The impact of meat on global warming

Time magazine has a great article on how meat makes global warming worse:

In a 2006 report, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concluded that worldwide livestock farming generates 18% of the planet's greenhouse gas emissions — by comparison, all the world's cars, trains, planes and boats account for a combined 13% of greenhouse gas emissions.

I've written a few things on my experiment with complete meatlessness, and how one of my motivations is the environmental impact of raising cattle. As of a few months ago, I started eating white meat again. I never plan to eat pork or beef again regularly, although there will probably be times when I'm trapped somewhere and all they offer is BBQ or something. On the ethics, I suppose I just don't think that birds have the same sort of conscious awareness as mammals like pigs and cows do.

Call me a bleeding heart liberal

Go ahead. Call me a bleeding heart liberal if you want to. But supporting this grotesque mockery of "sport" -- shooting wolves from airplanes -- is just abominable. And Palin supports it.

There's hunting for food then there's bloodsport. I'm all for the 2nd Am protecting gun rights and all, as well as reasonable hunting laws. However, these beautiful animals are viciously tortured, not cleanly and painlessly killed for any good purpose.

That's ignoring all the other reasons to vote against the McCain-Palin ticket.

Time mag. asks, and I answer: Palin = disaster

Barack says that Bristol Palin's teenage pregnancy is off-limits:

MONROE, Michigan (CNN) – Barack Obama told reporters firmly that families are off-limits in this campaign, reacting to news that Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant.

“Let me be as clear as possible,” said Obama, “I think people’s families are off-limits and people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a vice president.”

Obama said reporters should “back off these kinds of stories” and noted that he was born to an 18 year-old mother.

“How a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn't be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off-limits.”

The Illinois senator became aggravated when asked about rumors on liberal blogs speculating that Palin’s fifth child - Trig - is actually her daughter Bristol’s. A Reuters report Monday quotes a senior McCain aide saying that Obama’s name is in some of posts, “in a way that certainly juxtaposes themselves against their 'campaign of change,’”

“I am offended by that statement,” Obama shot back, not letting the reporter finish his question. “There is no evidence at all that any of this involved us.”

“We don’t go after people’s families,” Obama said. “We don’t get them involved in the politics. It’s not appropriate and it’s not relevant. Our people were not involved in any way in this and they will not be. And if I ever thought that there was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that, they’d be fired.”

Although McCain's campaign insists that they knew about this, I remain skeptical, not the least reason being that they're now sending an army of lawyers to Alaska to try to contain this...which is something they should've done beforehand. Time magazine asks whether McCain's pick was "bold or disastrous?" I think that answer is becoming more clear. Let's have a run-down of the woman's baggage:

1. Late addition: She was a member of a fringe Alaskan political group that seeks its independence from the US, and was involved in their 2008 conference
   
2. Late addition: It looks like independent voters are seeing through the nonsense
   
3. She had a shotgun wedding as she got pregnant with her first kid out of wedlock
4. Her husband was arrested on a DWI
5. She's a staunch "abstinence-only" advocate whose teenage daughter got pregnant, the political fallout from which is still to be determined
   
6. Troopergate: She used her authority as governor to try to have her sister's ex-husband fired, then fired his boss when the boss refused, then lied about it [apparently the ex-husband was a dickhead, but the last two points are more important here]
7. She claimed in her first public appearance as VP candidate that she opposed the "Bridge to Nowhere" but this turns out to be a lie, and a bad one, at that
8. She claims to have opposed corruption in Alaska, but said that calling for Ted Stevens resignation would be "premature" after his arrest and received his endorsement, which she paid to run as an ad
9. She directed Ted Stevens' 527 group on his behalf and appeared with him in July after his indictment to appeal for him politically
10. A few months ago, she claims to have no idea what the VP does everyday
    
11. In a 2006 gubenatorial questionaire, she said that she opposed abortions for incest and rape, only giving an exception if it could be proven that the mother might die from childbirth. The Religious Right loves her. Re-read that.
12. From the same source, and many others, she claims that teaching creationism in science classes is the way to go, "teach both."
    
