FOX News evidently agrees with Global Warming Skeptic Trollcat (see above):

Thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit were hacked recently and dumped on a Russian web server. Fox News and right-wing bloggers believe the illegally obtained emails prove that “global warming is a MYTH.”

Oops, that’s Global Warming Skeptic TrollCat. Here’s the take from FOX News.com (actual screenshot):

Here’s an unscientific sampling of the reasoned analysis from prominent right-wing bloggers:

Evidently due to this email conspiracy, Arctic sea ice is at historically low levels, Australia is on fire, the northern United Kingdom is underwater, and the world’s glaciers are disappearing. Oh yeah, and it’s the hottest decade in history.

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Jennifer Hashley processes a chicken on her Massachusetts farm. Massachusetts poultry farmer Jennifer Hashley has a problem. From the moment she started raising pastured chickens outside Concord, Mass. in 2002, there was, as she put it “nowhere to go to get them processed.” While she had the option of slaughtering her chickens in her own backyard, Hashley knew that selling her chickens would be easier if she used a licensed slaughterhouse. Nor is she alone in her troubles. Despite growing demand for local, pasture-raised chickens, small poultry producers throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, and even New York can’t or won’t expand for lack of processing capacity.

It isn’t only small producers who are feeling the pinch—a widespread lack of processing infrastructure appropriate for small farmers has caused supply chain problems for the big retailers as well. Whole Foods—the world’s largest natural-foods supermarket—wants to aggressively expand its local meat sourcing, according to its head meat buyer, Theo Weening. But it faces the same limitation as Hashley. Most regions of the country have “lots of agriculture but nowhere to process,” Weening told me, adding that the phenomenon is most acute in the northeast.

Whole Foods wants to change all that. In a move that has national implications, the retail giant has confirmed to Grist that it is working with the USDA as well as state authorities to establish a fleet of top-of-the-line “mobile slaughterhouses” for chicken. Starting with a single unit serving Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Hudson Valley, N.Y. area, Whole Foods hopes to offer small farmers an affordable way to process chickens as well as to vastly increase the amount of locally-sourced chicken it sells. If successful, this program could be expanded to any region of the country with similar infrastructure shortages.

Consolidation Is for the (Big) Birds

That Whole Foods would undertake a move into meat processing serves to underscore the extent of the meat industry’s consolidation. Today, 90 percent of beef processing, 70 percent of pork processing and nearly 60 percent of poultry processing are handled by the top four companies in each sector (with new mergers occuring almost monthly). As processing giants like Tyson scale up and buy competitors, they shutter smaller facilities. Farmers like Hashley have to truck their livestock dozens—sometimes up to a hundred—miles to get to the nearest slaughterhouse for the privilege of paying premium prices to process a small herd. And in some cases, small producers can’t get access to these large facilities at any price; they simply won’t accommodate small growers, often due to rigid “biosecurity” protocols.

What might be an inconvenience transforms into a Catch-22 considering the maze of requirements for the legal sale of meat—this is not an area where DIY is easy or welcome. Generally speaking only meat processed at USDA-inspected facilities can be sold to the public. About half of all states allow for state inspectors to stand in for federal inspectors, but even then, that meat may only be sold within state lines. Poultry farmers are somewhat exempted from this—they can process some of their own birds on the farm and then sell them directly to consumers. But, with a few state-specific exceptions, beef, pork, and lamb simply may not be sold—even direct farm-to-consumer—unless it has been processed at a state or federally inspected slaughterhouse.

Given the high costs and uncertain prospects of building new small-scale slaughterhouses, there is a growing interest among farmers in these mobile slaughterhouses—interest that inspired Whole Foods in the first place. Currently, only a few such units are in existence, such as the state-certified mobile unit in California recently profiled by Mother Jones, and they often end up operating in a legal gray area. That particular unit came with such severe restrictions on how the meat could be sold that it functioned under “something of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy” with farmers. In fact, in all the U.S., there is only a single USDA-certified mobile slaughterhouse—complete with a permanently-assigned USDA inspector—in operation. It resides on a small island off the coast of Washington state.

But if Whole Foods’ mobile-slaughterhouse strategy succeeds, this farmer-friendly method of processing birds will come into its own. To some, it’s a welcome effort to increase options for farmers. To others, it’s an ominous sign that the government is siding with a powerful retailer in a way that will, intentionally or not, squeeze farmers even more.

An Italian-made mobile-processing unit, of the type Whole Foods is considering. Photo courtesy of Whole FoodsWhole Foods to the Rescue?

Whole Foods’ Weening, architect of the initiative, doesn’t see it that way. He only sees the difficulties small producers have with getting their chickens processed at large slaughterhouses. For him, if Whole Foods can help the little guy while also providing an expanded market for locally-produced meat, everyone wins.

And experts in local agriculture are tempted to agree. Mary Hendrickson, a rural sociologist who specializes in regional food systems at the University of Missouri, told me that “processing capacity is an absolutely critical link that we’ve struggled to fill—mobile slaughtering has a hope of filling the gap.”

Weening is certainly trying to do just that. The mobile units aren’t designed as a money-maker for Whole Foods. While Whole Foods will have a minimum “buy” of around 500 chickens, farmers who sell chickens to Whole Foods will be able to process as many birds as they want with the unit. Since the processing cost will be included in the price Whole Food pays the farmer, processing of additional chickens will essentially be free. Crucially, Weening also intends to allow farmers who don’t sell to Whole Foods use of the mobile units (though pricing is yet to be determined). Farmers can then sell those chickens however they like—to other retailers (remember, it would be USDA certified), at farmers markets, or directly on the farm. If all goes to plan, the first Whole Foods’ processing unit will be on the road and operating by May 2010.

But support for Whole Foods effort is not universal. There is growing concern over the power large national retailers have over farmers, and the prospect of Whole Foods moving into the meat processing business does little to allay it. Fred Stokes, executive director of the Organization for Competitive Markets, a group dedicated to resisting agricultural consolidation, lauded Whole Foods for trying to provide an alternative to the large slaughterhouses, but suggested that individual farmers lacked the power to go toe to toe with such a dominant player. Hendrickson also questioned how small farmers could “maintain their competitive bargaining position” with an entity as powerful as Whole Foods.

Stokes—along with Fred Kirschenmann, a farmer as well as a leading advocate for sustainable agriculture and president of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in upstate New York—took serious issue with one significant element of Whole Foods plan: the set of very specific guidelines any farmer who hopes to sell to Whole Foods will have to follow. To Whole Foods’ Weening, this is about providing a “consistent” product to consumers; to ensure that all Whole Foods chickens—in Weening’s words—“look and taste the same.” Weening explained that the company will require participating small farmers to raise a specific breed of chicken supplied by a specific (local) breeder, feed them a specific brand of feed (no antibiotics or animal byproducts allowed) and raise them according to Whole Foods standard poultry production style, which requires “access to pasture” but does not require actually keeping the birds on pasture.

Big Buyer, Small Seller

These experts expressed concerns that, despite Whole Foods’ good intentions, such a strict set of guidelines when applied to small farmers put the whole enterprise dangerously close to “contract farming.” In contract farming, a farmer raises birds under contract for sale to a large processor like Tyson Foods or Purdue. With large processors like Tyson, the farmer doesn’t even own the birds, but is still responsible for the land, the equipment and all the infrastructure required to raise the animals, often making significant investments to satisfy the needs of the processor. But if the processor ultimately refuses the sale for whatever reason (and these contracts are very favorable to the processor), there is no backup plan. The farmer raised the birds specifically to satisfy the contract. Without the sale, it’s a total loss. In such cases, the farmer has a nasty tendency to go bankrupt. Too often, farmers “essentially become,” as OCM’s Stokes put it, “indentured servants on their own land.”

Now, Whole Foods denied that it has any interest in “contract farming”—there will be no contracts signed in advance—and the company strongly asserts that it is trying to give small farmers more options, not fewer. But Hashley, the Massachussetts farmer, painted a scenario whereby small East Coast farmers are forced by Whole Foods to compete on price with the large scale “natural” poultry growers in California that currently supply the retailer’s stores. If that’s the case, according to Hashley, farmers may find themselves pushed to expand their operations, making up on volume what they can’t make per bird, and investing large sums of money in chicks, feed, and even barns with only Whole Foods as a buyer. If Whole Foods then refuses the sale for a declared violation of one of its guidelines, the financial loss to the farmer will be disastrous.

Hashley is clearly skeptical that partnering with Whole Foods is a good idea for individual small farmers. And worst of all in her view, Whole Foods guidelines will effectively preclude pasture-raised birds. With space in Massachusetts, and most of the northeast at a premium for farmers, providing adequate supply to a buyer the size of Whole Foods will inevitably lead farmers to move their birds indoors, since barn-raised chickens can be more densely packed. Aside from the financial implications, Hashley resented the idea of replicating the Whole Foods “access to pasture”-style of intensive poultry production: birds that in reality rarely if ever step outside despite an open barn door.

Tipping the Scale

There are, of course, alternatives to a reliance on Whole Foods as a local food enabler. Hashley herself has been working hard with state regulators and local boards of health to create a farmer-owned solution to the infrastructure problem, which she had hoped would be funded by a USDA Rural Development grant. As I finished reporting for this article, Hashley learned (and I confirmed) that her grant proposal will be rejected, though she continues to seek funding from other sources. Hashley passionately believes that a farmer cooperative should own the processing units, which would initially be certified by the state for direct sales by farmers (i.e. at farmers markets or on the farm) but not for sale to retailers. Small farmers would no longer have to haul their chickens halfway across the state for processing, but they would still have to sell their birds directly—something that many farmers are happy to do. Over time and with the coops having proved the model, USDA certification and inspection could follow. In any event, access to the unit would not be controlled by a private entity with a substantial financial interest in how it’s used.

Resolving these sorts of market-oriented conflicts and helping farmers is, of course, the role of state and federal regulators. Where do they stand on the Whole Foods effort? Jay Healy, Massachusetts State Director for USDA Rural Development, the office that turned down Hashley’s grant proposal, is more sanguine about Whole Foods’ effort. One obvious appeal: unlike Hashley, the retailer isn’t asking for any federal money for its initiative. Healy also praised Whole Foods “state of the art,” stainless steel, Italian-built unit, a version of which already has regulatory approval in Europe, for addressing to his satisfaction all the relevant food safety and environmental concerns. While Healy appreciates the coop’s efforts and hopes to fund them in the future, he felt that their unit still needed further refinement. The Whole Foods unit seems to him poised to get federal certification, which is the ultimate goal if mobile slaughterhouses are to become a mainstream solution.

Healy’s was exactly the response that Hashley herself feared when she first got word of the Whole Foods proposal. Aside from her concerns about the guidelines, Hashley doesn’t have a blanket objection to Whole Foods effort overall since her processing options are virtually non-existent. But she is concerned that, Healy’s statement notwithstanding, state and federal regulators will eventually lose total interest in working with farmer cooperatives as a result of the Whole Foods’ move into small-scale processing. Like the other experts I talked to, she’s also deeply skeptical of relying on Whole Foods’ good intentions. While a breakeven project now, the company’s processing units may transform into a revenue center later, which would be a threatening development for farmers.

Small is beautiful, but not always enough: Hashley’s on-farm processing unit. The good news for Hashley is that Massachusetts’ top agricultural official Scott Soares appears to share her concerns. In a recent meeting with Whole Foods, Soares strongly encouraged the company to work with the farmer coops to avoid a conflict over the dueling proposals. He wants to be “certain we have a level playing field for all the players out there.” That means balancing the concerns of farmers as well as the interests of Whole Foods. Soares has requested detailed information from Whole Foods on its inititative, including pricing and provisions for access to the units, and emphasized in his discussions that coops do have an important role to play. While Soares has a limited regulatory role in approving the unit, he will continue to seek assurances that Whole Foods will operate fairly and in good faith.

But Healy’s and Soares’ comments make clear that, while Whole Foods is neither enemy nor savior for farmers, the danger is real that state regulators and the USDA will view large processors and large retailers as their ideal partners. Ag experts like Stokes, Hendricksen, and Kirschenmann all agree that regulators should instead side with farmer coops as entities best suited to counterbalance the market power of industry giants, even well-intentioned ones like Whole Foods.

It’s also clear that no one really wants to stop Whole Foods’ move into meat processing—though that fact has more to do with the lack of processing infrastructure than with Whole Foods itself. And the retail giant’s initiative may yet collapse if the USDA proves unwilling to certify the units themselves. But should Whole Foods succeed and launch mobile slaughterhouses, regulators, farmers, and consumers will be relying on a corporate behemoth to address problems created by the existence of other, larger behemoths. While it may be the best available solution to an entrenched problem, it doesn’t seem a robust one.

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————-

Ever since evolution of the swine flu virus accelerated in 1998, virologists and veterinary-science have warned (PDF) that factory hog farms create the ideal conditions for generating novel viruses. They worried that three things would happen:

Last spring, with the onset of the HINI pandemic, the first two fears came two pass. As for the third one, well ....

Epidemic experts say they are investigating the apparent spread of Tamiflu-resistant swine flu virus among four patients at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., and five in a hospital in Wales. These clusters appear to be the first in which a virus resistant to the antiviral Tamiflu, a mainstay of flu treat, has spread from person to person, researchers said Friday.

...

In Wales, doctors have confirmed five Tamiflu-resistant swine flu cases
in one ward of an unidentified hospital. Three more patients on the
ward are being tested for drug-resistant virus; a ninth patient is
infected with virus that is still susceptible to Tamiflu.

And that’s not good.

if Tamiflu-resistant virus spreads widely, swine flu will become tougher to treat and may cost more lives, says Duke’s Daniel Sexton, who is leading the hospital’s investigation.

Now is it time to start seriously investigating the CAFO-swine flu link?

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A parable on the National School Lunch Program

I have a huge, huge soft spot for Paul Simon. Simon & Garfunkel was one of the first bands I ever got into (like when I was eight) and I still love virtually everything Simon’s ever done. My musical tastes were shaped by his catchy melodies, pretty harmonies, and wry, literate lyrics. I’m one of the 12 people that bought the soundtrack to his Broadway play.

So I was both excited and trepidatious about the musical debut of his son (with his first wife) Harper Simon. Needless to say, a lot can go wrong with these musical legacy artists. They tend to ... try too hard. Happily, Simon escapes that trap—his eponymous debut is a short (30 minute), modest, likeable affair. It doesn’t stray to far from his father’s template, perhaps with a little less folk and a little more steel-guitar americana. Promising.

This track may be the most Paul-like, perhaps because he co-wrote it with Paul. It’s called “Tennessee.”

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You could make a pretty simple argument that the fate of the world rests with the United States Senate Republicans:

1. It takes 60 votes to pass a climate bill in the U.S. Senate (assuming it won’t be done through budget reconciliation). Getting the votes of all 58 Democrats and two Independents will be just plain tough, as they might say in the Blue Dog states.

