Please try to keep in mind as you shop this holiday season: Fair Trade doesn't just apply to African villagers and Amazon tribes - it also applies to the folks who grow our food here at home.
An interesting note from a farmer who tried switching from big-breasted flightless corporate turkeys to heritage birds:
Our customers who had eagerly signed up to reserve a heritage bird were not only disappointed about the size, but they also complained about the higher price tag and the noticeable lack of breast meat. So the heritage birds cost 2.5 times the price as chicks, took twice as long to grow out, ate nearly twice the food, and dressed out at half the size. We had to charge $8/lb. and we still made no profits on these birds. What was curiously frustrating was that these self-described foodies still wanted the size and body shape of a hybrid bird, along with a small price tag. Even somebody from a local Slow Food chapter still insists that we should be able to raise heritage turkeys for $4/lb.
That's right. Real food costs more, and doesn't look the same was as crap corporate food (or taste the same way, thank god!)
I've also got a post up over at Ecoble.com about how to live a little greener on Thanksgiving this year... check it out.
Nobody would argue that Hershey's chocolate is better than Dagoba or Ghirardelli, or that there's no difference in quality between a Mercedes and a Mercury.
And yet, when it comes to wine, it seems every six months someone is trotting out "evidence" that there's really no difference between higher-priced bottles of wine and the cheap stuff. That it's all about elitism and marketing and hype.
When I was first learning about wine, I bought into it, too. I'd tried $6 bottles and $16 bottles, and there didn't seem to be that much difference. So why spend the extra $10?
Then I did a write-up on the Hermitage Inn in Wilmington, Vermont, and got a chance to sample from its 30,0000-bottle cellar. My first $40 bottle of wine, from California's Far Niente vineyard. Wow! Here was a wine that outshone the hype. It was complex, light, dazzling... and totally worth the price.
I still buy cheaper wines (who can afford $40 a week on wine, in this economy?), but I totally lost sympathy for the elitism/marketing whiners.
Like Robin Goldstein. His study, which "proved" that most people couldn't tell the good stuff from the cheap stuff in blind taste tests, made the rounds this past spring (here and here), and is cropping up again. Jonah Lehrer, at The Frontal Cortex, just brought it up, and Andrew Sullivan picked up on it too. Both of them pushed the line that, in Lehrer's words, "expensive wine doesn't necessarily taste better, at least for people who aren't wine experts".
This kind of "study" always bugs me, so I tend to delve into the raw numbers to see where they're pulling their conclusions from. And guess what?
To make sure that our results are not driven by wines at the extreme ends of the price distribution, we also run our regressions on a reduced sample, omitting the top and bottom deciles of the price distribution. Given the broad range of prices in the sample, this is an appropriate precaution. The remaining wines range in price from $6 to $15.
Meaning: 90% of their wines are priced at less than $15. What elitism? The useful comparison is between the $10 bottle and the $40 bottle, not between the $6 bottle and the $15 bottle.
So what's the real scoop? Goldstein was publishing a book: "The Wine Trials: Brown-bag blind tastings reveal the surprising wine values under $15." That certainly explains the fact that 90 percent of the study's wines were under $15.
Their choices of more expensive wines? Mere foils, so they could say things like:
"...when more than 500 blind tasters around the country sampled 6,000 glasses of wine ranging in price from $1.50 to $150, their preferences were inversely correlated with price. For example, Domaine Ste. Michelle, a $12 sparkling wine from Washington State, outscored Dom Pérignon, a $150 Champagne, while a six-dollar Vinho Verde from Portugal beat out a $40 California Chardonnay and a $50 1er Cru white Burgundy."
The book is a nice idea. There are a lot decent wines out there for under $15, and a guide is a great thing (see here for another good source of tips). But it's just not a source of accurate scientific data.
And yet they managed to market their 'findings' into the pages of Newsweek and the New York Times... while pontificating on the notion that much of wine snobbery was nothing but marketing. Ah, the irony..
All we have to do this year is look toward Washington, DC, and we've got tons of stuff to be thankful for...
But as we officially enter the season of holiday cheer, holiday shopping and holiday excess, can we all think about the planet, too?
They say that green is the new black, but that doesn't mean you have to get all emo about it. It's possible to be joyful and celebratory - and smart.
10 Great Ways to Green your Thanksgiving
Getting There - Thanksgiving is one of the heaviest travel weekends of the year, and how you choose to get there can make a big difference in your annual carbon footprint. If you’re driving long distances, avoid SUVs and big gas-guzzlers – remember, you can always rent something smaller. Carpooling is also good, although not always an option. And if you’re flying, keep in mind that air miles are about the most damaging mode of travel for the environment. Avoid flying if possible; if you can’t, consider purchasingcarbon offsets from a reliable source.
Set the Scene - Candles are great for creating a warm, homey environment. But paraffin candles are awful for the home environment. They’re made from petrochemicals, they put vaporized parrafin into the air, and they often contain artificial oils and scents that you don’t want your loved ones to be breathing, either. Today, we have better options, made with beeswax and soy wax. Likewise, as you’re buying decorations, think of what’s going to happen to them when the holiday has passed. Try to avoid buying a bunch of paper goods that will go straight into the landfill.
Moderate the Meat - Industrial agricultural poultry farms generate a huge amount of waste; too much to compost (which is how small farms deal with natural by-products in a natural way, returning them to the soil as fertilizer). Instead, all that manure degrades into methane – a greenhouse gas that’s 20 times more potent than CO2. Plus, these birds are pumped full of antibiotics and nasty chemicals to try to keep them healthy in that cramped, hellish environment. This does awful things for the meat – both in terms of nutrients, and in flavor. Go for a free-range organic bird – your taste buds will thank you, as will your arteries. (Or you could try going Vegan…)
Go Local - Transportation is a big part of the CO2 impact of our food. Shipping by water has a modest impact, trucking is pretty bad, and air freight is terrible. Which means that, surprisingly, (ocean-shipped) Peruvian mangoes may have a lower impact than (trucked) Idaho potatoes. Your best bet – buy local. Go down to the farmers market for the most planet-friendly potatoes and yams.