13. On the same anti-science note, she is a global warming denialist
14. She is to the right of McCain on drilling in ANWR, protecting polar bears and protecting the environment in general (yet another anti-science Republican)
15. On the same line of reasoning, she semi-opposed the surge in Iraq, hailed as one of the only things that McCain has not failed at in the past decade or so
16. There is zero national security experience involved in being governor, so quit repeating the "commander-in-chief of the national guard" line. Campbell Brown stumped Tucker Bounds today (H/T: Kos) who tried to equivocate on this -- she didn't command troops to go to Iraq. Not even close. I'm the "commander-in-chief" of my classroom, but that doesn't make me an education policy wonk.
    
17. She is clearly and unequivocally unqualified to be president should something happen to McCain, the oldest presidential candidate ever nominated for a first term whose four bouts with cancer should make everyone think twice

Go Obama-Biden '08! (pic source)

Meatlessness

Yesterday, Kristof of the NYT wrote a column about animal rights:

So, yes, I eat meat (even, hesitantly, goose). But I draw the line at animals being raised in cruel conditions. The law punishes teenage boys who tie up and abuse a stray cat. So why allow industrialists to run factory farms that keep pigs almost all their lives in tiny pens that are barely bigger than they are?

Defining what is cruel is, of course, extraordinarily difficult. But penning pigs or veal calves so tightly that they cannot turn around seems to cross that line.

More broadly, the tide of history is moving toward the protection of animal rights, and the brutal conditions in which they are sometimes now raised will eventually be banned. Someday, vegetarianism may even be the norm.

Perhaps it seems like soggy sentimentality as well as hypocrisy to stand up for animal rights, particularly when I enjoy dining on these same animals. But my view was shaped by those days in the barn as a kid, scrambling after geese I gradually came to admire.

So I’ll enjoy the barbecues this summer, but I’ll also know that every hamburger patty has a back story, and that every tin of goose liver pâté could tell its own rich tale of love and loyalty.

His colleague, Mark Bittman, gave a talk at TED that had a lot more moral force behind it:

I went for about a year eating very, very little meat. I gained a lot of weight. Although I wasn't 100% strict, since I would partake of fish and seafood on occasion, I certainly felt good about my decision. When people asked me why I was a vegetarian, I told them three reasons:

1. ethics -- I don't like to cause animals to suffer; they feel pain just like we do
2. health -- studies have been done showing that a plant-based diet is very good for your ticker, while red meat has been clearly linked to cancer and heart disease
   
3. the environment -- the amount of our resources diverted to raising animals for food is vast, and the efficiency of this system is low, compared to directly growing plants for human consumption

Now, none of those three things changes whether or not you choose to be a vegetarian, however, after reading Kristof I don't see how he can make the arguments he makes with a straight face while admitting to eating meat. He talks about the increasing role and rectitude of animal rights, and how his own experiences on a farm support that, but then admits to enjoying burgers and goose liver.

I guess it's like religion: they preach perfection while admitting to being imperfect with a straight face.

Back to me for a moment, this summer I've started eating some poultry again. For one thing, I am getting really tired of what we eat; for another thing, I've gotten really fat. Part of the problem is just eating too many damned carbs, but I think the bigger problem for me is the feeling of being full. High-protein foods are very filling to me, while low-protein foods leave my stomach rumbling an hour later.

Unlike Kristof, I'll not preach it if I'm not practicing it, but I don't know how much I did before.

The big issue for me is getting people to wake up to the environmental impact of raising cattle, but I am afraid that won't happen any time soon.

The impacts of climate change on food prices

Paul Krugman writes today about the high prices of food, which severely injure poor people at home and denizens of third-world countries abroad. He mentioned in his article a few of the major points about how this has come to pass:

1. rising Chinese other foreign economies are producing a booming middle class, raising the demand for meat, which in turn lessens the availability of grain and corn for direct human consumption (something I've covered here and here)
2. this same factor (rising global incomes) has led to an increase in demand for oil, and oil prices directly affect food prices due to fertilizer, diesel fuel, preservation and transportation costs
3. biofuels like corn ethanol provide huge incentives for farmers to move away from other foodstuffs and raise the price of those commodities, even though biofuels are not a climate change solution in any real sense (see here, and I've provided the full-text of that article below)
4. climate change has caused severe droughts, and is itself exacerbated by the aforementioned problems (1-3), as more people clearcut forest to meet the demands for new cattle pastures, arable land and new acres of corn ethanol for biofuels
   

Even though he includes biofuels in his energy policy proposals, I am hopeful that Barack will wake up to these realities about ethanol and take serious action to reverse the issues discussed above.

Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008
The Clean Energy Scam
By Michael Grunwald

From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the "savannization" of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it's going to get worse fast. "It gives me goose bumps," says Carter, who founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. "It's like witnessing a rape."

The Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It's been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it's released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Carter is not a man who gets easily spooked--he led a reconnaissance unit in Desert Storm, and I watched him grab a small anaconda with his bare hands in Brazil--but he can sound downright panicky about the future of the forest. "You can't protect it. There's too much money to be made tearing it down," he says. "Out here on the frontier, you really see the market at work."

This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.

Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they're serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol--ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter--in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil's filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group. Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class.

But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.

Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.'s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn't exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.

Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.

Backed by billions in investment capital, this alarming phenomenon is replicating itself around the world. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world's top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it's running out of uncultivated land. But most of the damage created by biofuels will be less direct and less obvious. In Brazil, for instance, only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels most Brazilian cars. More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it's subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon. It's the remorseless economics of commodities markets. "The price of soybeans goes up," laments Sandro Menezes, a biologist with Conservation International in Brazil, "and the forest comes down."

Deforestation accounts for 20% of all current carbon emissions. So unless the world can eliminate emissions from all other sources--cars, power plants, factories, even flatulent cows--it needs to reduce deforestation or risk an environmental catastrophe. That means limiting the expansion of agriculture, a daunting task as the world's population keeps expanding. And saving forests is probably an impossibility so long as vast expanses of cropland are used to grow modest amounts of fuel. The biofuels boom, in short, is one that could haunt the planet for generations--and it's only getting started.

Why the Amazon Is on Fire

This destructive biofuel dynamic is on vivid display in Brazil, where a Rhode Island--size chunk of the Amazon was deforested in the second half of 2007 and even more was degraded by fire. Some scientists believe fires are now altering the local microclimate and could eventually reduce the Amazon to a savanna or even a desert. "It's approaching a tipping point," says ecologist Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center.

I spent a day in the Amazon with the Kamayura tribe, which has been forced by drought to replant its crops five times this year. The tribesmen I met all complained about hacking coughs and stinging eyes from the constant fires and the disappearance of the native plants they use for food, medicine and rituals. The Kamayura had virtually no contact with whites until the 1960s; now their forest is collapsing around them. Their chief, Kotok, a middle-aged man with an easy smile and Three Stooges hairdo that belie his fierce authority, believes that's no coincidence. "We are people of the forest, and the whites are destroying our home," says Kotok, who wore a ceremonial beaded belt, a digital watch, a pair of flip-flops and nothing else. "It's all because of money."

Kotok knows nothing about biofuels. He's more concerned about his tribe's recent tendency to waste its precious diesel-powered generator watching late-night soap operas. But he's right. Deforestation can be a complex process; for example, land reforms enacted by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have attracted slash-and-burn squatters to the forest, and "use it or lose it" incentives have spurred some landowners to deforest to avoid redistribution.

The basic problem is that the Amazon is worth more deforested than it is intact. Carter, who fell in love with the region after marrying a Brazilian and taking over her father's ranch, says the rate of deforestation closely tracks commodity prices on the Chicago Board of Trade. "It's just exponential right now because the economics are so good," he says. "Everything tillable or grazeable is gouged out and cleared."

That the destruction is taking place in Brazil is sadly ironic, given that the nation is also an exemplar of the allure of biofuels. Sugar growers here have a greener story to tell than do any other biofuel producers. They provide 45% of Brazil's fuel (all cars in the country are able to run on ethanol) on only 1% of its arable land. They've reduced fertilizer use while increasing yields, and they convert leftover biomass into electricity. Marcos Jank, the head of their trade group, urges me not to lump biofuels together: "Grain is good for bread, not for cars. But sugar is different." Jank expects production to double by 2015 with little effect on the Amazon. "You'll see the expansion on cattle pastures and the Cerrado," he says.

So far, he's right. There isn't much sugar in the Amazon. But my next stop was the Cerrado, south of the Amazon, an ecological jewel in its own right. The Amazon gets the ink, but the Cerrado is the world's most biodiverse savanna, with 10,000 species of plants, nearly half of which are found nowhere else on earth, and more mammals than the African bush. In the natural Cerrado, I saw toucans and macaws, puma tracks and a carnivorous flower that lures flies by smelling like manure. The Cerrado's trees aren't as tall or dense as the Amazon's, so they don't store as much carbon, but the region is three times the size of Texas, so it stores its share.

