by Dana Gunders.

Have you ever considered what that rotten food in your refrigerator costs? The average American family of four throws out an estimated $130-175 per month in spoiled and discarded food. That’s real money going straight into the garbage or compost bin instead of paying off your credit card bills.

Don’t get me wrong—I love compost. It’s just not the best use of the staggering amount of resources that are needed to grow all the food that never even gets eaten, including the money you spent to buy it. If you don’t eat half of that $10 fish, that’s $5 you’re throwing away.  

Collectively, we consumers are responsible for more wasted food than farmers, grocery stores, or any other part of the food supply chain. We’re also wasting far more food than ever before, as the average American today wastes 50 percent more food than 40 years ago. The truth is the implications of our wasteful habits with food are just not on most of our radars.

However, our British friends across the pond have demonstrated that with some basic public awareness, we can make big strides in food waste reduction. A public awareness campaign in the United Kingdom has been stunningly successful in reducing household food waste by 18 percent [PDF] in just five years. Doing the same here would mean hundreds of dollars in savings for the average family.

There are many steps we can take to turn this food waste trend around, but one of the first is to understand just what we’re wasting. 

Using USDA data, a recent report by Clean Metrics [PDF] provides estimates of the retail value of all the food we Americans waste, broken down by categories of meat, dairy, and fresh produce. Note that these numbers summarize the retail value of avoidable wasted food—that is, they do not include bones, peels, and fat that burns off during cooking.

The winner? Vegetables by a long shot. In 2009, U.S. consumers spent a whopping $32 billion on vegetables they bought, never ate, and ended up throwing away. By volume, tomatoes and potatoes are the most common culprits, but that’s partially because they’re also the most commonly eaten vegetables in the U.S. If we look by percentage, greens, onions, peppers, and pumpkins (Halloween?) are tossed at the highest rates. 

You know your own food habits best, but here’s a peek into the average American kitchen garbage bin:

(If you’re like me and want to totally geek out on the percentage of eggnog and hazelnuts that go to waste, see this recent USDA report [PDF].)

Take a moment to think about the products on this list that most often go bad in your household. When you go to the store, are you realistic about how much you actually cook and eat? Do you know the best way to store food items, or how to tell when they’re actually bad? (Hint: It’s not necessarily  the expiration date. See my previous blog here.) Do you take the time to freeze food you won’t eat in time?

The Love Food Hate Waste site has excellent advice for how to store many different foods and fun recipe tools to help use up specific foods. They also have a portion planner to help you cook just the right amount. NRDC’s new food waste fact sheet [PDF] has tips on what to think about when buying and storing food. And there’s a wealth of knowledge out there in the form of friends, family, and cookbooks. I like The Use-It-Up Cookbook or The Frugal Foodie. 

Awareness is the first step, so you’re already well on your way. Now it’s time to take action. Observe your habits, educate yourself, try a new recipe or freeze something you haven’t frozen before, and get on the journey to reducing your food waste, food bills, and food print all at the same time.

A version of this post originally appeared on Switchboard, the blog of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

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by Andrew Leonard.

Grist is proud to present the Change Gang -- profiles of people who are leading change on the ground toward a more sustainable society and a greener planet. Some we've written about before; some are new to our pages. Some you'll have heard of; most you probably won't. Know someone we should add to the Change Gang? Tell us why.

For Ximena Prugue, being "young and naïve" is a strength, not a weakness.

"It makes you that much more powerful," says the 21-year-old. "You don't have all those years of experience deterring you from thinking that you can do something."

To support this thesis, Prugue offers herself up as Exhibit A. Born and raised in Miami, Fla., the daughter of Peruvian immigrants, she had no idea what she was getting herself into when she decided to attempt to alleviate "energy poverty" in rural India by distributing solar-powered flashlights.

She didn't know about the hassles involved in setting up a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, or how Indian customs officers would react to a girl whose luggage was stuffed with $3,000 worth of lights. She didn't know how difficult it would be to fundraise, or make connections with on-the-ground aid workers in India who didn't understand why an American teenager was badgering them. She underestimated the difficulties inherent in simultaneously holding down a part-time job, attending full-time community college, and running her own nonprofit. Perhaps most daunting of all, she knew nothing whatsoever about India.

Before her first visit, she says, "I literally had not even eaten Indian food. I hadn't even seen Slumdog Millionaire."

All she knew, she says, is she wanted to "make a difference."

By the time she was a 19-year-old studying mechanical engineering at a community college in Miami, she already boasted a resume filled with socially meaningful work. In high school, she made a documentary about homeless sex offenders living under a bridge in southern Miami. She also helped raise money to support the construction of tilapia farms in Haiti. But she was looking for a project that would go beyond just fundraising -- something that she could sink her teeth into.

"I've always been into art and design," she recalls, "so I read a lot of design blogs and I stumbled across this article about the world's most affordable solar-powered light."

She proposed to one of her professors that the lights might be useful in Haiti. He told her to do some more research and encouraged her to apply for a grant from the Clinton Global Initiative University, a three-day conference that brings together thousands of young people interested in doing progressive work.

The conference was a life-changing event.

"There were people that were my age who already had their 501(c)(3) status," recalls Prugue. "That had already had gone to all these different places and done amazing things. I was just like, wow, I have absolutely no excuse to say, 'Well, oh well, I'm young. Oh well, I still have school.' There was absolutely no excuse for me to not be doing something."

She ultimately decided that Haiti didn't have a big access-to-cheap-energy problem. Rural India, she determined, was where conditions were worst -- where the lack of electricity was a major obstacle blocking people's escape from deep poverty. She won a grant from the Clinton Global Initiative, built a website, set up Giving the Green Light as a nonprofit, and started emailing. A year and a half later, she was headed to India with her bag of lights. And now she knows exactly what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

"I am studying mechanical engineering," says Prugue, "because I want to be the type of engineer that designs products that you can implement into developing countries to solve all sorts of problems."

Looking back, Prugue doesn't downplay the difficulties she faced.

"It doesn't come easy. It definitely doesn't come easy," she says. "But if you work hard and you are really doing it with genuine good intentions -- you're not doing it because you just want to put it on your resume and get into a good college -- it will come. It will happen. I believe in positive energy, and that that energy will come back to you, and all the karma will work out. And I really hope that other young people try to change the world too, because I feel that that is where the change is going to come from."

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by Ask Umbra.

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

Generally speaking, sustainability advocates seem to be a serious crowd. Have you got any jokes or one-liners that can bring some levity to our work? Especially ones related to recycling?

Robert D.
Jefferson City, Mo.

A. Dearest Robert,

Have you heard the one about the aluminum recycling plant? It smelt.

Have you heard the one about the recycling bin with a sign that said, "Empty water bottles here"? Pretty soon the bin was full of water.

Know why environmentalists are bad at playing poker? They avoid the flush.

Chortle, chortle, chortle. Robert, you have touched upon a serious gap in our cultural lives, and I'm hoping your fellow readers will weigh in with some good jokes to keep our spirits up. To be honest, we at Grist have struggled with this since our founder got the oh-so-brilliant idea to launch an environmental news site infused with humor in 1999. Because it turns out "environmental humor" is not that funny, at least in the form of the classic jokes and one-liners. Please do not tell our auditors.

Others have found this a tricky topic, too. Bill Maher, for instance, once said the environment is "one of the hardest subjects to do in comedy." British comedian Marcus Brigstocke has called climate change "far and away the most difficult comedy subject I've ever dealt with." Some will be eager to blame this on the perceived earnestness of the movement and its members -- but shouldn't that make it all the funnier?

Back to our quest for one-liners. A few chestnuts from stand-up comedians might elicit a titter, depending how free you are with your titters: George Carlin remarked of national-park camping reservations that "when you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong." Robin Williams compared clean coal to "wearing a porous condom -- at least the intention was there." Stephen Wright eschewed cars with his typically profound observation that "everything is within walking distance if you have the time." And Sam Levenson offered this take on overpopulation: "Somewhere on this globe, every 10 seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped."

If late-night TV is your thing, you will find plenty of lukewarm climate gags in the collected works of Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, and Jimmy Fallon. Here is a compendium of somewhat dated examples. My favorite (and I use the term loosely): "According to a new U.N. report, the global warming outlook is much worse than originally predicted. Which is pretty bad when they originally predicted it would destroy the planet."

If you lean more toward literature, you might like this Mark Twain musing: "Learn to ride a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live." Or how about some Ogden Nash? There's this classic: "I think that I shall never see/A billboard lovely as a tree./Indeed, unless the billboards fall,/I'll never see a tree at all." And the produce-averse "Further Reflections on Parsley": "Parsley/Is gharsely" (yes, that's the entire poem). And "The Purist," which unintentionally offers a wee bit of insight into why scientists have a hard time speaking passionately about climate change:

I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist ...
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
"You mean," he said, "a crocodile."

I would also point you to The Onion, which offers some of the most incisive environmental humor around. (A couple of classics: Consumer product diversity now exceeds biodiversity and Suburban recycling program now accepting broken and discarded dreams .)

And needless to say, our very own Grist List is an insanely wonderful source of good guffaws, each and every day.

I encourage you to keep your quest alive, with the warning that your average "environmental joke" search on the interweb will give you scintillating results such as this: "Your so hot you must've started all of globle warming." Sic.

Finally, because I care, Robert, I have come up with an Umbra Original: A recycling joke just for you. Are you ready?

"What's the worst way for glass to get around town?  By downcycling."

You may now toss rotten tomatoes in my general direction. Or leave a better joke below in comments.

Yukkily,
Umbra

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by Lionel Foster.

Forty-four years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot dead while supporting sanitation workers in Memphis, his legacy is indisputable. Because of the way he mobilized the poor and the powerful, state-sponsored racial discrimination, a prominent factor in American life for nearly 200 years, is no more. As a result, it's now hard to imagine a position of prominence in this country, including the presidency, that an African American could not obtain.

But Dr. King's work is not complete. Today, we face continued attempts at voter suppression, attacks on collective bargaining rights, income inequality, a racially inflected discussion of illegal immigration, and one of the last great bastions of state-sponsored discrimination: the denial of marriage and other rights on the basis of sexual orientation. If Dr. King were alive today, I believe he would speak out about these issues. I believe, too, that in this era of globalization, he would talk about climate change, the North/South divide, and our moral duty to preserve the natural resources that are fundamental to human wellbeing.

Dr. King would be an environmentalist, but I think he would talk about the natural and man-made worlds in a way that resonates with everyone, especially the poor. Let me explain.

I spent most of my childhood on the eastside of Baltimore, part of a black family living paycheck to paycheck in the shadow of one of the world's great medical research institutions, Johns Hopkins Hospital. Unfortunately, the health and prosperity of Hopkins rarely spilled over into the surrounding community. On our side of the invisible line, urban decay and drug-related crime defined the landscape. Three out of every ten houses in my neighborhood were vacant.

These two very different communities viewed each other warily. I attended Johns Hopkins University on scholarship as an undergrad, worked part-time as an office assistant in the department of anesthesiology and critical care medicine, and was there when a division chief within the department was robbed and assaulted on his way home. I can't remember speaking to anyone else in that office who lived within the city limits, let alone near the hospital, and I think that attack reinforced the idea that Hopkins was by necessity a fortress, a place apart.

The fear ran both ways. My grandmother summed up many residents' concerns about the hospital down the street. "I have friends who go into Hopkins," she once told me, "but they don't come out." There was a lot to this statement. For people with little or no access to healthcare, an acute illness left untreated for years can become chronic and eventually irreversible. Add this to glaring disparities in wealth and cultural barriers, and it becomes plausible for a 70-year-old woman from the segregated South to believe that white men in lab coats might kill her if they had the chance.

After years of trying to solve the problem of the surrounding community, the hospital settled on a solution: They tore much of it down. Hopkins and the City of Baltimore formed a partnership called East Baltimore Development Inc., used eminent domain to relocate my grandmother and hundreds of other families, and cleared 88 acres to make room for a biotechnology park.

What does all this have to do with the environment? In 2006, when a local magazine asked me and a pair of artists to fill two pages of a special issue with anything we wanted, the story of my troubled neighborhood was on my mind. Why was the city so racially divided, we asked, and was there anything we could do about it? Our attempt to answer that question became a small environmental campaign called Black + White = Green. The idea was that even though the most outspoken proponents of environmentalism were white and the victims of environmental degradation were disproportionately black and brown, the environment could give us lots of common ground, especially if we expanded its definition to include the material and non-material factors that shape life everywhere, from untouched mountain tops to the streets of inner cities.

I don't think any of us had much experience working on environmental issues, so we embarked on this project with no knowledge of people who were already doing what we had in mind in much bigger and better ways. There's Will Allen, a Milwaukee-based MacArthur Foundation "genius" award winner who's turning young people into urban farmers; former Obama administration green jobs advisor Van Jones, connecting environmentalism to community development and economic opportunity; and Majora Carter, another MacArthur "genius," busy greening New York's South Bronx.

