses of sensitive habitat like rainforests around the world. The fact of a growing population and finite resources and land also means that technology like genetic engineering can't be taken off the table as a tool for leading us to greater sustainability.

There is a bias by many in the environmental community to see all things "natural" as better than anything manmade. Yet if you really study biology and chemistry, you can see numerous examples of natural pesticides and natural chemicals that can cause harm when ingested in the wrong dosage, and to which we are far more likely to be exposed. The issue should not be natural vs synthetic, but what is the affect and what dosage is effective and safe vs what dosage causes harm. These should remain scientific, not political questions. The consequence of allowing bias to dictate policy is unintended consequences -- something we see so often in policymaking.

Here's hoping that those working to shape and influence consumers about sustainability take some time to think about the issue from a global perspective, rather than from their own parochial view. The world has too much at stake to rule out technologies and practices that can help us all live well and protect our environment and societies in the process

Remembering Borlaug

2009-09-15T15:02:00.006-04:00

One of the things that drives me crazy about the modern environmental movement is its seeming inability to look at things as they usually are: in shades of gray. Take agriculture for example, many environmentalists seem to want agriculture to be all organic, small and picturesque -- never mind that this would result in the mass starvation of much of the world. A case study for this unfortunate argument is the environmentalist criticism of Norman Borlaug - whose work revolutionized world agriculture by allowing the sector to overcome pests and boost yield from fertilizers that enabled feeding a much larger population than ever believed possible.

Awhile ago, I signed up to get regular emails from the authors of "Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility." Below is their latest email update focusing on Borlaug's work. I thought this piece fit perfectly into the Eco-Pragmatism mindset I'm promoting. Enjoy!

Dear Friend,

Last Saturday, a truly great American died. Norman Borlaug, known throughout the world as the father of the green revolution, was 95. A farm boy from Iowa, Borlaug revolutionized modern agriculture by developing new seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers that exponentially increased agricultural yields and today sustain more than 6 billion of us globally.

One of the great stains on the modern environmental movement was its opposition to Borlaug's work. Stanford professors Paul Ehrlich and current White House science adviser John Holdren famously argued in the late 1960s that halting food aid and sterilization would be more humane than new agricultural technologies. In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson warned that pesticides would be humankind's downfall. Andmany environmentalists remain largely hostile to Borlaug's work, for which he won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.

There's little doubt that chemical fertilizers and pesticides have been abused. But to focus exclusively on the unintended consequences of those technologies while ignoring the extraordinary accomplishments of a revolution that virtually ended famine and malnourishment in most parts of the world is ingratitude at its worst. And Borlaug's innovations, along with those of other agricultural pioneers who came before him, did more than save lives.

If you make your living today doing something other than agricultural labor, as virtually all of us do, you can thank Norman Borlaug, and thousands of others like him, for the innovations that make such lives possible. Three hundred years ago, when virtually the entire human population devoted its labors to growing enough food to sustain themselves, such lives would have been unimaginable.

Yet, even in Borlaug's death, some environmentalists today ask whether or not modern agricultural technologies are "sustainable." But since when did we evaluate technologies for whether or not they lasted forever? We don't, thank god, use the same machines or agricultural practices of our grandparents much less our Neolithic ancestors. The existence of technologies that allow us to feed a growing global population while liberating almost all of us from backbreaking agricultural labor is something we should celebrate - and improve.

Recently, two friends of Breakthrough, Colin Beaven and Adam Werbach, have come out with books that raise their own questions about the meaning of sustainability. Colin's book "No Impact Man" (Farrar 2009) is about a year-long experiment that he and his family undertook to massively reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. For Colin, sustainability is more about achieving personal fulfillment non-materialistically than it is about reducing emissions and waste. He describes the journey from being an environmental scold, berating his wife and himself for basic acts of consumption, to merrily proselytizing for community-building, through charades with neighbors to Sunday strolls to biking to work.

So often environmental books demonize our high-technology lifestyles as "unsustainable" without any expression of gratitude for the kind of comfortable lives these technologies allow us to have. For this reason, the best part of the book is when Colin and his wife attempt to hand-wash their clothes. It turns out to be hugely time-consuming and difficult. They quickly - and justifiably - abandon the effort for the laundry machine in their apartment basement.

Adam's book, "Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto" (Harvard Business Press, 2009), calls on firms to go beyond easy fixes like carbon offsets to embrace larger changes of continuous innovation and creative efforts to improve the quality of life for their employees. Adam became controversial after working for Wal-Mart. But what few people know is that his work there was about broadening the definition of sustainability to include Personal Sustainability Programs for employees, all while advocating that firms look beyond themselves to the larger world of policy and politics. A single firm cannot decide to pay much more for clean energy, for example, or else it will suffer a competitive disadvantage. Rather, it must engage in the larger world of business, policy, and politics to support society-wide innovation in how we generate energy and recycle materials.

In our view, these new books by Adam and Colin are reminders that we should have gratitude and even awe in our modern technologies - from hybrid seeds to washing machines - and to the shared investments in innovation that made them possible. This gratitude should motivate us to make investments in the next generation of technologies to power our civilization in ways that allow our species to thrive while also protecting, creating, and nourishing those nonhuman animals and systems upon which we depend.

All of this may lead us to question the elevation of sustainability as the principle that purports to organize ecological thought and action. The response by Borlaug to imminent famine was not to sustain natural systems but rather change them. This is what humans have done since time immemorial and it is precisely this adaptive and innovative spirit that will sustain us long into the future.

Michael and Ted

Even Solar Power is Controversial??

2009-09-08T14:07:00.004-04:00

It is unfortunate that we live in a time when common sense and pragmatism often get shelved for petty, local politics. Case in point -- even though there is WIDESPREAD call by almost all environmentalists to generate new sources of clean power . . . just about every time someone who can actually provide this elusive goal steps forward, they face criticism for not being "the perfect" solution.

Until now, I thought solar power was the exception - it seemed to be the preferred darling of the environmental community . . . even though its scale and cost have kept it from being a mainstream source of power generation. But just when you have a company with the expertise, engineering and capital to make this leap, it is being objected to by who?? environmentalists??

To be fair, not all environmentalists oppose a proposed solar power plant in the Mojave desert - probably not even the majority of them do, but as you will see in the article below -- some local environmentalists and Senator Feinstein do. And the kicker is that the basis for the objection is the protect the desert . . . from solar power? Really, I can't make this stuff up!!

As long as people refuse to see the big picture and *gasp* prioritize the problems we face, environmentalists and environmentalism will remain a small, divided issue rather than a large, transforming movement.

Here's hoping that with some more thought and illumination, this misguided effort gets turned back!