Go Seasonal - Hothouse-grown peppers, tomatoes and lettuce are also not great for the environment – because of the hefty energy used in growing them in cold climates. Think like the Pilgrims, and try to focus on things that grow naturally in your neighborhood this time of year. In the north, that might mean substituting cold-loving crops like spinach, kale and chard instead of a salad.
Go Organic - Industrial agriculature depletes the soil, then uses petrochemical-derived fertilizers to attempt to replenish it. It’s a crazy system that’s accelerating climate change. Organic agriculture, in contrast, actually returns large amounts of carbon to the soil. If all the farms in the US switched to organics, it would be the equivalent of taking millions of cars off the road! Plus, organics are healthier. And your health is always something to be thankful for.
Avoid Packaged Foods - Often, producing and disposing of food packaging takes more energy than it took to grow and process the food in the first place. What can you do about that? Cut back on pre-packaged stuff. Go with fresh local spinach instead of frozen; bake your own pumpkin pie instead of buying one in a plastic clamshell from the market.
Recycle - And of course, make sure the cans, bottles, and packaging you use gets recycled.
Compost - Don’t send your scraps off to a landfill! In that nasty environment, food waste breaks down into methane, which as we’ve noted is a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2. Set up a home composting system; if you can’t, check locally – many cities now have composting programs.
Don’t Say “Yes” to Excess - Don’t go whole hog – or whole turkey. Buy a smaller bird, only make three side dishes instead of six, go for two pies instead of four. You can still eat plenty of food, there will be less waste overall, and when you step on the scale Monday morning, you’ll be able to look at that dial without fear and loathing.
I've got one of my classic pieces up on Helium.com: How to Cook the Perfect Thanksgiving Turkey. It includes step-by-step instructions, plus expert advice from Eric Trites, the gourmet chef at the Hermitage Inn in Wilmington, Vermont.
A sample:
Your first turkey could be a piece of cake, or it could be a total disaster. So we thought we'd seek out some professional help - Eric Trites, chief cook and pheasant plucker at the Hermitage Inn in Wilmington, Vermont. The Hermitage is a resort that specializes in the fare the pilgrim fathers (and mothers) laid on their tables: pheasants, wild turkeys, ducks, gamecocks, deer. And Trites figures he's cooked around five hundred turkeys over the past ten years....
Thanksgiving food-fests: "Before you start cooking, remove the little plastic bag with the giblets." It is, of course, not a major disaster if you forget this. It just makes the inside of the bird a little messy when the plastic bag starts to melt in the 325-degree oven...
"Actually," Trites notes, "the first thing you have to do depends on whether it's fresh or frozen. If it's frozen, you've gotta defrost it. The best way to do that is to leave it in the fridge, because turkeys are apt to spoil - as with all fowl. They have been known to have salmonella, which is not fun. Spending Thanksgiving day on the john is not a good time."
Bill McKibben has a great column in Orion magazine this month, in which he makes an interesting point:
But in a world where we need massive change at lightning speed, the usual equations are turned upside down. We’re used to thinking that being practical is what really counts—that you can only reduce carbon by, in fact, reducing carbon. Hence the light bulb, or the farmers’ market, or the hybrid car. If we think globally, to use the hoariest of green clichés, we should act locally. In the fight against global warming, though, the practical acts are for the most part symbolic, while the symbolic acts might just save the day. Say you have a certain amount of time and money with which to make change—call it x, since that is what we mathematicians call things. The trick is to increase that x by multiplication, not addition. The trick is to take that 5 percent of people who really care and make them count for far more than 5 percent. And the trick to that is democracy.
We naïvely believe that it takes 51 percent of the people to make change in a democracy, but it clearly doesn’t—5 percent is plenty, if those 5 percent are engaged in symbolic action that can force the kind of legislative change that resets the course for everyone. In the civil rights movement, for instance, the strategy was not to desegregate the country one lunch counter at a time—there were way too many lunch counters. Instead, you use the drama of the fight over one lunch counter to help drive the Civil Rights Act, which puts the full power of the federal government behind the idea that anyone can order a hamburger wherever they want to. And here’s the thing: I bet less than one-quarter of 1 percent of Americans took part in a protest during that great movement, but it was more than enough.
Want to green your ride, but can’t afford a Tesla? That’s okay… there are plenty of cool (if not quite so flashy) new transportation options coming down the pike that will cost you less than $100,000. Some of ‘em you can even build yourself.
Seriously Strange Fossil Fuelings:
Who needs hydrogen? Some energy alternatives have been around for years, and are making a comeback.
1. Wood
It’s not talked about as much as the Manhattan Project, but there was a big energy crisis during WWII, when the military sucked up a huge portion of the world’s petroleum output. Individual car-owners across Europe converted their cars and trucks to run on… wood.
Wood?
Wood. Engines don’t run on liquid gasoline - they literally run on fumes. Same goes for the fire in your fireplace – when you see flames rising, that’s the fumes of volatiles coming off the logs and igniting. You can do the same thing in your car.
Some folks are working on making this high-tech, with scrubbers and sealed, carefully controlled burners. Renewable Energy Systems are currently running a demonstration coast-to-coast tour with a couple of modded 1991 Dodge Dakota V8 pickups.
But for now you can go very low-tech – plonk a stove on the back of your pickup and run a vacuum hose to the carburetor; after that your spark plugs ignite the fumes as per usual. You can get information on the web to rig your vehicle with a hundred or so dollars in parts: Jim Mason offers workshops and info, or order a how-to guide from Mother Earth News.
But either way, your fuel can be wood if you want – or any scrap biomass.
2. Steam
The British Steam Car looks like the Batmobile and runs like an iron horse. It is not quite road-ready just yet, though, as it guzzles 1,000 litres (one ton!) of water per 25 minutes of travel time. So for now it is recommended only for shorter commutes (or perhaps not at all).