Tactically and philosophically, these are some of the descendants of Dr. King. As if reading from King's playbook, Jones in particular has made a point of empowering young people; fighting for economic opportunity; using collective action; helping those who might otherwise be written off as powerless turn their hands and feet into assets; and paying close attention to the way America thinks and talks about itself. In his latest project, called Rebuild the Dream, Jones is encouraging environmentalists, community activists, and average citizens to demand economic fairness. His timing was perfect. Rebuild the Dream was up and running as the Occupy movement kicked into full gear, and it soon became clear that Jones, the urban environmentalist, already spoke the demonstrators' language.

Last October, when occupiers were making news daily, I attended a forum in Washington, D.C. A new monument to King had been erected in the National Mall and civil rights veterans gathered to remember King and his work. The speakers repeatedly drew connections between their departed friend's push for economic equality and the Occupy movement. The parallels were striking.

King spent his last months organizing a Poor People's Campaign that, just weeks after his death, saw the erection of a settlement in the capital full of people demanding an end to poverty. It's impact was small. King was killed before the march took off on Mother's Day 1968, the assassination of Robert Kennedy dampened spirits during the encampment's third week, and in mid-June the Department of the Interior forced the demonstrators to leave after their permit expired.

Dr. King has now been dead for several more years than he ever spent walking, teaching, and preaching, but lots of people of different colors and backgrounds are still looking for a way forward. Now, as then, progress in some areas is still elusive, but the events of the past year show that thousands are willing to work for change.

Forty-four years after his death, Occupy, people like Van Jones, and the resonance with which King's voice still reverberates through current events, all suggest that a movement that can unite people who care about patches of soil with those who know how cold and unforgiving a swath of concrete can be, could bring us that much closer to something that looks like justice.

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by John Farrell.

This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's New Rules Project.

Solar grid parity is considered the tipping point for solar power, when installing solar power will cost less than buying electricity from the grid. It’s also a tipping point for the electricity system, when millions of Americans can choose energy production and self-reliance over dependence on their electric utility.

But this simple concept conceals a great deal of complexity. And given the stakes of solar grid parity, it’s worth exploring the details.

The cost of solar

For starters, what’s the right metric for the cost of solar? The installed cost for residential solar ($6.40 in 2011), or commercial solar ($5.20), or utility-scale solar ($3.75)? Even if we pick one of these, it’s difficult to compare apples to apples, because grid electricity is priced in dollars per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity, not dollars per Watt.

Enter "levelized cost," or the cost of a solar PV array averaged over a number of years of production. For example, a 1-kilowatt (kW) solar array installed in Minneapolis for $6.40 per Watt costs $6,400. Over 25 years, we can expect that system to produce about 30,000 kWh, so the "simple levelized cost" is $6,400 divided by 30,000, or about $0.21 per kWh.

But people usually borrow money, and pay interest, to install solar power. And there are some maintenance costs over those 25 years. And we also use a "discount rate" that puts heavier weight on dollars spent or earned today compared to those earned 20 years from now. A 1-kW solar array that is 80 percent paid for by borrowing at 5 percent interest, with maintenance costs of about $65 per year, and discounted at 5 percent per year, will have a levelized cost of around $0.37.

That means that "solar grid parity" for this 1-kW solar array happens if the grid electricity price is $0.37 per kWh. But this calculation is location-specific.

In Los Angeles, that same 1-kW system produces 35,000 kWh over 25 years, lowering the levelized cost to $0.31. The time frame also matters.

If we look back at the Minneapolis project with a levelized cost of $0.37, but look at the output over 20 years instead of 25 years, it increases the levelized cost to $0.43, because we have fewer kWh of electricity over which to divide our initial cost.

We choose 25 years because solar PV panels have a good chance of producing for that long.

We also use a lower installed cost than the U.S. average. Residential solar projects may average $6.40 per Watt, but there are some good examples of aggregate purchase residential solar projects costing $4.40 per Watt. The levelized cost of solar at $4.40 per Watt in Minneapolis is $0.25; in Los Angeles it is $0.21.

The following map shows the levelized cost of solar, by state, based on an installed cost of $4.40 per Watt, averaged over 25 years.

This map shows half our grid parity equation, the cost of solar. But what about the other half, the grid price? It’s another complicated question.

The grid price

Utilities like to compare new electricity production to their existing fleet, which means comparing new solar power projects to long-ago-paid-off (amortized) coal and nuclear power plants that can produce electricity for 3-4 cents per kWh. But this is apples to oranges, because utilities can’t get any new electricity for that price, from any source.

A more appropriate measure of the grid price is the marginal cost for a utility of getting wholesale power from a new power plant. In California, this is called the "market price referent," and it’s around 12 cents per kWh. The figure varies from state to state.

But while the market price referent provides a reasonable comparison for the cost of utility-scale solar, it’s not the number that matters for solar installed on rooftops or near buildings. In those cases, the power is used “behind the meter,” and depending on the type of state policy for net metering, the customer can essentially spin their electric meter backward when their solar panels produce electricity. That means that solar power is really competing against the energy cost on a utility bill, known as the "retail price."

The following map shows the average retail electricity price by state across the U.S. It ranges from 8-10 cents in the interior to 15 cents per kWh and higher on the coasts.

In general, the residential retail electricity price is the generally accepted grid parity price. With this price and our previous map of the levelized cost of solar, we can assess the state of solar grid parity. The following map shows the ratio of the levelized cost of solar to the grid parity price in each state. Only Hawaii has reached solar grid parity without incentives.

As time rolls ahead, and grid prices rise while solar costs fall, the picture changes. In five years, three states representing 57 million Americans will be at solar grid parity: Hawaii, New York, and California.

There are other considerations in the grid parity calculation.

Time-of-use rates

Some utility customers pay “time-of-use” rates that charge more for electricity consumed during times of peak demand, such as when a hot sunny day has everyone using their air conditioners. Under these rates, a solar project can be replacing electricity that costs upwards of $0.30 per kWh. Over a year, time-of-use rates can (on average) boost the cost of electricity -- at peak times, when solar panels produce a lot of power -- by about 30 percent.  Assuming every state implemented time-of-use pricing (and that it was equivalent to a 30 percent increase in grid prices during peak times), solar grid parity would be a reality in 14 states in 2016, instead of just three.

Solar vs. grid over time

There’s one other calculation. Let’s say that in 2011 solar still costs just a bit more than the grid electricity price, but that the grid price is rising at a modest rate each year. In this case, solar may still be the right choice, because the lifetime cost of solar (at a fixed price) will be less than the rising cost of grid electricity. We can use an accounting tool called net present value to estimate the savings from solar compared to grid power over 25 years, and we find that for every percentage point annual increase in electricity prices, solar can be about 10 percent more expensive than grid power today, and still be at "parity." We find that with electricity price inflation of 2 percent per year, solar grid parity shifts up two years using this method.

To further explain the concept of solar grid parity, I’ve also created this slideshow. You can view more of my presentations here.

Solar grid parity has enormous implications for the electricity system, and the time is drawing very close for many Americans. I hope this post (and slideshow) helps illustrate the complexity of the concept, and I’d appreciate your feedback via email (jfarrell@ilsr.org) or in the comments below.

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by Ted Alvarez.

Not inclined to wake up on a Saturday at 4 a.m. PST? Even to see our own beloved David Roberts hold forth on capitalism, politics, and more on MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes? 

Fine, we've got your back. Watch the entire stream here:

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by Grist.

We ran an article earlier this week called Five packaged foods you never need to buy again and we got a flood of comments from enthusiastic home cooks eager to share tips and suggestions about avoiding processed foods. We've collected a few of our favorites here. Feel free to add to these comments in the... comments section below. Does it get any more meta than that?

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by Eric de Place.

Cross-posted from Sightline Daily.

Here are three pictures that help explain why American railways seem to be supporting coal export proposals in the Northwest. It's because railways are very closely connected to the coal industry. Consider:

Coal so dwarfs every other rail-hauled commodity that it is almost as important as all the other commodities combined. (Note: This picture excludes "intermodal" freight.)

But while coal is a huge component of rail freight, it declined noticeably in 2009 and 2010:

Presumably, a good deal of the recent decline is related to a lousy economy and the attendant reduction in demand for electrical power and industrial uses of coal. Yet the recently depressed coal rail volumes are not entirely driven by the economic downtown. In fact, coal fired-power is on a long-term downward trajectory:

Going forward, that downward trend is likely to continue, and perhaps accelerate. Regulators are tightening pollution standards; other power sources like natural gas and renewable energy are becoming increasingly competitive in the marketplace; and communities across the country are averse to coal-fired power for its deleterious health effects.

Power plants are not the only customers that railways service with coal shipments, but they easily constitute the lion's share. So given the ongoing decline (and dismal future prospects) for domestic coal use, it's no wonder that railway companies support big new coal export facilities. As Americans are increasingly uninterested in buying coal, railways will want to find consumers -- no matter how far afield they may be -- who will pay coal to be moved by rail, whether it's to a power plant or an export terminal.

Notes: I created the first chart using data from the table on page 8 of the American Association of Railroad’s “Rail Time Indicators” report for Jan. 2011. (The AAR data does not combine commodity carload data with figures for intermodal freight, which amounted to 11.3 million trailers and containers in 2010.) The second chart comes directly from page 13 of that same report. The third chart is taken from the most recent rail indicators report [PDF], which was published in Dec. 2011.

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by Mary Anne Hitt.

When my husband and I decided to put solar panels on our West Virginia home last year, we thought we might make some waves in our small town, since we would be the first family in the historic district to go solar. Well, it turns out we were right -- the panels quickly increased our profile in many ways.

Not only have we produced 2 megawatts (MW) of solar energy (often producing more than we use and therefore feeding back into the grid to power our neighbors' homes), but we also managed to start a bit of a solar power frenzy in our town.

Inspired by us, one of our neighbors soon installed a solar system three times bigger than ours. Then another neighbor was denied permission to install solar panels, because the town determined they would violate existing historic preservation guidelines. That sparked a larger discussion, still going on today, about whether those guidelines should be changed. The whole town has started to notice and ask questions. The issue created such a buzz that it made the Shepherdstown Chronicle's list of "10 news stories that characterize Shepherdstown in 2011":

Historic districts go solar

In April, the Shepherdstown Planning Commission approved a permit for resident Nathaniel Hitt to place photovoltaics on his garage, making Hitt one of the first residents to have solar panels in the historic district. Since last spring, conversation has continued with regard to amendment of rules associated with the allowance of solar panels on Shepherdstown's historic buildings. Currently the town's ordinances ban solar panels on the street facing portion of homes, limiting options for residents looking to go solar. In November, the HLC held an informal discussion about the future of solar panels in the historic district, concluding that the Planning Commission and Town Council should take a closer look at the issue.

I can't tell you how happy this makes me -- people are talking about solar power, and nationwide, both solar and wind energy continue to expand as we move beyond coal. Some recent news on that front, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association:

Here are three recent examples of solar power installations continuing nationwide:

And from the American Wind Energy Association's review of 2011:

Both Iowa and South Dakota reached the important milestone of 20 percent of their electricity coming from wind power, a first for the U.S. ...

According to the latest edition of the U.S. Department of Energy's Wind Technologies Market Report, turbine prices decreased by as much as 33 percent or more between late 2008 and 2010. ...

When more than 50 power plants totaling 7,000 MW unexpectedly went offline in Texas due to unusually cold weather early in the year, wind power was there to help stabilize the system and keep the lights on. Wind energy played a critical role in limiting the severity of the blackouts, providing enough electricity to keep the power on for about three million typical households.

Clean energy is powering more homes and businesses every year, and it's energizing our economy with new jobs. If we want to keep these trends moving in the right direction, we're going to have to join together in 2012 to remove obstacles to clean energy.

As just one example, in Virginia, utility giant Dominion has convinced state regulators to approve a surcharge on homeowners with rooftop solar systems between 10 and 20 kilowatts, and they have actively tried to block a large solar project at Washington and Lee University. Removing outdated and misguided barriers like these will be a priority for the Sierra Club and our allies in the year ahead.

As I said before when talking about my own solar panels, it's an amazing feeling knowing that I am making clean electricity on my own rooftop that does not blow up mountains, cause asthma and heart attacks, spew mercury into the air and water, or leave behind toxic waste. Americans nationwide are feeling the same way as they install solar and wind power at record levels, and 2012 is shaping up to be even better!

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by Grist.

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by Brad Johnson.

Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green.

On Jan. 24, President Obama will address Congress and the nation on the state of the union, with the chance to stir this country to action on the existential threat of climate change. Obama has the responsibility to seize the moment and finally explain to the American people the great mobilization of resources and will that protecting our homeland from a poisoned climate requires.