RENEWABLE ENERGY: RFK Jr., enviros clash over Mojave solar proposal (Greenwire, 09/08/2009)
Colin Sullivan, E&E reporter
SAN FRANCISCO -- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no stranger to hardball politics.
The environmental attorney has confronted polluters of the Hudson River, been arrested in Puerto Rico for trying to block U.S. Navy training operations and scrapped with oil companies looking to drill in remote parts of Alaska.
Along the way, he has worked for environmental groups large and small, lending his famous name to a burgeoning movement fighting to bring attention to macro-issues like climate change while protecting local wildlife habitat. In 1999, he was named a Time magazine "Hero of the Planet" for his work with the advocacy group Riverkeeper.
But in California's emerging battle over renewable energy development, Kennedy has gained new enemies: fellow environmentalists.
Kennedy, the son and namesake of the late Attorney General and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.), is at the center of a nasty dispute among environmental groups, energy developers and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) over the future of federal lands in the sun-soaked Mojave Desert.
The Mojave's 22,000 square miles straddle California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah. Given its elevation, heat, aridity and proximity to population centers on the California coast, the region is viewed by many as the ideal venue in North America for building a new generation of large solar-thermal power plants, especially in a state where utilities are required to get 20 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2010 and likely 33 percent by 2020.
Among the leaders in a group of aggressive solar prospectors is an Oakland-based company called BrightSource Energy Inc., which has been making a splash lately for its plans to build 2.6 gigawatts of power for California's investor-owned utilities, much of it to be located -- on paper, at least -- in the Mojave Desert.
But some California-based activists are worried that solar developers like BrightSource are getting a free pass in a headlong rush to build clean energy and capitalize on federal stimulus dollars now available for such projects. These activists have enlisted Feinstein to push for the declaration of a national monument in the desert and intend to unveil legislation with the senator in September that would apparently protect 1 million acres in the eastern Mojave to limit development.
Enter Kennedy, who calls the national monument, as it is likely to be drawn, a bad idea. To Kennedy, the instinct to protect local ecosystems has collided with the goals of a progressive national energy policy.
"I respect the belief that it's all local," Kennedy said in an interview. "But they're putting the democratic process and sound scientific judgement on hold to jeopardize the energy future of our country."
But here's the rub: Kennedy has a stake in BrightSource through VantagePoint Venture Partners, a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley that was instrumental in raising $160 million in financing for the solar startup. Other investors include Chevron Corp., Google.org and JPMorgan Chase & Co.
That Kennedy is a senior adviser at VantagePoint, and an open promoter of BrightSource in public speeches, is an irony not lost on David Myers, an activist who charges Kennedy with shilling for a company intent on using his political clout. To Myers, the lure of profit if BrightSource makes it big is why Kennedy, a cousin of California's first lady, Maria Shriver, wants to stop the national monument before it ever gets off the ground.
"I'm getting pretty tired of BrightSource using their Kennedy connection," said Myers, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy. "BrightSource [is pursuing] the worst projects in the worst locations, but they have the best PR firm, because Robert Kennedy is involved."
Feinstein's monument
Next, enter Feinstein, a longtime advocate of desert conservation and lead appropriator for the Interior Department in Congress. Her office is working on a bill to be released this month that some sources said will cut off 1 million public acres in the desert -- up from a previous estimate of 600,000 acres -- to protect a threatened species of desert tortoise and preserve its habitat.
Feinstein, according to several sources who spoke anonymously, is livid about the pace of development on public lands and has bluntly told the solar developers not to challenge her on the national monument designation. Calls to several solar companies seeking comment seemed to bear this out, as none would take a position on the measure.
Myers has been instrumental in developing the boundaries of the monument, sparking rumors that he is cozy with Feinstein and is dictating the terms of the legislation. The boundaries would stretch from Joshua Tree National Park to Mojave National Preserve, including nearly 100,000 acres of National Park Service lands and 210,000 acres spread across 20 wilderness areas controlled by the Bureau of Land Management.
That area includes lands previously owned by Catellus Development Corp., a real estate subsidiary of the former Santa Fe and Southern Pacific Railroad. Myers insisted that the purchase was made years ago in the name of conservation, a promise that he says Feinstein takes seriously.
And though he would not release details of the bill, Myers said none of the land would come from the federal energy zones marked by the Interior Department for development. Nor does he believe solar companies will have trouble finding land to build on elsewhere in the region.
"The land in the monument is minuscule," Myers said. "There are so many other places where solar is being proposed throughout the state."
But Kennedy disagrees. BrightSource and 19 other companies have petitioned BLM and the California Energy Commission (CEC) to build in an area called Broadwell that would be shut off under the Feinstein bill. Those applications represent about 10,000 megawatts of power, or 30 large-scale solar power plants; and though much of that would never get built, Kennedy says closing down Broadwell is a significant blow to the companies that have invested there under the guidance of federal land managers.
"This area is probably one of the best solar areas in the world," Kennedy said. "All that the solar industry has said is, 'Look, let's respect the robust process in place,' a process that is among the most transparent in the world through the CEC and BLM."
That process is still proceeding. BLM has received 66 applications for solar, totaling 577,000 acres, most of which would be located in the desert, an agency spokesman said. BLM is also processing 93 wind applications, representing 815,000 acres.
Yet the monument bill may have already produced a chilling effect. John White, a renewable-energy policy expert at the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies, says the proposal has cast a "shadow" over these projects just as they are vying for financing and federal stimulus dollars only available until 2010. To White, setting aside 1 million acres in the eastern Mojave would mean "less land for solar than for off-road vehicles ... in the very best land that has the highest solar radiation."
"I'm astonished that nobody's said that," said White, who refused to comment further on the political wrangling.
Myers countered that most of those 19 companies have agreed, in private discussions with Feinstein, to build elsewhere. Florida Power & Light Co., Cogentrix Energy LLC and Stirling Energy Systems Inc., among others, have informed Feinstein that they filed "shotgun applications" in the Broadwell area and are more than willing to drop those and find other areas, he said.
"They're fine going outside the monument," Myers said. "BrightSource is the laughingstock of the industry right now."
Kennedy vs. Myers
For his part, Kennedy was unfazed by Myers' allegations or his harsh take on BrightSource, calling the political heat familiar territory, given his family's unique place in U.S. history. In the same breath, he urged Feinstein to take a step back before proceeding with the monument.
"I don't think it does anybody any good to start making personal attacks," Kennedy said. "Let's argue this on the merits. I think if we argue this on the merits, I think BrightSource and 19 other companies are going to win the debate."
Kennedy added that he has a "limited stake" in VantagePoint and denied asking for special treatment through Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) or anyone else in the state government.
"I don't care enough about BrightSource to compromise my integrity or the national interest," Kennedy said. "I've never talked to anyone about choosing BrightSource over anybody else. I've never asked for any favors from any politician or any regulator or any human being, ever."
In the next breath, Kennedy went negative himself and questioned Myers' relationship with a competitor to BrightSource, Pasadena-based eSolar Inc. Like BrightSource, eSolar is a solar-thermal outfit whose business model is built around reflecting radiation from mirrors into a large tower to convert steam into electricity. Unlike BrightSource, eSolar has no stake or planned projects in the Broadwell region.
Myers, Kennedy pointed out, has his own overlap issues with Silicon Valley money through eSolar. A major donor to the Wildlands Conservancy is the venture capitalist David Gelbaum, who has poured his own funds into eSolar and reportedly owns a fat stake in the company. eSolar would stand to benefit from the national monument, several sources said, because it is not involved in the Broadwell area.
Adding to the fire is Myers himself, who recently appeared at an eSolar press event in person to praise the company for siting projects on industrial lands near power lines in Lancaster, Calif. Yet Myers denies an inappropriate relationship and blamed Kennedy and BrightSource for stoking the rumors.
Gelbaum, Myers said, donated $45 million seven years ago to help acquire the Catellus lands. Myers said the donation and pledge to keep the lands off-limits took place well before BrightSource came into being.
Not stopping there, Myers slammed Kennedy for opposing a wind project off the coast of Nantucket, Mass., and questioned his recent environmental credentials. He said Kennedy is hiding behind the local versus national environmental debate when his real motivation is turning a profit through VantagePoint.
"Bobby Kennedy told us they did not want to see windmills in Cape Cod, that they had to put it all in the California desert," Myers said. "The real story here is, Bobby Kennedy is on the side of major industrial development, and he's against distributed generation."
Kennedy responded in kind. "He is very focused on a narrow piece of land, which I respect," he said of Myers. "All I've ever asked for is a rational process that is democratic, that is transparent, that is robust. That process is in place."
View from the bleachers
Spectators on the sidelines were hesitant to comment on the flare-up between Kennedy and Myers or the shape of the monument designation. Most said they could not take a position on the forthcoming Feinstein bill until it is publicly available, which a spokeswoman said has not been finalized.
Officials at BrightSource, who contacted Kennedy for an interview after receiving a call for this article, said the focus had been placed unfairly on their company when the future of the entire solar industry is at stake.
"The debate over renewable development and desert protection is not adversarial," said Keely Wachs, a spokesman at BrightSource. "We all have the same end goal of protecting the environment."
White, whose organization is meant to bridge industry and environmental groups, said "a little bit of land rush" followed the stimulus frenzy and perhaps led to tense feelings on both sides. He urged the players to learn from the experience, even as he cautioned that the political process has yet to play out.
"It's one thing to introduce a bill and another thing to get it through both houses," White said. "I think that this really is the beginning of a long conversation about where and how to put solar in the desert."
Elden Hughes, a former chairman of the Sierra Club's California-Nevada Desert Committee, blamed BLM for promoting lands bought from Catellus years ago and said officials there should have respected a promise that those lands be conserved. He said BLM has only recently changed its tune.
Calling BLM officials "two-faced SOBs," Hughes said, "For some months, they were telling us they were protecting the land, while at the same time they were taking developers out there."
BLM spokesman John Dearing would only say that the agency's job is to process applications. BLM has no right to block any entity from seeking a right of way on the Catellus lands, he said, adding that the agency will pursue "high-level reviews" for any proposed impacts to lands meant for conservation.
"They might want to steer away from that area," Dearing said of the developers. "But they're not prohibited from making an application."

Saving the Rainforest: Markets Succeeding Where Blame Game Failed

2009-08-07T13:50:00.005-04:00

Protecting the environment does not mean stifling the economy. In fact, its just the opposite -- only in wealthy countries, where the economy is developed, can you turn toward priorities like preserving and cleaning up the environment. The sooner this lesson is learned, the sooner we can move beyond environmental partisanship and toward the implementation of actual solutions.

Below is a terrific example of this thinking. You've no doubt heard quite a bit about deforestation. Unfortunately, what you've probably heard is that biofuels are causing rainforest destruction. First of all, that's not true - as this article points out, by FAR, the leading cause of deforestation in Brazil, for example, is cattle production, not biofuels.

But the more important point is this: why are people spending thousands of dollars on "campaigns" to blame one thing or another for the destruction of rainforests vs actually creating a market to value rainforests as forests??

There are so many reasons why the rainforests are being cut down in developing countries. To attack one reason in a vacuum would merely shift the destruction to occur for the myriad of other reasons still pushing in that direction.

Instead, as the effort below shows, there are ways to create a market to preserve the forest -- a market that also allows people in developing countries to use their land and make a living -- which simply MUST happen if any cessation of rainforest destruction is to be sustained.

I hope more people will follow the example of John Carter - profiled in this story . . . and create markets to solve problems, rather than rhetorical blame game campaigns!! Just maybe, funders of environmental groups could start funding solutions instead of problems!!

I urge any and all of you who are interested in this issue to visit the website for Aliancia da Terra - the group that John Carter started and discussed in this article. If you are going to give money to fight this problem, give it to folks like this!

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Can cattle ranchers and soy farmers save the Amazon?
An Interview with John Cain Carter:
Rhett A Butler, mongabay.com
June 7, 2007

The key to making conservation successful is making it profitable. John Carter may hold that key.

Since the early 1970s, environmental groups have spent billions of dollars on conservation efforts in the Amazon, but have failed to slow the destruction of its rainforests – the Brazilian Amazon has lost more than 700,000 square kilometers (270,000 square miles) of forest in that time. As donor dollars poured into the region, deforestation rates continued to climb, peaking at 73,785 square kilometers (28,488 sq mi) of forest loss between 2002 and 2004, before falling sharply in 2005 and 2006 due to declining commodity prices. To many, it's become apparent that the market, not conservation measures, will determine the fate of the Amazon.

The reasons for land-clearing in the Amazon are compelling: cheap land, low labor costs, and booming demand for commodities driven by a surging China and growing interest in biofuels. These factors have helped Brazil become an agricultural superpower – the world's largest exporter of beef, cotton, and sugar, among other products – in less than a generation. Amazon landowners have seen their land values double every 4-5 years in areas that just a decade ago were pristine rainforests. The market is driving deforestation.

John Cain Carter with his Xavante Indian neighbor

Given this landscape, John Cain Carter believes the only way to save the Amazon is through the market. Carter is a Texas rancher who moved to the heart of the Amazon 11 years ago with his Brazilian wife, Kika, and founded what is perhaps the most innovative organization working in the Amazon, Aliança da Terra. Carter says that by giving producers incentives to reduce their impact on the forest, the market can succeed where conservation efforts have failed.

While deforestation rates in the Amazon have accelerated, the problem is not a lack of laws, but rather a legal system where enforcement is so slow and so corrupt that it renders the laws effectively useless. On paper, cattle ranching in the Amazon may be the most restricted in the world, with landowners required to keep 80 percent of their land forested – a limitation no rancher in Texas faces. Carter wants to see farmers in Brazil benefit in following the law, by turning this restriction into a marketing advantage. However in order to do so, Amazon producers have to ensure that consumers ( i.e., buyers of commodities like McDonalds, Wal-Mart, and Cargill) can confidently say that agricultural products are produced legally and even more sustainably than stipulated by the law. The incentive for producers is market access: Aliança da Terra helps Brazilian farmers and ranchers get the best price for their products, but only if they follow the rules. While producers get higher prices for their goods, buyers like Burger King and Archer-Daniels Midland can say they are using legally and responsibly produced beef. Meanwhile more rainforest is left standing, ecosystem services preserved, and biodiversity conserved. Everybody wins.