2. It takes 67 Senate votes to ratify an international climate treaty. That requires Republican votes.

3. The international community isn’t likely to pass a climate treaty without the cooperation of the United States.

4. The world needs the Senate Republicans.

The hope is that enough of the most (relatively) independent-minded ones can be peeled away from the obstructionist line and cajoled into supporting a first-step climate bill. That’s why it’s problematic that John McCain (R-Arizona) is acting like anything but a maverick on the issue.

There’s been some interesting reporting on the McCain front today.

Before his most recent presidential run, McCain had long been a leader on taking climate change seriously and doing something about it. He and Joe Lieberman authored the first major climate bill in the Senate in 2003 and introduced new versions in 2005 and 2007. 

POLITICO summarizes his about-face:

Now the Arizona Republican is more likely to repeat GOP talking points on cap and trade than to help usher the bill through the thorny politics of the Senate.

McCain refers to the bill as “cap and tax,” calls the climate legislation that passed the House in June “a 1,400-page monstrosity” and dismisses a cap-and-trade proposal included in the White House budget as “a government slush fund.”

The shift even has former McCain aids “mystified.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), the only Senate Republican who’s shown real interest this fall in working with Democrats to craft a climate bill, tells POLITICO, “I wouldn’t be here on this issue without him … He’s the guy that introduced me to the climate problem.”

More bad news: McCain is vulnerable to a primary challenge from the right, according to a new Rasmussen poll. Matt Yglesias concludes:

This seems like pretty much terrible news for the world. The most likely path between Point A and Senate passage of a reasonable climate bill is for McCain to rediscover his interest in the issue. But that’s not the sort of thing a Senator worried about a right-wing primary challenge is likely to do.

For more on the way it used to be: Grist’s interview and overview of McCain’s environmental record from last year’s campaign show how he’s changed his position on a climate plan.

And don’t expect the Republican dynamic to change soon, according to Greenwire. Reporter Alex Kaplun takes a look at upcoming primaries and finds candidates courting the Republican base by taking hard-line positions against a climate bill. His sources say “the general trajectory of the Republican Party as whole for the foreseeable future will be toward opposition of the climate bill.”

All this still amounts to reading tea leaves on where McCain will be if the Senate ever gets around to voting on a climate bill. Maybe he’s still working through some post-election blues. Maybe, over time, he’ll be drawn to playing a constructive role again.

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Reflecting on the lameness of my profession

Shucks, we shoulda known!Photo courtesy Andrew Ciscel via Flickr Hackers recently broke into thousands of emails and internal documents from a leading climate research center and dumped them onto an anonymous Russian server. The hacked emails
(160 MB worth, unzipped) came from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). They allegedly include 20-year’s worth of exchanges between top climate scientists who were debating the latest developments in climate research. Global warming skeptics, the internet over, are jumping on the (illegal) hacking to claim that global warming is a hoax, full of fudged data and dishonest, conspiratorial scientists. It’s “the global warming scandal of the century,” claim conservative bloggers.

A CRU spokesperson confirmed that their server was hacked; however, the spokesperson told the BBC, “Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine.”

As far as I can tell, the worst of the allegations currently circulating involves a few quotes plucked out of context, such as this one from private correspondence between CRU researcher Phil Jones and Pennsylvania State University’s Michael Mann (author of the infamous “hocky stick graph” of rising global average temperatures):

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards), and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline,” wrote Jones.

I’ll save you from the science wonkery and allusions here (check out RealClimate for a more detailed explanation), but noisy climate skeptics are jumping on two parts of that sentence. Guess which ones? Yup, “trick” and “hide the decline.”
The legitimate climate scientists over at RealClimate have an indepth response to the allegations being made against the CRU folks, which include some of their own contributors. They translate the science slang at work here: “Scientists often use the term ‘trick’ to refer to ‘a good way to deal with a problem,’ rather than something that is ‘secret,’ and so there is nothing problematic in this at all.” As for the “hiding” part, they admit it is a poor choice of words. But in this case, it is an “appropriate” use of a certain kind of data that is actually “‘hidden’ in plain sight.”

RealClimate’s level-headed response to the event is worth reading, along with its active and excellently moderated discussion thread. Another point they make which is worth emphasizing in light of blog posts calling this “a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science”:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’ [Grist note: MWP refers to “Medieval Warm Period”], no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though ...

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. But it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times.  Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person ... Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

It appears that the original Russian FTP server, which held the illegally obtained files, has been shut down, although the files have now been uploaded elsewhere on the web.

A few things to keep in mind throughout this entire “scandal”:

As implicated researcher Michael Mann notes to the respected international scientific journal Nature: “The deniers will probably do anything they can to distract the public from the reality of the problem [of climate change], and the threat that it poses. Cherry-picked, out-of-context quotes, stolen from private e-mails, is the best they’ve got.”

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Energy Self-Reliant States [PDF], a flawed study on local Renewable Energy availability from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ISLR) found that 18 of the 50 states could not meet their electricity
needs with local renewables. In fact, no state can meet its
electricity demand through local renewables without expensive
electricity storage. On a national basis, such storage would cost an
estimated $13 trillion, or over 65 times the cost of the transmission
investments they oppose.

One of the study authors, John Farrell, has been promoting the study as a “Heresy on Transmission.” Rather than a heretic attacking misguided establishment shibboleths,
this flawed study attacks a simplistic misunderstanding of why we need
transmission. Farrell and his co-author David Morris are either
intentionally promoting this misunderstanding, or
they simply fail to grasp the reasons behind long distance
transmission’s necessity.

Their straw man is the false choice between states relying on local
renewables such as PV on rooftops which supposedly would require only
“minimal transmission upgrades” and far-off wind farms requiring
expensive long distance transmission.  They say, for example,

[I]f Ohio’s electricity came from North Dakota wind
farms—1,000 miles away—the cost of constructing new transmission
lines to carry all that power and the electricity losses during
transmission could result in an electricity cost to the consumer that
is about the same, or higher, than local generation with minimal
transmission upgrades.

This ignores most of the benefits which would flow from new
transmission lines connecting North Dakota and Ohio. A 1,150 mile
transmission line from Bismark to Cincinnati would also connect Fargo,
Minneapolis, Eau Claire, Madison, Chicago, and Indianapolis running
along Interstate Highway corridors (Google maps.)
It also ignores the study’s own finding that Ohio would only be able to
generate 29 percent of the electricity it needs with local renewables. 

Incidentally, their national map shows Ohio being able to generate
33 percent of its electricity from local renewables, but adding up their own
numbers for the renewables they identify gives 29 percent. I looked closely
at their numbers for only six states, so there may be other arithmetic
errors as well.

The states along this hypothetical route are North Dakota,
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. The study found
that these states can generate the following percentages of local
demand with in-state renewables:

If each of these states attempted to meet their local electricity needs
with the renewables in the study, Ohio and Indiana would still need to
import some electricity from other states. Although Ohio would not
need to import power from as far away as North Dakota, they would have
to tap into Minnesota’s wind resources if demand were to be satisfied
along this corridor. An attempt to meet that demand with the nearest
resources might look like this:

You’ll note that the total above exceeds 600 percent because the states
with renewable energy surpluses have much lower local demand. The
magnitudes of this demand are my best guess. Keep in mind that I did
not choose this corridor to make my example work; the suggestion came
directly from the transmission example in the study.

The Consequences of Timing

By the study’s own methodology, both Ohio and Illinois need
interstate transmission, because they cannot generate all their
renewable electricity locally.  Yet, as I will demonstrate, even though
North Dakota and Minnesota would be generating electricity for export,
they will often need to import renewable electricity as well.  

Using the Correlation Maximization tool on Energy Timing (note: Energy Timing has been taken down, see comment here.),
I generated the best portfolio of North Dakota wind and solar farms to
meet the needs of Square Butte Electric Coop, an electric utility in
Grand Forks, N.D.  The results are shown below:

Composition of Optimal Portfolio of North Dakota Renewable Energy: 

This combination of three wind farms represents the best fit between
electric output from existing wind farms and solar sites in Energy
Timing’s database, and local demand.  Even though this is the best fit,
the correlation between supply and demand is only 13.2 percent. Solar sites
do not appear in the optimal portfolio because they do not lead to a
better fit.

As you can see from the bottom graph, wind output is strongest
in the morning, when demand is relatively low, and falls off in the
afternoon, as demand rises.  Hence, unless North Dakota builds far more
wind farms than it needs to supply local demand (an expensive
proposition which could only be justified by electricity exports), they
would not have enough electrify in the afternoon and early evening,
when the wind typically dies down.  This would be the situation on a
typical day.  On any given day, wind power is even more variable than
it is on average, leading to large and frequent swings from oversupply
to undersupply.

In the case of Minnesota electrical demand, solar sites turn out to
be a better fit than wind sites.  In reality, if Minnesota were to
attempt to meet local demand with renewable energy, a mix of wind and
solar sites would be used, since wind is so much less expensive than
solar.  But since solar sites are the best fit for local demand, a mix
of wind and solar would produce a worse match than the 24.5 percent
correlation we see in the scenario above.

Benefits of Transmission

We can now see how both Minnesota and North Dakota would benefit
with a high capacity transmission connection between the states. In
the early morning, before the sun rises, Minnesota will not be
producing any domestic renewables, so it makes sense to import
electricity from North Dakota, where production is far in excess of
demand all morning. Minnesota will in turn be able to supply excess
solar power to North Dakota in the afternoon before the sun gets low
and cuts solar output.  

In short, even though both Minnesota and North Dakota can easily
produce enough local renewable electricity for their needs, the timing
of that electricity causes problems of both oversupply and unmet
demand. If we build transmission connecting states regions, these
problems are reduced, and less storage is needed to make up the
difference.

As we increase the interregional connections, we will be able to
bring in power from farther afield that better meets demand.  For
instance, both these states don’t have enough local renewables in the
evening, even when combined. The worst period is just around dusk,
from about 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. CST, before the wind begins to pick up
at night in North Dakota. But in the sunny Mojave Desert of southern
California, the sun is still up (it’s two hours earlier, Pacific Time),
and large Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants can use relatively cheap thermal storage to continue producing power for hours after sunset.

We can also see that both North Dakota and Minnesota typically have
spare production capacity in the summer months, so they could export
electricity back to the Southwest during these months, when Southwest
electricity demand peaks due to air conditioning loads.

As we increase the length of regional transmission networks, each
state along the path gains, both as an electricity exporter and as an
importer depending on the season and weather conditions. Ohio does not
need to pay for giant transmission lines from North Dakota to import
which “could result in an electricity cost to the consumer that is
about the same, or higher, than local generation.”  North Dakota,
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana would also benefit from
such a line, and all could be asked to contribute.

Costing Storage vs. Transmission

The study’s authors also invoke electricity storage to “solve” the problem of timing, saying

Some renewable fuels, like sunlight and wind, are
variable. Thus, the estimates, especially for wind, assume a
significant level of storage or on-demand distributed generation.

Unfortunately, they make no attempt to account for the price tag of such storage. They state only, 

This report does not examine storage and its
implications, but in our analysis of variable renewable energy
potential, we assume that sufficient storage is available.

“On-demand distributed generation” could come from natural gas or
biomass. Renewable generation relies on the availability of the
natural resource, few of which can be stored. Even incremental
hydropower is typically not on-demand, because it is usually the result
of adding generation to existing dams and comes with obligations to
maintain flow rates.

Biomass based power is typically baseload, not on-demand.
Furthermore, the study authors explicitly rule out the large scale use
of biomass for electricity because they expect the amount of
biomass-based electricity to be “modest.” Even if large scale,
on-demand distributed biomass based generation were available, it would
only be available in those states with a large biomass resources.  See
the map below.

Natural gas is an incomplete response to climate change in that it is a fossil fuel, may not even be available in the necessary quantities,
and must be imported by the vast majority of states.  What is the point
in pushing for reliance on locally generated renewable electricity if
it only increases our dependence on imported natural gas which may not
be available and produces greenhouse gas emissions? 

Given the not only daily, but seasonal mismatches between local
electricity production and demand, states which are locally
self-sufficient in electricity would have to invest in a month or more
worth of storage. While electric vehicles may be able to provide some
daily or hourly storage, they will not be available for seasonal
electricity storage, since the vehicle owners will need to drive them,
and so cannot keep them fully charged for months or even days on end.

The cheapest large scale electricity storage solutions,
(Pumped Hydropower, Compressed Air Energy Storage, and Molten Salt
Thermal Storage) typically cost $10 to $50 per kWh of storage. 
Unfortunately, all three of these options are limited in where they can
be located, so restricting transmission will also restrict the use of
these cheaper forms of storage. The cheapest battery and flow battery
storage technologies cost about $100 to $150 per kWh. To be generous,
I will assume that all states can build as much electricity storage as
they want at $50 per kWh, or $50,000 per MWh. I will also assume that
geothermal, hydropower, combined heat and power, and efficiency gains
will mean that solar and wind will need to supply only 50 percent of our
current electricity usage. 

According to the Energy Information Administration, total electricity production in 2007 was 4,156,745 thousand MWh. An average monthly production was thus 346,395,000 MWh, and the cost of
a month’s worth of national electricity storage to meet half of a
month’s demand would be $8,665 billion under the assumptions above. In
contrast, the ILSR study states that “FERC, Congress, and environmental
groups ... rush to accelerate the construction of a new $100-$200 billion
interregional transmission network.”  

If such a network cost $200 billion, and reduced the need for
storage by only 10 percent, then it would have paid for itself more than eight
times. Given less conservative (and I think more realistic)
assumptions of reducing the need for storage by 50 percent, and a per MWh cost
of storage of $75,000, a regional transmission network would pay for
itself in reduced storage needs by 65 to 1.

Conclusion

To me, 65-to-one, or a savings of approximately $13 trillion, seems worth the price of stringing wires. For comparison, $700 billion has been spent on the war in Iraq since 2001. In other words, the ILSR study is suggesting that we pay for eighteen
wars in Iraq in order to avoid building an interregional transmission
network, costing about as much as we spent in Iraq in 2008. 

In fact, the price for local self-reliance on renewable energy would
likely be higher. Thirteen trillion dollars does not include the cost
savings that the report’s authors tried to address: Transmission allows
us to exploit less expensive renewable generation. Furthermore, the
variability of both wind and solar generation can be vastly reduced by
combining the output of dispersed wind and solar farms. Less
variability reduced the need for costly spinning reserves to stabilize
the grid if wind power suddenly drops or a cloud passes above a solar
farm.

Not all self-styled heretics are fighting a just cause against an
oppressive consensus.  To the extent that a consensus exists in favor
of an improved national transmission grid, it is based on sound science
and economics.  It is unfortunate that so many environmentalists are
seduced by the mirage of renewable energy self-reliance.