In a tweet to ThinkProgress Green, White House Director of Public Engagement Jon Carson promised that he would personally tell Obama that people believe he needs to talk about the science of climate change in his State of the Union address:

If Obama does make clear that the nation's prosperity is already being damaged by the first glimmers of the coming onslaught of climate change, it will mark a dramatic departure from the past. Each year of his presidency, as more Americans suffered and died from the consequences of climate pollution, Obama's discussion of global warming in his State of the Union addresses has withered.

In his 2009 address, he spoke of the need to "save our planet from the ravages of climate change" through "legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America." As the climate bill stalled in the Senate that year, Obama went silent. "Thus far, he has neglected to use his bully pulpit to hammer a climate science message home, thereby helping to fuel skepticism about climate science and lend support to the building backlash against the policies he favors," climate blogger Andrew Freedman wrote in Sept. 2009. After Obama made a major speech calling for health-care reform, climate hawks hoped he would explain to Americans the need for the climate bill held up in the Senate.

In the 2010 State of the Union, he said only he wanted to advance a "comprehensive climate and energy bill," but then the White House avoided the subject.

"I'm just not sure how you do a response to climate change if you can't really say the words 'climate change,'" wrote Ezra Klein in June 2010.

In last year's State of the Union address, Obama avoided any mention of climate change, spurring dismay from climate hawks. Grist's David Roberts called the omission a "moral failure, a failure of leadership, but also, I would argue, a political failure."

A textual analysis of State of the Union addresses found that Obama mentions climate change far less than President Bill Clinton ever did, and less even than President George W. Bush. "From a political viewpoint, it is clear that Obama is not talking about climate change," Robert Brulle wrote. "In my opinion, this approach has several major drawbacks, and effectively locks in massive and potentially catastrophic global climate change." Bill Becker even wrote an entire sample speech on the climate challenge for the president.

There are many other climate hawks Obama could follow -- in the past year, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka have delivered compelling speeches on the mandate for action to fight the greatest threat to human civilization of this generation.

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Give Thanks for Regulations

by Daniel Klein.

Our videos are often inspired by whatever it is I'm in the mood to eat. Such was the case with this short trip we took along the Rappahannock River in Virginia, where oyster farmers are helping clean the Chesapeake Bay and replenishing the native oyster population (now down to just 1 percent of what it once was). These bivalves are a remarkable, sustainable food and if you are in an oyster-growing region, I recommend you partake as soon as possible. Winter is oyster season! (Just make sure your cameraperson isn't prone to seasickness.)

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Learning on the half-shell

by The Climate Desk.

Prominent MIT researcher Kerry Emanuel has been receiving an unprecedented "frenzy of hate" after a video featuring an interview with him was published recently by Climate Desk.

Emails contained "veiled threats against my wife," and other "tangible threats," Emanuel, a highly-regarded atmospheric scientist and director of MIT's Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate program, said in an interview. "They were vile, these emails. They were the kind of emails nobody would like to receive."

"What was a little bit new about it was dragging family members into it and feeling that my family might be under threat, so naturally I didn't feel very good about that at all," Emanuel said. "I thought it was low to drag somebody's spouse into arguments like this."

Climate Desk has seen a sample of the emails and can confirm they are laced with menacing language and expletives, and contain personal threats of violence.

Emanuel began receiving emails "almost immediately" after the video was posted on Jan. 5, and the volume peaked at four or five emails a day. The threats have now petered off.

Threats are nothing new in the world of climate science. But Emanuel was surprised by the viciousness of the emails. "I think most of my colleagues and I have received a fair bit of email here and there that you might classify as ‘hate mail,' but nothing like what I've got in the last few days."

"This was a little more orchestrated this time," he said.

The video -- "New Hampshire's GOP Voters Speak Out About Climate Change" -- documented a climate change conference run by a group of Republican voters upset by their party's anti-science rhetoric. Emanuel was a keynote speaker, along with former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), who, incidentally, has not received any threats since the video.

In one clip, Emanuel says, "It makes me feel to some extent disgusted with politics and to some extent ashamed to be an American."

The comments were seized upon, Emanuel suspects, by "bloggers bent on distorting that message and amplifying it." One website, Climate Depot, posted Emanuel's email address.

Emanuel notes that in the full video, he went on to explain that the Republican candidates "have either been misled, in which case it's not great to be part of the political system where candidates for the president of the United States could be so misled on such an important issue, or they were dishonest, which [is] equally bad in my view: How could we live in a country where candidates are being dishonest about an issue of such importance?"

Another website, Junk Science, raised questions about his wife's anti-war feelings in the 1960s.

"Somebody came to the conclusion that back in the '60s she was a Marxist -- which she was back then," Emanuel said. He notes that "conservative heroes of today like Norman Podhoretz [and] Jeane Kirkpatrick" were also socialists in the '60s. "So I don't quite know what the problem was there!"

In June 2011, top Australian climate scientists said they had been targeted by death threats and menacing phone calls, including threats of sexual attacks on family members. Australian National University in Canberra reacted by tightening security, and the police began investigating. U.S. researchers received a torrent of hate mail in the wake of "Climategate," in which a trove of emails was stolen and released at the University of East Anglia in the U.K.

Emanuel decided not to alert police.

Emanuel says climate scientists are not used to the intensity of political debate around climate change: "We scientists are usually not in any kind of heated public debate, as is the case in climate; we're not used to this, we're not trained for it."

"I've done a lot of public speaking, and I've spoken to many types of audiences, including audiences that are very conservative, and while I certainly have people push back -- which is understandable and encouraged, and people debate; that's all part of that, that's fine -- I've never ever encountered in direct contact with the public any behavior that I thought was bad or threatening or vile or anything like that. So I don't have any trouble communicating directly with the public. I think it's the distortions that occur sometimes in certain formats that are the root of the problem."

Emanuel asked me to publish the full audio of our interview, which you can listen to below.

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by Lexicon of Sustainaibility.

Editor's note: This is the first in a weekly installment of images from Douglas Gayeton and Laura Howard-Gayeton's Lexicon of Sustainability. We'll be running one image every Friday this winter, so stay tuned. There's more where this came from!

Industrial agriculture = monoculture.
Small farms = biodiversity.

Small, organic farms like Rick Knoll's are able to eliminate their reliance on petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides. The results are fewer pollutants, less environmental degradation, and cleaner air. And by using cover cropping and other soil fertilization principles they are able to sequester carbon and keep topsoil -- which is carbon heavy -- from being lost into the atmosphere (the latter also contributes to climate change).

Biodiversity

Weeds + trees + crops + critters + soil = An integrated food web allowing biota to self-regulate = A self-regulating, multi-layered farm that requires little maintenance and no pesticides.

Additional text taken from the photograph:

The conventional farmer next door¹ calls Rick's organic methods "dirty farming" (they're "clean"). Each winter their fields sit idle for months at a time. Since no cover crop is planted (a process that returns nutrients to the soil and increases fertility), the soil remains exposed to the elements. Wind erosion will carry some of this precious top soil away and, in so doing, release carbon back into the atmosphere.

About Rick Knoll

Rick Knoll is an organic farmer who has been practicing biodynamic farming for 32 years. He owns Knoll Farms in Brentwood, Calif., and holds a Ph.D in Organic Chemistry from UC Irvine. He has also studied Agroecology at UC Santa Cruz. Learn more on the Knoll Farms website.

This image was made possible with generous funding from Google.

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by Claire Thompson.

Anyone who's been stung by a bee knows they can inflict an outsized pain for such tiny insects. It makes a strange kind of sense, then, that their demise would create an outsized problem for the food system by placing the more than 70 crops they pollinate -- from almonds to apples to blueberries -- in peril.

Although news about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has died down, commercial beekeepers have seen average population losses of about 30 percent each year since 2006, said Paul Towers, of the Pesticide Action Network. Towers was one of the organizers of a conference that brought together beekeepers and environmental groups this week to tackle the challenges facing the beekeeping industry and the agricultural economy by proxy.

"We are inching our way toward a critical tipping point," said Steve Ellis, secretary of the National Honey Bee Advisory Board (NHBAB) and a beekeeper for 35 years. Last year he had so many abnormal bee die-offs that he'll qualify for disaster relief from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

In addition to continued reports of CCD -- a still somewhat mysterious phenomenon in which entire bee colonies literally disappear, alien-abduction style, leaving not even their dead bodies behind -- bee populations are suffering poor health in general, and experiencing shorter life spans and diminished vitality. And while parasites, pathogens, and habitat loss can deal blows to bee health, research increasingly points to pesticides as the primary culprit.

"In the industry we believe pesticides play an important role in what's going on," said Dave Hackenberg, co-chair of the NHBAB and a beekeeper in Pennsylvania.

Of particular concern is a group of pesticides, chemically similar to nicotine, called neonicotinoids (neonics for short), and one in particular called clothianidin. Instead of being sprayed, neonics are used to treat seeds, so that they're absorbed by the plant's vascular system, and then end up attacking the central nervous systems of bees that come to collect pollen. Virtually all of today's genetically engineered Bt corn is treated with neonics. The chemical industry alleges that bees don't like to collect corn pollen, but new research shows that not only do bees indeed forage in corn, but they also have multiple other routes of exposure to neonics.

The Purdue University study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, found high levels of clothianidin in planter exhaust spewed during the spring sowing of treated maize seed. It also found neonics in the soil of unplanted fields nearby those planted with Bt corn, on dandelions growing near those fields, in dead bees found near hive entrances, and in pollen stored in the hives.

Evidence already pointed to the presence of neonic-contaminated pollen as a factor in CCD. As Hackenberg explained, "The insects start taking [the pesticide] home, and it contaminates everywhere the insect came from." These new revelations about the pervasiveness of neonics in bees' habitats only strengthen the case against using the insecticides.

The irony, of course, is that farmers use these chemicals to protect their crops from destructive insects, but in so doing, they harm other insects essential to their crops' production -- a catch-22 that Hackenberg said speaks to the fact that "we have become a nation driven by the chemical industry." In addition to beekeeping, he owns two farms, and even when crop analysts recommend spraying pesticides on his crops to kill an aphid population, for example, he knows that "if I spray, I'm going to kill all the beneficial insects." But most farmers, lacking Hackenberg's awareness of bee populations, follow the advice of the crop adviser -- who, these days, is likely to be paid by the chemical industry, rather than by a state university or another independent entity.

Beekeepers have already teamed up with groups representing the almond and blueberry industries -- both of which depend on honey bee pollination -- to tackle the need for education among farmers. "A lot of [farm groups] are recognizing that we need more resources devoted to pollinator protection," Ellis said. "We need that same level of commitment on a national basis, from our USDA and EPA and the agricultural chemical industry."

Unfortunately, it was the EPA itself that green-lit clothianidin and other neonics for commercial use, despite its own scientists' clear warnings about the chemicals' effects on bees and other pollinators. That doesn't bode well for the chances of getting neonics off the market now, even in light of the Purdue study's findings.

"The agency has, in most cases, sided with pesticide manufacturers and worked to fast-track the approval of new products, and failed in cases when there's clear evidence of harm to take those products off the market," Towers said.

Since this is an election year -- a time when no one wants to make Big Ag (and its money) mad -- beekeepers may have to suffer another season of losses before there's any hope of action on the EPA's part. But when one out of every three bites of food on Americans' plates results directly from honey bee pollination, there's no question that the fate of these insects will determine our own as eaters.

Ellis, for his part, thinks that figuring out a way to solve the bee crisis could be a catalyst for larger reform within our agriculture system. "If we can protect that pollinator base, it's going to have ripple effects ... for wildlife, for human health," he said. "It will bring up subjects that need to be looked at, of groundwater and surface water -- all the connected subjects associated [with] chemical use and agriculture."

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by Thomas Hayden.

This story is cross-posted from The Last Word on Nothing.

I live in a bubble. It's called San Francisco, and it is a magical place where everyone recycles, no one smokes, and Nancy Pelosi is considered distressingly conservative. Worse, I teach environmental sustainability at Stanford, where I'm surrounded by bicycle riding, reusable-mug toting, enthusiastically composting colleagues and students. I come from the outside world, so I know my current behavioral baseline is a little skewed. But still, I was recently reminded that some Americans continue to use incandescent light bulbs, and I was genuinely surprised.

A far bigger shock came unbidden, as they usually do, from the internet. Every perversion ever known is freely displayed online, of course. But I never really understood how bad America's garbage problem is until I found a trove of wildly explicit videos documenting it on YouTube.

At home, "garbage truck!" was among my son's first phrases, followed closely by words such as "recycling!" and "compost!" The kid loves everything to do with tossing items into cans, wheeling them to the curb, and, best of all, waiting for the awesome machines that come once a week to grab and hydraulically dump! dump! dump! the carefully sorted stuff into their hungry mechanical maws.