Accountability has other benefits. Aliança da Terra's growing clout even helps fight corruption – officials know they can't solicit bribes from Aliança's members while members know that passing bribes will only get them kicked out of the system. The promise of Aliança da Terra is so great that conservation groups and landowners are sitting down at the same table, when just two years ago they were the most bitter of adversaries – a substantial achievement and one that bodes well for the success of these efforts.

What is most remarkable about Aliança's system is that it has the potential to be applied to any commodity anywhere in the world. That means palm oil in Borneocould be certified just as easily as sugar cane in Brazil or sheep in New Zealand. By addressing the supply chain, tracing agricultural products back to the specific fields where they were produced, the system offers perhaps the best market-based solution to combating deforestation. Combining these mechanisms with large-scale land conservation and scientific research offers what may be the best hope for saving the Amazon.

In a June interview with mongabay.com Carter explains his experiences in Brazil and his approach to saving Earth's largest and most important rainforest.

To read the interview with John Carter, click here

It's About Competitiveness, Not Just the Climate

2009-08-03T11:42:00.004-04:00

Over and over again I have heard the argument that we can't adopt policy that encourages greater energy efficiency in the U.S., a greater market for home made and home grown energy sources because we would be taking on a burden that the Chinese will never join. What's sad is that so often, this argument is made by people who have NO clue what is going on in China, have never been to China, and probably couldn't point to China on a map!

The article below does a great job of outlining why this argument is actually, all backwards. That in fact, China is already moving faster into the "clean energy" market than we are!! Though China may achieve gains differently than our policy structure (i.e. not taking a carbon cap) that is hardly a surprise when you consider how completely different their government and culture are from our own. Just one example, China's authoritarian government means that they literally "turn on" the nation's air conditioning on a set date and same with the nation's heating. They dictate things like the temperature allowed in business offices, and how many cars can be on the road.

I am NOT advocating for this type of complete government control. It makes my skin crawl. But the point is that China can and is controlling its energy use in ways that we would never consider. Just because they do it differently, does not mean they have no regard for energy efficiency and moving toward more clean energy.

This excerpt from the article below shows the amazing amount of activity in this area within China:

Consider: Chinese cars are more than one-third more fuel-efficient than U.S. cars. China is investing 10 times as much on clean power, as a percentage of gross domestic product, as the United States is. China is on track to create 150,000 jobs through the deployment of 120 gigawatts of wind power by 2020 -- an amount equivalent to today's global total and nearly five times America's. As a result, China is already curbing its carbon emissions substantially. This year alone, it will abate almost 350 million tons of CO2, as compared with business as usual. That's as much as is emitted by Argentina.

And why is China doing this? I think it is safe to say its not for the environment - but that is the larger point we seem to continually miss. They are taking these measures because they realize that controlling as much of their own energy use and production as possible means being less dependent on unstable and pricey foreign sources. More control over a country's energy means more strategic independence and a more efficient economy over the long run.

In the debate about whether the U.S. should adopt policies that send a market signal saying "invest in clean energy and efficiency," let's PLEASE remember that the larger reason for doing this is actually economic competitiveness with the environment getting a side benefit.

I urge you to read the article below co-authored by GE's Jeff Immelt for some very good examples of what I'm talking about.

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The Washington Post

Falling Behind On Green Tech

By John Doerr and Jeff Immelt
Monday, August 3, 2009

America confronts three interrelated crises: an economic crisis, a climate crisis and an energy security crisis. We believe there's a fourth: a competitiveness crisis. This crisis is particularly evident in America's worldwide standing in the next great global industry, green technology.

There is no topic of greater importance to America's economic future. The question is whether the United States will lead or lag in tomorrow's global energy markets. And the difference between these two futures is dramatic.

Energy in the United States costs more than $1 trillion a year -- for oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear and renewables. This is on top of a similar sum spent on the things that use this energy -- our homes, shops, factories and cars. That means about $2 trillion a year is at stake right here.

Do we want to win the race to lead the next great global industry, clean energy? That is the choice before us.

We are clearly not in the lead today. That position is held by China, which understands the importance of controlling its energy future. China's commitment to developing clean energy technologies and markets is breathtaking.

Consider: Chinese cars are more than one-third more fuel-efficient than U.S. cars. China is investing 10 times as much on clean power, as a percentage of gross domestic product, as the United States is. China is on track to create 150,000 jobs through the deployment of 120 gigawatts of wind power by 2020 -- an amount equivalent to today's global total and nearly five times America's. As a result, China is already curbing its carbon emissions substantially. This year alone, it will abate almost 350 million tons of CO2, as compared with business as usual. That's as much as is emitted by Argentina.

What do Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have in common? Two things: They are the world's five leading Internet technology companies, and they are all American. But when it comes to wind power, the most mature of the clean-energy sectors, of the top five manufacturers (Vestas, GE, Gamesa, Enercon and Suzlon) only one is American. Similarly, the United States is home to only one of the 10 largest solar panel producers in the world and two of the top 10 advanced battery manufacturers. How can we catch up? Not through protectionism or massive government intervention but through the power of good old home-grown innovation.

We are American businessmen. Our job is building businesses and commercializing innovation. Every year, GE invests 6 percent of its industrial revenue in research and development to produce more efficient and cleaner wind turbines, jet engines, locomotives, power turbines and appliances. Kleiner Perkins has invested $680 million in 48 of the most compelling new clean-energy technologies, with $1.1 billion more to invest. We are trying to do our part. But our government's energy and climate policies are our principal obstacle to success.

Right now, the United States has no long-term market signal to tell companies and consumers that it values low-carbon energy. It has no policies to discourage sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas for energy. It does not offer adequate sustained R&D funding to be a serious competitor in this huge business.

Today's policies stifle American innovation and competitiveness. But good policy can flip this dynamic. Five basic changes are needed:

-- Send a long-term signal that low-carbon energy is valuable. We must put a price on carbon and a cap on carbon emissions. No long-term signal means no serious innovation at scale, which means fewer American success stories.

-- Get the rules of the road right for utilities. We must make our utilities a driving force for repowering America, driving efficiency through incentives, a renewable electricity standard and a national unified smart grid.

-- Set energy standards that grow steadily stronger. America should strive to have the most efficient buildings, cars and appliances in the world. The savings will land in the pockets of U.S. consumers and businesses.

-- Get serious about funding research, development and deployment, at scale. The federal government currently spends only $2.5 billion on clean-energy R&D a year -- 0.25 percent of our annual energy bill. Sen. Jeff Bingaman's Clean Energy Deployment Administration is a good idea that would be fast and flexible. But more such programs are needed.

-- Fulfill President Obama's commitment to "become the world's leading exporter of renewable energy." We need a robust trade policy that seeks to open markets abroad -- including the Chinese market -- for U.S. clean-energy products through new trade agreements. Such policies unleash American competitiveness disciplined by market forces. This is widely endorsed by U.S. companies that compete internationally and by the broad-based President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

We should carefully design policy to bring in other nations. Think of the Copenhagen climate summit in December as an opportunity to create world markets and momentum for a low-carbon future, just as the Internet set the world on course for an information-rich future. Some say we shouldn't move until China moves. In fact, China is moving full speed ahead -- with or without us.

There is still time for us to lead this global race, although that window is closing. We need low-carbon policies to exploit America's strengths -- innovation and entrepreneurs. We know that building such policies is a heavy political lift. But, without doubt, bad energy policy has cost our country dearly, and the costs of continuing it are incalculable.

John Doerr is a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Jeff Immelt is chairman and chief executive of General Electric.

The Irrationality of Indirect Analysis

2009-06-05T11:41:00.004-04:00

The indirect land use issue has gotten a lot of attention recently. For those not familiar with this topic, it basically revolves around EPA calculating the emissions from indirect land use changes that are likely to come from increased ethanol production in the U.S. Specifically, the assertion has been that greater production of ethanol in the U.S. means an increased demand for corn production elsewhere (i.e. Brazil).

I have long contended that this is a flawed approach to dealing with de-forestation - and that in fact, if you take this view then anything that decreases yields in the U.S. is increasing deforestation and should be banned. So, for example, any enviornmental regulation on say clean water, air or endangered species that reduces agriculture's productivity, is increasing deforestation because it shifts ag production abroad.

The article below brings up a whole new set of reasons why the indirect land use analysis is a flawed policy lens to use!

If the problem is de-forestation, we have to provide incentives to counter that . . . DIRECTLY, rather than pretending that there is some magical puppet master that can control all the indirect forces leading to de-forestation.

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The Irrationality of Indirect Analysis

June 3, 2009, 5:32 p.m.
By Robert Zubrin
Special to Roll Call

Those wishing to counter global warming have for some time been pushing for measures that would favor fuels whose utilization adds the least carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. In recent statements, however, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced that in seeking to assess the ethanol program, it will take into account not only the carbon released as a direct measurable result of the production and use of the fuel, but immeasurable indirect effects, such as Third World deforestation, allegedly caused by business activity here. This is a mistake.

The indirect analysis method was first made popular by former Environmental Defense Fund staff attorney Tim Searchinger via a well-publicized report issued by the German Marshall Fund in February 2008. In that paper, Searchinger conceded that in terms of its role in replacing gasoline derived from petroleum with fuel derived from biomass, and thus the Earth’s atmosphere, the U.S. corn ethanol directly decreased carbon emissions. However, according to Searchinger, since the program also reduced the dumping of U.S. corn on Third World countries, it indirectly increased net global carbon emissions by encouraging the expansion of agriculture abroad.

The Searchinger indirect analysis approach has been criticized by scientists who pointed out that the putative indirect link between the U.S. corn ethanol program and deforestation elsewhere is not measurable or falsifiable, and thus simply not a scientific assertion. A more cogent critique, in my view, would be a moral one, as the Searchinger argument, now apparently embraced by the EPA, presupposes that it is or should be a proper goal of American policy to restrict the economic growth of underdeveloped nations.

However, whatever one might think of the right of poor foreign countries to economic development, the indirect analysis method of carbon accounting must be rejected by American policymakers because, if it is embraced, it must perforce prevent the implementation of any positive policies here, not just in biofuel production, but in any field of endeavor whatsoever.