3. People Power
HumanCar is driven by people - even the steering is human powered, like on a bicycle or motorcycle.
How does it work? They’re being very, very cagey – there’s lot of talk on their website about patents and proprietary trade secrets, not too much on how it will run.
But for sure, this won’t be a Flintstones-style feet-through-the-floor operation.
Perfect for in-city commuting or shopping, this little car only has a 25-mile range. Still, it brags that even after counting emissions from generating the electricity it uses, it produces 98% less pollution than a gas vehicle. And it’s available now. Next up: A ZAP trucklet with a solar panel to fuel itself.
This may look like a toy, but it pumps out 110 horsepower (between a 4-cylinder gas engine and a 50-kilowatt electric motor) And it is kind of cute. This vehicle seats two comfortably (depending on the individual, of course); at a stretch you can cram in thirteen contortionists.
Future Green Transport:
6. Zoop
This little electric flitter can travel at up to 120 mph (although that prospect raises the specter of “Unsafe at Any Speed”). The Zoop is more about being seen – hence the clear canopy and the flashy design by EV-proponents André and Coqueline Courrèges of Paris-based fashion house Maison de Courrèges.
It is hard to say whether this Chinese offering is even a car, and even the name implies it is some sort of scooter…
Still, it has four wheels (in a diamond layout, rather than the standard “four corners” formation) and there is a roof over your head to keep out the wind and rain, so perhaps it qualifies.
The way it parks is particularly interesting - thanks to the diamond wheelbase, you can do some remarkably tight turning with this little thing:
The name stands for “Low Resistance Mobile” This just goes to show that you don’t need to wait for next decade’s technology to accomplish amazing things with milage: The Loremo combines a highly-efficient German-engineered diesel engine with extremely low-drag design to achieve 150 miles per gallon. Coming next year to Europe, with US launch to follow.
Want to really get off the grid? Helios has the answer: a solar-powered buggy with a saurian solar sail that spreads out to soak up the sun and recharge, photovoltaicly. This concept car won the Best Use of Technology at the Interior Motives Design Awards 2008. Note to racers: do NOT attempt to deploy the sail as a drag chute…
Coming as early as spring 2009 from MDI and Zero Pollution Motors, it runs on compressed air. Developed by Formula One engineer Guy Nègre, the Air Car is expected to make big inroads in India, where it will be sold as the Tata Nano for $2500.
A few of the mainline automakers are trying to break out of the gas-guzzler mode (although not GM, who have announced they won’t be bringing their min-cars to the US market, further demonstrating their brilliant business acumen and why the government should give them a big bailout.) VW wanted a car that would go 100 miles on one liter of gas, but it’s taken them more than six years to perfect the high-tech low-weight materials like carbon fiber and titanium. Along with a super-sleek aerodynamic shell, this diesel-powered commuter car is scheduled to get a spectacular 235 mpg when it hits the roads (in a limited edition test release) in 2010.
Can’t wait - or really want to do something now? Don’t despair - you can upgrade your current rustbucket to at least make it a little more fuel-efficient.
At this stage, who really wants dead-tree magazines shipped to your doorstep?
It seems there is finally an alternative - and the first dose is free, thanks to The Read Green Initiative.
There's a wide range, from Parenting to Playboy, plus PC, Popular Science, even Reader's Digest. Nice!
Over the past few years, I've cut out just about all of my magazine subscriptions (Lyra and I still get Mother Earth News and the sister publication, Herb Companion).
I'm trying to decide with zine to take as my freebie... probably going to go with Outside. I'm guessing Lyra will go with Saveur.
No matter where you're reading this from, you can go to Earthdance this weekend.
Earthdance is one of those times when unification trumps narcissism. This is a trans-global dance party, with events from Argentina to Zambia, but we're fortunate in having the Hub Event, the center of it all, just up the coast at the Black Oak Ranch in Laytonville. It unites world music, jamband, electronica, folk and reggae on five stages over three days.
Find your local Earthdance event - from Argentina to Zambia - on the main website.
"World sea levels rose 3.1 millimetres (0.12 inch) per year from 1993 to 2003, the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said."
Doesn't sound like a big deal, does it? It's just millimeters, right?
The thing that is rarely reported when they mention that figure is... "average" means that some places it's lower, and some places it's higher... much higher.
"...a 2006 study by Australian oceanographers found the rise was much higher, almost one inch every year, in parts of the western Pacific and Indian oceans.
"It turns out the ocean sloshes around," said the University of Tasmania's Nathaniel Bindoff, a lead author on oceans in the U.N. reports. "It's moving, and so on a regional basis the ocean's movement is causing sea-level variations ups and downs."
Just as warming is much higher than average in the Arctic - and causing a host of problems, from melting sea-ice to melting permafrost - the sea level change is higher in some places, like the island nation of Kiribati.
"For nations and communities that sit only a few metres above sea level, even small ocean rises engulf their land and send destructive salty water into their food supply, leaving residents with little choice but to flee...
As sea levels have crept higher, the coasts have eroded, corals have been bleached, and islanders' staple foods such as the giant Babai taro, coconut and banana are unable to grow in salty soil.
On the Carterets, where one island has been split in two by the encroaching sea, Rakova said hunger and desperation were sending the young men to mainland Papua New Guinea, or spiralling into depression."
"Ron and Maria Passi, who operate Murray Island's only taxi, were out driving the night the king tide struck... The couple's son, Sonny, was outside his fibro shack with his five children, watching the monster surf, lashed by north-west winds, rise ever higher. In the commotion, everyone had forgotten that Sedoi, the baby, was still inside. They heard her crying and found her in her cot, covered in sand. Water had surged in after a wave picked up a big wooden pallet and flung it through the front wall...
No one on Murray had ever seen such a high tide before. Other islands in the Torres Strait, which lies between the far north-eastern tip of the Australian mainland and Papua New Guinea, have witnessed similar scenes in recent years. Houses, roads and graveyards have been flooded, and the locals believe they know the reason: climate change."
Something for the rest of us to look forward to...