In between garbage days, we sometimes watch garbage truck videos on YouTube. (Not every day, and with full parental participation -- c'mon bubble people, a *little* screen time isn't going to hurt him.)

If you don't have young children, you might not be aware that the garbage truck video is a robust genre. Home-shot compilations with titles like "Garbage Trucks Part II" and "Types of 'Garbage Truck'" amass millions of views, mostly, presumably, by delighted youngsters. They see everything from traditional rear-loaders, to automated side- and front-loaders, to the exotic knuckle boom trucks that look like those arcade games where you try to grab a stuffed doll by the head with a set of metal claws.

And here's what else the kids see: that every last manifestation of the American dream of disposable consumption can be hauled to the curb and disappeared into the crushing jaws of a garbage truck.

Some households astound by sheer volume -- eight, 10, or 12 black garbage bags per pickup elicit nary a comment nor complaint from the municipal workers in their fluorescent green safety vests. But it's the exotic items that really surprise. Is the home basketball hoop a little banged up? Toss it in! Have a five-piece living room set that clashes with the new drapes? Grind it up! An unwanted toilet? In it goes!

In one particularly heartbreaking YouTube moment, senseless violence is committed against what appears to be an entire toddler-hood worth of playthings. I usually enjoy the garbage videos almost as much as my son does, but seeing two perfectly good toy cars -- the Flintstonesque foot-powered ones kids ride in -- pitched into a formidable McNeilus front-end loader is too much. It's like watching a snuff film about toys. I paid $20 for a car much like these on Craigslist last year, and would happily have offered $35 for the pair. But I'm just one guy, darn it, I can't save them all.

Doing something decent with your castoffs has never been easier. Recycling databases at websites like earth911.com and 1800recycling.com make it simple to find local recyclers for even the most exotic goods. Building material salvagers are on the rise; Craigslist and Freecycle make it a snap to sell or donate just about anything that can still be used. And of course, you can always just buy less crap.

Here in the bubble, recycling and composting are the law for households and businesses alike. My students go out of their way to build side tables out of old VHS cassettes, and kinetic pelican sculptures out of scavenged bleach bottles and PVC pipe, for gosh sakes. Overall, the daily generation of landfill-destined trash in the U.S. has declined modestly since a 2000 high of nearly 4.75 pounds per person.

But the ethnographic evidence of YouTube does not lie: Americans still throw out an absurd amount and variety of stuff, most of it sellable, salvageable, or recyclable. When it comes to waste management decisions, nothing is easier than the curb.

I'm no garbage wimp, by the way, effetely bemoaning the excesses of others. As a youngster, I spent a couple of summers intermittently driving a garbage truck in a small community in northern Saskatchewan. But here's the real heartbreak: My time behind the wheel of a rear-loader happened long before the advent of digital cameras, and no video was ever taken. If only I had three or four minutes of that sweet garbage action recorded, I swear I could give "Types of 'Garbage Truck' II" a run for its money."

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by Brad Johnson.

Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green.

Thursday morning, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue argued that "free enterprise" requires a future of accelerated, unending global warming. Supporting expanded fracking, shale oil, and tar-sands development, including the Keystone XL pipeline, Donohue said that the United States should burn hundreds of billions of tons of fossil fuels for hundreds of years:

We have 1.4 trillion barrels of oil, enough to last at least 200 years. We have 2.7 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to last 120 years. We have 486 billion tons of coal, enough to last more than 450 years -- and we need to use more of this strategic resource cleanly and wisely here at home while selling it around the world.

Burning that amount of fossil fuel would generate 444 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the oil, 135 billion tons from the natural gas, and 1.3 trillion tons from the coal. To maintain a climate compatible with civilization, all of humanity needs to limit future greenhouse pollution to less than 650 billion tons [PDF].

Far from "keeping the American Dream alive for generation after generation," as Donohue claims, his promotion of catastrophic global warming would grant a diminished, deadly world to future generations.

Read Donohue's remarks promoting the destruction of civilization:

Let's start with a big one -- energy.

Our nation is on the cusp of an energy boom that is already creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, revitalizing entire communities, and reinvigorating American manufacturing.

Unconventional oil and natural gas development is on pace to create more than 300,000 jobs by 2015 in Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia alone. Take a look at what's happening in North Dakota. The state is booming. Unemployment is at 3.4 percent. Oil production just surpassed that of Ecuador -- one of the members of OPEC.

Energy is a game changer for the United States. It is, as the saying goes, "the next big thing." With the right policies, the oil and natural gas industry could create more than 1 million jobs by 2018. Not only can we create jobs, but we can cut our dependence on overseas imports while adding hundreds of billions of dollars to government coffers in the coming years.

Recent discoveries have confirmed that this nation is truly blessed with energy resources. We have 1.4 trillion barrels of oil, enough to last at least 200 years. We have 2.7 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to last 120 years. We have 486 billion tons of coal, enough to last more than 450 years -- and we need to use more of this strategic resource cleanly and wisely here at home while selling it around the world.

To tap our energy resources, we must speed up permitting and end many of the restrictions that have put key areas off-limits. Instead of handpicking a few technologies, we must harness all our resources, traditional and alternative -- while expanding nuclear power and driving greater efficiency.

Our biggest and most reliable foreign energy supplier is Canada. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline would bring Canadian oil sands down to our Gulf Coast refineries and to other destinations along the way.

This project has passed every environmental test. There is no legitimate reason -- none at all -- to subject it to further delay. Labor unions and the business community alike are urging President Obama to act in the best interests of our national security and our workers and approve the pipeline. We can put 20,000 Americans to work right away and up to 250,000 over the life of the project.

Donohue also expressed disappointment with Republican attacks on Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, calling them “foolish” and “not doing anything other than setting up the ad base for their opponents.”

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by Twilight Greenaway.

It's been a little over a year since methyl iodide -- a known carcinogen that's been made to work as a fumigant on industrial-scale conventional farms, and is especially likely to be used on strawberry farms -- was approved for use in California.  

Methyl iodide is being seen as a replacement for the ozone-depleting methyl bromide, which will be phased out of use in the state by 2015. And while farmers appear to be holding off on using this highly toxic chemical (only a handful of applications have been recorded in the state so far), that fact hasn't stopped anti-pesticide advocates from pushing the state's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) to reconsider the decision.

Thursday's hearing, in response to a suit filed by California Rural Legal Assistance and Earthjustice against the state Attorney General's Office and Arysta LifeScience Corp, the makers of the fumigant, offers a glimmer of hope. [Note: See tweets about the hearing on the KQED website or read this report on the trial from Amy Standen].

A group of advocates and lawyers held a press conference in Salinas on Wednesday to bring attention to the issue in advance of the hearing. There, a farmworker named Maria Vargas, from a group called Líderes Campesinas, spoke through a translator. She told The Californian: "We know that methyl iodide will principally affect women, children, and farmworkers, and, because we are in the fields, we will be most affected."

It's hard to say just how likely it is that today's hearing will influence Gov. Jerry Brown or the DPR on the issue. But what's really interesting to me -- and it's getting much less news coverage -- is the simultaneous work being done by anti-pesticide advocates in Monterey County, the part of the state most likely to be impacted by the use of the fumigant.

Just last month, the Monterey County Board of Education passed a resolution opposing methyl iodide. A story in the local Monterey Herald (by Sara Rubin, a reporter who's been following this issue closely) read:

Citing possible health risks for children attending Monterey County schools, six of the seven trustees Wednesday supported a resolution urging California lawmakers to repeal approval of methyl iodide, a pesticide the Environmental Protection Agency says could cause pulmonary edema, harm to the central nervous system and other effects.

This is a big deal in an agricultural county (and you can be sure not everyone is happy about it).

Now the same group of activists -- a combination of teachers, farmworker advocates, the area's League of Women Voters, and even some representatives from Planned Parenthood, who are making a connection between the fumigant and birth defects, as well as an array of other reproductive health issues -- are asking the Monterey County Board of Supervisors to pass a similar resolution.

After an initial request in November (and the passage of a similar resolution in neighboring Santa Cruz County) the Board of Supervisors have agreed to a stakeholder meeting that will take place Friday, a day after the state-level hearing.

Monterey County is an important agricultural county -- especially when it comes to strawberries; the crop is worth nearly $1 billion, and the strawberries grown there end up in grocery stores all over the nation. (California grows 86 percent of the fresh and frozen strawberries sold in the U.S., and nearly half of those are grown in the Salinas/Watsonville region.) It's also where a large portion of methyl iodide would ultimately get used.

Dana Perls, an organizer with Pesticide Watch who has been working tirelessly to support these Central Coast communities, believes it would be "hugely symbolic" if Monterey County stands up and asks that last year's decision be reconsidered.

"Monterey County has not always been the most liberal county," she adds. "It has traditionally been a county that answers to the [conventional] ag community because it is so essential for the local economy. So it would be a pretty powerful statement for an agricultural county to side with public health."

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by Brad Johnson.

Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green.

Five senators and 39 representatives received a perfect 100 percent score from the Koch brothers' astroturf group Americans For Prosperity (AFP) for the first half of the 112th Congress. AFP judged Congress on their votes to protect the Koch brothers' right-wing petrochemical empire on such issues as the repeal of President Obama's new health care law, preempting EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases, Chairman Paul Ryan's budget to end Medicare, ending ethanol subsidies, several Congressional Review Act resolutions of disapproval to overturn new regulations, and the fiscal year 2012 appropriations bills.

The Koch Five are Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who have received a combined $187,400 in campaign contributions from the Koch empire:

The Kochs were the top contributors to Johnson's successful campaign to unseat Russ Feingold in 2010. Like first-termers Rubio and Johnson, Coburn has a perfect lifetime Koch score.

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by Tom Laskawy.

In a New York Times op-ed, Mark Bittman flagged this story from the Daily Livestock Report that notes the USDA is now projecting that U.S meat consumption will continue to drop, representing a 12 percent decrease from 2007. While American beef consumption has been dropping for some time, the story says chicken and even pork are now suffering a similar fate.

The Daily Livestock Report, a trade paper, pins the blame on rising feed prices (thank you, ethanol), growing exports -- which reduce domestic supply -- and, remarkably, "the fruition of 30-40 years of government policy." The paper continues:

If the federal government and its agencies decide to wage war on a product and continue that war for long enough, it will eventually have an impact. And the feds have indeed waged war on meat protein consumption for many years.

Bittman rightly considers this claim ludicrous. As he points out, the government is doing everything it can to boost meat consumption, from refusing to enforce laws that would make it harder for factory farms to operate at the scale they now do, to purchasing billions of dollars in "surplus" chicken to feed to schoolchildren. I would also add last year's proposed ag-gag laws to his list, i.e., the government attempts to keep prying eyes away from the abuses that appear to be endemic to industrial agriculture (meanwhile, the bill that failed in Florida last spring was just re-introduced in December).

What really struck me was how this latest news mirrors the trend in consumer attitudes on meat-eating uncovered by the food industry's own market research. It turns out that since 2007, there has also been a 12 percent drop in the number of consumers who report that they have "no problem" eating meat or dairy (a bare majority of respondents currently feel that way).

This interesting correlation does support Bittman's speculation as to the cause of the drop in consumption. As he put it, "conscious decisions are being made by consumers," and they aren't just reacting to price signals like so many automatons. Whether it's the Meatless Monday campaign, the Mercy for Animals whistleblower videos, or simply the growing understanding that meat does not have to sit at the center of the plate -- consumer attitudes are changing. And not a moment too soon.

I say that not only because meat-eating at the rate Americans currently practice it isn't sustainable from an environmental or a climate standpoint (even Al Gore says so), but also because the human cost is beyond belief.

Earlier this week, The Nation published a must-read piece by David Bacon on the link between the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), immigration, and the pork-producing behemoth Smithfield. In short, NAFTA, combined with the lax U.S. protections for workers (even when they're unionized), has created a bizarre and corrosive system. The result: Smithfield's massive increases in pork exports to Mexico that occured in the wake of NAFTA's passage put thousands of Mexican butchers and pig farmers out of work and destroyed rural economies. Bacon reports that the total jobs lost due to the explosion in pork imports exceed 100,000.

As a result of this economic devastation, those very same farmers and butchers have decamped to the U.S. -- specifically North Carolina -- where they are hired as undocumented workers to labor in Smithfield pork slaughterhouses. Bacon found strong evidence, despite the company's denial, that Smithfield specifically hired undocumented workers as more pliant replacements for African- and Native-American workers who refused the increasingly dangerous, low-paid, and OSHA-flouting practices of its slaughterhouses. According to residents interviewed by Bacon, entire Mexican villages have ended up in the Tar Heel State working for Smithfield.