Consider: If an American goes to the supermarket and buys groceries, regardless of their origin, he is acting to bid up the price of agricultural commodities internationally. This then encourages the growth of agriculture everywhere, and thus plausibly deforestation. So anything that allows Americans to buy increased quantities of groceries can be said to cause deforestation and thus global warming. Therefore, according to indirect analysis, any policy or technological development that contributes to income growth or increased levels of employment in the U.S. needs to be prevented. Instead of seeking to stimulate the economy that we should be seeking to depress it.

But that is not all. According to indirect analysis, public education should also be shut down because it leads to higher incomes and health care needs to be ruined as thoroughly as possible because, by keeping people alive, it also increases their total purchases. If indirect analysis is accepted, then the EPA’s otherwise commendable activity in combating toxic air pollution should be reversed because, by reducing smog-induced cancer rates, the EPA has extended the lives of thousands Americans, thereby allowing them to continue to buy things and thus further global warming. Also the EPA should think twice about encouraging high-fuel-economy cars because, by reducing the amount that consumers need to spend on gas, such vehicles indirectly allow more to be spent on groceries and thereby contribute to deforestation.

So to summarize, according to indirect analysis, all measures that improve the economy, education, health, the environment or technology are to be condemned. This result must follow because all of these help humanity, and so long as humanity engages in any activities that cause carbon emissions, anything that helps humanity can also be said to cause global warming.

Clearly such an absurd theory cannot be accepted as a basis for policy. If it is, we will end up legislating depression, banning all technological and medical advances, and ultimately, perhaps requiring environmental impact statements every time a lifeguard rescues a swimmer or a midwife assists in the birth of a child. Instead, the proper, scientific, ethical and sane way to proceed in assessing carbon emissions, whether of ethanol use or any other human activity, is to base such judgments strictly on the direct effects of the activity itself. These can be measured and therefore reduced in detail as technological alternatives permit. If we operate otherwise, then no constructive solutions will be possible.

Robert Zubrin is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

What are you For?

2009-03-22T13:58:00.004-04:00

I'm sure many of us have had the experience of being in a meeting with someone who constantly shoots down every idea in the room, but can't come up with an alternative. It's beyond frustrating - it is obstructionist.

For too long, the modern environmentalist point of view seems to have been defined more by what they oppose, than by what they support. And when they (as a sector or group) can agree on support for something, it is usually so filled with caveats and unworkable engineering . . . or is so insanely costly that it is worthless in the practical world.

This is part of why it is so important to re-define the environmentalist movement. Real environmentalists want progress - both for the environment and for the people it supports. We have the crazy situation before us today where wind projects can't get built because ENVIRONMENTALISTS oppose them. They don't want coal-fired power, nuclear is a dirty word (even though it has ZERO ghg emissions and kills far less people in its production than coal or natural gas), wind kills birds and is "unsightly," solar is ok -- but people, we can't power our way of life on solar alone -- and if there was an actual proposal to do so, there would be opposition to that because the physical footprint you generate with solar for large projects is huge. We can't focus on biogas generated power because that would "reward" large animal feeding operations . . . and the list goes on and on.

To be fair, not all enviros oppose all these energy types, but dig a little deeper into most enviro organizations and I'll bet you'll find that most of them have at least internal disagreements about what to support.

The point is that there seems to be an obsession with calculating every wrong impact that could come from energy source a or b, while forgetting the fact that WE WILL USE ENERGY, so the issue should be minimizing the impacts not picking a "perfect" winner that doesn't exist!

The environmental movement as a whole needs to get comfortable with the concept of a "net environmental benefit" which makes the hard choice sometimes, that while there may be damage caused by a wind turbine, lets say, its a hell of a lot less than a coal plant, so, let's all get on board with supporting wind. Perhaps this could happen if the environmental movement diversified itself to include a few more engineers and businesspeople instead of constantly alienating them.

The exact same problem is unfolding over electric transmission. Environmentalists want renewable energy, but not the new transmission lines it will take to bring it to electrical users.

The Wall Street Journal is doing stories on the "green tape" that holds up renewable energy projects . . . And now, we have the chamber of commerce out there calculating all the energy projects that are being blocked by environmental opposition. The chamber of commerce is hardly a helpful ally when it comes to environmental issues. But they have a point on this issue. And when environmentalists oppose everything, they set their opponents up to look like the reasonable ones.

You can't be FOR the environment in theory and oppose every means to make some improvement on the ground merely because there are trade-offs.

Life is filled with trade-offs. The only alternative, is to do nothing -- and tell me, how is that reducing pollution?

The Environmental Divide

2009-03-02T07:54:00.000-05:00

When times are tough, as they are now, there often emerges an even sharper contrast of visions. In some ways, the extremists for any cause thrive in the crisis times when they can use the "urgency" of the underlying crisis as reason to stop compromising and give in to the feel-good approach of self-righteous ideological grandstanding. The justification becomes that "times are too urgent" for half measures.

Let's think about this. If times are so bad, doesn't it make more sense to work WITH other people? Don't we need pragmatism now more than ever? When you consider that extreme positions rarely if ever accomplish anything (other than fundraising and self-aggrandizement), you realize that when times are tough economically, that's when you need swift action . . . forward progress! America's government is not designed for this - it is designed to require compromise and steady, thought-through action that has the agreement of a wide cross section of our very diverse country. So in the end, it is pragmatism, bridge-building and finally, shared understanding that moves large issues forward in a sustainable way.

Keep all of this in mind as you read the article below from the Economist.

There is an interesting divide emerging within environmentalists with some using the urgent needs of the planet as an excuse to be as uncompromising and ideological as they want. I feel the need to keep asking these folks: "What actual good has your position brought?" If you oppose new transition lines being built for a project that will increase renewable energy . . . how are you helping the overall environment?

I've long been frustrated that there seems to be NO ability or willingness in the majority of the environmental community to prioritize!! There are ALWAYS trade-offs -- and there are even for "good" energy projects. The path of opposing everything leads us to actually support the dirtiest options -- SINCE THEY ARE THE ONES THAT ALREADY EXIST! Enviros are forever engaging in intellectual puzzles that try to assess all the impacts of any action. There is certainly a place for understanding impacts to the best of our ability -- but there is also a place for recognizing that if you wait until the "perfect" energy source is ready to be commercialized, you are in fact prolonging the life of the dirtier option because you are unwilling to take a more modest step forward.

I hope that the public and those that fund environmental organizations begin to see the real trade-offs from extremist rhetoric on both sides.

I know I'm often hard on the environmentalists for their refusal to be pragmatic -- but let us also recognize that these groups would have far less power in our society if there had been more good-faith efforts from industry to address environmental problems head on. So - there is plenty of blame to go around.

Economist
Feb 12, 2009

Tree-huggers v nerds
Feb 12th 2009 | LOS ANGELES
From The Economist print edition

As the planet heats up, so do disputes between environmentalists
LAST December California approved a power line between San Diego and the Imperial Valley—a spot blessed with sun, wind and geothermal energy resources. The Sunrise Powerlink would twist around a state park, an Indian reservation and much of a forest (see map). Its builders would be banned from harming burrowing owls or rattlesnakes. It is just the sort of green infrastructure project that might be expected to delight environmentalists. Their response? An appeal and a petition to the state Supreme Court.
“Environmentalists have never been a well-mannered lot”, says Terry Tamminen, who has advised Arnold Schwarzenegger on climate change. But they seem to be becoming more ornery. A growing fear that the environment is on the brink of collapse is making many greens less willing to compromise, even with each other. And George Bush’s departure from the White House has removed a common adversary.
The fiercest disputes are over electricity transmission. Many environmentalists, including Mr Schwarzenegger, argue that more power lines must be built to connect cities with potential sources of renewable energy. The governor strongly supports the Sunrise Powerlink project. The Sierra Club opposes it, along with another line that would run east from Los Angeles. Together with the Centre for Biological Diversity, the organisation is holding out for a guarantee that the line will be used to transmit electricity solely from renewable sources. Environmental groups in Nevada and the Midwest have issued similar ultimatums.
To an extent this is a dispute between pragmatism and idealism. Politicians like Mr Schwarzenegger tend to believe that energy projects should be judged on whether they improve on current practice. Activists, by contrast, prefer to measure them against an environmental ideal. “A little bit better than the status quo isn’t good enough,” explains Bill Magavern, the Sierra Club’s California director. He wants power to be generated close to those who will use it, and envisages a rash of solar roofs in San Diego.
A more profound difference has to do with how the problem is diagnosed. Although no big environmental group is unconcerned with global warming, they view the threat in different ways. The big divide is between those who fret about measurable changes in greenhouse-gas emissions and those who worry more about harm to natural habitats, whether caused by global warming or anything else. The first group—call them the environmental nerds—includes people like Al Gore and Mr Schwarzenegger. The second group—call them the tree-huggers—includes the Sierra Club, the Centre for Biological Diversity and other established conservation groups.
The dispute is likely to intensify in the next few months as Washington weighs in. This week Congress reached a deal on a stimulus plan that encourages the construction of yet more power lines. Barack Obama wants to create green jobs, but he needs to create jobs above all, and quickly. Environmentalists, who know how to hold up big projects better than anybody, will not be bounced so easily. A shame: after all, the greens are winning.

Germans Exporting Energy Efficiency - We Should Too!

2009-01-17T09:37:00.000-05:00

Awhile back I participated in a farmer-to-farmer exchange between the U.S. and Germany looking at renewable energy and climate-friendly agricultural practices that might count as offsets to a mandatory climate cap-trade system some day.

While in Germany, I was extremely impressed with the amount of bio-gas production they had going on. The government guaranteed a 22 cent/kilowatt price for bio-gas created energy (over double the usual price for electricity) and as a result, almost every farm of any size has added a bio-gas production facility.

So - from time to time, I check in on what's going on in the German renewable energy sector -- as they seem to be very innovative and focused on solving the problems of promoting more low-carbon energy -- German engineering indeed!

Today I saw a press release from the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. Their latest offering is a database that allows buyers to find energy-efficient technology made in Germany. This resource says so many things - not only is Germany largely engaged in low-carbon energy technology, but they are major exporters of this technology -- and they are promoting it in a very good way.

Now imagine how much the U.S. could do on this front - with all its resources . . . and what that new economic activity could do for our struggling economy. Yes, I realize that America has far more fossil resources to use, and thus, it makes sense that the U.S. would develop that resource. But, its often said these days that "We just don't make anything here anymore." Well, think of energy efficiency and low carbon/renewable energy as "a whole lot of stuff" we could make very well -- and that much of the world increasingly wants to buy!

Even more important from my perspective -- is how much MORE is actually done to solve energy problems through engineering and science than through rhetoric and partisanship.