Searching for a miracle... a fuel source that is actually efficient.
Ethanol has been a disaster, barely breaking even in energy output, not doing well at all in carbon footprint, and driving up the price of corn and other grain. Time to try something else.
Hydrogen hasn't been much better, so far - it's still not cost effective. We simply don't have an industrial process to make it cheaply and in bulk. Wouldn't it be nice if we did? Termites, and the microbes in their guts that allow them to digest wood, could change that.
A worker termite tears off a piece of wood with its mandibles and lets its guts work on it like a molecular wrecking yard, stripping away sugars, CO2, hydrogen, and methane with 90 percent efficiency... Offer a termite this page, and its microbial helpers will break it down into two liters of hydrogen, enough to drive more than six miles in a fuel-cell car. If we could turn wood waste into fuel with even a fraction of the termite’s efficiency, we could run our economy on sawdust, lawn clippings, and old magazines.
Bad news for those who still think it'll be 20 or 30 years before we have to face an ice-free arctic ocean. Climate change is accelerating far faster than anything in the models.
More ominous signs Wednesday have scientists saying that a global warming "tipping point" in the Arctic seems to be happening before their eyes: The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that sea ice in the Arctic now covers about 2.03 million square miles. The lowest point since satellite measurements began in 1979 was 1.65 million square miles set last September...
Within "five to less than 10 years," the Arctic could be free of sea ice in the summer, said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally.
"It also means that climate warming is also coming larger and faster than the models are predicting and nobody's really taken into account that change yet," he said
Where was I twenty years ago? Covering Leonard Bernstein's 70th Birthday bash at Tanglewood...
Leonard Bernstein at 70 Tanglewood, August 25-28 By Jeremy Bloom
There is an irony to the career of Leonard Bernstein, celebrated this past weekend with a whole series of concerts and parties at the Tanglewood Music Center, where that career began.
By the end of Thursday night's gala multi-starred celebration, it was obvious what an impact “Lenny” (as everyone calls him) has had in every area of music, from conducting the works of Copeland, Stravinski and Mahler to his own writing for the classical halls, the Hollywood screen, the Broadway stage.
There is so much wonderful material to draw on - songs from his early broadway shows, On the Town and Wonderful Town; his ballet collaboration with Jerome Robbins, Fancy Free; his film score for On the Waterfront: and of course, the unforgettable melodies of West Side Story and Candide.
"Poor Lenny, ten gifts too many,'' was the sad refrain of the lyrics specially penned for the evening by collaborator and friend Stephen Sondheim.
And yet, this is the man who once criticized Gershwin as being merely a pop composer whose music would not dwell among the immortals. Bernstein wants very much to be remembered as a serious classical composer. But of the 36 works performed over the course of the weekend, only four were from among his classical writings - and all four were choral works or songs, including the jazzy Mass. His heavier pieces, such as his Age of Anxiety Symphony, were passed over completely.
So what? Let's let Lenny and his psychiatrist and the historians sort it out. Thursday night, there was no doubt about how his contemporaries feel about him.
One after another, the people he has touched took the stage to thank their friend and mentor with a memory, a joke, and a gift of song - a Who's Who of 20th century music, from cellist Mstislav Rostropovitch, older than Lenny himself, to the 16-year-old Japanese wunderkind violinist, Midori; more than 50 singers, conductors, composers and musicians.
"I was at the Nureyev birthday celebration in New York last year,'' said one tuxedoed gentleman who had laid out $5,000 for top tickets for the week, ""and it was nothing like this. No one else has this depth of talent to draw on. These aren't just performers he's worked with - these are all his friends.''
Or, as Greek minister of culture Melina Mercouri put it, one of dozens of world figures sending greetings to the birthday boy: "To say, bless you? You were born blessed.''
Cafe Society (Appeared in The New York Times, 1991) By Jeremy Bloom
“There is a cloud of weirdness that hangs over Saratoga Springs,” says the singer-songwriter Bruce (Utah) Phillips. He should know, having spent most of the mid-'60s period he calls “the great folk music scare” in the small upstate New York city, along with Arlo Guthrie, Don McLean, Rosalie Sorrels, Bob Dylan, Spalding Gray and others.
They gathered spontaneously around Lena Spencer and Caffe Lena, the small Bohemian coffeehouse she ran in Saratoga Springs from 1960 until her death in 1989. The oldest continuously-running coffeehouse in the country, Caffe Lena endures as almost a time capsule - and a natural documentary subject.
In 1989, a BBC-TV crew filmed performances and interviews with some of the many musicians who considered Spencer a friend and her “caffe” a surrogate home. The result, titled “Caffe Lena”, will be broadcast at midnight Thursday on WNET (NY).
Arlo Guthrie is on hand for the film, as he always was for Spencer - he jokes about his role as financial angel for the often-broke cafe, saying he knew things were O.K. with Lena when he didn't hear from her.
Rosalie Sorrels lived with Spencer, and her children stayed with Spencer when she was on the road (Spencer never had any children of her own, but after her husband left her, the cafe provided an ever-shifting family). Ms. Sorrels' contribution to the documentary is a soulful performance of Mr. Phillips' “I Could Be the Rain” with blues-rocker David Bromberg playing lead guitar; it's the kind of collaboration that happened all the time in the early days.
Spalding Gray got his first acting job in a short-lived theater company which Spencer founded and then folded at the cafe during what he describes as the surreal summer of 1966. He has vivid memories of late nights with Spencer piloting the Ouija board.
“The theater productions were done with such inspired madness,” he told an interviewer. “The backyard looseness of it really set the tone for the Wooster Group's work,” he added, referring to the avant-garde theater he founded in New York in 1975 with Elizabeth LeCompte, who was waitressing at Caffe Lena when they met.
And then there was Spencer herself. She presided at the top of the stairs with the myopic regality of a Persian cat. “Do you have a reservation?” she would ask each visitor in the refined tones of an Italian immigrant's daughter who has trained for the stage.