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Blowing up our clean energy future

Global warming is melting 18,000 Himalayan glaciers—the largest
concentration of glaciers outside the great polar ice sheets. If the
present melt rate continues, many of these glaciers will be gone by the
middle of this century, disrupting the perennial water supply to
hundreds of millions of people.

To explore this growing collection of glacier images from the “roof
of the world”—including a must-see video made by mountaineer and
filmmaker David Breashears, Founder and Project Leader of Glacier
Research Imaging Project (GRIP)—go to the Asia Society’s “On Thinner Ice” website.

For some of the underlying science, see my November 2008 post, Another climate impact comes faster than predicted: Himalayan glaciers “decapitated.” It discussed an important paper by leading international cryosphere
scientists, including American’s own Lonnie Thompson, “Mass loss on
Himalayan glacier endangers water resources,” which concluded ominously:

If Naimona’nyi is characteristic of other
glaciers in the region, alpine glacier meltwater surpluses are likely
to shrink much faster than currently predicted with substantial
consequences for approximately half a billion people.

The study notes that Naimona’nyi is the highest glacier (3.7 miles above sea level) “documented to be losing mass annually.” MSNBC reported:

Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University and a team of
researchers traveled to central Himalayas in 2006 to study the
Naimona’nyi glacier, expecting to find some melting ... But when the team
analyzed samples of glacier, what they found stunned them ...

In fact, the glacier had melted so much that the exposed surface of the glacier dated to 1944 ...

“At the highest elevations, we’re seeing something like an average of 0.3 degrees C (0.54 degrees F) warming per decade,” Thompson said ...

“I have not seen much as compelling as this to demonstrate how some
glaciers are just being decapitated,” Shawn Marshall of the University
of Calgary said ...

“You can think of glaciers kind of like water towers, ” he
said. “They collect water from the monsoon in the wet season, and
release it in the dry season. But how effective they are depends on how
much water is in the towers.”

The time to act is now.

Thanks to the Asia Society for providing me that awesome sliding “then and now” photograph of Mount Everest.

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The climate problem is incredibly complex. Heck, it’s unfathomably complex to most folks, as it involves chemistry, computer models, economic development, and, of course, the weather.

This complexity demands strong, explanatory journalism—the kind of fact gathering and storytelling that too many news organizations are ignoring in an era of declining budgets and celebrity infatuations.

There are exceptions, thankfully. The good people at the Earth Journalism Awards have singled out 15 journalistic approaches to the climate problem (or aspects of it) that they believe did the best job at exploring the issue and breaking it down for their readers.

The 15 finalists for the 2009 awards include a Scientific American series on carbon sequestration and a report from the Business Daily of Nairobi on how Kenya’s companies are losing out in the global carbon trading scheme.

You, dear reader, have a voice in selecting the winner of the Earth Journalism Global Public Award.  Go to the site, read the stories, and vote on the one you think is the best.

You’ll be doing two important things—informing yourself, and supporting journalists who are doing their best to gather facts about the most consequential threat facing humanity.

The winning story will be presented at the Earth Journalism Awards ceremony to an audience of negotiators, climate change experts, activists and media representatives in Copenhagen on December 14 on the eve of the negotiations.”

Follow the Earth Journalism Awards on Facebook.

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15 people worth watching in Copenhagen (a slideshow!)

Image: Tom Twigg for GristThere are those who would like us to believe that industrialized farming is the only way to feed the earth’s growing population. Disinformation comes daily from powerful industrial agricultural companies whose profits depend entirely on the sale of chemicals, genetically modified (GM) seeds, and food processing. Furthermore, they maintain that massive-scale farming methods are key to adapting to climate change.

This is just not so.

Contrary to what the propaganda tells us, yields from industrial crops do not consistently produce more food.  It’s an industry-generated myth that ecologically-safe organic agriculture yields less than conventional agriculture. In fact, a comprehensive study comparing 293 crops from industrial and organic growers demonstrates that organic farm yields are roughly comparable to industrial farms in developed countries; and result in much higher yields in the developing world.

Numerous studies unequivocally state that our survival depends on resilient and biodiverse farm systems that are free of fossil fuel and chemical dependencies.  The 2008 World Bank and United Nations International Assessment on Knowledge, Science and Technology concluded that a fundamental overhaul of the current food and farming system is needed to get us out of both the food and fuel crises. The report’s findings indicated that small-scale farmers and agro-ecological methods are the way forward.

This assessment dovetails with a 2002 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, which found that organic farming enables ecosystems to better adjust to the effects of climate change and has major potential for reducing agricultural GHG emissions. The FAO report also found that organic agriculture performs better than conventional agriculture in terms of both direct energy consumption (fuel and oil) and indirect consumption (synthetic fertilizers and pesticides).

Large-scale agriculture-dependent upon commercial seeds (including GM seeds), chemical sprays, and petroleum-based fertilizers-can only reliably feed one thing: company profits. These profits come at the expense of our climate as well as farmers who become wholly dependent upon these companies for their livelihood.

And it’s farmers who are realizing through hard experience that this system doesn’t work.  Monsanto, a major proponent of GM seeds, agro-chemicals and industrialized methods, this week reports a massive $283 billion loss in the third quarter-quite a hit.

Monsanto and others in the industry are scrambling for a foothold in developing nations to save a failed agricultural and business model in the U.S.  They’re trying to convince foundations, aid agencies, and foreign governments that they hold the only key to staving off starvation.  And, the way to do this is by smearing organic farming - which is the only truly dependable way to feed the world - and by ignoring climate change.

They’re putting their shareholders’ bottom line before a sick and hungry planet.  It’s time we held them to the truth.

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More work than anyone imagined—watch a slideshow of the project unfolding.Leise JonesIt is worth noting that the original JP Green House budget for the first year of the project was $25k. In retrospect, this was woefully inadequate, but by no means out of line with the four previous rehabs I had completed. We now project that total expenses for the first phase of the rehab, from purchase (July 2009) through occupancy (January 2010), will come in over $200k, a cost overrun of Big Dig proportions.



  Like the largest public works boondoggle in U.S. history, we seriously underestimated the problems; in our case, the difficulties in rehabbing a poorly maintained structure which had been abandoned for five years.

Our first clue in this regard, uncovered during the first week of ownership, was that the sill plates—hard pine beams resting on the stone foundation on which the building sits—in more than half of the building were termite-ridden. The major structural work of supporting the building, pouring new foundations, and replacing the sills and lower framing was both beyond our own capacity and also precluded occupancy and the piecemeal rehab we planned.

Most anyone who has worked on an old building will nod knowingly in sympathy at our experience of grabbing hold of one problem only to find another, and then another. It’s like tugging on a loose piece of yarn and watching a whole sweater unravel. So to with the JP Green House, but the silver lining that was gradually revealed as we came to understand that no part or system in the 100-year-old, ill-maintained, former corner store could be left in place, was the opportunity to shoot for a truly revolutionary standard of energy efficient rehab.

Between purchase of the property last July and October, the scope of work and scale of our ambitions for the JP Green House were raised from a modest, homeowner conducted spiff-up to a full, down-to-studs demolition job, complete new wiring and plumbing, and, most important, the goal of passivhaus certification. Unlike most energy-efficiency investments, it is very difficult to determine what should be considered additional costs of aiming for passivhaus. Yes, we would have had to attend to the structural problems in the JP Green House under any remodeling plan, but neither would we have needed the massive (for a single family house) buttresses and footings to support thick concrete floors, which will serve as heat sinks, had we not gone down the route we chose.


Thankfully, we had patient, expert guidance from a number of highly proficient advisers—particularly Greg Caplan of Living Structures, Inc. in JP, my dad, Harold Ward, recently retired from teaching at Brown University, where he ran the Urban Environmental Laboratory and Environmental Studies Program, and Peg Preble, our neighbor and master electrician. We were also fortunate to connect with the just-founded design/build firm of Placetailor, headed by Simon Hare.

There will be no shortage of work left for Andrée and me. The schedule calls for completion of all rough carpentry, insulation, HRV system and ducting, electrical and plumbing, sufficient to meet Boston building code, by mid-January, with the first passivhaus blower test soon thereafter. This still leaves to us construction of all interior walls, completing kitchen and bath, all finish work, storefront exterior and a few other odds and ends like construction of the deck necessary to access the new front door.

We have had tremendous community support, with too many volunteers to name joining our crew for a few days to full weeks and 20+ turnouts for Saturday work days. We are looking to expand on this support with a contractor “barn raising” week in December, whereby our friends and other interested construction professionals gain hands-on experience with passivahus building techniques, while donating time and expertise to help finish off the project.

The JP Green House is almost entirely an expression of faith—on our own part (Andrée and I are looting our retirement accounts to meet the nut), our families (both of which have given important assistance), and the generous volunteer hours, donations of supplies, tools and appliances of our community.

  What we have not received, thus far, is any support from federal, state or local “green build” programs, utility “renewable portfolio” funds or private foundation grants (other than an estimated $9k we expect in tax benefits and small rebates).

The JP Green House is a “pure” model, therefore: a demonstration of what may be done without relying on funding sources that are unavailable to all. On the other hand, we will occupy our home and start our JP Green House program work without any reserve or cushion, lacking the solar hot water and pv systems necessary to achieve < zero carbon impact, and with the old strorefront, to be used as community space, passivhaus education and outreach and “hub” for 350.org campaignign, still to be completed. More on this interesting state of affairs in the next post.

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For the last year and a half, Ken Ward and Andrée Zaleska have been rehabbing a 100-year-old former neighborhood store in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. They’re converting it into a home for their combined family, a community gathering place, and a zero-carbon demonstration home to inspire others—and sharing their journey in the special series Coming Home: Chronicling the (re)invention of the JP Green House.

The firm overseeing the project, Placetailor, specializes in creating homes on the Passive House model, in which supertight insulation and careful use of passive solar create a building that requires no heating source. The JP Green House will be one of the first Passive House rehabs in the U.S. Photographer Leise Jones has documented the work of as it progresses, and shares some of her images here.

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New York passes clean energy financing bill

Ask Umbra on shower caps, computers, and junk mail

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Seventh Generation launches anti-toxics campaign with wee gimmick

This post marks the launch of “Plate Tectonics,” a new feature that highlights ways that citizen action can move the food system in more sustainable directions.

————————-

How do we stop this thing?Like many people, I applauded when Michelle Obama broke ground on her organic garden—and jeered when Croplife America, the pesticide industry’s main lobby group, chided her to spray “crop protection” (i.e., poison) on her family’s veggies. I was proud of the First Lady for shrugging off that absurd appeal.

That’s one reason I came down with whiplash when Michelle’s husband nominated a top Croplife America functionary to the post of chief agricultural negotiator at the U.S. Trade Office. Instead of handing the guy a powerful post, shouldn’t the President have punched him in the jaw for the insult to the family spinach?

Normally, the appointee—Isi Siddiqui—wouldn’t run into much trouble in the Senate, most of whose members rather like the agrichemical industry. But as I reported a while back, sustainable ag and green groups are rallying against the appointment. At this point, some 80 groups have gone on record opposing the appointment. 

According to an account in the New York Times, Siddiqui has already made clear what that agenda will be:

Both [WTO ambassador Michael] Punke and Islam “Isi” Siddiqui, nominee for chief U.S. agricultural negotiator, have said they will not send a deal to Congress for approval unless it clearly gives U.S. companies and farmers greater market access to developing nations.

“I can assure you that the administration will not conclude a Doha deal that does not work for U.S. farmers, ranchers and agribusinesses,” Siddiqui said in his written comments.

That’s the same agenda we’ve seen for 30 years; decades of flooding markets in the global south with cheap U.S. ag products has undermined farmers there, making entire nations utterly dependent on U.S. grain. Last year, when commodity prices spiked and millions of additional people found themselves priced out of food markets, the full viciousness of the Siddiqui agenda became clear. As for free trade in U.S. agrichemicals, ask the folks in India’s breadbasket, the Punjab region, how that has gone.

So educate yourself. And then let
Obama know that we don’t want an agrichemical-industry rep forming our
agricultural trade agenda.

• I lived in New York City in the early 2000s, during which time Mayor Giuliani essentially issued a fatwa against community gardens, declaring them “communiism.” He tried to sell them off for development; citizen activism, with a major assist from then attorney general Elliot Spitzer, for the most part stymied the small-minded mayor’s designs, though he did manage to pave dozens of gardens in some of the city’s lowest-income areas.

During the battle over the gardens, pro-development forces tried to frame the issue in terms of affordable housing. Garden activists, they claimed, were hurting the poor by holding back new development. The logic was flawed for several reasons, but here is the main one: gardens occupied a fraction of he city’s vacant lots.

If the developers wanted to build more affordable housing, why didn’t they choose lots that were actually vacant? The reason, I think, was that the gardens tended to revitalize the city streets around them. They brought people out, beautified the area, and lowered crime. Naturally, developers wanted to plunk their projects down into those spots, and not in some grim, desolate lot a few blocks away.

I bring all of this up because, like a zombie, Mayor Giuliani’s discredited garden agenda has popped back up again in Brooklyn’s glorious, storied Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where developers are scheming to bulldoze a a highly productive community garden called Bed-Stuy farm. Check out this post by Kerry Trueman on Green Fork blog; watch the above video; and sign this petition.

• For a look at citizen activism in full flower—Wendell Berry’s “agrarian responsibility” illustrated—check out Bonnie Powell’s account on Ethicurean about how the Bay Area food community rallied to save Soul Food Farm after it experienced a devastating fire.

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So who will be the real power players in Copenhagen? The official estimate for official delegates attending the U.N. climate conference hovers somewhere around a gajillion. OK, seriously, it’s a mere 20,000. Then there are thousands of activists, journalists, business leaders, and NGO reps who will be seeking the delegates’ ears. Here are 15 people worth watching—ones who wield outsize potential to shape the outcome, or to shape the narrative that affects the outcome. And two you can safely ignore.

There’s a text version below the slideshow for you multimedia haters and search-engine spiders, ahem.

Lars Loekke Rasmussen, Denmark’s Prime Minister—The chairman of the climate talks naturally wants some positive news to come out of the host city. He’s promoting a two-step deal: reach a political agreement in Copenhagen, then hash out the “legally binding” part in 2010. But signing a toothless deal in Copenhagen could take the pressure off richer countries to do the hard part next year, as one analyst notes. It would help heads of state like Rasmussen (and Barack Obama) save face, but a “one agreement, two steps” approach might prove impossible to finish.

Abdalla Salem El-Badri, Secretary General of OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries)—The oil group’s lead Copenhagen negotiator made news this fall by saying OPEC nations should be compensated as oil-burning countries reduce their consumption. Buy less, pay more? It sounds absurd at face value, but world leaders may see the peril in destabilizing economies in the Middle East and other oil-exporting states.