At least it did, before it was transformed by the march of progress--first into pastures, then into sugarcane and soybean fields. In one field I saw an array of ovens cooking trees into charcoal, spewing Cerrado's carbon into the atmosphere; those ovens used to be ubiquitous, but most of the trees are gone. I had to travel hours through converted Cerrado to see a 96-acre (39 hectare) sliver of intact Cerrado, where a former shopkeeper named Lauro Barbosa had spent his life savings for a nature preserve. "The land prices are going up, up, up," Barbosa told me. "My friends say I'm a fool, and my wife almost divorced me. But I wanted to save something before it's all gone."

The environmental cost of this cropland creep is now becoming apparent. One groundbreaking new study in Science concluded that when this deforestation effect is taken into account, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel produce about twice the emissions of gasoline. Sugarcane ethanol is much cleaner, and biofuels created from waste products that don't gobble up land have real potential, but even cellulosic ethanol increases overall emissions when its plant source is grown on good cropland. "People don't want to believe renewable fuels could be bad," says the lead author, Tim Searchinger, a Princeton scholar and former Environmental Defense attorney. "But when you realize we're tearing down rain forests that store loads of carbon to grow crops that store much less carbon, it becomes obvious."

The growing backlash against biofuels is a product of the law of unintended consequences. It may seem obvious now that when biofuels increase demand for crops, prices will rise and farms will expand into nature. But biofuel technology began on a small scale, and grain surpluses were common. Any ripples were inconsequential. When the scale becomes global, the outcome is entirely different, which is causing cheerleaders for biofuels to recalibrate. "We're all looking at the numbers in an entirely new way," says the Natural Resources Defense Council's Nathanael Greene, whose optimistic "Growing Energy" report in 2004 helped galvanize support for biofuels among green groups.

Several of the most widely cited experts on the environmental benefits of biofuels are warning about the environmental costs now that they've recognized the deforestation effect. "The situation is a lot more challenging than a lot of us thought," says University of California, Berkeley, professor Alexander Farrell, whose 2006 Science article calculating the emissions reductions of various ethanols used to be considered the definitive analysis. The experts haven't given up on biofuels; they're calling for better biofuels that won't trigger massive carbon releases by displacing wildland. Robert Watson, the top scientist at the U.K.'s Department for the Environment, recently warned that mandating more biofuel usage--as the European Union is proposing--would be "insane" if it increases greenhouse gases. But the forces that biofuels have unleashed--political, economic, social--may now be too powerful to constrain.

America the Bio-Foolish

The best place to see this is America's biofuel mecca: Iowa. Last year fewer than 2% of U.S. gas stations offered ethanol, and the country produced 7 billion gal. (26.5 billion L) of biofuel, which cost taxpayers at least $8 billion in subsidies. But on Nov. 6, at a biodiesel plant in Newton, Iowa, Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled an eye-popping plan that would require all stations to offer ethanol by 2017 while mandating 60 billion gal. (227 billion L) by 2030. "This is the fuel for a much brighter future!" she declared. Barack Obama immediately criticized her--not for proposing such an expansive plan but for failing to support ethanol before she started trolling for votes in Iowa's caucuses.

If biofuels are the new dotcoms, Iowa is Silicon Valley, with 53,000 jobs and $1.8 billion in income dependent on the industry. The state has so many ethanol distilleries under construction that it's poised to become a net importer of corn. That's why biofuel-pandering has become virtually mandatory for presidential contenders. John McCain was the rare candidate who vehemently opposed ethanol as an outrageous agribusiness boondoggle, which is why he skipped Iowa in 2000. But McCain learned his lesson in time for this year's caucuses. By 2006 he was calling ethanol a "vital alternative energy source."

Members of Congress love biofuels too, not only because so many dream about future Iowa caucuses but also because so few want to offend the farm lobby, the most powerful force behind biofuels on Capitol Hill. Ethanol isn't about just Iowa or even the Midwest anymore. Plants are under construction in New York, Georgia, Oregon and Texas, and the ethanol boom's effect on prices has helped lift farm incomes to record levels nationwide.

Someone is paying to support these environmentally questionable industries: you. In December, President Bush signed a bipartisan energy bill that will dramatically increase support to the industry while mandating 36 billion gal. (136 billion L) of biofuel by 2022. This will provide a huge boost to grain markets.