Like her friend Bob Dylan (he played the cafe in 1962, but is not seen in the film), Spencer was at heart a private person. “She was a strange, warm, mothering character,” Mr. Gray recalls fondly. “One of the few I've met in America.”
Want to cut your carbon footprint at home? Four ways you can make a difference:
Disposable Coffee Cups It might not seem like a big deal, but paper coffee cups add up – fast. One national chain estimated that in just one year, their customers who chose to bring their own mugs together prevented 30 tons of paper from going into landfills. That’s a lot of trees, and a lot of CO2.
Disposable chopsticks Next time you’re in an Asian restaurant, think about the more than 100 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks used every year, the millions of trees cut down to make them, and the CO2 released when they are burned or land-filled. You can join the movement to bring your own chopsticks.
Wrap it up More than 4 million tons of wrapping paper goes into US landfills every year. Use old newspapers, color comics, magazines or pieces of cloth instead.
Nix the bottle Americans use - and dump - 30 million plastic water bottles every day. All of those bottles were manufactured (using power and 63 million gallons of petroleum per year), packed into cardboard boxes (millions of trees cut down), then trucked around the country (more oil). Use an inline filter on your tap, and a reusable bottle when you're on the road.
We've been pushing local food for some time now. Local food tends to be better, more nutritious, and tastier. And and if you don't ship stuff thousands of miles, you don't pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
A recent study by a pair of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University came up with a surprising result, though. While transporting food long distances definitely contributes to greenhouse gases, that amount is tiny compared to the impact of red meat and dairy.
...engineers Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have found that although most foods in the U.S. are transported over long distances, the process of making the food dominates greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, they traced 83 percent of the average household's food-related footprint of greenhouse gases to the origins of the food itself. Transportation only contributes 11 percent of greenhouse gas emissions on average—with the transportation leg from producer to retailer accounting for just 4 percent.
The big culprit is, of course, cattle. Not only do they crank out vast amounts of methane (and methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2), but other aspects of the production process are also GHG intensive.
The start-to-finish process of raising and distributing red meat causes more greenhouse gas emission than any other food group, with dairy products coming in second. Animal products create the greatest amounts of nitrous oxide, emitted as a result of soil fertilization and management, because animals are inefficient at using plant energy. Producing red meat and dairy also causes the bulk of all methane emissions, which are put out by ruminant animals and manure fertilizer.
The scale is such that, for the average household, just cutting a little over a day's worth of red meat and dairy would totally balance out the buy-local effect.
Which isn't to say that buying local isn't a worthy goal - it is. But encouraging people to cut out meat and dairy is even better. Even one meatless day can have a big impact; cutting our red meat entirely would be as good, from a GHG perspective, as driving a more fuel efficient car or cutting out a couple of airplane flights.
For perspective, food accounts for 13% of every U.S. household's 60 t share of total U.S. emissions; this includes industrial and other emissions outside the home. By comparison, driving a car that gets 25 miles per gallon of gasoline for 12,000 miles per year (the U.S. average) produces about 4.4 t of CO2. Switching to a totally local diet is equivalent to driving about 1000 miles less per year, Weber says.
Another good point - ocean shipping is much more efficient than trucking. So food brought in by boat from Chile to San Francisco has a fairly low impact - better than potatoes trucked in from Idaho.
Which is good news for us, since we eat no red meat, but are addicted to mangoes and coconuts...
Successful movements are built on passion. They're built on confidence. They're built on Teddy Roosevelt's bully pulpit. They're built on critical mass and often they're built on an element of alarm that galvanizes action.
I believe the environmental movement is switching over from being powered by guilt to being powered by something much more positive, something much more dynamic, something much more capable of bringing about revolutionary change. Its image is also changing from one of hand‑wringing and whining to one that is hip, an image that is cutting edge, forceful and self‑confident and even sexy.
He whines a bit about environmentalists blocking power lines, but for the most part, it's amazing how... well, how the climate has changed. :)
He was a hell of a guy, a storyteller, singer, raconteur, and union man.
"Don't mourn, organize"
Here's a piece I did on Utah some twenty years ago...
Labour of Love Utah Phillips spreads the word – and the ashes – of Joe Hill
By Jeremy Bloom
“If you want to do something good for yourself, go to Utah and get thrown out.”
U. Utah Phillips knows from whence he speaks. In 1968, he got 6,000 votes as the Peace and Freedom Party candidate for the U.S. Senate from Utah (Eldridge Cleaver headed the national ticket as Presidential nominee). For some reason, in 1969 Phillips found himself persona non grata in Mormon Utah.
He left - and ended up becoming a nationally-know (or at least notorious) raconteur, folksinger, and Union activist with the Industrial Workers of the World – aka, “The Wobblies”.
Which was how it happened that he found himself in Washington, DC (“Or Mordor, as we like to call it”) recently, on a special mission to pick up a very unusual parcel: the ashes of Joe Hill.
For those unfamiliar with “The Ballad of Joe Hill,” or the Wobblies, Phillips is glad to explain. After all, stories and songs are his living.
“Joe Hill was executed by the state of Utah, essentially for writing songs,” he says. “He was the Wobbly Bard.”
The IWW was doing organizing up in the silver mines, and the governor of Utah had vowed to break the union. Joe, an organizer as well as a songwriter, was framed on a murder charge and executed.
His final wish: that he be cremated and his ashes scattered in every state but Utah. He is also reputed to have asked his friends to get his body over the state line into Wyoming, so he wouldn’t “be caught dead in Utah.”
(This is trademark Utah Philips: Tell ‘em a story, make ‘em laugh, and then slip in the message.) Joe’s last request to his friends has become famous: “Don’t mourn, organize”.
It was that business about scattering his ashes, though.
“An extraordinary experience, you know, to have Joe’s ashes in my hand,” he said, simply. “They were so kind to me. The woman down at the National Archive was a mole back in the inner recesses, by name Aloha South. She’d been there 27 years. The ashes were in a little ceramic jar. And there was the torn envelope.”