Jairam Ramesh, India’s Environment Minister—India’s lead negotiator has been plain unpredictable this year, first staking a rather belligerent “development first, cleanup later” position, then making overtures toward a side deal with the U.S. Recently he denied that climate change is melting Himalayan glaciers, the main source of the subcontinent’s water. That odd claim earned a very public rebuke from fellow countryman Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Bill McKibben, 350.org founder and Grist advisor—Few have been reporting and tracking global warming longer than McKibben, who wrote the first book on the topic for a general audience (1989’s End of Nature). Lately he’s criticized Obama’s leadership on climate (though David Roberts criticizes his criticism).  McKibben will be in Copenhagen as a reporter for Grist and Mother Jones, an organizer for 350.org, and a voice of conscience for the army of activists he’s helped mobilize.

The Yes Men, Pranksters Extraordinaire—There will be plenty of earnest activism and heartfelt pleas to Think of the Children and Puppies. For something fresher, look to America’s most inventive activists, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. They’ve made fools of Dow Chemical, Halliburton, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Now they’ve launched BeyondTalk.net to organize civil disobedience aimed at Copenhagen, with more yet to be revealed.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, President of Brazil—Brazil’s leader has staked part of his legacy to protecting Amazon rainforests, and world leaders have good reason to encourage him—razing forests worldwide has caused about 40% of carbon dioxide emissions. Lula will be keen to reach a deal that involves other countries paying Brazil and Indonesia to preserve their forests—and it’s one of the more likely agreements to be reached in Copenhagen.

Kevin Conrad, lead delegate of Papua New Guinea—The negotiator for this tiny* Pacific island nation drew wild applause and brief fame at the 2007 Bali climate talks, when he told the United States, “If for some reason you’re not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way.” Within minutes the American delegate withdrew an objection, allowing a deal to be struck. Since that folk-hero moment, Conrad has been a leading voice for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), many of which have their existed threatened by rising sea levels. He’s another key supporter of a forest-protection plan.

Ed Miliband, Britain’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change—Miliband blurs the line between politician and activist, running the “Ed’s pledge” campaign for a binding deal in Copenhagen (don’t hold your breath, Ed). He’s also refused to puff up a non-binding temporary agreement—the kind that would help world leaders save face—saying he wouldn’t back that sort of “inadequate” deal.

Brian Flannery, Exxon Mobil’s Science, Strategy and Programs Manager—The energy giant’s veteran climate advisor might keep a low-profile in Copenhagen—dirty-energy reps tend to use international gatherings for networking, then exert their influence back in national capitals. Like the company that employs him, Flannery no longer denies climate change outright. Instead, the new industry push is for slower plans, lower targets, and alternatives like “let’s just adapt to it instead.”

Jonathan Pershing, chief American negotiator and Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change—In 1997 Al Gore jetted to the log-jammed Kyoto climate talks to help “save” the negotiations at the last minute. But the Senate never ratified the deal he struck, and the U.S. never joined the Kyoto plan. By contrast, Barack Obama’s negotiation team has been careful not to promise anything it can’t deliver (meaning anything the Senate won’t approve). That’s made it a villain on the world stage. Pershing, the lead negotiator and a veteran diplomat from the Clinton administration, has been generally candid about the Obama administration’s difficult position.

Michael Martin, Canada’s chief negotiator and Ambassador for Climate Change—Martin must defend what one scientist-activist called Canada’s “obstructionist position” on climate policy. It’s driven in part by the polluter-friendly leanings of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the incredibly dirty but lucrative Alberta tar sands.

Ibrahim Mirghani Ibrahim, Sudan’s lead delegate—Sudan holds the chairmanship of the G77, a bloc of developing countries that negotiates together. The nation’s top negotiator wants to ensure the next deal follows in the tracks of the Kyoto Protocol, which does not require developing countries to cut their emissions. Industrialized nations want to begin a new track, or combine the two. Ibrahim’s contentious position ensures that resolving this will be a sticky (if technical) challenge in Copenhagen.

Angelica Navarro, Bolivia’s top climate negotiator—At preliminary meetings in both Bonn and Barcelona this year, Navarro gave bold speeches on behalf of poor countries, low-lying countries, and vulnerable parts of India, China, and Brazil. Millions of people “are suffering from the effects of a problem to which they did not contribute,” she told the wealthier delegates in Barcelona. There will be plenty of moral appeals from small countries such as Bolivia and the Maldives; Navarro’s could be one that stands out.

The Grist reporting team, of course!—We’ll have an A-Team on the ground: comedian and Flight of the Conchords actor Eugene Mirman, green-living guru Umbra Fisk, and crackerjack reporters Amanda Little and Jonathan Hiskes. [Reporter’s note: My editor wrote that “crackerjack” part. I may indulge in self-promotion, but I never describe myself with HFCS-laden adjectives.] [Editor’s note: Oh, get over yourself.] Stay tuned to Grist’s Copenhagen hub [link] for the best coverage around.

Barack Obama, United States President—It’s easy to overstate the president’s power, given how much the U.S. Senate has tied his hands. He hasn’t even said if he’s attending (even though he’ll be in the neighborhood to pick up that Nobel Peace Prize on December 10). Yet Obama could bring attention and prestige to the beleaguered proceedings, more so than any other world leader. If he goes, he’ll be the one to watch.

Bjørn Lomborg, founder of the Copenhagen Consensus Center—The Danish political scientist, self-styled “Skeptical Environmentalist,” and savvy publicity seeker will make the most of home-town advantage to push his silly argument that the world must choose between helping the poor and addressing climate change. His signature rhetorical move is to frame multiple worthwhile goals as an either/or choice. Choose emissions cuts or fighting malaria, because you can’t do both. Don’t fall for it.

James Inhofe, Republican Senator of Oklahoma—The notorious climate skeptic famously called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” He promises to bring a “truth squad” to Denmark in hopes of undermining the Obama administration’s efforts and making sure the world knows just how contemptuous of 21st century science a U.S. senator can be. Admittedly, he may be tough to ignore—adolescent antics can be entertaining.

* Papua New Guinea, with some 6.7 million people and 178,704 sqare miles, isn’t tiny. Thanks for the catch, readers.

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Whether you’ve been hitting snooze each time a global climate conference rolls around or you’re looking for a refresher before the Copenhagen climate talks this December, Grist has an interactive timeline to bring you up to speed. And don’t forget to keep tabs on all our juicy coverage of the Copenhagen climate talks.

The road to Copenhagen on Dipity.

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For some people, climate change is a tough cause to rally ‘round—even those who understand that it’s happening and that it’s human-caused get distracted by things like eating, working, having sex, watching TV, or watching people on TV have sex.

While social scientists ponder the best ways to get the message out and motivate the masses—and since we’re gearing up to cover December’s climate talks in Copenhagen—we’ve devised a Grist list of good reasons to care about this global crisis. Got reasons of your own? Let us know in the comments section below.

25. Because supermodels are stripping for the cause. If these lovely ladies are getting hot and bothered, shouldn’t you? At least watch the video. Call it your good deed for the day.

24. Because you don’t want your insurance premiums to go up. The sea level rise, severe weather, flash floods, and windstorms attributable to climate change have all got the insurance industry on edge. Some firms in the U.S. have already raised premiums in coastal areas, and rates in the U.K. are on the rise as well.

Dirt moguls just aren’t the same.Photo: Shay Haas23. Because you like to ski. Listen up, snow bunny: you’ll soon be consigned to schussing in an indoor dome if climate chaos has its way. Shorter winters and decreased snowfall are forcing big ski areas to ramp up their snowmaking efforts (a questionable scheme in the face of global water shortages) and leading smaller ski areas to close.

22. Because you’re a raging hypochondriac. Warmer temperatures mean happy, thriving insects, which might mean increased risk of West Nile, encephalitis, malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever. Do you really need more to worry about? Isn’t that weird spot on your inner thigh enough?

Nothing to see here, folks.Photo: andedam via flickr21. Because it’s a good excuse to learn weird things about animal sex. OK, you don’t care about the plight of the polar bears. But admit it, you’re curious about polar bear penises, aren’t you? And why they’re larger in snowier areas? That’s nothing compared to the lengths sea turtles go to for reproduction, and the flip-flopping gender of the hot bearded dragon lizard. Go on, check it out —you know you want to.

20. Because you hate oil. If your soul still wilts at the thought of all those people in slickers cleaning slick-covered birds in the wake of the Exxon Valdez spill, if you’d rather ride a bike than participate in the auto economy, then climate change is your issue, man. Fossil fuels got us here, and ending our reliance on them can get us out. But you don’t need us to tell you that.

19. Because you love oil. So maybe you didn’t mind the oily birds and you love driving your car? You should be worried too: according to a report from the U.S. government, the severe storms that are becoming more frequent due to climate change threaten our infrastructure and transportation networks, including the ports and freight lines used to transport oil. The oil-rich Gulf Coast is, as was made painfully clear in 2005, a particularly vulnerable area. Stop climate change in its tracks! Save the oil distribution network!

18. Because you eat rice. It’s a pleasant side dish to you, and for 750 million people, it’s a life-giving staple: rice. But this crucial crop stands to wither in the face of climate change, thanks to rising temperatures, increased flooding, and rats. Yeah, rats—they scurry in after major storms, eat all the rice, and nibble on people too. Care yet?

He speaks truth.Photo: Martin Crook17. Because Stephen Colbert does. Need we say more?

16. Because the Christian Coalition does. Need we pray more?

15. Because it will create jobs. Talk about your silver lining: In the midst of the deepest recession this country has seen in decades, attempts to forestall this global climate scourge could create new jobs in clean-energy industries, weatherization, and other areas. The feds are already steering money toward job training for green professions, and clean-energy legislation now before Congress could create jobs and boost the GDP of every U.S. state.

14.  Because you live near water. Sea levels could rise as much as a meter or more by 2100. That’s enough to put places like Miami, downtown Philadelphia, and parts of Manhattan underwater. How many people live in such vulnerable coastal areas? Oh, just 53 percent of the U.S. population.

13. Because Kardashians interest you more than Katrinas. Who can forget the powerful images beamed around the world when Hurricane Katrina hit: the faces of the forgotten, houses crumpled like paper cups, water washing over everything. And who can forget how they beamed in during your favorite show! So inconsiderate. If this sort of prime-time interruption irritates you, you may want to get involved in the climate fight. Because we’re going to see a lot more storms, and that means a lot more unhappy people beamed in your living room.

12. Because you like breathing. Got lungs? Got a healthy apprecation for fresh air? Well, take a deep breath: warming-induced increases in ground-level ozone and particulate matter are expected to increase respiratory disorders including asthma, and a recent study says more children will be hospitalized over the next decade due to such respiratory problems.

11. Because colorful coral jewelry completes most of your outfits. Prepare to adopt a new accessory, or wear a lot of white necklaces: climate change has led to massive coral bleaching and die-offs. The real problem is the disturbance of the delicate relationship between coral reefs and the teensy organisms that build them and give them color. It’s the foundation of a healthy ocean, which is the foundation of a healthy planet.

10. Because you won’t be able to hold up your end of a conversation with Obama, Lucy Lawless, Glenn Beck, Evander Holyfield, or the Pope if you don’t. You can probably fake it with Miley Cyrus, though.

Fading to black.Photo: burnblue9. Because colorful fall leaves are so pretty. But warmer autumns—and pests that enjoy warmer autumns—are messing with the trees. Duller leaves means less for you to look at, and translates into an economic hit for places like New England that rely on tourism generated by the annual phenomenon.

8. Because you don’t want to serve embarrassing champagne. Rising temperatures are altering the world’s finest champagnes, making the alcohol content “embarrassingly high,” says one British wine critic. How fun! Uh, we meant to say how terrible.

7. Because you like lights to come on when you flip a switch. Remember that blackout in 2003? The one that left 50 million people in the dark? That happened on a hot, hot day when lots of people wanted electricity. Guess what we’re in for more of? Hot, hot days. Guess how much our power grid has improved since then? Not much. For a little bit of Jazzercise for the brain, check out this academic paper on climate’s potential impacts on our power grids and national security—including, oh, crippling our society.

6.  Because: “insect feeding frenzy.” Shudder.

5. Because you support the recycled-soda-bottle fleece industry. What will become of those cozy fleece jackets made from recycled soda bottles? Such an incredible innovation, such a wonderful way forward—but if our northern climes turn temperate and our southern climes turn tropical, no one will wear fleece. And those soda bottles are going right back in the trash.

4. Because you think it’s depressing when old people die alone in hot apartments. Heat waves are the deadliest natural disaster in the U.S.—and the probability of severe heat waves is increasing along with temperatures. If emissions are not reduced, heat waves are projected to double in Los Angeles and quadruple in Chicago. With an aging boomer population, that’s a recipe for one hot mess.

3. Because you think it’s depressing when little kids die. It’s happening. Now. According to Save the Children, 9 million kids die before their fifth birthday each year from diseases that are occurring more frequently because of climate change, which is also affecting access to food and water. What are you, completely heartless?

2. Because everyone at Grist cares. We’re a bunch of (fairly) normal people, with pets and kids and money woes and Twitter obsessions—but we all think this is big. Like, bigger than Elvis. A survey shows that our reasons range from the practical (I live near the coast) to the dire (it’s going to kill my unborn grandbabies). But on one thing we agree: we need to do whatever we can to reverse this course.

1.  Because if we stop climate change, we can stop earnest lists like this. Seriously. We’d rather be doing other stuff too. Like maybe watching that supermodel video again?

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Eugene Mirman is doing what in Copenhagen?

Home Economics of the JP Green House, Part 1

Welcome! It’s not too late to get up to speed on the climate-change jamboree that begins Dec. 7. Here’s a short primer.

What is this Copenhagen thing?

It’s a gathering of negotiators from every United Nations member country who will try to come up with a plan to protect the world from catastrophic climate change. Two weeks to save the world!

Copenhagen, huh? Are they going to tell everyone that dikes and wooden shoes are the answer?

Sorry, that’s the Dutch. The Danish in Copenhagen will tell us that pickled herring and little mermaids are the solution.

Why should I care?

So glad you asked! Do you enjoy colorful fall leaves? Do you enjoy skiing? If you’re not sure about caring, better check out our 25 reasons to give a damn about climate change.

Do you think “Hagen Days” would be a good slogan for the event?

“Cop a Feel” is better. It plays off Copenhagen and also the dork term COP15—the 15th Conference of the Parties to address climate change. Dorky facts: The COP process started at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992. Kyoto was COP3. And yes, there’s a COP16 already scheduled for next year, in Mexico City.

This is the 15th one? Shouldn’t they have reached an agreement by now?

Most definitely. Scientists say our atmosphere can safely hold no more than 350 parts per million (ppm) of heat-trapping gases. We’ve already gone past that, to 387 ppm. To put it another way, to prevent the sort of changes that will make Chicago feel like Miami, we pretty much need to start cutting emissions last week.

But they’ll finish the deal in Copenhagen, right?