Below is the press release so you can read all about it. And, you can check out the database by clicking here.

PRESS RELEASE
2008-10-8
Database of German providers of energy-efficient products and services now online free of charge: The Energy Efficiency Export Initiative launches its international debut
Starting today, potential business partners from around the world can search online for German providers of energy-efficient products and services, thanks to the English-language website of the Energy Efficiency Export Initiative (www.efficiency-from-germany.info/en). In order to be included in the database, German companies can register themselves free of charge at www.efficiency-from-germany.info. The process takes just a few minutes. After registering, German companies can then create a company profile which enables them to be identified in online searches by interested users from around the globe. In the few weeks since the German-language version of the website went into operation, more than 350 companies have registered with the Initiative. And the numbers keep going up.
The database covers a comprehensive spectrum of products and services that range from "architects" to "ventilation systems". This makes it possible for entrepreneurs, policymakers and other interested parties from around the world to gain quick access to potential business partners in Germany, who are grouped together under a single international label: "Energy Efficiency - Made in Germany". The database also provides information on a dynamic network of partners in specific target countries. All of these features make the website a one-stop-shop and central point of contact for anyone who is looking for German suppliers and business partners in the field of energy efficiency. And German companies benefit as well: the website gives them a direct platform for making their products and services known to potential international customers, providing them with a "gateway to the world" that enables them to build contacts to new export markets both quickly and easily.
The newly launched English-language website is targeted toward companies and opinion leaders in export markets that are of key importance for Germany's energy efficiency industry. It is a crucial addition to the extensive German-language website of the Energy Efficiency Export Initiative, which provides numerous services to support the export activities of German companies.
Federal Minister of Economics and Technology Michael Glos stated: "This new online database covers the entire spectrum of energy efficiency and will help match international stakeholders with the right contact persons at qualified and knowledgeable German companies that provide technology and services. At the same time, we are providing the German energy efficiency industry with a web-based platform for expanding their export business. We want the label 'Energy Efficiency - Made in Germany' to become internationally recognised as a mark of first-rate quality."
Since the 2007, the Energy Efficiency Export Initiative - which is run by the Federal Government under the lead responsibility of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology - has been supporting the export activities of German firms in the field of energy efficiency. The Initiative provides support above all to small and medium-sized enterprises that offer energy-efficient products and services.
For further information, please contact the Energy Efficiency Export Initiative (full contact information is available at www.efficiency-from-germany.info/en).

Congress' Climate Plan: Partisan or Passable?

2009-01-16T10:04:00.000-05:00

A new Congress has been seated in the U.S. and soon, a new President will be sworn in. Now is the time when legislative plans are being made for the year and the new President's priorities either clash or harmonize with the Congress.

As I have discussed here before, there is a real danger that the new leaders of the climate issue in the Congress will move to the left on the climate issue (less flexibility in allowing regulated entities to meet their cap and a very limited or no offsets option). Currently, most Republicans remain absent from the climate debate - and the few that are engaged are trying to stand in front of a political train that will merely run them down. Therefore, it will fall to a select group of conservative or "blue dog" Democrats and some moderate Republicans to ensure that the climate legislation that moves forward is workable and, dare I say it, SUSTAINABLE in this difficult economy.

Below is a good overview article laying out the Congressional agendas for the climate issue.

Climate Change - Environment and Energy Daily
Jan. 16, 2009
Waxman begins four-month march to move emissions bill
Darren Samuelsohn, E&E senior reporter

Let the vote-counting begin.
Minutes into his first hearing yesterday as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) boldly pledged to move a comprehensive climate change bill through the panel by Memorial Day. But the road to the House floor isn't that simple.
Democrats hold a 36-23 edge on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. That is a big margin for Waxman to work with as he takes the lead in writing a cap-and-trade climate bill over the next four months. But lawmakers from both parties warn that there are no guarantees Waxman will be able to satisfy any Republicans, let alone some of his own Democrats who represent districts with heavy industrial bases.
"That's the question: Are you going to insert the word 'Ohio?' Are you going to insert the word 'Pennsylvania?'" asked Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the GOP's former top House vote counter. "What are you going to put in this that allows people in states that are particularly dependent on coal, either as a producer or user of coal, to move forward?"
Waxman, an 18-term congressman, did not give specifics on the climate bill he has in mind during yesterday's hearing on global warming, the first since he took over late last year as the new chairman.
But Waxman did explain that he has a wider range of recommendations available to pull from, including previous versions of cap-and-trade legislation introduced by other Democrats and the U.S. Climate Action Partnership blueprintreleased yesterday that calls for a reduction of U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases to 20 percent of 2005 levels by 2050.
"A consensus is developing that our nation needs climate legislation," Waxman said. "Our job is to transform this consensus into effective legislation. The legislation must be based on the science and meet the very serious threats we face."
As he moves forward, Waxman can claim support from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). In a prepared statement, Pelosi called Waxman's Memorial Day schedule an "aggressive timetable for action to reduce global warming and our dependence on foreign oil. I share his sense of urgency and his belief that we cannot afford another year of delay."
Across Capitol Hill, Senate Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) issued her own statement saying she was "very pleased" with Waxman's plans. She pointed out that while she pushed a cap-and-trade bill through her committee in December 2007, the House took no action on global warming legislation over the last two years.
Looking ahead, Boxer promised to release "a set of principles for my new legislation in the coming weeks." And she said that Waxman's schedule, coupled with the U.S. CAP announcement, suggest "the writing is on the wall that legislation to combat global warming is coming soon."
House and Senate Democratic leaders say they will be consulting closely with the Obama administration on its preferences for global warming legislation, a strategy repeated during confirmation hearings this week by EPA Administrator designee Lisa Jackson.
The Obama administration will likely release a series of legislative principles out of the Obama White House, as opposed to a detailed bill, according to an aide to Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the chairman of the newly created House Energy and Environment Subcommittee with primary jurisdiction on a global warming bill.
"Frankly, I think what we're going to get from this administration is what we got from the tail end of the Clinton administration and not the start of the Clinton administration," the Markey staffer said. "One of the great mistakes of the health care debate is they tried to write a 300-page bill. Congress doesn't take dictation very well."
'The fossil fuel Democrats'
Given the size of the Democratic majorities, Blunt predicted cap-and-trade advocates would find success when it comes to moving climate legislation, though it may mean making some concessions.
"If Barack Obama is pushing for it, and Nancy Pelosi is pushing for it, and Barbara Boxer is pushing for it and Henry Waxman is pushing for it, it probably happens," Blunt said. "But that doesn't mean it happens in the right way, or the right time frame."
Blunt also would not rule out Republicans voting in support of a Waxman-led climate bill. "It's too early to tell," he said.
Several Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee said they had already made up their mind they would be opposed to a cap-and-trade bill, including Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois.
Shimkus, a seven-term congressman from southern Illinois' coal country, sounded off during yesterday's hearing against the economic implications of a new carbon cap in the United States. And he predicted political fallout for Democrats from similar industry-heavy districts if they back Waxman's legislation.
"I'm going to hold the fossil fuel Democrats accountable," Shimkus said. "You better be prepared to defend your vote as global climate change legislation will destroy the fossil fuel industry."
Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) said he did not buy the argument offered by U.S. CAP members that it would cost more to stave off the effects of climate change in future years if lawmakers do not move now to curb emissions with a cap-and-trade bill.
"You hear that in a lot of issues: A stitch in time saves nine," Gingrey said. "But right now, I don't believe we have a stitch left when we get through trying to save the economy and restore some of these 2.5 million jobs lost last year."
Warnings from Shimkus and Gingrey underscore the work Waxman has to do to win over Republicans. Meantime, some of the so-called fossil fuel Democrats who serve on the Energy and Commerce Committee said they planned to be active participants in the drafting of climate legislation.
"I want to be able to support a bill," said Rep. Baron Hill, a five-term lawmaker from southeastern Indiana. "But if coal is not addressed, then I cannot support a bill. It's just as plain and simple as that."
Rep. Charles Melancon (D-La.) said Waxman's Memorial Day target would require giving lawmakers like him time to study the climate bill. "Mr. Waxman is a very experienced legislator, and I think he realizes he can't just dump this on us one day and move it forward," said Melancon, a three-term congressman representing the state's southeastern swampland.
Asked if the committee's Democrats would be a "rubber stamp" on whatever legislation Waxman produces, Melancon replied, "That'd be a firm no. But I have committed to be open minded and try to resolve issues rather than just take an opposing position."
"I think the work starts today," added Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.)
DeGette, the Democrats' chief House deputy whip, also predicted GOP support for the legislation, though she would not name any names. "I'd have to take a survey," she said.
Off Capitol Hill, environmental groups and companies involved in U.S. CAP welcomed Waxman's decision to spell out a four-month game plan.
"There's a lot of work to be done," said Francis Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "But you'll never know how long it takes if you don't get started."
Jeff Sterba, president and CEO of PNM Resources Inc., a New Mexico-based electric utility company, said he wanted to see Congress write and vote on climate legislation this year. "They can move quickly if they want to," he said.

Climate Crash?

2008-12-17T12:24:00.000-05:00

Going into 2009, there will be many changes in U.S. climate policy. That is welcome news. What is NOT welcome news is that so far, many of these changes seem to be driving the issue right off another ideological cliff - only this time, a liberal one.

I'm the first to admit that Republicans, by and large, have mishandled the climate issue in particular and the issue of the environment in general. But just because one party is behaving badly does not by ANY means indicate that the other party is "good" on the issue.

I had hoped that the Obama message of "change" would mean a break in the partisan way of doing business, but it is shaping up to look like that, unfortunately, will not be the case with climate change.

Looking at the new leadership in the influential House Commerce & Energy Committee as well as the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, we can get a glimpse of the new desired approach - one that caters almost exclusively to the most strident environmental groups desire to "punish industry". It remains to be seen whether the Obama environment/climate appointments will also follow in this path -- one that will guarantee no bill passes through a still mostly divided Congress (on this issue at least), or whether they chart a brave direction toward bi-partisanship and compromise -- the ONLY way anything EVER passes through the U.S. legislative process.

I hope for the best, but would alert people following this issue to the need to impress on the new leaders the dangers -- TO THE ENVIRONMENT of giving in to the feel good approach of partisan idealism. We are rapidly running out of time to get started on a climate regime that will allow us to reduce emissions by the needed levels to avoid irreversible affects on our planet. We can not afford to waste another 2 years - this time by sounding good and getting nothing done.