But what were the ashes of Joe Hill doing in the National Archive? With Aloha South’s help, Phillips was able to piece together the story of the lost, lonely packet.
“We were in the first world war in 1917, and there was a big red scare,” he said. “They passed the Espionage Act June 15, 1917, and the FBI, through the Postmaster General, sent out the word to postmasters all over the country. They got in the habit of taking anything they thought looked suspicious and sending it to the FBI.”
Joe's ashes were parceled out into 47 packets for mailing to to the various states. But one of the packets became torn during the mailing, and the suspicious Chicago postmaster alerted the Feds. Perhaps it was illegal to mail an anarchist over a state line…
The ashes found their way into the National Archive in 1944. Their existence was common knowledge in the archive, but the world outside didn’t find out until last year, when the catalogue was published, and someone noticed and notified the IWW. The last of Joe was rescued from a bureaucratic burial, which left the question: What do with him?
“I really think the ashes ought to go to the farm workers in California”, was Phillips’ opinion. “That’s a living struggle with a superb record, consistent with what Joe and the IWW is about.”
Actually, he had another idea… inspired when an old-timer came up at a concert and asked, "Could you do a couple of lines of ‘Joe Hill’?"
“Well,” said Utah, laughing through his grey Santa Claus beard, "we could get a mirror and a razor blade… don’t tell anyone in my union I said that. They’re a humorless bunch.”
Utah Phillips sings Joe Hill's "There is Power in The Union."
When I first heard about this idea, I thought it was dumb. With the amount of vacant land available, why bother growing food in skyscrapers? But there may be something to it.
Why build vertical farms in cities? Growing crops in a controlled environment has benefits: no animals to transfer disease through untreated waste; no massive crop failures as a result of weather-related disasters; less likelihood of genetically modified “rogue” strains entering the “natural” plant world. All food could be grown organically, without herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers, eliminating agricultural runoff. And 80 percent of the world’s population will be living in urban areas by 2050. Cities already have the density and infrastructure needed to support vertical farms, and super-green skyscrapers could supply not just food but energy, creating a truly self-sustaining environment.
I'm particularly sympathetic to the idea of being able to isolate your crops to keep out GMOs and insect pests, having spent enough time in my life picking bugs off spinach, zucchinis and apple trees. Of course, if you ever got an infestation in the kinds of monocultures they would have in these buildings, it would be game over...
Update: Kate Petersen at Politicook sends me to City Farms, a blog about Urban Agriculture (not the skyscraper kind)
It seems that nukes won't be our energy salvation, either.
A new study out of Australia points out a couple of salient facts: There's not that much Uranium available anymore, and gearing up for more power plants would just make the shortage worse. Building more plants and mining the uranium and processing it would generate - of course! - more greenhouse gases.
The researchers' basic assumption of declining uranium jibes with data from the Nuclear Energy Agency and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The agencies have put the total amount of known recoverable uranium reserves at around 3.5 million tons. That accounts for reasonably assured reserves and estimated additional reserves that can be mined at moderate costs.
At the current rate of usage -- around 67,000 tons per year -- those reserves will last for just over 50 years. And that's before any additional nuclear plants are built, reports Friends of the Earth, Australia in this analysis.
McCain is one of those proposing a whole new round of nukes - according to one estimate, even reaching a fraction of his goal, meeting 20% of US needs, would take $250 billion dollars. (And that's just to build the plants, without even addressing the issue of waste)
In contrast, SolveClimate quotes a new Department of Energy Report (PDF) that says we could get to 20% of US needs with wind power by 2030... and all for just $43 billion, the cost of four months of the Iraq war. That seems like a better deal...
Could organic farming be one of the major engines in scaling back atmospheric carbon? Rodale Institute CEO Tim LaSalle thinks so:
Simple everyday tasks, such as what food you buy, can either contribute to—or reduce—global warming. Rodale Institute research shows that organically managed soils can store (sequester) more than 1,000 pounds of carbon per acre, while non-organic systems can cause carbon loss. For consumers, this means that the simple act of buying organic products can help to reduce global climate change.
I've been fairly distant from the science fiction world the past few years, but the Hugo nominations are up and one of the short story nominees, The Cambrist and Lord Iron, is a pretty marvelous piece of work. The author, Daniel Abraham, is a fellow alum of the Clarion West Writing Workshop, as well...
A year or so ago, I was involved in a conversation, and the subject came around to the classic definition of insanity: "Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results."
I've seen it widely quoted, generally attributed to Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein. Back then I did a Google search, and found both those attributions, along with others that stated definitively that it was NOT either Franklin or Einstein. So where did it come from? I shrugged and moved on.
Until today. There was a post on Balloon Juice that once again quoted "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results," attributing it to Franklin.
I guess Wikiquotes has gotten on the case in the time since I last explored this, because someone in the comments was able to direct us to the answer... In fact, the line comes from Rita Mae Brown, in her mystery novel Sudden Death (Bantam Books, New York, 1983, p. 68).
Franklin is one of those classic American "wise men" (ie: Jefferson, Lincoln, Twain) to whom many "pithy" statements often get attributed; attributions without a verifiable source should be treated with some skepticism (Wikiquotes)
So, now we know! Of course, I can't resist noting that once again, lazy intellectuals forget the name of a smart woman and transfer her wisdom to dead white males....
Ben Stein has a new movie. It's a documentary, sort of, about intelligent design (ID) theory. Cleverly, they're calling it "Expelled" (see, it's a riff on the expulsion from paradise, while whining that the poor ID scientists are being unfairly expelled from intellectual circles - and jobs at academic journals - just because they're propounding "science" that violates every tenet of what science stands for.
Oh, wait. That's not quite the way they put it... according to a review in Scientific American, the main issue was how a pro-ID paper get published in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington without peer review. According to Managing Editor Richard Sternberg, "it was my prerogative to choose the editor who would work directly on the paper, and as I was best qualified among the editors, I chose myself.")