Fat chance. Everyone agrees it’s just about impossible to complete an agreement in Copenhagen, which was the hope earlier this year (how naïve we were ...). That said, Copenhagen could still achieve some useful steps that make a finished deal possible in 2010. In fact, negotiators held week-long meetings four different times in 2009 alone to begin hashing out a deal (take a look at the draft negotiating text). So beware of anyone calling the conference a failure before it even begins.

Why is this so hard?

Getting 192 countries to agree on one plan is never easy. Climate change has been called “the public policy problem from hell” because it entangles so many competing interests and thorny issues.

I’m ready to learn now. What are those issues?

Historical polluters—Developed (industrialized) countries created most of global-warming polluting over the past century, so by how much will they cut their emissions? The United States is the only developed country that hasn’t announced a target, complicating everything else.

Leapfrogging—How will developing nations avoid the mistakes the industrialized world made over the last century? Ideally, by “leapfrogging” over outdated technologies like coal-fired power and moving straight to cleaner sources. That will cost money—how much and from whom must be hashed out.

Dude, it’s already happening—Climate change has already worsened droughts, malaria, and freak storms. The most severe effects will fall on the Global South, and it will cost up to $100 billion a year to help these countries adapt. How will wealthier countries share that cost?

Transitioning countries (China and India)—Their pollution contribution (got a ring to it, yeah?) has been light until the last few decades. Now it’s skyrocketing, as they build new power plants (mostly coal) to meet the growing demand of their increasingly middle-class economies. China and India say helping their citizens rise out of poverty is priority No. 1, but a global deal can’t work unless they agree to develop in a sustainable way.

The deadline—Meeting strong targets by 2050 is generally understood to be a crucial goal. But climate scientists say we must that we make progress much sooner. Will there be “mid-term” targets for 2020 as well?

Protecting forests—Trees are natural CO2 vacuums, and it makes perfect sense to preserve the forests we have—especially the carbon-rich tropical ones concentrated in Brazil and Indonesia. Lots of folks are optimistic about the REDD program (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) that would pay such countries to protect their forests. But were the protected trees going to be razed anyway? And who checks that they remain protected? Details, details.

Capping and Trading (don’t go away—this is the last one!)—It works like this: The international community agrees that only X amount of CO2 can be emitted into the atmosphere each year. Each country is then allotted an amount its industries can emit, and that amount declines by a small bit each year. Countries and companies can choose to emit their allotments, or sell portions of them to other countries or companies.  Sounds crazy, right? But this kind of scheme was used to get the acid-rain problem under control in the United States more than a decade ago.

For more explainers on the Copenhagen talks, we’ve got a slideshow of 15 key players to watch,
a timeline of how we got to this point, and 25 reasons to give a damn about climate change.

For ongoing news, analysis, and hilarious commentary from Eugene Mirman, bookmark our Copenhagen hub page.

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Cast your vote for the best climate journalism

Eugene Mirman is doing what in Copenhagen?

A Gristy guide to the COP15 climate talks

The following is a Plan B Update by my colleague Janet Larsen, the Director of Research for the Earth Policy Institute, about the connection between the increase of wildfires and rising temperature.

Future firefighters have their work cut out for them. Perhaps nowhere does this hit home harder than in Australia, where in early 2009, a persistent drought, high winds, and record high temperatures set the stage for the worst wildfire in the country’s history. On Feb. 9, now known as “Black Saturday,” the mercury in Melbourne topped 115 degrees F as fires burned over 1 million acres in the state of Victoria—destroying more than 2,000 homes and killing more than 170 people, tens of thousands of cattle and sheep, and 1 million native animals.

Even as more people move into fire-prone wildlands around the world, the intense droughts and higher temperatures that come with global warming are likely to make fires more frequent and severe in many areas (see table of regional observations and predictions). For southeastern Australia, home to much of the country’s population, climate change could triple the number of extreme fire risk days by 2050.

Although fires typically make the news only when they grow large and put lives or property at risk, on any given day thousands of wildfires burn worldwide. Fire is a natural and important process in many ecosystems, clearing the land and recycling organic matter into the soil. Some 40 percent of the earth’s land is covered with fire-prone vegetation. A number of plants—such as giant Sequoia trees and certain prairie grasses—need fire to propagate or to create the right conditions for them to flourish.

Fire patterns have changed over time as human populations have grown and altered landscapes by clearing forests, allowing pasture animals to overgraze grasslands, and importing new plant species. Across parts of the western United States, for example, cheatgrass, an invasive annual adapted to frequent burns, has supplanted native brush, desert shrub, and perennial grasses that typically experience longer intervals between fires. In other areas, mixed-age and mixed-species forests have been replaced by single-species plantations where flames can jump easily from tree to tree. The result, instead of a low-intensity restorative fire, is a fire so hot that it can cause lasting harm to soils.

Humans have also altered fire patterns through deliberate suppression. After 1910, when a severe wildfire charred more than 3 million acres of western U.S. forest in just two days, the strong desire to protect timber resources gave life to a policy of quickly extinguishing fires. For decades, firefighters proved remarkably successful in this endeavor, but the upshot was that forests became so loaded with fuel that a blaze that evaded control could quickly grow into a dangerous megafire.

Now policies are shifting in many places to let some fires proceed naturally or through preventative controlled burns; yet by warming the planet, we may be relinquishing even more control than we bargained for. Higher average global temperatures mean extremes are in store: even as climate change brings more flooding in some areas, other places will be plagued by droughts and extended heat waves. As the temperature rose between the 1970s and early 2000s, for instance, the share of total global land area experiencing very dry conditions doubled from less than 15 percent to close to 30 percent. A hotter, drier world burns more readily. Global warming could be pushing us into a new regime of larger, longer-burning, more intense fires as well as fires in places that historically have been hard to ignite, like moist tropical forests.

Already there is evidence of the connection between higher temperatures and wildfire. Anthony Westerling of Scripps Institution and colleagues found a marked uptick in forest fires in the western United States since the mid-1980s, with the wildfire season lengthening by 78 days over the last 15 years compared with the preceding 15 years. The fire season length and the duration of each fire rose in concert with regional spring and summer temperatures, which were an average 0.87 degrees C (1.56 degrees F) higher in the later period. Higher temperatures are melting mountain snow cover earlier in the spring, leaving less moisture for the summer and giving fires a better chance to spread. And while human land use certainly has had a direct effect on wildfire patterns throughout the West, the biggest increase in U.S. wildfire frequency has actually occurred in the largely untouched mid-elevation Northern Rockies forests, implicating climate change.

Farther north, Alaska’s and Canada’s boreal forests recently have experienced more-frequent fires, releasing enough carbon to transform them in some years from net absorbers to net emitters. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the total area burned more than doubled.  Higher temperatures have extended the range of the tree-damaging spruce budworm into new territory and allowed spruce beetles, no longer delayed by cold winters, to complete their typical two-year life cycle in just a single year. Drought has limited the efficacy of the trees’ defenses. Together the insects and the drought are leaving millions of acres of dead wood in their wake, providing fuel for wildfires. Overall, a warmer climate is predicted to double the area burned in northern Canada by 2100; in Alaska, the area could double by as early as 2050.

In other parts of the world fire regimes are changing and are projected to change even more as the planet heats up. Over much of Europe fire frequency decreased during most of the twentieth century, and expanding forests soaked up carbon. Now, however, some areas may be starting to see more fires. Between 2000 and 2006, some 50,000 fires burned each year in the Mediterranean region, compared with 30,000 a year in the 1980s, though the total area burned did not increase, in part because of more vigilant firefighting.

During Europe’s record 2003 heat wave, which killed over 50,000 people, an estimated 650,000 hectares (about 1.6 million acres) of forest burned continent-wide. Although the number of fires during this warm and dry year was not particularly high, the area burned was a record. More than 5 percent of Portugal’s forest area burned, four times the 1980–2004 annual average, resulting in economic damages exceeding 1 billion euros. If future warming is not kept in check, hot and dry summers like 2003 could happen as frequently as every other year, dramatically increasing wildfire risk.

For Southeast Asia, the extreme 1997–98 El Niño brought a major drought to the region, allowing some of the most severe fires in recent history to burn in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Laos. Fires set to clear land jumped from grasslands and shrublands to logged forests and peat swamps, where they burned underground. For months, Southeast Asian skies were hazy from smoke. Nearly 10 million hectares (about 25 million acres) burned in Indonesia alone, affecting 23 of 27 provinces and costing more than $9 billion.

During that same El Niño, more than 20 million hectares (about 50 million acres) burned in Latin America, wreaking damages of up to $15 billion. In 2001 the following El Niño brought more drought and put a frightening one third of Amazon forests at risk of burning. With a temperature rise of more than 3 degrees C (5 degrees F)—well within the range projected for this century barring rapid and dramatic action to curb carbon emissions—much of South America is likely to see more frequent wildfires.

Just as a weakened immune system leaves a person vulnerable to otherwise innocuous germs, the combination of logging, road construction, and intentional burning to clear forests for cattle ranches, farms, and plantations has fragmented the world’s tropical forests, increasing their vulnerability to fire. Piling higher temperatures on top of such stresses could completely undermine forests’ resilience. For the massive Amazon rainforest, we risk reaching a tipping point where recurrent droughts dry out the landscape enough so that small fires can turn into devastating conflagrations.

We all rely on trees to soak up greenhouse gases and store carbon. If large swaths of forest go up in flames, it could set into motion a vicious cycle, where more wildfires in turn release more carbon into the atmosphere. Stabilizing climate, and doing so quickly, takes on a new urgency when it means averting an inferno on earth.

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Lester Brown and I, diavlogging

The Copenhagen Conference on food security

Three models of social change

First things first: A week of anticlimaxes saw President Barack Obama conducting a less-than-exuberant swing through China, the international community conceding a binding climate treaty at the COP-15 negotiations in Copenhagen, and U.S. lawmakers postponing to the spring of 2010 consideration of climate policy—even as talk of a legislative “plan B” surfaced. A Wall Street Journal piece on Obama’s China visit characterizes how hemmed in the president is abroad and at home, balancing as complex a portfolio as any new president has faced in a century, at least.

Obama left China with seven commitments to work more closely on energy matters, particularly the development of an inventory for China’s greenhouse gas emissions. This technical cooperation may have a political echo in Washington, where Senate Democrats making up their minds about climate change policy have expressed concern that the world’s leading CO2 producer, China, is unable to quantify its pollution. A close read of language in the U.S.-China agreement reveals “subtle but important shift” in climate positions, writes NRDC’s Jake Schmidt.

The call is (also) coming from inside the house: Other international voices sound increasingly nonplussed with U.S. performance in the global climate arena. Critics blame Obama, who personifies America abroad, for what they see as a continuation of President George W. Bush’s policies against Kyoto-style international climate agreements. The German newsweekly Spiegel publishes a deeply critical view of Obama’s young presidency. It echoes voices heard elsewhere, voices Climate Post heard a little bit in India last month and that he documented in a post this week over at the New York Times’ DotEarth blog. The Catch-22: The U.S.‘s critics abroad feel that their complaints will not be heard here, since, as Christian Schwägerl charges in Spiegel, “Americans do not look beyond their own borders.”

Naomi Klein, the activist, globalization skeptic, and writer, provides a fine example in Rolling Stone of how some Americans do not look within their own borders. Klein’s breathless call for climate reparations paid by rich nations to poor, vulnerable nations overlooks major and minor “real-world” issues, beginning with which bank account—previously unrevealed—is she writing her checks from? The piece makes a fine bookend with George Will’s latest effort, as naive as Will’s piece is ignorant. (Both writers seem equally angry.)

Thomas Friedman thumps opponents of measures to reduce national emissions of heat-trapping gases, condensing observations of his recent book into his New York Times column.

You heard it here first!: The COP-15 talks in Copenhagen were a cautious success. After months of increasingly dour headlines, 15,000 people (18 of them from the Nicholas Institute and Nicholas School) will have descended three weeks from now on this elegant Scandinavian capital and will have reached a political agreement, in a spirit of collaboration and goodwill that will be expected to lead to a binding legal treaty next year. Whatever will have happened in Copenhagen to make it a success—after all, we just don’t know—it’s likely that high-profile attendees will trumpet its successes, however defined. There has been too much anticipation, too much pre-game show, too many resources spent, to not produce something tangible, or at least argue that something tangible was produced. Even if it receives headlines similar in tone to Obama’s China trip.

A casual observer to the now year-long run-up to next month’s talks in Copenhagen might be forgiven for thinking that a treaty is an end in itself. The treaty is a means by which countries force themselves and each other to transform their economies toward non-polluting energy systems. The Guardian lassoes some top thinkers on climate policy, who emphasize the urgency to inject capital into energy technologies that do not emit heat-trapping gases. The public emphasis on a deal next month has overshadowed this urgency, the Guardian contents, and, unless investment picks up, nations will continue to build out fossil-fuel powered 20th-century-style infrastructure projects.

Without national or international guidance, businesses already working toward a clean tech economy face considerable uncertainty. Players in the $126 billion global carbon market—concentrated in the European Union’s emissions trading scheme—are particularly exposed. The impetus for that market came after the Kyoto Protocol. Its 2012 expiration date threatens investments, money, and projects tied up in the system. Developing nations, particularly China and India, have made up to hundreds of millions of dollars executing carbon-reduction projects that generate emission credits that rich nations use to “offset” their pollution. The global market for carbon offsets traded under the current regime adds up to $6.5 billion.

The push for “green jobs” continues, even without an international mandate. Americans in green jobs needn’t work for U.S. companies, it turns out. With Obama in China, Suntech, the world’s largest maker of solar panels, announced it would build a factory near Phoenix. The Chinese company’s move may ease some lawmakers’ concerns that less expensive labor costs will push clean-energy manufacturing jobs overseas, BusinessWeek reports. That the profit motive is drawing a Chinese solar giant to the U.S. should fuel the ongoing confusion about whether solar energy is affordable or not.

Roger Pielke Jr, the University of Colorado Boulder political scientist who plays Ugolino to more liberal climate bloggers’ Ruggieri (or vice versa), reminds us with a picture, and his own quick romp through the headlines, what’s happening, and keeps happening, far beneath lofty discussions and aspirations of Copenhagen.

A day in the life: Washington’s mystique might emerge in the contrast between the monumental things that occur here (and that are expected to but don’t), and the patient, gradual, and frequently silent steps it takes to achieve them. It takes a piece like Barry Yeoman’s profile of Tim Profeta, director of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions (and Climate Post’s “publisher”) to add depth to the generally superficial headlines about events in Washington. The piece, just published in Duke magazine, lays out with dimension and color the Institute’s mission and the way we do the things we do.

Climate Post will be off next week for Thanksgiving and will return Dec. 3.

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Cast your vote for the best climate journalism

Eugene Mirman is doing what in Copenhagen?

A Gristy guide to the COP15 climate talks

Paul Bakus in a ruined pumpkin patch.Photo: Wonk Room

Cross-posted from the Wonk Room.