And while abuses in the food processing industry are easy to find -- this Mother Jones investigation into a single Hormel processing plant is utterly shocking -- Bacon draws a much starker picture in many ways. As he describes it, we have an industrial meat production system -- encouraged by our larger economic policies -- that immiserates virtually anyone it touches.  From those who work in CAFOs or slaughterhouses, to those who live near them or have seen their families torn apart by the industry in one way or another -- no one is immune.

So, while I don't have visions of a Vegan America, I do hope we continue decreasing our meat consumption in this country -- and in the rest of the developed world, for that matter. The goal as I see it isn't just that we move toward a less-intensive system that's more humane for the animals we consume, but also a system that's humane for the people who are, as things stand right now, being consumed by it.

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by The Climate Desk.

Nathan Swanson might be the greenest dentist in the state of New Hampshire ... or the whole country. His practice, Newmarket Dental, reduces radiation by using a digital X-ray sensor, hands out toothbrushes made with recycled yogurt containers, and is on its way to being a paperless office. Swanson can't make getting your teeth cleaned more fun, but he can make it greener. Check out the video to find out how he does it.

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by Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan.

Perhaps I should have seen this coming.

The very name "dumpster diving" makes the nature of the activity pretty clear. It doesn't hide behind a sanitized euphemism, like, say, "gently used snack gathering." It's right there in the title. Dumpsters -- you dive in them. But as I stood behind a neighborhood bakery, peering into a slimy abyss of trash, there was only one thought in my mind: Somehow I thought it'd be less putrid.

I admit, I was reluctant when Grist first suggested that I investigate the dumpster-diving phenomenon firsthand. But now that good old-fashioned garbage-picking has gone all hipster on us, I figured it couldn't be so bad. And preventing perfectly good food from going to waste -- what's not to love about that? Besides, it's free eats!

So I sweet-talked my boyfriend, Ted (who also happens to be Grist's managing editor), into acting as my lookout on a Sunday-evening excursion to a pair of dumpsters with good reputations for divability. One of them even had a review on Yelp.

We struck out around 7 p.m., well after dark and past closing time for the businesses whose dumpsters we would be probing. "I hear this place is great -- they have day-old loaves of bread just sitting out," I told Ted brightly as we circled around to the back of a bakery.

"Oh yeah? What if we get there and there are, like, four bums gathered around it?"

Hmm. Hadn't thought of that. "I bet they'll share," I said.

We turned the corner and saw nobody -- just an unassuming dumpster in a dark parking lot. I hurried up to it, fully expecting to find pillowy loaves of rosemary challah or cinnamon raisin bread piled high, all individually wrapped, perhaps still warm. But when I lifted the lid of the dumpster marked "food waste," I found only trash. Bags and bags of trash.

From what I could discern through the semitranslucent plastic, the bags were stuffed full of moist coffee grounds and wadded-up napkins, then glazed with a layer of God-knows-how-old half-and-half.

Free food? Honey, ain't nuthin' free.

"I think you're supposed to get in there and open the bags," said Ted from the sidelines.

He was right, of course. But could there possibly be any usable carbs amidst all this grime? I checked all the other dumpsters, just to be sure, but my immaculate cornucopia was nowhere to be found. Damn. I would have to dive in.

But as I stood at the rim, gathering my courage, a blinding security light spotlit us. "Crap!" I said, losing my nerve. "Everyone can see us!"

We weren't really doing anything wrong -- the legality of rummaging through dumpsters is a gray area, depending on your city -- but nor were we keen on getting caught neck-deep in the rubbish bin. In search of a more shadowy location, we headed elsewhere. (A closer read of the Yelp reviews later hinted that the magical bread dumpster had been removed sometime in 2010.)

Next up was a chocolate shop, but by now, my visions of finding neatly wrapped chili-hazelnut bars were fading. Not that I ever got close enough to find out for sure: Though the store was closed, the lights were still on and employees puttering about. Plus, it was still early enough for passersby to be strolling around at regular intervals. It all felt so exposed. So vulgar.

Maybe dumpster diving is like $2 tequila shots -- best saved for the late-night hours, I thought as we slunk away in defeat.

The next night, I plied Ted with promises of beer if he would once again stand guard while I attempted a dive or two. This time, I chose an affluent neighborhood with three grocery stores in close proximity, as grocery stores are notorious for wasting perfectly good food. We went much later this time (past 11 p.m.), and I stashed a headlamp and some extra bags in my backpack. Ted loaned me a black jacket, and attired in cat burglar chic, we set off.

Everything went swimmingly until we reached the alley behind grocery store No. 1. There were ample dumpsters, all right, no doubt brimming with slightly bruised fruits and fine crackers that had reached their completely meaningless sell-by dates. But, in a Rapunzelesque twist of fate, they were all locked behind a six-foot fence. Not only that, a blinking security camera was trained on us, just daring us to go ahead and make its day.

Off we went to grocery store No. 2, where we found the same dilemma. Damn.

With the clock inching past midnight, we tromped over to the third and final grocery store, our last hope. Free dumpsters at last -- a little too free, actually. The trash was in full view of the street, with megawatt security lights erasing all shadows. Our black outfits did nothing to camouflage us. If we were to go a-garbage picking, we'd have to do it on stage.

So be it. I opened the first dumpster, wondering what I might tell the store owner or police officer if we were caught. Should I go with, "I lost my wedding ring in there," or "My Pomeranian is trapped inside?"

Then came the moment of truth. This dumpster, and all the others nearby, was truly foul. No edible treats were readily apparent among the stinky refuse. I'd have to climb in and start ripping into bags.

I cannot tell a lie. I totally chickened out. I simply couldn't bring myself to do it.

So I did what any reasonable American would do in the face of such failure. I took Ted to the only bar still open, where we drank beer and ate an ice cream sundae. For full price.

Still, dear readers, don't lose faith. I'm down, but I'm sure not out. I'm determined to make a successful dive, to explore the murky depths and emerge, dinner in hand.

Perhaps there are a few successful dumpster divers in your ranks who can show a poor rookie like me the way. If so, please, share your secrets. In the meantime, I'll be scrounging up a pair of industrial-grade rubber gloves.

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by Susanne Rust.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to climb, a team of California scientists has created a new material that will help reduce the amount escaping from smokestacks and power plants.

The material, called polyethylenimine, or PEI, acts like a carbon dioxide fly-tape trap, attracting the greenhouse-gas molecules and sticking to them so they can't escape.

Indeed, carbon dioxide is so attracted to the material that the team says it can pull the molecule right out of the air, something other carbon filter materials have not been able to do well.

"This is really an important quality," said Alain Goeppert, a senior researcher at the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute at the University of Southern California. In the near future, it will enable small-scale removal of carbon dioxide from air in enclosed spaces, such as submarines and manned spacecraft, where carbon dioxide buildup can be hazardous, or in laboratories, where carbon dioxide can hinder engineering or the chemical reactions of certain products.

PEI may have long-term applications, too, for wide-scale removal of the gas from air.

In addition, the team says PEI is cheaper and more easily produced than other materials already being used to extract carbon dioxide from smokestacks and industrial flues.

Goeppert and coauthor G.K. Surya Prakash, also a chemist at USC, say the new material is just part of a vision they have of carbon recycling and a carbon dioxide market.

One of the advantages of the new material is that it can be reused. Once the material is saturated with carbon dioxide, it is heated to a relatively low temperature of 85 degrees C (185 degrees F). At that temperature, the carbon dioxide is released and can be stored.

The carbon can then be used to create fuel.

Other materials also are able to release carbon for storage, but according to Prakash and Goeppert, those other materials need to be heated to very high temperatures -- 700 or 800 degrees C (1,292 or 1,472 degrees F) -- which requires a great deal of energy and, therefore, a large amount of carbon in the form of fossil fuels.

"It kind of defeats the purpose" of recycling the carbon to keep things carbon neutral, Goeppert said.

According to Prakash, widespread use of carbon dioxide-capturing materials, such as PEI, could provide an environment where "we wouldn't need to drill or dig for fossil fuels anymore," he said.

The research appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Prakash and Goeppert's vision for a carbon-neutral future is laid out in their book, Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy. The book also was written by USC's George Olah, a Nobel laureate.

This story was produced by California Watch for the Climate Desk Collaboration.

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by Jane Mountain.

What did you resolve to do this year? Eat healthier? Avoid processed foods? Stay away from GMOs? Stop buying products foisted on you by the man? Reduce the size of your weekly garbage bag? Become a domestic god(ess)?

I want to do all of those things, which is why I am so damn excited about this post. You see, until recently, these five packaged foods were staples on every shopping list I made. But, over the last few months, I've discovered that they are all completely unnecessary once you get the hang of making them at home.

1. Never buy soup

I've always hated trying to shop for soup. They always hide nasty ingredients in there, and more often than not, even the most vegan-sounding soup is made with chicken stock or a little beef fat. Campbell's makes a vegetable soup that isn't vegetarian. Why?

If there are no animal parts in the soup, there's usually lots of salt, fat, and additives, or a little GMOs just for fun. And in case you haven't heard, soup comes in cans lined with BPA. Nasty.

If there's nothing objectionable in the ingredients, eating store-bought soup usually means taking a trip to bland city. Seriously, I've never found one I like.

The funny thing is, when you make soup at home, you don't have to add any junk and it's always bursting with the flavor of whatever vegetables you put in it. That's the magic of eating whole foods.

Campbell's and their corporate buddies have somehow managed to convince us that making soup is a task better left to the experts. In reality, it's the easiest, quickest meal you can conjure. You don't even need any special ingredients.

Just open your fridge and Google whatever you see in there followed by "soup recipe." I guarantee you'll find lots of them.

So get to it. Here are a few examples (based on what we have sitting around right now) to get you started:

Super soup tips

2. Never buy stock and bouillon

If you've done your homework with the soup, you've noticed that almost all soup recipes call for stock. Guess what? That's another thing you never have to buy again. I discovered a few months ago that making stock is even easier than making soup. And you can make it from garbage! Honestly.

You know all those potato peels, apple cores, onion skins, leek tops, and eggplant stems that collect in your kitchen? Instead of sending them straight to the compost, stick them in a plastic bag in the freezer. Once you have enough to half fill your biggest pot, it's time to make stock.

Here's the method I've been using.

Hot stock tip: I pour the stock into some flexible ice-cube trays and freeze them. Then it's ready to use in small portions every time we make soup, stew, rice, curry, stir fry ... whatever.

3. Never buy canned beans

Remember how we were just talking about BPA in cans? Well, it's in your canned beans, too. And just like soup, beans taste better and fresher, and are better for you, if you buy them dried and prepare them at home.

I know all that soaking and cooking seems like a huge pain in the ass. That's what I thought until my husband started coming home with dried adzukis, chickpeas, and black beans.

In reality, it takes around three minutes to put the beans in some water, another minute to change that water during soaking, and then about five more minutes to put them on the stove. All the beans you'll eat all week in less than 10 minutes.

Here's a great guide to preparing various types of beans.

When we have a batch of beans sitting in the fridge, we use them to make our own burgers (thanks to Peggy at Lovin' Spoonfuls in Tucson for her delicious recipe!), falafels, soups and chili, or just sprinkle them on a salad.

Basic bean tip: Get your spouse or kids to soak and cook the beans while you relax. That's what I usually do!

4. Never buy hummus

One of the things we use our fresh chickpeas for is to make hummus. This takes me, oh, all of about six minutes now that I've done it a few times. Unlike store-bought hummus, it is not too salty, too sweet, too lemony, too bland, or too garlicky. It's just right, because I made it that way.

One of these days, I'll share my recipe, though it's better if you just make it to your own liking.

Tasty hummus tip: Add a little of the bean-cooking water into your hummus (instead of olive oil). It adds tons of flavor and creates the perfect hummus-y texture without adding any fat.

5. Never buy cereal

My mother-in-law started it. She makes amazing granola that we eat every morning at her cottage on Lake Muskoka. When we leave, the best way to recapture those lazy summer days is with a fresh batch of granola.

The other punch came when I discovered that most frosted mini-wheat-type cereal contains beef fat or gelatin!

What? There are cow and pig parts in cereal? Yes. Even in pseudo good-for-the-world brands like Trader Joe's and Three Sisters. Bleh.

I'm really not a fan of standing in the grocery store scouring ingredients lists. But once I started, I discovered that most cereal is a combo of high-fructose corn syrup and GM corn. Plus, all of it is ridiculously overpriced.

So, the only solution is to make your own.

You can make muesli (granola's uncooked European cousin) in a matter of minutes. Granola takes a little longer because it has to cook, but it's also a no-brainer.

Try this recipe for tahini granola. So good.

Groovy granola tip: Make a huge batch and stick it in airtight food containers. It will keep for months.

A worthwhile investment

That's it. Five things you never ever have to buy again. I estimate that by making all of these things at home, I have time to watch one less hour-long TV show a week. That's a trade-off I'm willing to make. But if you're not, you could always put a TV in your kitchen.

What other common packaged products do you make at home? Anyone trying almond milk, nut butters, or flour? I'd love to know.