According to Sternberg, "after the publication of the Meyer article the climate changed from being chilly to being outright hostile. Shunned, yes, and discredited." As a result, Sternberg filed a claim against the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) for being "targeted for retaliation and harassment" for his religious beliefs. "I was viewed as an intellectual terrorist," he tells Stein. In August 2005 his claim was rejected. According to Jonathan Coddington, his supervisor at the NMNH, Sternberg was not discriminated against, was never dismissed, and in fact was not even a paid employee, but just an unpaid research associate who had completed his three-year term!
One thing we can do right away about climate change: DO NOT adopt the current version of the farm bill.
How bad is it?
What can we citizens expect if the proposed $300-billion farm bill is signed into law? Federally subsidized feed -- corn, soybeans and cottonseed -- for animal factory farms that spread disease, greenhouse gases and dangerous working conditions wherever they set up shop... The continuation of America's obesity campaign, which ensures the cheapest and most widely available foods are made up of such high-calorie ingredients as high-fructose corn syrup, refined flours, saturated fats and unhealthy meat and dairy products. And more federally backed exports of California's water -- in the form of cotton and rice, mostly sold overseas.
Ironically, when Gingrich's radical free-market Republicans took office in 1994, the bloated farm bill of the day was one of their prime targets. They put together a package that was supposed to increase subsidies temporarily to wean farmers off Uncle Sam's bloated teat.
You can guess how well that worked. Once the subsidy increases were in place, no-one had the political courage to actually do the weaning. The next time the farm bill came up was right after 9/11, and agribusiness used National Security as a catch-all excuse for even BIGGER subsidies (we must secure our food supply!).
Now, with food prices soaring to the highest levels in decades, nobody really thinks farmers need subsidies. But that's not stopping agribusiness from demanding them. And unless we do something, it looks like once again, they're going to get them. It's a great deal. They spread $80 million around in campaign contributions and lobbying costs, and in exchange they get billions and billions of taxpayer dollars.
One of the favorite arguments of the Climate Change Deniers is that we don't have any effect on Earth's climate - it's mostly the sun.
So it's big news when Lancaster University scientists report "there has been no significant link... in the last 20 years." Scientists have produced further compelling evidence showing that modern-day climate change is not caused by changes in the Sun's activity...
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its vast assessment of climate science last year, concluded that since temperatures began rising rapidly in the 1970s, the contribution of humankind's greenhouse gas emissions has outweighed that of solar variability by a factor of about 13 to one.
According to Terry Sloan, the message coming from his research is simple.
"We tried to corroborate Svensmark's hypothesis, but we could not; as far as we can see, he has no reason to challenge the IPCC - the IPCC has got it right.
Yellowstone is changing, as warmer weather encourages Canada Thistle to move in. Pocket gophers feed on the roots, and grizzlies feed on both the roots and the pocket gophers.
As climate change alters ecosystems, Dr. Crabtree said, “the winners are going to be the adaptive foragers, like grizzlies that eat everything from ants to moose, and the losers are going to be specialized species that can’t adapt.”
He said one specialized declining species was the long-tailed weasel. It feeds primarily on voles, which are also declining. The changes in the Lamar Valley might point to a new approach for invasive species, which are overwhelming many natural systems. “Invasives are the single biggest threat to biodiversity,” Dr. Crabtree said.
In another example of species shift, ecosystems are moving higher and higher up the mountains of Vermont as the climate warms:
We resurveyed forest plots established in 1964 along elevation transects in the Green Mountains (Vermont) to examine whether a shift had occurred in the location of the northern hardwood–boreal forest ecotone (NBE) from 1964 to 2004. We found a 19% increase in dominance of northern hardwoods from 70% in 1964 to 89% in 2004 in the lower half of the NBE... Our results indicate that high-elevation forests may be jeopardized by climate change sooner than anticipated.
Although it's been a particularly cold winter (thanks to a strong La Nina system in the Pacific), arctic ice is thinner and younger than ever before (no surprise, since we had a record melt last summer).
According to Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as ice ages it continues to grow and thicken, so that older ice is generally also thicker ice. This winter the ice cover is much thinner overall and thus in a more vulnerable state heading into the summer melt season.
"It's becoming thinner and thinner and much more susceptible to melting during the summer - much more likely to melt away. It may look OK on the surface, but it's like looking at a Hollywood movie set - you see the facade of a building and it looks OK, but if you look behind it, there's no building there," said Meier.
Wind power has been part of the energy landscape for thousands of years. But in the nuclear era, it was viewed as quaint - “Tilting at windmills” became a metaphor for fighting hopeless battles against the forces of change. Mind you, Helix Wind of San Diego does come off a bit quixotic in their corporate philosophy: “Freedom is at the heart of our values – energy independence and autonomy – a freedom fueled by a resource that never runs out. The wind.”
But this ain’t Cervantes’ windmill. Not only is their Savonius more efficient, simpler to set up and less expensive to buy than your average model - it’s also flipping gorgeous. When I saw this sleek, nautilus spiral at the Wired NextFest, it took my breath away.
The key to the design: vertical orientation, which eliminates a lot of traditional windmill issues. When folks apply for zoning variances to install wind power, they’re nearly always battled by neighbors who say (quite rightly) that windmills are ugly, noisy, obtrusive, and dangerous to birds and other wildlife.
All of those problems are eliminated in the Savonius. Instead of horizontal propeller-like blades with tips that spin at very high speed (noisy!), and must therefore be set very high above the ground (dangerous!), the Savonius spins vertically, with no more noise than wind blowing through the trees, on a pole (no tower) that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Oh, bird-lovers should note that at the low speeds the Savonius spins, you never have to worry about it taking on that translucent look that encourages birds to try to fly through it…
The Savonius currently comes in two configurations: 1 kw for residential applications, which stands 9’ feet tall by 4’ feet in diameter (2.74m x 1.21m). The commercial turbine, the Helix 2 kw measures 12’ feet in height by 4’ feet in diameter, (3.6m x 1.21m).