Our increasingly extreme climate is devastating American agriculture. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, strengthened by global warming, caused $1.6 billion in agriculture damage in Louisiana alone. Now it appears that a Thanksgiving mainstay—pumpkin pie—is next on the global boiling hit list. On Tuesday, Nestle Baking, “which controls about 85 percent of the pumpkin crop for canning, issued a rare apology and said that rain appeared to have destroyed what remained of a small harvest this year and that it expected to stop shipping the holiday staple by Thanksgiving.” Paul Bakus, vice president and general manager of Nestle Baking, bemoaned the devastating rains that made it impossible to harvest the Morton, Illinois pumpkin crop used for Libby’s canned pumpkin:

If only we could have changed the weather. We hope Mother Nature is nicer to us next year, hopefully delivering less rain and more sunshine.

In addition, waffles are on the hit list, as supplies of Eggos are disappearing. “Heavy rains that soaked Atlanta last month knocked out Kellogg’s waffle operations,” ABC News reported on Tuesday. September’s epic flooding actually exacerbated a shutdown caused by an earlier virulent outbreak of the deadly bacteria Listeria monocytogenes. Kellogg’s initially only referred to the food poisoning threat as “equipment issues,” preferring to let global boiling take the blame.

Unfortunately, we have changed the weather.

“2009 continues to climb up the rainiest-years-ever chart” in Illinois. This year’s rainfall in Peoria of 49.34 inches—50 percent above normal—has already exceeded the total of 2008, itself 25 percent above normal. With only six more inches of precipitation, 2009 will break the record rainfall set in 1990.

Similarly, the Sept. 21 flood in Atlanta, Ga. “was worse than what’s statistically projected to happen once every 100 years—even worse than every 500 years.” It was “extremely rare”, “epic” and so “stunning,” the U.S. Geological Survey says the “flood has defied its attempts to define it.”

This kind of extreme precipitation is part of the changes to our climate wrought by global warming, which increases the amount of water vapor the atmosphere can hold and changes circulation patterns. As the U.S. Global Change Program reported in June, 2009 on the impacts of climate change in the Midwest and the Southeast:

– In the Midwest, both summer and winter precipitation have been above average for the last three decades, the wettest period in a century. The Midwest has experienced two record-breaking floods in the past 15 years.

– According to climate models, precipitation in the Midwest is projected to increase in winter and spring, and to become more intense throughout the year.

– In the Southeast, average autumn precipitation has increased by 30 percent for the region since 1901. There has been an increase in heavy downpours in many parts of the region.

Update: LinkTV discusses the “fluke storm” in Georgia “that killed almost a dozen people.” Scientists say “weather this extreme is becoming the norm, due to rising global temperatures”:

Related Links:

Top 25 reasons to give a damn about climate change

Climate Citizen: Wyclef Jean

Make the kids pay: The economic effects of climate change on future generations

Can such a “turkey” make your holiday feast soar?Photo courtesy of Jason HoustonGiven the ire I provoked in last year’s turkey column, it’s high time that this Grist columnist acknowledges that:

A. Meat-centric holidays such as Thanksgiving can be challenging for vegetarians and evoke all kinds of emotions—including, but not limited to, extreme irritation toward carnivores.

B. These carnivores are likely to get very defensive, harrassed by the guilty knowledge that even a heritage-breed, biodynamic, locally raised, and gently killed bird probably isn’t as environmentally or morally justifiable as a plant-based meal—even if that plant-based meal is highly processed, lavishly packaged, and distantly shipped.

C. Any moral high ground gained by having a plant-based Thanksgiving may become absolutely meaningless if you screw up a happy, festive experience with a protein centerpiece that looks gross, or worse yet, has a flavor capable of sending guests, carnivorous and non, in search of a Butterball.

These facts, combined with a directive from my boss, have led me into the world of fake turkey. (Oh, I do it all for you, dear reader!) I went looking for a turkey-like main course that could please vegetarians and flummox the carnivores who insist that all faux meat sucks. And so I assembled a broad panel of tasters: three former vegetarians (including me, a former Michio Kushi-worshipping macrobiotic), one devout carnivore, and one actual full-fledged vegetarian (15 years running). The panel also included four children, whose ages range from two to nine, and whose approaches to eating run from adventurous to upsettingly fussy. Together we sampled several seasonal faux turkey products to see if any could produce the happy, bloated contentment of holidays past, whilst simultaneously embracing the spirit of change, earth-friendliness, inter-species kindness, and so forth.

How’d we do? Read on.

Box-to-table dining. Photo courtesy of Jason HoustonTofurky Vegetarian Feast
Ingredients: Water, vital wheat gluten, organic tofu (water, organic soybeans, magnesium chloride, calcium chloride), white beans, garbanzo beans, non genetically engineered corn starch, natural vegetarian flavor, expeller pressed non genetically engineered canola oil, shoyu soy sauce (water, non genetically engineered soy beans, wheat, salt, culture), spices, lemon juice, calcium lactate from beets.

Price: $24.99 for a total of 3 lbs of food—“turkey” plus sides—from Whole Foods. Note: You can buy a single Tofurky roast, but I decided to splurge on the “feast,” which for some odd reason included not only a Tofurky giblet (!) and mushroom gravy also but dumplings and a jerky wishbone. (Who says vegetarians don’t have a sense of humor!)

Tasters were not sure whether to be comforted or disturbed by the fact that this product had a skin, which one taster described as smelling like “art class.”  All tasters struggled for texture descriptors for Tofurky (motto: “America’s Leading Turkey Alternative Since 1995”), but the most evocative was “squeaky on the teeth.” Two tasters described the taste as bologna-like and most concurred that this “bird” was salty. Strangest overall comment: “Carp would love this.” The most backhanded compliment came out of the mouth of a babe, who, to the chagrin of her parents, exclaimed “It tastes like McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, and I like those!”

Nothing says Turk’y like a box. Quorn Turk’y Roast
Ingredients: Mycoprotein (58%), rehydrated egg white, pea fiber. Contains 2% or less of autolyzed yeast extract, onion powder, tapioca and potato maltodextrin, natural flavor from non-meat sources, salt, dextrose, gum arabic, calcium lactate, sage extract, canola oil, citric acid, garlic powder, pepper, sunflower & palm kernel oil

Price: $8.59 for 16 oz roast at my local grocery store

This product came highly recommended from Steven, the frozen foods manager at my favorite grocery store who also happens to be a bona fide vegetarian. Indeed, our panel’s own vegetarian taster admitted that she ate it “voluntarily” and deemed it the most turkey-like, juicy, and “pure.” The devoted carnivore, meanwhile, agreed it was turkey-like, but added that it was “dry, like an over-cooked turkey breast.” Overall, the group applauded Quorn’s un-stuffed, putty-colored honesty:  As one taster put it, “It’s not trying too hard to be turkey.” Tellingly, this was the only faux turkey product that the kids wanted more of, asserting that it tasted either like chicken, or, weirdly, like pizza.  Thank god they didn’t know it was largely made from fungus.

Full disclosure: The cooking directions called for this roast called for it to be cooked in its plastic “film.” There was no way in hell I was going to heat food in plastic, so I wrapped it snugly in aluminum foil. If this compromised the taste or texture in any way, we were none the wiser.

How much will you give me to try this? Field Roast Celebration Roast
Ingredients: Filtered water, vital wheat gluten, expeller pressed safflower oil, naturally flavored yeast extract, barley malt, butternut squash, organic wheat flour, granulated garlic, apples, mushrooms, onion powder, garlic organic wheat flakes, yellow pea flour, lemon juice, red wine, tomato paste, irish moss (sea vegetable) extract, black pepper, rubbed sage, rosemary, spices, natural liquid smoke and paprika.

Price: $7.99 for 1lb roast at Whole Foods

Though it’s maketed as a “roast,” the manufacturer lists steaming as a method for getting this fist-sized, squarish product ready for the table. I associate the holidays with roasting, but got over my cultural baggage and gave steaming a try. The method wins points for quickness and ease—but probably didn’t help this product’s texture, which inspired descriptions like “unfortunate” and was compared to rubber, cement, and—oxymoronically—“dried pudding.” More than one taster declared its flavor spicy. More specifically, tasters said it was like “Vegeroni” or “varnished pine.” The most damning comment came from a kid who said, “I would eat this for $10.”

What’s that in the middle?!Gardein Stuffed Turk’y Roast
Ingredients: Water, soy protein, vital wheat gluten, bread crumbs (enriched wheat flour (niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid)), dehydrated cranberries, natural flavors (from plant sources), modified vegetable gum, potato starch, long grain white rice, wild rice, expeller pressed canola oil and/or safflower oil, dehydrated onion and garlic, parsley flakes, spices, pea protein, carrot fiber, organic beet root fiber, organic evaporated cane juice, sea salt. Breading: modified corn starch, modified wheat starch, corn flour, wheat flour, sugar, toasted wheat crumbs, wheat gluten, sea salt, sugar, garlic powder, spice, onion powder, sunflower oil, dextrose, guar gum, yeast, extractives of paprika, caramel color.

Price: Time for a “full disclosure.” I couldn’t find this product at my local grocery stores or the nearest urban Whole Foods (where it is allegedly found, seasonally), so I had to call up its Canadian producer and ask for some. I don’t normally like to take freebies because I think they compromise journalists, but I was in a jam and there you have it. Oh, and they sent me some chicken-y items, too, that we didn’t have the time or room to taste.  Truth be told, after just four veggie products, my panel was pissing and moaning and very ready for pie to be served.  (Btw: It was this pie, made freshly by the Devout Carnivore.)  In any case, the suggested retail is $3.99 per individual Gardein Stuffed Turk’y Roast.

Although this product looked like a “dog treat,” as one taster aptly put it, it was the runner-up to the Quorn roast, at least for the adult tasters who almost unanimously found the taste to be smoky or hot-dog like. Most laudatory comment: “Nice crunchy coating.” Most frustrated: “What the f**k is in the middle?” It fared dramatically worse with the kids, who reacted to it with terrible faces. One child, perhaps owing to the fact that bedtime was approaching and dessert had not yet been served, even threw her chunk onto the floor and wailed that it tasted like “rotten eggs.”

All’s well that ends well. Photo courtesy of Jason HoustonOne more disclosure: I also ordered a Stuffed Faux Turkey Breast from Café Indigo to see if a local (New England, in my case) and more boutique product ($25 plus shipping) was somehow tastier. But because of a shipping snafu, this banana bread look-alike seitan “breast” did not arrive in time for the group tasting and therefore did not have the benefit of an expert wine-lit panel. But I will say this about it: Seitan products are all more alike than they are different.  They tend to be chewy and, at least to me, they all smell like bullion.

The Bottom Line: Do not, under any circumstances, let your dinner guests see any faux turkey products in pre-presentation form. Use the time-honored technique for overcooked real turkeys: Serve it sliced and attractively fanned out, smothered with gravy and cranberry sauce, presented to appropriately hungry diners whose palates have been primed by way too much Beaujolais Nouveau. In that spirit, consider the unpretentious and affordable Quorn roast. Otherwise, consider starting an entirely new tradition, one that skips highly processed and packaged food products and bases the entire meal on, say, homemade pie. There’s a new Thanksgiving tradition I’m sure vegetarians and carnivores could all agree on.

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Gourmet’s conscience, Gopnik on cookbooks, and other tasty morsels

It’s Getting Ha! in Here: Maria Bamford

As we grapple with global warming, ocean acidification, and the possibility that life on earth really is doomed, it is with considerable chagrin that we recall how Jacques Cousteau sounded the general alarm thirty years ago. The celebrated underwater filmmaker, co-inventor of scuba diving, television star, sage of the environmental movement, and bon vivant died in 1997. But before he left he had developed a brooding pessimism about the future of humanity.

At a rally in Seattle in 1977, where he headlined in a sold-out basketball arena with energy expert Amory Lovins and population theorist Paul Ehrlich, Cousteau predicted the dire consequences of a runaway human population and its apparently insatiable appetite for fuel to heat, move, and feed itself. Cousteau toned down his pessimism for the audience of 15,000 in the arena that night, urging them to take responsibility for the environment before it is too late. But an hour later, in an interview with a pair of reporters from the Seattle Weekly, he laid out his far more dismal vision.

“Fossil fuels are polluting the air and the sea and now people are saying that nuclear energy is the answer,” said Cousteau with his sexy French accent. “They are wrong. If we continue to develop nuclear energy and make kids like crazy, we will surely end up in a police state. It will become the duty of governments of the world to suppress all dissent in order to avoid nuclear terrorism. Eh? We will have no other choice. A nuclear civilization adds up to a global police state.”

Cousteau saw overpopulation and energy collapse leading inevitably to worldwide disaster and social chaos.

“Why do anything at all?” the reporters asked him. “Why have the Cousteau Society?”

“We have no choice,” Cousteau resplied. “And there’s a slim chance we can make a difference.”

Cousteau’s Calypso. Photo: Brad MatsenThe delicious irony in all of this (very important if we are, in fact, doomed) is that Cousteau’s earliest expeditions on his famous white ship, Calypso, were financed by oil exploration charters. His second hit movie told the story of the very development of sub-sea habitats and saturation scuba diving that make today’s offshore oil production possible.

Cousteau and his divers pioneered the equipment and techniques that now anchor gigantic platforms and wellheads to the sea floor at depths of up to a thousand feet and produce 60 percent of the world’s oil and gas. Until just fifty years ago, when Cousteau and engineer Emil Gagnan invented the demand regulator for breathing and swimming free underwater, our undersea explorations had been limited by the depth to which a single breath could take us.

Cousteau’s early oil exploration charters, his best-selling, ghost-written book about inventing scuba diving, and a pair of hit movies on scuba and under-sea habitats earned him an ABC television series on the oceans. By the early 1970s, the charming French sailor was one of the most recognized people on the planet. With the power of his celebrity, he tried to make the world see that his beloved Mediterranean would be the first sea to die and that like a canary in a mineshaft, it was only the beginning of the death of the oceans unless a way to reverse the destruction could be found.

“By the time my father died, he no longer believed that humanity could save itself from disaster,” said Cousteau’s son, Jean-Michel, himself a noted champion of the oceans. “I disagree with him, but I do not hold his mistake against him.”

Now, the deadly blend of fossil fuel emissions and a booming human population has even the most optimistic among us worried. Cousteau’s predicted disaster and chaos have arrived only in the most desperate parts of the world and the political structure remains generally intact. But with scientific tools that were nowhere on the horizon when Cousteau’s instincts were screaming at him that the Mediterranean was sick, we have discovered grim, undeniable evidence that we are in real trouble. Our continued use of fossil fuels has inflicted life-threatening damage on the oceans and the atmosphere, damage that cannot be repaired for several generations, even if we could manage to reduce carbon dioxide emissions 50 percent by 2050.