This post originally appeared on My Five Acres.

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by Michael T. Klare.

This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission.

Welcome to an edgy world where a single incident at an energy "chokepoint" could set a region aflame, provoking bloody encounters, boosting oil prices, and putting the global economy at risk. With energy demand on the rise and sources of supply dwindling, we are, in fact, entering a new epoch -- the Geo-Energy Era -- in which disputes over vital resources will dominate world affairs. In 2012 and beyond, energy and conflict will be bound ever more tightly together, lending increasing importance to the key geographical flashpoints in our resource-constrained world.

Take the Strait of Hormuz, already making headlines and shaking energy markets as 2012 begins. Connecting the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, it lacks imposing geographical features like the Rock of Gibraltar or the Golden Gate Bridge. In an energy-conscious world, however, it may possess greater strategic significance than any passageway on the planet. Every day, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, tankers carrying some 17 million barrels of oil -- representing 20 percent of the world's daily supply -- pass through this vital artery. 

So last month, when a senior Iranian official threatened to block the strait in response to Washington's tough new economic sanctions, oil prices instantly soared. While the U.S. military has vowed to keep the strait open, doubts about the safety of future oil shipments and worries about a potentially unending, nerve-jangling crisis involving Washington, Tehran, and Tel Aviv have energy experts predicting high oil prices for months to come, meaning further woes for a slowing global economy.

The Strait of Hormuz is, however, only one of several hot spots where energy, politics, and geography are likely to mix in dangerous ways in 2012 and beyond. Keep your eye as well on the East and South China Seas, the Caspian Sea basin, and an energy-rich Arctic that is losing its sea ice. In all of these places, countries are disputing control over the production and transportation of energy, and arguing about national boundaries and/or rights of passage.

In the years to come, the location of energy supplies and of energy supply routes -- pipelines, oil ports, and tanker routes -- will be pivotal landmarks on the global strategic map. Key producing areas, like the Persian Gulf, will remain critically important, but so will oil chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca (between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea) and the "sea lines of communication," or SLOCs (as naval strategists like to call them) connecting producing areas to overseas markets. More and more, the major powers led by the United States, Russia, and China will restructure their militaries to fight in such locales.

You can already see this in the elaborate Defense Strategic Guidance document, "Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership," unveiled at the Pentagon on Jan. 5 by President Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. While envisioning a smaller Army and Marine Corps, it calls for increased emphasis on air and naval capabilities, especially those geared to the protection or control of international energy and trade networks. Though it tepidly reaffirmed historic American ties to Europe and the Middle East, overwhelming emphasis was placed on bolstering U.S. power in "the arc extending from the Western Pacific and East Asia into the Indian Ocean and South Asia."

In the new Geo-Energy Era, the control of energy and of its transport to market will lie at the heart of recurring global crises. This year, keep your eyes on three energy hot spots in particular: the Strait of Hormuz, the South China Sea, and the Caspian Sea basin. 

The Strait of Hormuz

A narrow stretch of water separating Iran from Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the strait is the sole maritime link between the oil-rich Persian Gulf region and the rest of the world. A striking percentage of the oil produced by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE is carried by tanker through this passageway on a daily basis, making it (in the words of the Department of Energy) "the world's most important oil chokepoint." Some analysts believe that any sustained blockage in the strait could trigger a 50 percent increase in the price of oil and trigger a full-scale global recession or depression.

American leaders have long viewed the Strait as a strategic fixture in their global plans that must be defended at any cost. It was an outlook first voiced by President Jimmy Carter in January 1980, on the heels of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan which had, he told Congress, "brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world's oil must flow." The American response, he insisted, must be unequivocal: any attempt by a hostile power to block the waterway would henceforth be viewed as "an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America," and "repelled by any means necessary, including military force."

Much has changed in the Gulf region since Carter issued his famous decree, known since as the Carter Doctrine, and established the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) to guard the Strait -- but not Washington's determination to ensure the unhindered flow of oil there. Indeed, President Obama has made it clear that, even if CENTCOM ground forces were to leave Afghanistan, as they have Iraq, there would be no reduction in the command's air and naval presence in the greater Gulf area.

It is conceivable that the Iranians will put Washington's capabilities to the test. On Dec. 27, Iran's first Vice President Mohammad-Reza Rahimi said, "If [the Americans] impose sanctions on Iran's oil exports, then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz." Similar statements have since been made by other senior officials (and contradicted as well by yet others). In addition, the Iranians recently conducted elaborate naval exercises in the Arabian Sea near the eastern mouth of the strait, and more such maneuvers are said to be forthcoming. At the same time, the commanding general of Iran's army suggested that the USS John C. Stennis, an American aircraft carrier just leaving the Gulf, should not return. "The Islamic Republic of Iran," he added ominously, "will not repeat its warning."

Might the Iranians actually block the strait? Many analysts believe that the statements by Rahimi and his colleagues are bluster and bluff meant to rattle Western leaders, send oil prices higher, and win future concessions if negotiations ever recommence over their country's nuclear program. Economic conditions in Iran are, however, becoming more desperate, and it is always possible that the country's hard-pressed hardline leaders may feel the urge to take some dramatic action, even if it invites a powerful U.S. counterstrike. Whatever the case, the Strait of Hormuz will remain a focus of international attention in 2012, with global oil prices closely following the rise and fall of tensions there.

The South China Sea

The South China Sea is a semi-enclosed portion of the western Pacific bounded by China to the north, Vietnam to the west, the Philippines to the east, and the island of Borneo (shared by Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia) to the south. The sea also incorporates two largely uninhabited island chains, the Paracels and the Spratlys. Long an important fishing ground, it has also been a major avenue for commercial shipping between East Asia and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. More recently, it acquired significance as a potential source of oil and natural gas, large reserves of which are now believed to lie in subsea areas surrounding the Paracels and Spratlys.

With the discovery of oil and gas deposits, the South China Sea has been transformed into a cockpit of international friction. At least some islands in this energy-rich area are claimed by every one of the surrounding countries, including China -- which claims them all, and has demonstrated a willingness to use military force to assert dominance in the region. Not surprisingly, this has put it in conflict with the other claimants, including several with close military ties to the United States. As a result, what started out as a regional matter, involving China and various members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), has become a prospective tussle between the world's two leading powers.

To press their claims, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines have all sought to work collectively through ASEAN, believing a multilateral approach will give them greater negotiating clout than one-on-one dealings with China. For their part, the Chinese have insisted that all disputes must be resolved bilaterally, a situation in which they can more easily bring their economic and military power to bear. Previously preoccupied with Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has now entered the fray, offering full-throated support to the ASEAN countries in their efforts to negotiate en masse with Beijing.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi promptly warned the United States not to interfere. Any such move "will only make matters worse and the resolution more difficult," he declared. The result was an instant war of words between Beijing and Washington. During a visit to the Chinese capital in July 2011, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen delivered a barely concealed threat when it came to possible future military action. "The worry, among others that I have," he commented, "is that the ongoing incidents could spark a miscalculation, and an outbreak that no one anticipated." To drive the point home, the United States has conducted a series of conspicuous military exercises in the South China Sea, including some joint maneuvers with ships from Vietnam and the Philippines. Not to be outdone, China responded with naval maneuvers of its own. It's a perfect formula for future "incidents" at sea.

The South China Sea has long been on the radar screens of those who follow Asian affairs, but it only attracted global attention when, in November, President Obama traveled to Australia and announced, with remarkable bluntness, a new U.S. strategy aimed at confronting Chinese power in Asia and the Pacific. "As we plan and budget for the future," he told members of the Australian Parliament in Canberra, "we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region." A key feature of this effort would be to ensure "maritime security" in the South China Sea. 

While in Australia, President Obama also announced the establishment of a new U.S. base at Darwin on that country's northern coast, as well as expanded military ties with Indonesia and the Philippines. In January, the president similarly placed special emphasis on projecting U.S. power in the region when he went to the Pentagon to discuss changes in the American military posture in the world.

Beijing will undoubtedly take its own set of steps, no less belligerent, to protect its growing interests in the South China Sea. Where this will lead remains, of course, unknown. After the Strait of Hormuz, however, the South China Sea may be the global energy chokepoint where small mistakes or provocations could lead to bigger confrontations in 2012 and beyond. 

The Caspian Sea Basin

The Caspian Sea is an inland body of water bordered by Russia, Iran, and three former republics of the USSR: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. In the immediate area as well are the former Soviet lands of Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. All of these old SSRs are, to one degree or another, attempting to assert their autonomy from Moscow and establish independent ties with the United States, the European Union, Iran, Turkey, and, increasingly, China. All are wracked by internal schisms and/or involved in border disputes with their neighbors. The region would be a hotbed of potential conflict even if the Caspian basin did not harbor some of the world's largest undeveloped reserves of oil and natural gas, which could easily bring it to a boil.

This is not the first time that the Caspian has been viewed as a major source of oil, and so potential conflict. In the late 19th century, the region around the city of Baku -- then part of the Russian empire, now in Azerbaijan -- was a prolific source of petroleum and so a major strategic prize. Future Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin first gained notoriety there as a leader of militant oil workers, and Hitler sought to capture it during his ill-fated 1941 invasion of the USSR. After World War II, however, the region lost its importance as an oil producer when Baku's onshore fields dried up. Now, fresh discoveries are being made in offshore areas of the Caspian itself and in previously undeveloped areas of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

According to energy giant BP, the Caspian area harbors as much as 48 billion barrels of oil (mostly buried in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan) and 449 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (with the largest supply in Turkmenistan). This puts the region ahead of North and South America in total gas reserves and Asia in oil reserves. But producing all this energy and delivering it to foreign markets will be a monumental task. The region's energy infrastructure is woefully inadequate and the Caspian itself provides no maritime outlet to other seas, so all that oil and gas must travel by pipeline or rail.

Russia, long the dominant power in the region, is pursuing control over the transportation routes by which Caspian oil and gas will reach markets. It is upgrading Soviet-era pipelines that link the former SSRs to Russia or building new ones and, to achieve a near monopoly over the marketing of all this energy, bringing traditional diplomacy, strong-arm tactics, and outright bribery to bear on regional leaders (many of whom once served in the Soviet bureaucracy) to ship their energy via Russia. As recounted in my book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, Washington sought to thwart these efforts by sponsoring the construction of alternative pipelines that avoid Russian territory, crossing Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey to the Mediterranean (notably the BTC, or Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline), while Beijing is building its own pipelines linking the Caspian area to western China.

All of these pipelines cross through areas of ethnic unrest and pass near various contested regions like rebellious Chechnya and breakaway South Ossetia. As a result, both China and the U.S. have wedded their pipeline operations to military assistance for countries along the routes. Fearful of an American presence, military or otherwise, in the former territories of the Soviet Union, Russia has responded with military moves of its own, including its brief August 2008 war with Georgia, which took place along the BTC route. 

Given the magnitude of the Caspian's oil and gas reserves, many energy firms are planning new production operations in the region, along with the pipelines needed to bring the oil and gas to market. The European Union, for example, hopes to build a new natural gas pipeline called Nabucco from Azerbaijan through Turkey to Austria. Russia has proposed a competing conduit called South Stream. All of these efforts involve the geopolitical interests of major powers, ensuring that the Caspian region will remain a potential source of international crisis and conflict.

In the new Geo-Energy Era, the Strait of Hormuz, the South China Sea, and the Caspian Basin hardly stand alone as potential energy flashpoints. The East China Sea, where China and Japan are contending for a contested undersea natural gas field, is another, as are the waters surrounding the Falkland Islands, where both Britain and Argentina hold claims to undersea oil reserves, as will be the globally warming Arctic whose resources are claimed by many countries. One thing is certain: Wherever the sparks may fly, there's oil in the water and danger at hand in 2012.

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by Mark Hertsgaard.

Cross-posted with The Nation.

Look out, Minneapolis and Portland. Long Beach is making its move, aiming to surpass you as America's Most Bike Friendly City. Does that sound odd for a city whose chief claim to environmental fame has been its massively polluting port and offshore oil facilities -- a city that, like the rest of Southern California, has long been in thrall of the car?

Well, all that's changing, and the change is coming from the top. Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster, who says he tries to bike 100 miles a week, actually laughs about the car addiction of his mega neighbor to the north. "I love that scene in L.A. Story where Steve Martin gets behind the wheel, backs out of his driveway, and drives to his neighbor's driveway," Foster says. "He won't even walk as far as his neighbor's house!"

Of course, there are still plenty of cars in Long Beach (though Foster himself drives an electric one), but bicycles are getting more respect, not to mention resources, than ever before. With help from state and federal grants and pressure from local cycling enthusiasts, the city government has installed 130 miles of bike trails, established protected bike lanes (that is, lanes separated from vehicular traffic by physical barriers) on major commuter thoroughfares, created bike boulevards that enable kids and parents to bike or walk safely to and from school, and installed 1,200 new bike racks.

