Beef is the worst.

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...

Yes We Can

A leader we can believe in.

Gov Schwarzenegger at the Yale Climate Change Conference

The Governator says Environmentalism is sexy:

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. :)

Utah Phillips, 1935-2008

Utah Phillips has passed away.

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."

30-story urban farms?

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)

Mark Bittman: What's wrong with what we eat

Mark Bittman, who blogs and writes for that paper in New York, talks about the food situation.

Rant of the week

"It is not enough to simply question authority. You've gotta speak with it, too."

Bad news for Nuclear Proponents

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...

Organic Farming Sequesters Carbon

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.

Watch the whole interview...

The Cambist and Lord Iron

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...

The Definition of Insanity: Identified!

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....

Un-intelligent design

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!

Oh.

And it gets worse from there. Read the whole thing....

Disastrous Farm Bill

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.

Al Gore on Climate Change at TED

Al Gore gives yet another great talk on climate change...

Disproving Climate Deniers: It's not the sun

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.

As climate warms, species shift

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.

Arctic Sea Ice - More Bad News

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.

Tilting Windmills

(Cross-posted from 3rings)

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?

Paperless Gypsum Board?

(Crossposted at 3rings)

Who wants to breathe mold?

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!

Biofuels: "Worse than we thought"

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.