Next month, the world will limp into Copenhagen, frantic because 30-year old warnings from a seductive Frenchman—among many, many others—didn’t change human behavior enough to forestall what in all likelihood is a catastrophic global disaster that began 150 years ago with the industrial revolution.

If Cousteau were alive to address the delegates in Denmark this December, he would probably summon the courageous warrior he was in his youth and insist that humanity, not the earth itself, is in danger—and that this might not be a bad thing. He would likely argue that a world with fewer people, ultimately, is the answer. Then he would demand that we keep trying in the face of terrible odds, simply because we have no other choice.

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John Broder has an illuminating story in today’s New York Times, “Storm Over the Chamber” discussing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s climate crisis and how Thomas Donohue’s style exacerbates it.

Tellingly, the story begins with an anecdote that suggests where the U.S. Chamber gets its tin ear.

BACK in the 1990s when Thomas J. Donohue was president of the
American Trucking Associations, a subordinate raised a question at a
staff meeting.

Some of the association’s members, the aide said, wondered whether
it was really necessary for the group’s president to fly on a private
jet.

Mr. Donohue, a scrappy Irish-American born in Brooklyn and raised on
Long Island, turned to his chief of staff and asked how many seats his
jet had. “Well, eight, sir,” the aide said. “Tomorrow morning I want
you to call and get a 12-seater,” Mr. Donohue shot back. The subject
never came up again.

The U.S. Chamber has demonstrated a similar lack of interest in
exploring the concerns of its members when it comes to climate change.

Although it has at least made an effort—schizophrenic though it might be—to at least sound as though it isn’t as out of step as it really is. We’ve been keeping a close watch on the Chamber’s rhetoric, through our ad this week and our “WhoDoestheChamberRepresent.org” website and in recent blog posts (here and here.)

Alas, despite the Chamber’s change of tone, it has yet to change the tune. As the New York Times reported

Mr. Donohue would not agree to an interview for this article but
provided written answers by e-mail to a number of questions about the
chamber’s climate change position…

Mr. Donohue said that the chamber had a series of basic principles
by which it would judge any legislation on climate change. It supports
new nuclear plants, increased domestic oil and gas exploration,
research on capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions, new
efficiency measures and provisions to control cost increases associated
with emissions reductions. It has not expressed support for any proposals to impose a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions. (emphasis added.)

Aside from wondering why Mr. Donohue suddenly got so shy about
talking to a reporter, I couldn’t help but notice the last sentence,
which gets to the heart of the questions we’ve been raising about the
U.S. Chamber position.

Does this mean that the U.S. Chamber won’t support a mandatory cap?

Or is the Chamber keeping the door open to the possibility it will at some point support a cap?

Or is the Chamber just really never going to support serious climate policy, but is trying to avoid saying so?

While we wait for answers, in light of the fact the Chamber has
“not expressed support for any proposals to impose a mandatory cap on
green house gas emissions,” how does the Chamber explain its agreement “that the objectives outlined in [Senator Kerry and Graham’s NYT]
editorial can serve as a solid, workable, commonsense foundation on
which to craft a bill,” considering that the Senators stated their main purpose is “advocating aggressive reductions in our emissions of the carbon gases that cause climate change”?

UPDATE: Marc Gunther names Tom Donohue “America’s Worst CEO.” Find out why.

This post originally appeared on Pete’s Switchboard blog.

Related Links:

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News and views on the Kerry-Boxer climate bill

Coal companies and the nation’s biggest railroad association
accounted for 50 percent of the American Coalition for Clean Coal
Electricity’s (ACCCE) $47 million budget in 2008, according to ACCCE’s
tax return, E&E News reported on Wednesday. Yowza!

Arch Coal, Peabody, and Consol each put in $5 million; Foundation
Coal put in just $3 million. Meanwhile, the Association of American
Railroads (AAR) put in $6 million. AAR represents major railroads
including Union Pacific, BNSF, CSX, and Norfolk Southern, which get
substantial portions of their revenues from hauling coal. 

ACCCE opposed the Waxman-Markey climate bill, and recently Duke Energy left the group because of its entrenched opposition to meaningful climate legislation.

I recently looked closely at the ACCCE board of directors, many of which are named in the
E&E story along with their contributions to the group. It is
interesting to note how many board members ACCCE shares with the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, especially in the coal and rail sectors. And of
course, I’ve discussed U.S. Chamber President and CEO Tom Donohue’s connections with Union Pacific before. And we noticed that U.S. Chamber Executive Committee member and immediate past Chairman of the Board of the U.S. Chamber (i.e., Donohue’s boss last year) is Donald J. Shepard, who sits on the board of directors of CSX.

E&E also reported on the American Petroleum Institute’s (API)
tax return, noting that the group spent about $75 million on public
relations and advertising in 2008. API has been a vocal opponent of
climate legislation for a long time, including repeated investments in
misinformation and Astroturf campaigns. This past summer, API bankrolled the faux group “Energy Citizens” which organized a number of anti-climate legislation public events around the country.

It’s a lot of money to spend for the right to keep the U.S. stuck with
dirty energy sources that are warming the planet and melting the
glaciers. Speaking of melting glaciers, check out this remarkably
prescient ad from Humble Oil, which formed several building blocks of
what eventually became known as ExxonMobil.

Talk about truth in advertising.

Why should you buy their product? Because each day, they produce enough oil to melt 7 tons of glacier! Ok, it is from 1962, so its not like global warming was front-page news. On the other hand, it was just two years before President Lyndon B. Johnson noted:
“This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a
global scale through ... a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the
burning of fossil fuels” in a special message to Congress.)

This post originally appeared on Pete’s Switchboard blog.

Related Links:

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Corporations call off the old green battle, but Chamber of Commerce soldiers on [UPDATED]

Is Chamber of Commerce prez biased on climate because of his ties to Union Pacific railroad?

For the past few weeks there has been the appearance of a flood of news about the Copenhagen climate talks and the clean energy bill in the U.S. Senate. Standing in that flood it’s easy to get caught up in the atmospherics of frantic action and constant crisis. But step out for a while and it becomes clear just how much of the “news” consists of people who don’t really know anything guessing:  what things mean, who’s thinking what, what the future holds.

Copenhagen   failed and sprang back to life a half-dozen times and it hasn’t even started yet. The clean energy bill was declared doomed over and over in the House, until it passed. The Senate bill was declared dead, totally impossible ... then, no, it would be done by Copenhagen ... then it was hopeless ... then there was a bipartisan road to passage ... then they were abandoning the carbon cap entirely ... then it was a bill in Spring ...

What all this “news” has in common is that it’s based on Some Person Guessing. The closer one gets to the circus, the more one realizes that everyone is guessing, right up to negotiators and senators themselves. Everyone’s trying to shape the future, not forecast it. Check out these results from National Journal‘s poll of political insiders:

Q: How likely is this Congress to enact cap-and-trade legislation to curb global warming?

Democrats (38 votes)

Very likely: 16 percent
Somewhat likely: 37 percent
Somewhat unlikely: 37 percent
Very unlikely: 11 percent

Republicans (40 votes)

Very likely: 3 percent
Somewhat likely: 10 percent
Somewhat unlikely: 35 percent
Very unlikely: 48 percent
Other responses (volunteered) 5 percent

These are insiders, close to the process itself, and their predictions line up rather eerily with their ideological predispositions. Kerry says the bill will pass in the Spring; Murkowski mutters that it won’t happen this session. Which really knows? Neither. There is nobody who really knows. In an age of text, Twitter, and 24 hour media, there just aren’t many secrets left, even for insiders. What secrets there are stay that way not by being concealed but by being difficult to pick out from the torrent of junk speculation that surrounds them. (The same is true of predictions about what effect such a massive piece of legislation would have. The accurate answer is that no one really knows.)

Anyway, these days everyone’s a pundit, and pundits are always wrong:

[Philip Tetlock at Berkeley] studied pundits and discovered they were, to a rough approximation, always wrong when making predictions. He took 284 pundits and asked them questions about the future. Their performance was worse than chance. With three possible answers, they were right less than 33 per cent of the time. A monkey chucking darts would have done better. This is consoling. More consoling still is Tetlock’s further finding that the more certain a pundit was, the more likely he was to be wrong. Their problem being that they couldn’t self-correct,  presumably because they’d invested so much of their personality and self-esteem in a specific view. (That makes me think of so many people,  almost everybody, in fact.)

There’s a whole political media ecosystem that feeds on everyone being a pundit. Those inside it have every incentive to exaggerate the importance of every day’s comments and developments. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the country ignores almost all of it. It’s hard not to think sometimes that the world would be a better place if there were fewer people involved in the closed-loop meta-gossip circuit and more involved just putting their heads down and doing real work.

(Yes, yes, I know. Guilty as charged.)

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When my info-larder gets too packed, it’s time to serve up some choice nuggets from around the Web.

————————

Get ‘em while they’re hot.  •  For years, Barry Estabrook reported on food politics for Gourmet Magazine and its Web site. In a sense, he played the role of the conscience of the foodie set—at the margins of a magazine devoted to celebrating the latest cooking techniques, ingredients, and vacation hotspots, Barry gently but tenaciously informed pleasure-seeking readers about issues like the brutal economics of dairy farming and the ecological consequences of mindless fish-eating.

I always thought that Barry’s toehold at Gourmet would inspire other glossy food magazines to open their pages to serious discussions of the U.S. food system. It never happened—Gourmet’s competitors continued  singing the glories of, say, the steak, without troubling readers with information about how steaks are made in America. And now Gourmet is gone.

Barry, thankfully, isn’t. He’s launched a blog called Politics of the Plate. His latest post is typical: a well-reported piece on the creepy harassment members of Florida’s Coalition of Immokalee Workers are getting as they try to force the supermarket chain Publix to pay up for fair tomatoes.

• I sometimes enjoy New Yorker critic-at-large Adam Gopnik’s food writing. For example, I loved his 2005 piece comparing British chef Fergus Henderson, famed for utilizing the “whole beast,” with French chef Allain Passard, who shocked the cooking world by dispensing with beast altogether. I am forever in Gopnik’s debt for introducing me to the work of Henderson, whose prose style and cookbooks I admire, as I hope someday to admire his restaurant. (If I hadn’t read about Henderson in Gopnik’s piece, I might never had landed a review of Henderson’s book The Whole Beast in Gastronomica a couple of years ago.)

So I was excited to see Gopnik’s long rumination on cookbooks in the latest New Yorker. I, too, have a complicated and loving relationship with cookbooks. I wanted to like Gopnik’s piece, but didn’t. For me, Gopnik laid out a thicket of sentences, some 4,000 words’ worth, many of them over-elaborate or too dense by half, to belabor one point: “Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved.” Besides the “first” bit—don’t most folks learn that lesson before they first crack open a cookbook?—that seems true enough. And that (eventually) brings him here:

When you start to cook, as when you begin to live, you think that the point is to improve the technique until you end up with something perfect, and that the reason you haven’t been able to break the cycle of desire and disillusion is that you haven’t yet mastered the rules. Then you grow up, and you learn that that’s the game.

That’s well-said—but also well-established: Another way of saying that it’s the journey, and not the destination that counts, in cooking as in life. Okay.

But what about the ways people’s relationship to cookbooks has changed? Gopnik takes a quick glance at one: with the Web, it’s now easy to quickly search for recipes and information of on ingredients, meaning we reach for our laptops more and to our bookshelves less.

Here’s another, related one. In the old days (the mid-1990s), I would often be inspired by a recipe from a cookbook—say, a kibbeh from Paula Wolfert’s wonderful Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean (1994). I’d procure the ingredients at a combination of the supermarket and ethnic markets and then go home and cook. The results ranged from delightful to disastrous to that melancholy in-between described by Gopnik.

These days, settled as I am into the new-wave tradition of local and seasonal cooking, I start with available ingredients and then seek preparation ideas (when I don’t just lean on my established repertoire). This latter method is much more suited to the broad universe of Google than the inherently narrower universe of the cookbook shelf. Yet I still love cookbooks.

• I’ve been impressed by the emergence of the young novelist Jonathan Safran Foer as a public intellectual on the question of meat.

I haven’t read his new non-fiction book Eating Animals yet. I found his big New York Times Magazine essay on why he went vegetarian plodding and unconvincing; but his Wall Street Journal piece, “Let Them Eat Dog: A Modest Proposal for Throwing Fido in the Oven,” was brilliant. In a way I haven’t seen since the great J.M. Coetzee’s performance in the novel Elizabeth Costello, Foer plumbed the moral depths of meat eating.

I believe that mixed farming systems—ones that grow grains, veggies, and livestock synergistically—are probably the most productive and sustainable. Moreover, I cherish the cultural heritage of the globe’s various cuisines—most of which include meat, if usually in moderation. Thus I eat meat occasionally, and enjoy it greatly when I do. Yet the moral questions around systematically killing sentient beings—and arbitrarily declaring one species “pet” and another “dinner”—must be confronted and thought through.

Moralists like Coetzee and Foer push us to do just that. Even if we end up rejecting their insistence that we become vegetarians, they remind us of the suffering we cause when we eat meat—and thus they inspire us to do so only in moderation, and with great care for how the animal was treated.

On the other hand, wittingly or not, their appeals suggest a hallowed moral status for vegetarians. But in a society in which relatively few people are engaged in food production, morally upright victuals are hard to come by. Supermarket tomatoes carry the taint of exploitation and even slavery;  and even buying organic doesn’t guarantee socially just conditions in farm fields.

“Every document of civilisation is at the same time a record of barbarism,” wrote the great German writer Walter Benjamin.  Vegetarians, nearly as much as omnivores, need to conduct a withering critique of the moral and ecological liabilities in the processes that feed tham—and work to transform them accordingly.

• For the wine-obsessed, The New York Times’ excellent Eric Asimov has an overview of six recent wine books. Eco-wine enthusiasts like me will want to get their hands on two of them: Been Doon So Long, by the pioneering California vintner Randall Grahm; and Liquid Memory, by wine-world enfant terrible and polemicist Jonathan Nossiter.

Grahm, proprietor of Bonny Doon Vineyard, is legendary for his wacky and hilarious label prose and his trend-setting wine-making ways. According to a great piece by Asimov last spring, Grahm is now moving to organic farming and natural wine-making techniques. May a thousand imitators bloom in California wine country

Nossiter, a former sommelier at Manhattan’s Balthazar, is most famous for directing the documentary Mondovino—which doubles as a stink bomb hurled at makers of highly manipulated, lavishly marketed, and overpriced wines, and a love letter to Europe’s remaining traditional vintners.

• For the beer-inclined, here’s Paste Magazine’s “25 Best American Breweries of the Decade.” Any quibbles you might have with the list—there are 19 better breweries than San Diegos’s Stone?—just underscore the pretty truth: we’re in the full flower of a spectacular beer renaissance in the United States.

• Did y’all see my Newsweek piece?