Perhaps most innovative has been the city's effort to establish bike-friendly shopping districts -- the first in the country, officials say -- engaging local merchants by showing them how, contrary to common belief, biking can actually bring more customers and vitality to shopping districts.

"The math is pretty simple," says April Economides, the principal of Green Octopus Consulting and the leader of the city's outreach to local businesses. "You can park 12 bikes in the amount of space it takes to park one car. And someone who shifts from owning a car to a bicycle tends to have more discretionary income, because, for a commuter, the typical cost of a bicycle is $300 a year, compared to $7,000 a year for a car."

Economides, a vivacious 36-year-old whose family owns one of the best-known restaurants in town, describes herself as a "social change agent" who leverages the power of small business. "At first, most merchants didn't think about bikes or even had a negative view of them," she says. "My job was to educate them about how biking can put more money in their pockets."

Kerstin Kansteiner, whose Berlin coffee shop is a member of the East Village Arts Bike-Friendly Business District, confirms the point. "I see it every day," she says. "The bike racks outside our shop increase our visibility and bring us more customers. People on bikes stop at places they haven't visited before because they don't have to try to find parking."

Lauren Lilly, the 28-year-old co-owner of Yellow 108, a sustainable clothing business that sells its hats and sunglasses in Whole Foods and other retailers nationwide, says the company moved to Long Beach from L.A. last year "because we saw Long Beach as an up-and-coming area, and it's a lot less expensive." Her showroom is located on one of Long Beach's bike boulevards. "We saw lots of bike commuters going by, and that's our core demographic: working professionals who want to live a healthy, planet-friendly lifestyle."

In the Belmont Shore neighborhood, a green sharrows lane extends for a mile through an upscale shopping district. The lane is not physically separated from vehicular traffic, but it feels almost as safe to a bicyclist. "Putting green paint down is a sign that the city authority says that bikes belong here," says Charlie Gandy, a consultant to the city government. "In southern California it's assumed that bikes don't belong, but this sends a different message. That's also important for the larger public education campaign around the role of bikes in our community."

Local officials concede that making Long Beach the most bike-friendly city in America is still more an aspiration than a reality. Still, boosting cycling reinforces a new narrative for Long Beach, says Allan Crawford, the bicycle coordinator in the city's Department of Public Works. "Long Beach has always been seen as the poor stepchild to L.A., but now we're recreating our image," he says. "We're saying, especially to young people, Long Beach is a lot cheaper than L.A., and it's not sterile like Orange County [Long Beach's neighbor to the south]. It's easy to get around here, we encourage a car-light lifestyle, it's still a great beach town, and there's all these hip places to enjoy, too."

Not everyone is pleased, of course. A taxi driver named Kenny says bike lanes only reduce parking spots and slow traffic flow, especially because cyclists are "lackadaisical" -- by which he seems to mean they don't pedal as fast as cars want to travel.

Mayor Foster says there is an element of truth to such complaints, but only a tiny one. "Parking is always an issue," he says. "But I drive [the commuter thoroughfares of] Third Street and Broadway every day, and I don't wait any longer for [traffic] light changes than I did before."

Then he quotes an ancient philosopher: "I like a line by Aristotle, 'Beware the barrenness of a busy life,'" Foster says. "Sometimes I can't remember at the end of a day what I did the past eight hours. That's moving too fast. A bit slower pace in life is a good thing."

Correction: This story originally stated that Long Beach had installed 50 new bike racks. That referred only to the number of racks installed through the bike-friendly business program. The total number, corrected above, is 1,200.

For more about the economic impacts of bicycles, read Grist's Bikenomics series.

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by Twilight Greenaway.

When Slow Food came to the United States in 2000, it appealed mainly to people who could already tell their arugula from their radicchio -- those who knew both farmers and chefs before the phrase "local food" implied anything more than the sum of its parts.

In the late '90s, when chef and Slow Food New Orleans chapter founder Poppy Tooker first got wind of the Italy-based organization, which had formed in opposition to the globalizing fast food industry in the '80s, she felt right at home. "When I read about this movement, I thought, this was what my life's work had always been about: preserving foodways, valuing the food producers, closing the ties between chefs and farmers. And now there was an international organization out there ready to help me!"

Cut to 12 years later. Slow Food USA has 225 chapters in cities and rural communities across the nation. The term "slow food" has come to be synonymous, in some cases, with a much broader philosophy of eating, farming, and thinking about food. And the national organization has become a kind of conceptual hub for many divergent aspects of today's food movement.

That's why the movement took notice recently when Chow.com ran an article titled "Cheap Drama at Slow Food." Author John Birdsall described a crisis at Slow Food USA (SFUSA): "Its most prominent members -- famous cookbook authors, chefs, and leaders in the food movement -- are embroiled in a bitter squabble stoked by angry emails, hurt feelings, accusations."

As a follow-up to Birdsall's piece, a vocal group of SFUSA critics, including Tooker, have published a document called "10 Things Slow Food USA Can Do To Gain Direction as it Sees its Way Into 2012." The group believes the Brooklyn-based national office is too reliant on technology, not as connected with its constituencies in other parts of the country, and no longer aligned with the core vision, mission, message, and activities of Slow Food International. They say they worry that the organization is moving away from biodiversity work and direct support of farmers and artisan food producers by adopting a more populist big-tent approach and advocating national policies. And they point to a recent round of layoffs at the Brooklyn headquarters as proof that the organization is in trouble.

Meanwhile, SFUSA's Executive Director Josh Viertel and his current staff say they are merely keeping up with the times -- and the changing food landscape. No matter how you slice it, the conflict speaks volumes about the challenges that face every effort to build what Slow Food calls a "good, clean, and fair" food system.

Change of course or evolution?

Viertel sees SFUSA as work in progress. In many ways, when he talks about it, he sounds like he's running a start-up -- a stance that inspires and invigorates a portion of his audience, and no doubt alienates others. He doesn't deny the organization has been financially stressed this year. While SFUSA's membership has grown from 14,000 to 25,000 members during his tenure, he says "the gift amount has gone down. Those who were giving us $60 gave $45, those who were giving us $45 gave $25, and so on." Since SFUSA receives half its revenue from members, he chalks up the drop to the pain of a now-three-year-old recession. This year, he says, "it was important to get out in front of it and get the organization in a stable place."

At the same time, SFUSA has begun reaching thousands more people via email and social media; its mailing list expanded from 24,000 to 250,000 in the last three years, and its very prolific Twitter feed now reaches 200,000 followers.

Viertel has also worked toward creating an organization that can function as an umbrella for the food movement in America -- one that can "pick up on all the energy, anger, frustration, etc. that people feel after reading [Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma]," the book he sees as the Silent Spring of the food movement, "and turn that into actual power to make change."

Viertel says he saw a groundswell of people who "wanted to find an organization that would give them a pathway to do something about [their food system]. That something could be working to get a garden planted in your kid's school, it could be getting connected to a farmer, or it could be getting involved in a legislative fight to end farm subsidies." While Slow Food has long held "good, clean, and fair" as its motto, Viertel believes that SFUSA's recent emphasis on fairness has attracted a new following of enthusiastic food novices eager to share recipes, talk about the challenges of food access, and sign online petitions.

How political is too political?

It's this last part -- the fact that the organization has waded, swum, and is now diving deep into advocacy -- that most bothers Tooker.

"There's really been a confusion of the message," she says. For one, the new SFUSA has been "trying so hard to redefine the identity and get rid of this air of elitism they believed existed." It also used its blog to talk about food safety (including the giant egg recall linked to Jack DeCoster's Midwest CAFO dynasty in 2010), led a campaign against the proposed ag-gag bills, and sent out action alerts about last fall's "Secret Farm Bill." In other words, the organization has adopted what Tooker calls "a political stance."

Meanwhile, she says, the current Brooklyn-based SFUSA office "doesn't even have a kitchen!"

In 1999, while the World Trade Organization's Seattle meeting faced mass protests, Tooker heard Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini speak at an early stateside gathering. "He said it was not our jobs to march in the streets and protest. Carlo said the work of Slow Food was in the kitchen. And over the long range we would eventually win this fight with a smile in our hearts."

Cheap for whom?

This mentality, and the organization's heavy focus on biodiversity and heirloom varieties, might never have changed if it weren't for Slow Food Nation -- a 50,000-person event initiated by Chez Panisse chef and Slow Food matriarch Alice Waters that took place in San Francisco in 2008. Not only did this event position SFUSA as a leader, perhaps the leader, of today's sustainable food world, it also provided a brief but important opportunity for food justice advocates to make their case to the Slow Foodies.

Some advocates believe that a food-justice panel during Slow Food Nation that Viertel attended helped move the issue onto his agenda. Hank Herrera, an Oakland, Calif.-based food-justice advocate, recalls: "We spoke plainly about the issue of food justice and the exclusion of communities lacking access to healthy food and food justice. Josh took the challenges seriously and from that point has worked vigilantly to bring food justice into focus for Slow Food."  

But to hear Viertel tell it, his interest in food justice began much earlier. Before he began working in the food movement, Viertel farmed vegetables. It was a meager living, and he and his partner (now his fiancee) sold their produce at farmers markets "to people who could pay a lot."

"We didn't think twice about charging what we did, because we knew the work that went into it," he recalls. "At the same time people would come to the stand who were shopping with WIC [federal aid for women, infants and children] coupons and we'd charge two for one." That year, he and his partner earned only $12,000 between the two of them. He says he began to see "this false choice between paying the farmer what they deserve and actually creating a world where both [the eater and the farmer] can afford real food."

That awareness was likely part of the impetus for SFUSA's recent $5 Challenge, a direct response to the fast food industry intended to show a meal can be prepared using "Slow Food" or sustainable ingredients bought directly from local farmers for under $5 per person (roughly the cost of a value meal).  

Author and native foods expert Gary Paul Nabhan, a critic of Slow Food USA who coauthored the "10 Things" document, takes issue with the $5 Challenge, which, he argues, does a disservice to food producers by discouraging eaters from paying the "true cost of food." In a recent essay on the Edible Communities website, he suggested that efforts like the $5 Challenge "assum[e] that food justice is only about aiding and empowering low-income consumers." He asked: "If food production costs have risen 20 to 40 percent for many grains, vegetables, fruits, and meats over the last year, who should shoulder the costs: the producers, or the so-called ‘end-users' of the food system?"  

Slow Food USA board member (and occasional Grist contributor) Kurt Michael Friese counters that $5 per person for ingredients is not very cheap at all.

"You can pay the farmer a fair price and still make really good food and have it be under $5 per portion. That doesn't rule out heritage breeds in any way. In fact it helps to support them. I think it's fine for the people who can afford to buy some expensive heritage turkey or some rare pig breed. It's important valuable stuff. But it's not the only way people can support Slow Food," he says.

In response to accusations that efforts like the $5 Challenge don't support farmers, Viertel is adamant that a just food system include both ends of the food chain: the eater and the producer.

"Talking to a dairy farmer in Vermont and a working parent in Queens isn't very different. They both have crushing debt. They both get up really early in the morning. They both tend to have a hard time affording real food. And they both are controlled by a really consolidated corporate food system," he says. From distribution to retail to corporations involved in meatpacking, "there are a lot of companies that wedge themselves in between the producer and the consumer. So the way this debate sets them up against one another is really problematic."

While Viertel sees Slow Food's original work as important, he also wants to serve those who can't -- by necessity -- support heirloom varieties or shop in farmers markets. "No movement I have ever seen can go forward without the people who are hurt most at its core," he says.

The biodiversity issue

Tooker has long been involved in the North American chapter of the Slow Food USA's Ark of Taste, the national portion of an international effort to catalogue, bring attention to, and therefore preserve endangered heirloom and place-based foods. Earlier this year, she says the Ark of Taste committee was "given a stop work order," and Tooker worries about the future of the effort. One of the SFUSA staffers laid off in November was the last contact for the Ark work, and she says, "If you were to propose a food to be accepted onto the SFUSA Ark, there's no methodology in place to do that right now."

But Friese says it is alive and well, despite being put on hold briefly this year for a reorganization. "We've turned the whole thing around from being centrally located, with the work being run entirely from the national office, to being something where we support what various chapters are doing with native foods in their specific locations." 

Rather than host a committee that votes on which foods are worth preserving, SFUSA will allow local chapters to put forward food they're excited about in a more "open-source" manner, and SFUSA will give them a platform to do that work.

The organization has moved in a similar direction with disaster funding. After Katrina, SFUSA set up a disaster fund that was administered by a national committee, but they now plan to support individual chapters that rally around farmers in their area. "The idea is to be able to point our growing network toward their effort and help them fundraise," says Viertel.

The food-justice generation?