I would also alert those who have been less engaged than they should have been on this issue for many years -- WAKE UP! The window is rapidly closing on the ability to get sound policy that is sustainable for both the economy and the environment.

The only test for the next Congress on this issue -- is what they get DONE - NOT what is proposed and how much grandstanding occurs. In the end, that's just more hot air emissions.

Below is a story from the Wall Street Journal discussing some of the inside baseball changes happening -- and proof of what I'm referring to.

At the end of the day, members who represent coal states and oil states and car states -- will need to see a climate plan that is a pragmatic, steady transition toward a carbon constrained economy -- regardless of whether there is a D or an R behind their name. The sooner we all realize this reality and work with it, the faster we can get started saving the planet . . . and ourselves.

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OPINION: POLITICAL DIARY
NOVEMBER 22, 2008, 10:22 P.M. ET

The Climate Purge

Coup d'etat at the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Article »

By JOSEPH RAGO

Henry Waxman moved to consolidate his coup d'etat at the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee just hours after he was installed as the new chairman this week. It appears that the California liberal, with his customary subtlety, is plotting a night of the climate-change long knives.

Democrats dumped the current Chairman John Dingell because he does not favor global-warming action aggressive enough to suit the party's green wing. Now his lieutenants, who've been known to share his views, are targets too. Gene Green, an oil-patch Democrat who chairs the subcommittee on environmental issues, sent out a panicked Dear Colleague letter that called for "healing" and volunteered that he has enjoyed working "with Chairman Waxman on a number of other issues and I would hope to continue it."

Then Bart Stupak -- Mr. Dingell's chief deputy, head of the investigations subcommittee and resident FDA demagogue -- chimed in that he, too, looks forward to carrying on "the important work Chairman Dingell and I began."

But the Dingell ally who should be looking over his shoulder most nervously is Rick Boucher, chairman of the energy subcommittee. Mr. Boucher has been a friend to the coal industry and hardly finds himself in a comfortable position now when his incoming boss supports a moratorium on coal-fired power. Mr. Boucher's likely replacement is Ed Markey, Nancy Pelosi's climate-change point man, now head of the telecom subcommittee. In a fit of anti-Dingell pique, Speaker Pelosi last year stripped Mr. Dingell of jurisdiction over climate change, giving the portfolio to a special panel run by Mr. Markey. Never mind that the new panel, under House rules, lacks the power to mark up legislation. Mr. Dingell called the committee "as useless as feathers on a fish" and "an embarrassment to everybody."

No doubt Mr. Dingell's comments were among the many sins he's now paying for. Soon taxpayers will be paying a stiff price too if Mr. Waxman and company succeed in their plans to use federal money to subsidize all kinds of "green" energy interest groups.

The Green Bubble

2008-10-10T17:51:00.000-04:00

Well, as I was just saying . . . the economy is going to force the "green" movement to either become practical and intertwined with energy policy in a constructive way, or it will become last year's "fad" that fades away as just another part of the excesses of the 90s and the oughts. Unless environmental groups want to be remembered by history as a "luxury issue"-- fun to indulge in when money was easy, but not considered essential, then they had better start re-defining what it is they are "for" and "against" away from the environmental, anti-human activity, anti-industry rants of the past and toward the pragmatic problem-solving entities needed for our new energy future.

If what is happening to our economy right now is not a huge wake-up call for environmentalists of all stripes, then there is no hope for them.

But I think there IS hope for some. And crisis does offer opportunity for great advancement, if taken. If the technical knowledge and passion that exists in many environmental organizations can be tapped in the larger service of securing our energy future -- recognizing the need to reign in costs and go step-by-step, then amazing things can happen.

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L.A. Times

OPINION

The green bubble bursts

Amid the energy crisis, Democrats are losing the high ground on the environment to a GOP that is pushing oil drilling.

By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
September 30, 2008

As the election enters its endgame, Democrats and their environmental allies face a political challenge they could hardly have imagined just a few months ago. America's growing dependence on fossil fuels, once viewed as a Democratic trump card held alongside the Iraq war and the deflating economy, has become a lodestone instead. Republicans stole the energy issue from Democrats by proposing expanded drilling -- particularly lifting bans on offshore oil drilling -- to bring down gasoline prices. Whereas Barack Obama told Americans to properly inflate their tires, Republicans at their convention gleefully chanted "Drill, baby, drill!" Obama's point on conservation and efficiency was lost on an electorate eager for a solution to what they perceive as a supply crisis.

Democrats and greens ended up in this predicament because they believed their own press clippings -- or, perhaps more accurately, Al Gore's. After the release of the documentary film and book "An Inconvenient Truth," greens convinced themselves that U.S. public opinion on climate change had shifted dramatically, despite having no empirical evidence that was the case. In fact, public concern about global warming was about the same before the movie -- 65% told a Gallup poll in 2007 that global warming was a somewhat or very important concern in comparison to 63% in 1989. Global warming remains a low-priority issue, hovering near the bottom of the Pew Center for People and the Press' top 20 priorities.

By contrast, public concern about gasoline and energy prices has shifted dramatically. While liberals and environmentalists were congratulating themselves on the triumph of climate science over fossil-fuel-funded ignorance, planning inauguration parties and writing legislation for the next Democratic president and Congress, gas prices became the second-highest concern after the economy, according to Gallup.

This summer, elite opinion ran headlong into American popular opinion. The train wreck happened in the Senate and went by the name of the Climate Security Act. That bill to cap U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would have, by all accounts (even the authors'), increased gasoline and energy prices. Despite clear evidence that energy-price anxiety was rising, Democrats brought the bill to the Senate floor in June when gas prices were well over $4 a gallon in most of the country. Republicans were all too happy to join that fight.

Indeed, they so relished the opportunity to accuse Democrats of raising gasoline prices in the midst of an energy crisis, they insisted that the 500-page bill be read into the Senate record in its entirety in order to prolong the debate. Within days, Senate Democrats started jumping ship. Democratic leaders finally killed the debate to avert an embarrassing defeat, but by then they had handed Republicans a powerful political club.

Republicans have been bludgeoning Democrats with it ever since. They held dramatic "hearings," unauthorized by the Democratic leadership, on the need for expanded oil drilling to lower gas prices. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich quickly announced a book, "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less," a movie and a petition drive. And Republican presidential candidate John McCain stopped making speeches about his support for bipartisan climate action, which is how he had started his campaign, and attacked Obama and congressional Democrats for opposing drilling instead.

On June 9, three days after the emissions cap-and-trade bill died in the Senate, Obama led McCain by eight points, according to Gallup. By June 24, the race was in a dead heat, a shift owed in no small part to Republicans battering Democrats on energy. Seeing the writing on the wall, Obama reversed his opposition to drilling in August, and congressional Democrats quickly followed suit.

But the damage has largely been done. In following greens, Democrats allowed McCain and Republicans to cast them as the party out of touch with the pocketbook concerns of middle-class Americans and captive to special interests that prioritize remote wilderness over economic prosperity.

In a tacit acknowledgment of their defeat, some green leaders, such as the Sierra Club's Carl Pope, have endorsed the Democrats' pro-drilling strategy. But few of them seem to realize the political implications. The most influential environmental groups in Washington -- the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund -- are continuing to bet the farm on a strategy that relies on emissions limits and other regulations aimed at making fossil fuels more expensive in order to encourage conservation, efficiency and renewable energy. But with an economic recession likely, and energy prices sure to remain high for years to come thanks to expanding demand in China and other developing countries, any strategy predicated centrally on making fossil fuels more expensive is doomed to failure.

A better approach is to make clean energy cheap through technology innovation funded directly by the federal government. In contrast to raising energy prices, investing somewhere between $30 billion and $50 billion annually in technology R&D, infrastructure and transmission lines to bring power from windy and sunny places to cities is overwhelmingly popular with voters. Instead of embracing this big investment, greens and Democrats push instead for tiny tax credits for renewable energy -- nothing approaching the national commitment that's needed.

With just six weeks before the election, the bursting of the green bubble is a wake-up call for Democrats. Environmental groups, perpetually certain that a new ecological age is about to dawn in America, have serially overestimated their strength and misread public opinion. Democrats must break once and for all from green orthodoxy that focuses primarily on making dirty energy more expensive and instead embrace a strategy to make clean energy cheap.

By continuing to hew to the green agenda, Democrats have not only put in jeopardy their chance of taking back the White House and growing their majority in Congress, they also have set back the prospects of establishing policies that might effectively address the climate and energy crises.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are authors of "Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility" and co-founders of the Breakthrough Institute.

Why the Greens Need Pragmatism

2008-09-15T18:06:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite books on environmental policy is Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Although I don't agree with all of their policy solutions, that's the beauty of being a pragmatist - take the good, leave the rest. What I think they do an amazing job of is laying out the problem with the modern environmentalist movement today -- and its focus on limiting people rather than empowering them as a means to deal with pollution.

This book also gives a great explanation for how funders - with the best intentions, often end up creating a market force FOR conflict and high rhetoric, rather than a reward for pragmatic bridge-building.

I checked back in on the BreakThrough website and saw a number of articles worth looking at.

Click the following link to check out the latest at The BreakThrough Institute. In particular, there was an article about the rapid change in politics on the oil drilling/climate issue that made me think. The point of that article was to chronicle how fast the politics changed this past summer. It quotes Democratic leaders as confident about passing comprehensive climate legislation, only to end the summer by looking for ways to expand drilling opportunities as a means to appease the public on high gas prices.

There are several interesting points of discussion in this article. But the one that really struck me was how this recent history should be a big piece of proof to green groups everywhere that you MUST adopt a more pragmatic, solution-based focus if you want the environmental issue to survive high energy prices and an economy in turmoil.

It may be that the green groups were able to get away with partisan Bush-bashing (I'm not saying I'm a fan of Bush's environmental policies here - I'm definitely not!) and the rhetoric of the pure while times were good and people had disposable income to spend on organic, everything-free products that are sustainably made and only grown by farmers dedicated to not making a profit. But times have changed - and we are likely to be dealing with a bad economy and high energy prices for some time now. If enviros want their issue to have staying power beyond being the latest yuppie fad, they have to be willing to Gasp, compromise and work with people that don't already agree with them.