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By Teryn Norris & Devon Swezey

You know the world is changing when the president’s first trip to Asia is defined by a new U.S. foreign policy dubbed “strategic reassurance”
– convincing China that the United States has no intention of
containing its growing power or endangering its foreign investments. As
the New York Times put it,
“When President Obama visits China for the first time on Sunday, he
will, in many ways, be assuming the role of profligate spender coming
to pay respects to his banker.”

You also know times are changing when China, the world’s greatest
polluter, and other Asian nations are poised to dominate the burgeoning
global clean-tech industry by out-investing the United States. That’s
the conclusion of a large new report we co-authored called “Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant,” released this week by the Breakthrough Institute and Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (see coverage in Financial Times and Wall Street Journal). The report is the
first to thoroughly benchmark clean energy competitiveness in four
nations – China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States – and finds
the following:

“Asia’s rising ‘clean technology tigers’ – China, Japan, and South Korea – have already passed the United States in the production of
virtually all clean energy technologies and over the next five years
will out-invest the U.S. three-to-one in these sectors… While some U.S.
firms will benefit from the establishment of joint ventures overseas,
the jobs, tax revenues, and other benefits of clean tech growth will
overwhelmingly accrue to Asian nations… Should the investment gap
persist, the U.S. will import the overwhelming majority of clean energy
technologies it deploys.”

What do these two changes have in common? They both reflect the
accelerating shift of global power from America to Asia, caused in
large part by the serious mismanagement of U.S. economic policy.

The Pacific power shift is not a new phenomenon, and the Obama
administration is wise to seek stronger ties with the region. The U.S.
should applaud Asia’s growth, which is partly an outcome of our own
success at promoting economic liberalism and international development.
This shift in power is not a zero-sum game, nor should it be: the U.S.
and Asia should avoid trade wars at all costs, and we should seize
opportunities for partnership on a range of issues, from climate change
to nuclear proliferation.

But the growing pace of this power shift should be a cause of major
concern for Americans, and it should raise serious questions about our
economic policies at the highest level. While the U.S. economy has
suffered greatly from a crisis produced by its own financial sector –
losing millions of jobs, trillions in economic output, and demanding
huge spending packages financed by borrowed money – China has shrugged off the global recession with high levels of growth and self-financed stimulus, all while
purchasing billions of Treasury bills to fund a U.S. deficit that has
reached historic highs.

Last November, addressing the nation on the evening of his election,
President Obama declared that “a new era of American leadership is at
hand.” And indeed, his new administration has taken significant steps
to remake U.S. foreign policy. But unless the U.S. quickly improves its
economic competitiveness, our global leadership will be severely
damaged. What is demanded now is a major, coordinated national project
to regain our economic competitiveness in strategic sectors while
permanently correcting the imbalances that led to the Great Recession.

Correcting Imbalances & Fixing Finance

Speaking at the San Francisco Fed last month, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke declared it “extraordinarily urgent” that the U.S. and Asia take steps to prevent a
revival of global economic imbalances. There is now broad consensus on
how these imbalances – the huge gaps in trade deficits and surpluses,
and the associated gaps in national savings, consumption, and
investment rates – helped caused the housing bubble and the Great
Recession. Alan Greenspan offered a concise explanation in a widely-read column this spring:

“The presumptive cause of the world-wide decline in long-term
[mortgage] rates was the tectonic shift in the early 1990s by much of
the developing world from heavy emphasis on central planning to
increasingly dynamic, export-led market competition. The result was a
surge in growth in China and a large number of other emerging market
economies that led to an excess of global intended savings relative to
intended capital investment.”

In other words, the U.S. housing bubble was caused in large part by
the buildup of savings in emerging market economies, especially China,
accumulated from their large trade surpluses. As this large “pool of money”
was invested internationally, it drove down the costs of borrowing,
drove up subprime lending, and created large demand for mortgage-backed
securities. This era of easy credit – combined with the use of
“innovative” financial instruments, which relaxed mortgage standards,
concealed risk, and enabled the mass packaging and sale of these
securities – gave rise to the U.S. housing bubble.

This “global pool of money” wouldn’t have existed without the U.S.
running an enormous trade deficit, relying on imports and debt to
support a high consumption rate – hence the global “imbalance” of
high-saving versus high-consuming countries. The U.S. deficit in the
trade of goods and services in 2008 was $695 billion, according to the
Department of Commerce, compared to China’s surplus of $297 billion.

Speaking in Tokyo last week, President Obama extended this problem to its logical conclusion, calling for rebalanced growth and a new U.S. economic strategy based on exports: “One of the
important lessons this recession has taught us is the limits of
depending primarily on American consumers and Asian exports to drive
growth… [our] new strategy will mean that we save more and spend less,
reform our financial systems, reduce our long-term deficit and
borrowing. It will also mean a greater emphasis on exports that we can
build, produce, and sell all over the world.”

The implication is clear: the United States must shift away from a
“financial” economy to an “innovation” economy, one that focuses on
creating industries that produce real innovative products to sell
around the world. After years of creating imaginary wealth on the pile of sand that was the U.S.
financial sector, America must once again get into the business of
producing real goods and services. This means reducing the size of the
financial sector and the Wall Street “brain drain” – which has
distracted the nation’s best and brightest minds from the work of real
innovation and entrepreneurship – and refocusing on
productive, export-oriented industries. And it means adopting a new era
of innovation policies to ensure the U.S. economy is the most
competitive in the world, directing targeted public investments into
strategic technologies, infrastructure, and high-tech education
programs.

This new economic strategy is necessary not just for short-term
recovery, but for avoiding future credit bubbles and financial crises,
slashing our trade and budget deficit, producing more innovative
technologies to improve our everyday lives, and regaining our
international leadership.

The Clean Energy Race

What’s the biggest new industry that can boost America’s exports,
grow the economy, create better jobs, and tap our innovative potential?
In a word, clean-tech.

Here’s why: Reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, while
simultaneously meeting the surging demand for energy in developing
countries, requires the development and deployment of clean energy
technologies on a massive scale. Indeed, while global energy demand is
expected to double or even triple by 2050, emissions must fall by at
least 80 percent over the same period to avoid the worst consequences
of climate change.

Meeting this challenge requires nothing short of a revolutionary
shift toward clean energy and a dramatically increased level of
investment in these technologies. The International Energy Agency
estimates that achieving a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 2050
will require total additional global investments of $45 trillion.
“Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant” notes that “global private investment
in renewable energy and energy efficient technologies alone is
estimated to reach $450 billion annually by 2012 and $600 billion by
2020, and much larger if recent market opportunity estimates are
realized.” Recognizing these trends, an increasing number of analysts are calling the clean-tech industry a “guaranteed-growth” sector.

No wonder President Obama has made this his signature statement:
“The nation that leads in the creation of a clean energy economy will
be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy.”

Make no mistake: healthy international competition in the clean-tech
industry will not hinder the global transition to clean energy, but
rather will act as one of the most powerful accelerators for clean
energy development and deployment in the world. International
collaboration, such as technology partnerships, will be important to
promote clean energy development in China and other developing
countries, but we also need to think about how to leverage competitive
forces. International competition in the clean energy industry can
improve technologies and reduce their price at a rapid pace, and
governments can play a more active role in promoting these activities.
For example, we should consider establishing an official “U.S.-China
Clean Tech Competition” – jointly funded by each country – to promote
competition between U.S. and Chinese firms in developing the most
innovative technologies and business models.

Unfortunately, the United States is already falling behind its
competitors in this critical industry. Just for starters, we rely on
foreign companies for the majority of our wind turbines, produce less
than 10 percent of the world’s solar cells, and we’re losing ground on
hybrid and electric vehicle technology and manufacturing. China leads
the global production of solar cells and wind turbines, and it is
expected to become the number one solar market within five years. By 2012, China, Japan, and South Korea are expected
to produce 1.6 million hybrid gas-electric or electric vehicles
annually compared to North America, which is projected to produce
267,000, less than a fifth as many, according to industry forecasts.

China, Japan, and South Korea plan to gain even greater
“first-mover” advantages and solidify this lead with coordinated and
comprehensive policies based largely on direct government investment.
These governments are expected to invest a total of $509 billion in
clean technology over the next five years, compared to $172 billion in
the United States, assuming passage of the proposed American Clean
Energy and Security Act and including current budget appropriations and
recently enacted stimulus measures. According to a recent Deutsche Bank report,
“generous and well-targeted [clean-tech] incentives” backed by
“comprehensive and integrated government plans” in China and Japan will
create a low-risk environment for investors and stimulate high levels
of private investment.

As John Doerr and Jeff Immelt, two of the country’s top business leaders, recently wrote in the Washington Post, “We are clearly not in the lead today. That
position is held by China, which understands the importance of
controlling its energy future. China’s commitment to developing clean
energy technologies and markets is breathtaking.”

A New Project for Energy Competitiveness

Without a large national project to regain competitiveness in the
clean-tech sector, the United States will miss a major opportunity to
grow our economy, correct our trade imbalance, and reduce our national
deficit. Indeed, even if we transition to clean sources of energy, we
risk trading our dependence on foreign oil for dependence on foreign
clean energy.

Fortunately, the United States has a history of regaining
competitiveness in strategic industries. Decades ago, after trailing
Europe in aviation and aerospace, we raced ahead through sustained
federal support for aviation technology development. After the Soviet
Union launched Sputnik, we invested heavily in education, science, and
technology, enabling us to put the first man on the moon and achieve
breakthroughs in information-age technology. When the Japanese took the
lead in the semiconductor industry in the 1980s, we formed SEMATECH, a
public-private partnership that successfully repositioned the U.S. as
the global market leader.

What each of these stories has in common is direct public investment
in technology innovation and deployment, education, and infrastructure,
aimed at generating competitive private industries. Fareed Zakaria
explains the primary reasons for America’s previous innovation
leadership in the current cover story of Newsweek:
“The third tidal wave was massive government funding… After World War
II, the Cold War drove this funding to new highs, so that by the 1950s,
the United States was spending 3 percent of GDP on R&D, which
amounted to a majority of the total spending on science on the planet.
Government funding of basic research has been astonishingly
productive.” (Zakaria cites a report that one of us co-authored called “Case Studies in American Innovation.”)

Indeed, the United States did not invent the Internet by enforcing a
cap and trade system on fax machines, nor did we create the personal
computer by taxing typewriters. Those who suggest we can simply rely on
indirect, market-based mechanisms to achieve a clean energy revolution
fail to understand the history of technology innovation and
competitiveness, and they risk relegating our clean-tech industry to
second-class status or worse. Indeed, the same Deutsche Bank report
above noted that the U.S. is a “moderate-risk” country compared to the
lower-risk environment of China and Japan, because we rely on “a more
volatile market incentive approach and has suffered from a start-stop
approach in some areas.”

What is demanded today is a national energy competitiveness project
based on the success of past U.S. innovation policy, including targeted
support for technology research, development, demonstration,
deployment, education, infrastructure, and manufacturing. A large and
growing group of energy experts, think tanks, and companies – including
Google, Brookings Institution, dozens of Nobel Laureates, Association
of American Universities, Breakthrough Institute, and Third Way – has united behind a target for federal clean energy R&D at $15 billion per year.
Unfortunately, the climate bill under consideration in the Senate would
only invest around $1.4 billion per year in energy R&D. Similarly,
the bill would only offer a one-time capitalization of $10 billion for
a Clean Energy Deployment Administration. Another good provision is the
IMPACT Act, focused on clean technology manufacturing, but here again
it is unclear whether it will be adequately funded.

As we conclude in “Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant”: “If the United
States hopes to compete for new clean energy industries it must close
the widening gap between U.S. and Asian government investments in
research and innovation, manufacturing, and domestic market demand.
Small, indirect and uncoordinated incentives are not sufficient to
outcompete Asia’s clean tech tigers. To regain economic leadership in
the global clean energy industry, U.S. energy policy must include
large, direct and coordinated investments in clean technology R&D,
manufacturing, deployment, and infrastructure.”

The Energy Generation

The remaining piece is clean energy education. It is well known that
America is falling behind in high-tech education. What’s less well
understood is that nearly half the U.S. energy workforce is expected to
retire over the next decade. Federal investment in education, from the
G.I. Bill to the National Defense Education Act, was vital for U.S.
competitiveness in the post-war era, and it will be vital for competing
in the burgeoning clean energy industry. As Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman
recently put it, “If you had to explain America’s economic success with one word, that word would be ‘education.’”

In April, President Obama proposed an important initiative to inspire the next generation of clean energy innovators. The program,
called RE-ENERGYSE (Regaining our Energy Science and Engineering Edge),
would prepare thousands of highly skilled scientists and engineers to
enter clean-energy fields by supporting energy education programs at
universities, technical colleges, and K-12 schools. According to the Department of Energy,
the program would educate between 5,000 and 8,500 energy scientists,
engineers, and other professionals by 2015, rising to 10,000 to 17,000
professionals by 2020.

RE-ENERGYSE is critical for reclaiming U.S. leadership in the clean
energy sector. As a group of over 100 universities, professional
associations, and student groups stated in a recent letter to the Senate, “RE-ENERGYSE is an innovative program that will train
America’s future energy workforce, accelerate our transition to a
prosperous clean energy economy, and ensure that we lead the world’s
burgeoning clean technology industries.”

Unfortunately, Congress failed to provide any funding for RE-ENERGYSE for 2010. But the administration is not giving up, and
it intends to pursue funding for RE-ENERGYSE in its 2011 budget
proposal. College students have a unique role to play in advancing this
initiative and the broader energy competitiveness agenda. RE-ENERGYSE
needs a much stronger base of support to pass Congress next year, and
as the primary stakeholders in the program, students can be uniquely
influential in organizing a coalition of supporters and directly
voicing their concerns to members of Congress. That’s why students at
Stanford University are currently launching a national effort called Americans for Energy Leadership, aimed at advancing RE-ENERGYSE and inspiring the next generation of energy innovators.

Fifty years ago, in the wake of the launch of Sputnik, the United
States launched a massive national effort to lead the space race and
win the Cold War. Today, the clean energy race represents one of the
greatest opportunities and challenges for American leadership in a
generation. If we do not take immediate action to launch a national
energy competitiveness project based on large, direct, and coordinated
innovation policies, we will effectively cede the clean-energy industry
to Asia and other competitors. The mass majority of exports, jobs, tax
revenues, and other economic benefits will accrue to foreign countries,
and we will miss a historic opportunity to achieve a new era of
American leadership. The choice should be clear.

—
Originally published by The Stanford Review

Teryn Norris is a Senior Advisor at the Breakthrough Institute, Public Policy major at Stanford University, and Director of Americans for Energy Leadership.
Devon Swezey is Project Director at the Breakthrough Institute and
graduated from Stanford University in 2008. They are co-authors of the
new report, “Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant: Asian Nations Set to Dominate the Clean Energy Race by Out-Investing the United States.”

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