Viertel says he has never intended to do away with the group's biodiversity work. And given its history, it's unlikely that SFUSA will ever become a full-fledged food-justice organization, says People's Grocery Director Nikki Henderson.

But Henderson isn't surprised that Viertel and the younger generation of SFUSA staffers see food in an inherently political light.

"The last 30 years have wreaked havoc, and I feel like those of us who grew up in that don't feel as separate from those who are struggling in the streets every day. Our generation is sicker, poorer, and more diverse that any generation in recent history -- so of course we're going to feel that way!"

And while Viertel is clearly uneasy about all the attention this conflict has brought to the organization, Henderson thinks it's about time the food movement recognize SFUSA for being brave enough to attempt to make space for two efforts that can appear contradictory at times.

"SFUSA has tried to negotiate a minefield," she says. "And they're setting off mines. That's not a bad thing."

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by Tom Laskawy.

Did a recent scientific study just change the way we should think about the safety of genetically modified foods? According to Ari Levaux at the Atlantic, the answer is a resounding yes.

The study in question, performed by researchers at China's Nanjing University and published in the journal Cell Research, found that a form of genetic material -- called microRNA -- from conventional rice survived the human digestive process and proceeded to affect cholesterol function in humans.

Levaux argues that this new study "reveals a pathway by which genetically modified (GM) foods might influence human health" which should cause us to completely revisit the question of GM crops' safety. And he's right to be alarmed, just a little off on the reasoning.

Let's take a closer look at how this study applies to current GM technology, shall we?

I would argue that several studies have already suggested that existing GM foods might present a health risk. For example, this study in The International Journal of Biological Sciences found evidence that Monsanto's Bt corn causes organ damage in lab animals. Then there's this one which showed that GM soybeans can alter mice on the cellular level -- an indication that genetically modified material survives digestion and is active in animals that consume it.

Of course, advocates of genetically modified foods will observe that the phenomenon of genetic transfer through consumption applies to all plants and that GM foods are therefore "substantially equivalent" to non-GM foods. As Levaux explains at length, this concept of substantial equivalence has been used by the biotech industry as well as our government to push GM foods through safety testing with minimal scrutiny. What's Monsanto's defense of all this? On its website, the company claims:

There is no need to test the safety of DNA introduced into GM crops. DNA (and resulting RNA) is present in almost all foods ... DNA is non-toxic and the presence of DNA, in and of itself, presents no hazard ... So long as the introduced protein is determined to be safe, food from GM crops determined to be substantially equivalent is not expected to pose any health risks.

So the fact that the Chinese team found active genetic material going from plants to humans isn't really new and doesn't really change what we know about how existing genetically engineered crops might affect us.

But what is new -- and what Levaux missed -- is that the Chinese study happens to involve exactly the kind of genetic matrieral -- microRNA -- that biotech companies hope to use in their next generation of genetically modified foods.

Today's GMOs are almost entirely based on adding new genes to crops like corn, soy, and cotton in order to alter the way the plants function. And even then new functions are mostly limited to making plants either able to tolerate herbicides or to produce their own. But if biotechnology companies are successful in their efforts, there may soon be genetically modified foods that use microRNA -- simply put, snippets of RNA whose potency were only discovered around a decade ago -- to target, and block the function of specific genes in pests.

Thus the news that plant microRNA can survive digestion and affect human systems brings into question the wisdom of pursuing this kind of technology in food.

As explained to me by Doug Gurian-Sherman, senior scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists and expert in genetically modified foods, microRNA technology is an area that biotech companies are actively pursuing. Monsanto itself has a whole web page devoted to the technology, which they call RNA interference.

Gurian-Sherman notes that the Chinese study -- though requiring confirmation and follow-up research -- raises "an initial red flag." It calls into question "any general statement that [microRNA] technology would be inherently safe," he adds.

He observes that humans and insects share a surprising amount of DNA material -- evolution favors reusing and recycling genes even among creatures as different as insects and humans. If this research bears out, then it's entirely possible that microRNA meant to target a specific insect gene will also have an effect -- possibly unpredictable -- in humans. This is especially true because, for technology like this to work as a pesticide, the microRNA must be present in high levels in the plant, which makes it even more likely the genetic material will make it all the way into the human gut.

Gurian-Sherman also pointed out that microRNA techology poses an even greater environmental risk. There are many beneficial insects, such as various beetle species, that are closely related to crop pests and can coexist in the same field. It's thus hard to imagine being able to find a gene to target in a pest that won't also hurt their beneficial cousins (though this is unlikely to matter to biotech companies).

So where does this new research leave us? It suggests that, given the possibility of affecting humans and other bystander species, microRNA-based technology would require unimaginably high safety standards. And neither the biotech industry nor federal regulators have really shown an appetite for that kind of rigorous testing. Am I the only one who doesn't see that changing anytime soon?

UPDATE: Dr. Michael Hansen, Senior Scientist at Consumers Union wrote to me after this post was published with an important point about the significance of the Chinese study. While he agreed that the main implications relate to the possible risk from microRNA-based GM foods, he also felt that this study did make a new and somewhat startling finding regarding how plant genetic material affects humans. As he put it, the study "showed that the miRNA not only survived digestion [in humans] but also was taken up and moved to other parts of the body where a specific impact was noted. The studies you cited -- from Seralini's lab and Malatesta's lab -- only show that GE crops can have an adverse effect on animals."

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by Isa Hopkins.

I grew up in Cleveland. Yeah, Cleveland. I know, hailing from a less-than-premiere address leaves me open to a certain amount of disdain from urban elitists. Being from the city that is widely regarded as the "Mistake on the Lake" is urbanism's equivalent to being the fat kid in gym class, and it can leave one just as scarred as too many dodgeball hits to the face.

I don't live in Cleveland anymore, but I didn't leave because I wanted to be one of the cool kids. I was stricken with the burning need to explore, to go new places, and stake a claim for myself. And the more I travel, the more I find myself drawn back to my Rust Belt roots -- not Cleveland per se, but some semblance of it elsewhere in the world.

When I graduated from Georgetown in 2005, social momentum seemed to offer two choices: Stay in Washington, D.C., or be a rebel and move to San Francisco. I chose San Francisco. It was -- it is -- architecturally beautiful and politically liberal; the weather was good and the vibe was exciting. It was expensive as hell, too -- it would be a real challenge on my meager Americorps living allowance -- but I figured that I'd get one of those fancy high-paying careers that all San Franciscans seemed to have, then settle in, build a family, and grow old.

It wasn't long after I arrived, however, that I began to feel unnecessary. San Francisco is exciting, sure, but it's because the city -- like New York, or L.A., or other urban brands -- churns along on its own rhythms, driven by the labors and commitment of the hundreds of thousands of people who have already established themselves. It seemed like every niche was filled, and usually by someone both richer and cooler than me. I moved around for a few years, bouncing between different addresses in the Bay Area, heading down to Southern California for a spell, and even revisiting Cleveland, a fancy high-paying career slipping further and further from reach as the worldwide economy imploded.

And then, in early 2009, I discovered a little patch of Cleveland in California, just across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco: Oakland. Like my hometown, Oakland is ridiculed by those from posher zip codes and written off by most outsiders (and even some insiders). I came to Oakland for a non-fancy, low-paying job that I loved and found my own version of paradise, replete with affordable rents and restaurants without four-hour waits for a seat. It was just the kind of place where an urban-minded, broke-ass, fashion victim like myself could feel at home: Wearing sweatpants to the grocery store was socially acceptable, and I didn't need an impressive job title or great condo to fit in.

Like Cleveland or any other down-and-out city across the country, Oakland is a fixer-upper kind of town, thirsty for young people, where elbow grease and commitment to place matter more than the state of one's bank account. Since moving here, I've found the purpose I was lacking when I lived across the bay, and I'm gratified that my work has a real impact in the community.

Earlier this year, a friend and I co-founded Femikaze, a feminist sketch comedy troupe. (And if you don't believe that "feminist" and "comedy" are natural allies, you should come to one of our shows!) We had our first independent production in October, a full-length show here in the East Bay that sold out three of our four nights. We've already scheduled three more shows for next year.

It's the kind of thing that would have been exponentially more difficult in San Francisco, where any given Friday night offers thousands of entertainment options, including dozens of comedy shows. We're only a few miles away from the frenzy here in Oakland, but it's quiet enough that we don't have to shout to get anybody's attention. There's room for two determined women, with no patron and no budget, to start something.

Many San Franciscans find my decision to quit the hip side of the bay befuddling. "There's nothing there," they say of Oakland. They're not entirely wrong, either. There really IS less (although far from nothing) in places like Oakland and Cleveland -- or Pittsburgh, or St. Louis, or Knoxville, or dozens of other underrated, underpriced, overlooked cities -- than can be found in thriving urban centers like San Francisco, New York, or Boston. But that's just their charm.

"Less" might be boring to some, but to those of us who strive to create and produce and make a difference, "less" also means fewer resources are required to start something new, and less competition comes from established entities. As someone perpetually short on cash but long on idealistic ambition, I've found more opportunity in a second-tier city like Oakland than I ever knew in San Francisco. And although some people out there like to use my address as the butt of a joke, I've found it to be a rich, fertile place to build a life on my own terms.

To recent or upcoming college graduates, I offer my own bit of meager counter-wisdom: Forget about Washington, D.C., San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and L.A. Look for a city that will value your presence and appreciate your efforts, a city that doesn't think you're disposable just because you're young. It'll be easier on both your wallet and your soul.

Sure, you might catch some flack for moving to a place where "there's nothing there," but take it from me -- I came from the Mistake on the Lake, and to my mind, "there's nothing there" is just another way of saying "there's nothing in my way."

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Rust Wire.

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by Stephen Lacey.

Cross-posted from Climate Progress.

Politics is the art of controlling your environment. -- Hunter S. Thompson

I've been writing for years about how renewable energy is "an issue we can all rally around" that shouldn't involve partisan politics.

In an ideal world that would hold true. But after seeing the relentless campaign waged by a small-but-powerful group of belligerents determined to marginalize the industry, my opinion changed in 2011.

That shouldn't stop us from trying to bring this issue above politics. But we're in a fiercely partisan election year. And after witnessing the successful political campaign waged to raise doubts about climate science -- thus creating an army of conservative presidential hopefuls who see talking about human-caused global warming as a political death sentence -- we should all be on high alert.

Let's face it: The clean-energy industry isn't going to match the tens of millions of dollars being poured into anti-clean energy propaganda by the Koch brothers or the latest fossil-fuel PR campaign from the American Petroleum Institute. By the time clean-energy interests can actually match that level of spending, there probably won't be the same need to guard against the constant barrage of baseball bats swinging for the knees of anyone who cares about moving this sector forward to address climate change.

To make pushback more difficult, Washington-based advocacy organizations don't have any interest in getting into fisticuffs. They risk losing support if they lash out too much, so they hang back and try to make friends with as many people possible. This is understandable for trying to craft policy. However, it also means they don't have a very big dog in the political fight -- a fight they've been reluctantly dragged into over the last six months.

A lot of people working in clean energy on the ground level feel the same way. Who wants to get dragged into a barroom brawl started by a bunch of jabbering political drunkards who have no idea what they're talking about? It's best just to put their heads down, do their job, and hope they can ride through the bad vibes.

But that's just not going to work in 2012. Waiting for things to blow over isn't going to be an adequate response. If you care about clean energy issues and actually want to make an impact on the dialogue in 2012, you've got to get involved.

Here's what I mean.

I'm not talking about being a supporter of Obama just because he tends to be more publicly supportive of renewable energy. Given how quickly the administration stopped talking about climate change after 2009, it will be a huge surprise if Obama makes climate and clean energy a major part of his campaign anyway -- which is just another sad example of allowing someone else to hijack the issue.

What matters is stepping up to these candidates toe-to-toe when they come into your state to campaign and show the voters they know best. The clean-energy industry may not be able to cut through millions of dollars in television ads by the fossil-fuel lobby. But thousands of people scattered around the country challenging presidential and congressional candidates on their positions will have an impact.

When a candidate says green jobs don't exist and are nothing but propaganda, you need to show up at a town hall dressed with more green than Kermit the Frog and ask him or her, "I work in the industry. Do you not think my job exists?" Hold them accountable. Shake up their carefully controlled environment.

Republican voters in New Hampshire started doing it for climate change. Over the last few months, an active group of GOP members concerned about climate have been consistently challenging the presidential hopefuls at campaign stops, forcing candidates to talk about the issue. Some of the quotes from candidates have ended up in the mainstream press, making climate a greater topic of conversation in national debates and news stories about the election.

Supporters of clean energy have gotten lazy. Under Obama, they believed this would be the turning point for energy -- that somehow we'd reach a point of no return in national support of the industry.

Last year proved that wasn't the case. And it's likely not going to change if people who care about these issues -- particularly those actually representing the industry -- turn the other cheek and try to keep their issues completely apolitical.

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