And there are rebates - if you live in California, the state will cover up to 77 percent of the cost; other states are coming on board, as well. Helix Wind even has a calculator function on the website to help you work out the financials.
But we shouldn’t worry about such Philistine considerations… what, after all, is the true price of beauty?
There’s been a growing awareness of indoor air quality, with the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM) estimating that 10 percent of Americans are directly allergic to mold.That’s about 30 million people who can potentially be sickened just by walking into a building. Mold is an even bigger concern for at-risk populations, like children (it’s estimated that mold exposure doubles a child’s chance of developing asthma), the elderly, or those already sick.
It turns out mold’s major foothold comes in wallboard, and in particular the organic paper cladding, which in damp environments can provide the perfect home for mold to thrive in. This is why the Oakland children’s hospital went with DensArmor Plus paperless drywall from Georgia Pacific.
Instead of paper, the panels feature a glass-mat surface on both the front and back, plus additional moisture-resistance features. DensArmor Plus® scored a 10, the highest level of performance for mold resistance, under ASTM D 3273 testing.
The panels are recommended for all interior uses, but are especially useful in environments that might be exposed to moisture, including bathrooms, kitchens, and basements, in both residential and commercial settings. And moisture can be a problem anywhere: Georgia Pacific points out that “In today’s tightly sealed structures, inner wall cavities present ideal growth opportunities for mold, simply because of the moisture concentration, the lack of air circulation and the temperature differential from one side of the wall to the other. Thus, mold’s greatest potential for growth is out of sight.”
There are a couple of additional benefits. Because of its low emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), DensArmor Plus® is the first, and so far the only, gypsum drywall to be GREENGUARD Indoor Air Quality Certified®. It also received GREENGUARD Children & Schools Certification, for a product that can help reduce exposure of schoolchildren to indoor air pollutants, which means use of DensArmor Plus® gives LEED certification points two separate ways in school construction.
Another benefit: it’s so moisture-resistant that Georgia Pacific offers a 90-day in-place warranty against exposure damage, meaning wallboard can start going up even before the building is completely closed in. Imagine how much help that can be on a tight construction schedule!
The word has been trickling out that the latest attempt by big energy to jump on the green bandwagon is, in fact, an environmental disaster.
Via Kevin Drum, biofuels guru Mike O'Hare says recent studies have shown that, once you take all the factors into account, corn-based ethanol and similar fuels actually dump much more CO2 into the environment.
There is now more than good reason to expect that no biofuel from seeds, possibly none (even cellulosic) grown on land that could grow food, will reduce global warming if substituted for petroleum products...
(There's more...) The first piece of the puzzle is the recognition that if a piece of forest is cut down, or natural grassland plowed up, to grow biofuel, decay and/or burning of what was there before releases an enormous puff of carbon into the atmosphere that needs to be counted along with the carbon releases of the biofuel crop. Even spreading the initial release over decades of biofuel growing, it is large enough to push almost any biofuel's global warming intensity way above that of gasoline, especially because it all occurs right at the beginning of the future rather than a few years or decades down the line...
Small amounts of diesel and ethanol will probably be available from trash and agricultural waste like the tree branches and bark scraps the logging industry leaves around to decay, or cornstalks, or McDonald's used frying oil, and these are environmentally OK because they don't induce land use conversion....And many smart folks in this business expect that algae growing in tanks in the desert (for example) can eventually be taught to make a lot of diesel cheap, with no land use implications. But for now, and for a while, biofuels generally are going over a very rough patch of road, a patch that may go on for years before new technologies smooths it out again.
It looks like the writers strike is over. Niki Fink reports (extensively!) at DeadlineHollywood:
At the WGA's news conference today, union leaders declared the new contract is "a huge victory for us". Trumpeted WGAW President Patric Verrone, "This is the first time we actually got a better deal in a new media than previously." Verrone credited News Corp. No. 2 Peter Chernin and Disney chief Bob Iger, and also CBS boss Les Moonves, with "being instrumental in making this deal happen" after the WGA spent 3 months "getting nowhere" with the AMPTP negotiators and lawyers. WGA negotiating committee chief John Bowman added that, "What happened to the Golden Globes was instrumental in getting the CEOs to this table. It was a huge symbol." Bowman said it was "imperative" that the WGA "get in on the ground floor of New Media. Henceforth, we're in from the start. It's 2% of distributor's gross. They can't have a business model without taking that into account."
(There's more...) Verrone said, "Since we began negotiations in July, we've been saying, 'If they get paid, we get paid.' This contract makes that a reality. It's the best deal this Guild has bargained for in 30 years after the most successful strike this Guild has waged in 35 years. It was arguably the most successful strike in the American labor movement in a decade, clearly the most important of this young century. It is not all that we hoped for, and not all that we deserved. But as I told our members, this strike was about the future, and this deal assures for us and for future generations of writers a share in the future..."
Verrone said it was "heartbreaking for me personally" to drop the WGA's demands relating to reality and animation (Verrone is an animation writer) "But it was more important that we make a deal that benefitted the membership and the town as a whole and got people back to work." Verrone stated that "The legacy of the '88 strike was the ability of the companies to develop content without writers and creators. The legacy of this strike will be the ability of writers and creators to develop content without the companies. We are making deals, and we will continue to make deals, with Google, Yahoo, and others beyond just the 7 conglomerates."
First, it was the flashlight you charged up by shaking it a few times. Never again to frantically search for batteries by candlelight when the power goes out...
Now, scientists at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University are developing a knee-brace that charges up electronics as you walk.
Max Donelan's team's work has spawned a startup called Bionic Power, which has received seed investment but no rounds of venture capital. Donelan told Wired.com that their initial markets were "people whose lives depend on portable power." These off-grid power users include backwoods hikers and the military, which is always looking for ways to reduce energy usage. Donelan called soldier battery use "astonishing," noting that soldiers can pack 30 pounds of batteries for a 24-hour mission. All those batteries add up to an equally astonishing $57,000 per soldier per year in battery costs.
They've got a video up explaining the core technology... worth checking out.
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