Now I know many of the green groups claim to have this as a goal. But preaching to people who don't agree with you doesn't count. And for groups that are really trying to reach out, it must be recognized that you need to be willing to speak the other side's language -- to recognize their concerns from time to time (i.e. the concern about the cost to the economy of a climate change plan). Green groups need to understand that they are largely comprised of people who have nothing in common with those who don't agree with them -- and certainly the language they use on this issue is far from objective and carries baggage that many well-meaning enviros don't even realize they are inflicting.

The point is, recognize this weakness and recruit guides to help make the transition. Reach out to people that walk in both worlds (trust me, they DO exist) and ask them to help you formulate messaging that will not get the figurative door closed on your group before you even get through the first meeting.

I know this is a long shot -- because by and large, people LIKE to feel superior far more than they like getting things done. It seems to be a sad bi-partisan truth about us humans.

But just maybe if we recognize the problem, we can begin to fix it.

Finding Green Balance

2008-09-12T19:08:00.000-04:00

A good friend sent me a link to an interesting article I recommend to you. The article is titled It's Not Crazy Being Green" and you can read it by clicking on the title. The article talks about the needless differentiation between "the environment" and "the people" and how the modern environmentalist movement has become a partisan battle over purity rather than what it always should have been: an understanding that the environment and the people are irrevocably linked.

The health of a people IS in large part due to the health of the environment in which they live. If you have any doubt about this -- take a look at developing country that has not yet dealt with environmental pollution to any real degree. Would you want to live there?

So how do you go from a relatively non-controversial point -- like saying we all live in our environment, so of course we care about its pollution, into the partisan divide we see before us today where nearly every environmentalist group is a liberal one and conservative groups take turns highlighting the latest infringement of freedom that the environmentalists are proposing?

I don't have all the answers -- but it seems to me that part of the problem is that we allow issues to be too easily defined by others with agendas that have little to do with the named issue. The problem is fed by the human tendency to gather in groups that are alike. My rule of thumb these days in evaluating an advocacy organization -- is this: How much are they really trying to reach out to those who don't agree with them? For many groups working on the environment, the answer is, they aren't!

One way to begin to change this dynamic is through the "marketplace" if you will for non-profits that work on environmental issues. In your personal giving, make it clear that you are giving to organizations that are working to bridge the divide. And on the larger front, write to foundations that give large amounts of money to environmental groups encouraging them to fund cooperative, educational, bridge-building work rather than partisan, feel-good attack dogs.

One thing is for sure, if funders demand results rather than rhetoric, they will start getting it. And then the environment would truly be better off.

Power to the People

2008-08-28T16:53:00.000-04:00

Below is a good article from Greenwire about promising developments in the "smart grid" -- or the ability to make the electrical grid that controls access to power more efficient and flexible. When we provide more information to consumers and tie that information with market incentives for using power more efficiently, we can begin to build an electrical system that meets our needs while avoiding waste. Even more important, we can begin to build up an electrical power system that is capable of taking on renewable energy from disbursed sites and use electric power to fuel our transportation system (think plug-in hybrids or electric cars).

Its good to see a utility moving forward on this. And again, it just points to the fact that solutions only come from working WITH the folks in the industry of making the power -- not just suing them and protesting against their pollution!
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UTILITIES: Xcel starts turning Boulder, Colo., into a 'smart grid' Skinner Box (08/22/2008)

Jenny Mandel, Greenwire reporter

Part three of a series.

If you can think of electricity as a chain that connects the power plant to your portable music player, you can grasp the notion of "smart grid."

Broadly, smart grid means applying modern, digital technology to the analog world of electricity infrastructure. But what makes a grid smart is anybody's guess right now.

Xcel Energy, a utility serving eight states -- Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas and Wisconsin -- aims to firm up the definition. With a pilot program called Smart Grid City, the company is installing a network of technologies it says will serve as a "living laboratory" to test smart-grid components.

Some of those components will be put into the hands of the company's customers. Xcel plans to install 15,000 so-called smart meters at homes and businesses in Boulder, Colo., by the end of the year.

Roy Palmer, Xcel's managing director of government and regulatory affairs, said the first group of meters will be relatively simple, though more sophisticated than the familiar counting machines with the row of clock faces. The new digital meters will provide second-to-second data on power use, a vast improvement over the static, cumulative meters they will replace.

And unlike traditional meters, the new ones can be read by machines via built-in communications technology. Xcel is installing an arterial system of Internet technologies, including fiber optics and broadband over power line, that will reach across the entire grid and into individual meters and give engineers unprecedented insight into what is happening on the grid in real time.

"Today, we have a first look into customer meters that we've never had at Xcel Energy," Palmer said.

What advanced meters will not do is offer customers control over how individual appliances or outlets draw power, although models being tested by other utilities have that capability.

For the first stage of Xcel's test, the utility has installed just one bells-and-whistles system. At the University of Colorado chancellor's residence, a mansion that offers abundant opportunity for energy efficiency, Palmer said, Xcel will install an advanced metering system manufactured by GridPoint, a Virginia-based technology company.

A computer-based "dashboard" lets users of GridPoint's system monitor and control electricity use in the home. Photo courtesy of GridPoint.

The GridPoint setup includes a command center, installed by the main circuit breaker, that takes over operation of key loads. Karl Lewis, GridPoint's executive vice president and chief operating officer, said that in a typical installation the command center would control a home's hot water heater, air conditioning, refrigerator and other energy hogs.

A consumer dashboard is designed to receive signals from the utility about the cost of energy throughout the day.

Energy dashboard

Many grid experts see a switch to time-of-use pricing as an important way to rationalize energy use, allowing utilities to pass along the higher cost of running an extra generation plant to handle peak afternoon load, for example.

Through GridPoint's energy dashboard, a homeowner can assign set-it-and-forget-it settings to reflect how his or her house should perform throughout the day -- maybe adjusting the thermostat a few degrees if the cost of power rises or charging battery-based appliances if it falls.

At the University of Colorado's site, the setup will also include GridPoint's system to support distributed power generation. A large battery will store electricity generated by in-home solar panels, allowing the house to draw on homemade power even when the sun doesn't shine.

The system will also include support for a plug-in electric vehicle, a technology that GridPoint sees as potentially transforming the electric industry.

"We're pretty excited about the car," GridPoint's Lewis said. He noted that General Motors Corp., Nissan Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. have each expressed intentions to put at least 100,000 plug-in cars on the road by the end of 2011.

Charging those vehicles would represent a significant new market for utilities. Those that are prepared could see 15 percent to 30 percent revenue increases, Lewis estimated, while those unprepared could find themselves in a bind as their legal obligation to supply customers with power bumps up against capacity constraints.

"The utilities are scared to death [of the prospect of pluggable cars]," Lewis said. "We like that."

GridPoint sees technologies like its own, which give both the customer and the utility greater control over when cars might charge, as crucial to managing such a transition.

In Boulder, the control system will let the chancellor fuel his plug-in electric car overnight, when electric demand is low, rather than starting to draw power the second a driver arrives at the house and plugs it in.

Telegraph technology in a broadband world

While the university serves as a test bed for the high end of consumer systems, the part of Boulder wired with digital meters will provide valuable data to feed into the wider grid network, Palmer said.

That larger system includes a huge number of sensors and communication nodes that most people might assume already exist.

Today's electric grid is, in many respects, hardly changed from the system that first grew up in the 1920s, according to Phillip Schewe, author of "The Grid: A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World."

The original electric system first entered homes in significant numbers in the early 1900s and by the end of the 1950s reached into virtually every corner of the country, Schewe said.

Most early electricity was powered by coal, Schewe said, and the country saw steady efficiency gains in the amount of power generated per ton of coal between 1900 and 1960, with accompanying cost decreases.

Similarly, utilities learned to increase the voltage of the transmission lines carrying electrons from power plants to city streets, allowing more electricity to be moved more efficiently. Starting at a few hundred volts, companies gradually increased that into the thousands, and today some lines carry power at 500,000 volts or more.

But Schewe describes the 1970s as a "depressing decade" for the grid. Advances stagnated, the first rumblings of deregulation surfaced with new companies that generated power but owned no transmission lines, and a long period of an uncertain investment climate began.

Today, confusion continues to reign over long-distance transmission authority and investments (Greenwire, Aug. 14), and the technologies that undergird the grid remain largely unchanged.

"A lot of companies live or die on their research. But the power company is one that, strangely ... largely does not rely on new technology," Schewe said. "That's partly because the nature of electricity hasn't much changed."

But data collection has changed.

Today, utilities largely rely on customers to call when the power is out and devices fail without warning. But part of the Smart Grid City project, and the larger conception of a comprehensive smart grid, is to bring new communication and data handling technologies into play to give utilities better insight into what is happening on their networks.

In Boulder, Excel will install sensors and automation on the city's five electric substations. By this time next year, the substations will communicate among themselves about power flows, and engineers at an operations center will be able to see what is happening at each. They will also have data on, for example, the current temperature of various devices, which can serve as a warning of imminent failure and allow them to take proactive steps to avoid it.

"We believe the distribution system digitalization will pay for itself," Palmer said. "But because these assets generally aren't linked in a smart grid-enabled fashion, the benefits of horizontal integration across the whole system, from generation to consumption, are best guesses."

Beyond the substations, the company will add similar sensors and Internet-enabled devices at other points in the network. "Everything that can have a sensor, whether switches or transformers or other [equipment], will be monitored and recorded," Palmer said.

The massive new flows of data will require new software and data analysis, of course, making full implementation of the system a challenge much bigger than just plugging it all in.

Closer bond with customers

Xcel's goal in all of this: a combination of financial and environmental benefits.

"If we can presume that our system is much more reliable and has distributed generation backup -- say that we had 10,000 [plug-in cars] plugged in at any one time -- then if we had a power event, if we had a smart grid, then we would instantly be able to access the power from those 10,000 batteries," Palmer said.

A half-hour of backup storage would cut down on inefficient "spinning reserves" that utilities run in case of need and could prevent the need to run an expensive plant, or even build a new one.

In addition to reliability and efficiency savings, though, Palmer sees potential benefits on the environmental side. If customers have real-time data on the balance of "green" and conventional power on the grid, they can make decisions to use more energy when the wind is blowing or the sun is generating juice.

The utility also aims to ensure that any customer who wants to take advantage of a solar subsidy can. Today the city has a program to foster home solar energy systems, but the number of people who use it is small, from a grid reliability standpoint. Palmer wants to know that as more people sign up, problems will not be triggered when a cloud passes over the city and all those power inputs suddenly go dark.

The program focuses on testing many different technologies and working with multiple partners.

"We don't know how good this is," Palmer said, echoing a utility refrain that they understand some elements of the project will fail to perform. "Part of what we want to demonstrate here, and measure, and tinker with a little bit, [is] to see how many megawatts we would save."

In two or three years, Palmer said, the company will have enough data from its living laboratory to know what works and what misses the mark.

'Creative power menu'

The utility has an unusual degree of flexibility in its program, in part because it relies on partners to cost-share their contributions and in part because Xcel has not sought a rate hike to pay for it. Officials hope that as data arrive, they can use Smart Grid City to make arguments with regulators and lawmakers on how such innovation should be paid for down the road.

The company estimates that the whole program will cost a bit more than $100 million, of which Xcel will contribute about $15 million. The list of partners currently includes Accenture, Current Group, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, GridPoint and Ventyx.

Schere, the grid historian, believes the time has not yet come for smart grid. Most utilities are too risk-averse, he said, and the federal government has not pushed the issue.

But American consumers have seen the provision of some services -- especially telecommunications -- evolve from a minimal fee-for-service relationship to one in which users can select from a menu of options and pricing plans to suit their individual needs.

Such a "creative power menu" could be on the horizon for electrons, too, Schere said, with choices to make about when and how power is delivered, and with varied pay rates. The whole thing could start with smart metering, he believes, because "the average consumer can wrap his or her mind around it."

If so, the power industry could show some of the "Prius effect" -- named for Toyota's popular hybrid vehicle -- whereby consumers are pushed by mileage feedback from the fuel-efficient cars to drive even more conservatively.

If that virtuous cycle shows itself in the tests, Xcel's gamble will look like a very smart one.

Running on Scum!

2008-08-27T12:12:00.000-04:00

I just love stories about emerging feedstocks for biofuels and new technology making renewable power production less expensive and more efficient. The story below discusses the promise of scum -- and for once, not the political kind :)

Imagine - being able to take something that can cause so many problems (think algae blooms that upset the balance of a pond/waterbody) and turn it into a feedstock for energy production?! These and many more amazing opportunities await us all -- if we can focus on them and send the right market signals.

The research grant given here is very important -- and we need more of this type of targeted research investment. But after that, there is often a temptation to simply subsidize promising technology -- thinking it will then magically make the transition into the marketplace. History shows us time and again that this is not what happens. We don't need a subsidy for algae -- WE NEED A MARKET FOR IT!! A GHG cap-trade system would reward this type of fuel precisely because of its low pollution properties. If we want energy security and environmental protection, we MUST make sure our market asks for these attributes and rewards them!

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August 27, 2008

Algae: Biofuel of the Future?

by Brevy Cannon, University of Virginia

Virginia, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com]

In the world of alternative fuels, there may be nothing greener than pond scum. Algae are tiny biological factories that use photosynthesis to transform carbon dioxide and sunlight into energy so efficiently that they can double their weight several times a day.

"The main principle of industrial ecology is to try and use our waste products to produce something of value." -- Lisa Colosi, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, U.Va.

As part of the photosynthesis process algae produce oil and can generate 15 times more oil per acre than other plants used for biofuels, such as corn and switchgrass. Algae can grow in salt water, freshwater or even contaminated water, at sea or in ponds, and on land not suitable for food production.

On top of those advantages, algae — at least in theory — should grow even better when fed extra carbon dioxide (the main greenhouse gas) and organic material like sewage. If so, algae could produce biofuel while cleaning up other problems.

"We have to prove these two things to show that we really are getting a free lunch," said Lisa Colosi, a professor of civil and environmental engineering who is part of an interdisciplinary University of Virginia research team, recently funded by a new U.Va. Collaborative Sustainable Energy Seed Grant worth about US $30,000.

With the grant, the team will try to determine exactly how promising algae biofuel production can be by tweaking the inputs of carbon dioxide and organic matter to increase algae oil yields.

Scientific interest in producing fuel from algae has been around since the 1950s, Colosi said. The U.S. Department of Energy did pioneering research on it from 1978 to 1996. Most previous and current research on algae biofuel, she said, has used the algae in a manner similar to its natural state — essentially letting it grow in water with just the naturally occurring inputs of atmospheric carbon dioxide and sunlight. This approach results in a rather low yield of oil — about 1 percent by weight of the algae.

The U.Va. team hypothesizes that feeding the algae more carbon dioxide and organic material could boost the oil yield to as much as 40 percent by weight, Colosi said.

Proving that the algae can thrive with increased inputs of either carbon dioxide or untreated sewage solids will confirm its industrial ecology possibilities — to help with wastewater treatment, where dealing with solids is one of the most expensive challenges, or to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, such as coal power-plant flue gas, which contains about 10 to 30 times as much carbon dioxide as normal air.

"The main principle of industrial ecology is to try and use our waste products to produce something of value," Colosi said.

Research partner Mark White, a professor at the McIntire School of Commerce, will help the team quantify the big-picture environmental and economic benefits of algae biofuel compared to soy-based biodiesel, under three different sets of assumptions.

White will examine the economic benefits of algae fuel if the nation instituted a carbon cap-and-trade system, which would increase the monetary value of algae's ability to dispose of carbon dioxide. He will also consider how algae fuel economics would be impacted if there were increased nitrogen regulations (since algae can also remove nitrogen from air or water), or if oil prices rise to a prohibitive level.

The third team member is Andres Clarens, a professor of civil and environmental engineering with expertise in separating the oil produced by the algae.

The team will experiment on a very small scale — a few liters of algae at a time. They will seek to optimize the oil output by using a pragmatic engineering approach, testing basic issues like whether it makes a difference to grind up the organic material before feeding it to the algae.

Wastewater solids and algae, either dead or alive, are on the menu. "We're looking at dumping the whole dinner on top of them and seeing what happens," Colosi said.

Some of these pragmatic issues may have been tackled already by the various private companies, including oil industry giants Chevron and Shell, which are already researching algae fuel, but a published scientific report on these fundamentals will be a major benefit to other researchers looking into algae biofuel.

Published evidence of improved algae oil output might spur significant follow-up efforts by public and private sectors, since the fundamentals of this technology are so appealing, Colosi said. Research successes would also open the door to larger grants from agencies like the U.S. Department of Energy, and could be immediately applicable to the handful of pilot-scale algae biofuel facilities recently funded by Shell and start-up firms.

Brevy Cannon is a general assignment writer in the media relations department at the University of Virginia.

Cool New Solar Stuff

2008-08-18T20:28:00.000-04:00

I always love reading about cool new breakthroughs allowing renewable energy to be produced in ways that are more flexible and less costly. The fact that there are so many such advancements on a fairly regular basis these days speaks to the strong market signals that are being sent.

As we have talked about here before, getting energy is becoming increasingly expensive and difficult. The upside of that unfortunate fact, is that the market signals are finally being sent and the market is responding.

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August 12, 2008

Flexible Nanoantenna Arrays Capture Solar Energy

by Roberta Kwok, Idaho National Laboratory

Florida, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com]

Researchers have devised an inexpensive way to produce plastic sheets containing billions of nanoantennas that collect heat energy generated by the sun and other sources. The researchers say that the technology, developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory (INL), is the first step toward a solar energy collector that could be mass-produced on flexible materials.

While methods to convert the energy into usable electricity still need to be developed, it is envisioned that the sheets could one day be manufactured as lightweight "skins" that power products such as hybrid cars or iPods with potentially higher efficiency than traditional solar cells. The nanoantennas also have the potential to act as cooling devices that draw waste heat from buildings or electronics without using electricity.

The nanoantennas target mid-infrared rays, which the Earth continuously radiates as heat after absorbing energy from the sun during the day. In contrast, traditional solar cells can only use visible light, rendering them idle after dark. Infrared radiation is an especially rich energy source because it also is generated by industrial processes such as coal-fired plants.

"Every process in our industrial world creates waste heat," says INL physicist Steven Novack. "It's energy that we just throw away." Novack led the research team, which included INL engineer Dale Kotter, W. Dennis Slafer of MicroContinuum Inc. and Patrick Pinhero, now at the University of Missouri.

The nanoantennas are tiny gold squares or spirals set in a specially treated form of polyethylene, a material used in plastic bags. While others have successfully invented antennas that collect energy from lower-frequency regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, such as microwaves, infrared rays have proven more elusive. Part of the reason is that materials' properties change drastically at high-frequency wavelengths, Kotter says.

The researchers studied the behavior of various materials — including gold, manganese and copper — under infrared rays and used the resulting data to build computer models of nanoantennas. They found that with the right materials, shape and size, the simulated nanoantennas could harvest up to 92 percent of the energy at infrared wavelengths.

The team then created real-life prototypes to test their computer models. First, they used conventional production methods to etch a silicon wafer with the nanoantenna pattern. The silicon-based nanoantennas matched the computer simulations, absorbing more than 80 percent of the energy over the intended wavelength range. Next, they used a stamp-and-repeat process to emboss the nanoantennas on thin sheets of plastic. While the plastic prototype is still being tested, initial experiments suggest that it also captures energy at the expected infrared wavelengths.

The nanoantennas' ability to absorb infrared radiation makes them promising cooling devices. Since objects give off heat as infrared rays, the nanoantennas could collect those rays and re-emit the energy at harmless wavelengths. Such a system could cool down buildings and computers without the external power source required by air-conditioners and fans.

More technological advances are needed before the nanoantennas can funnel their energy into usable electricity. The infrared rays create alternating currents in the nanoantennas that oscillate trillions of times per second, requiring a component called a rectifier to convert the alternating current to direct current. Today's rectifiers can't handle such high frequencies.

"We need to design nanorectifiers that go with our nanoantennas," says Kotter, noting that a nanoscale rectifier would need to be about 1,000 times smaller than current commercial devices and will require new manufacturing methods. Another possibility is to develop electrical circuitry that might slow down the current to usable frequencies.

If these technical hurdles can be overcome, nanoantennas have the potential to be efficient harvesters of solar energy. Because they can be tweaked to pick up specific wavelengths depending on their shape and size, it may be possible to create double-sided nanoantenna sheets that harvest energy from different parts of the sun's spectrum, Novack says.

The team's stamp-and-repeat process could also be extended to large-scale roll-to-roll manufacturing techniques that could print the arrays at a rate of several yards per minute.

The researchers will be reporting their findings on August 13 at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 2008 2nd International Conference on Energy Sustainability in Jacksonville, Florida.

Roberta Kwok is a Research Communications Fellow at Idaho National Laboratory.