Why is so much money still being poured into such a misguided enterprise? Like the scientists and environmentalists, many politicians genuinely believe biofuels can help decrease global warming. It makes intuitive sense: cars emit carbon no matter what fuel they burn, but the process of growing plants for fuel sucks some of that carbon out of the atmosphere. For years, the big question was whether those reductions from carbon sequestration outweighed the "life cycle" of carbon emissions from farming, converting the crops to fuel and transporting the fuel to market. Researchers eventually concluded that yes, biofuels were greener than gasoline. The improvements were only about 20% for corn ethanol because tractors, petroleum-based fertilizers and distilleries emitted lots of carbon. But the gains approached 90% for more efficient fuels, and advocates were confident that technology would progressively increase benefits.

There was just one flaw in the calculation: the studies all credited fuel crops for sequestering carbon, but no one checked whether the crops would ultimately replace vegetation and soils that sucked up even more carbon. It was as if the science world assumed biofuels would be grown in parking lots. The deforestation of Indonesia has shown that's not the case. It turns out that the carbon lost when wilderness is razed overwhelms the gains from cleaner-burning fuels. A study by University of Minnesota ecologist David Tilman concluded that it will take more than 400 years of biodiesel use to "pay back" the carbon emitted by directly clearing peat lands to grow palm oil; clearing grasslands to grow corn for ethanol has a payback period of 93 years. The result is that biofuels increase demand for crops, which boosts prices, which drives agricultural expansion, which eats forests. Searchinger's study concluded that overall, corn ethanol has a payback period of about 167 years because of the deforestation it triggers.

Not every kernel of corn diverted to fuel will be replaced. Diversions raise food prices, so the poor will eat less. That's the reason a U.N. food expert recently called agrofuels a "crime against humanity." Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute says that biofuels pit the 800 million people with cars against the 800 million people with hunger problems. Four years ago, two University of Minnesota researchers predicted the ranks of the hungry would drop to 625 million by 2025; last year, after adjusting for the inflationary effects of biofuels, they increased their prediction to 1.2 billion.

Industry advocates say that as farms increase crop yields, as has happened throughout history, they won't need as much land. They'll use less energy, and they'll use farm waste to generate electricity. To which Searchinger says: Wonderful! But growing fuel is still an inefficient use of good cropland. Strange as it sounds, we're better off growing food and drilling for oil. Sure, we should conserve fuel and buy efficient cars, but we should keep filling them with gas if the alternatives are dirtier.

The lesson behind the math is that on a warming planet, land is an incredibly precious commodity, and every acre used to generate fuel is an acre that can't be used to generate the food needed to feed us or the carbon storage needed to save us. Searchinger acknowledges that biofuels can be a godsend if they don't use arable land. Possible feedstocks include municipal trash, agricultural waste, algae and even carbon dioxide, although none of the technologies are yet economical on a large scale. Tilman even holds out hope for fuel crops--he's been experimenting with Midwestern prairie grasses--as long as they're grown on "degraded lands" that can no longer support food crops or cattle.

Changing the Incentives

That's certainly not what's going on in Brazil. There's a frontier feel to the southern Amazon right now. Gunmen go by names like Lizard and Messiah, and Carter tells harrowing stories about decapitations and castrations and hostages. Brazil has remarkably strict environmental laws--in the Amazon, landholders are permitted to deforest only 20% of their property--but there's not much law enforcement. I left Kotok to see Blairo Maggi, who is not only the soybean king of the world, with nearly half a million acres (200,000 hectares) in the province of Mato Grosso, but also the region's governor. "It's like your Wild West right now," Maggi says. "There's no money for enforcement, so people do what they want."

Maggi has been a leading pioneer on the Brazilian frontier, and it irks him that critics in the U.S.--which cleared its forests and settled its frontier 125 years ago but still provides generous subsidies to its farmers--attack him for doing the same thing except without subsidies and with severe restrictions on deforestation. Imagine Iowa farmers agreeing to keep 80%--or even 20%--of their land in native prairie grass. "You make us sound like bandits," Maggi tells me. "But we want to achieve what you achieved in America. We have the same dreams for our families. Are you afraid of the competition?"

Maggi got in trouble recently for saying he'd rather feed a child than save a tree, but he's come to recognize the importance of the forest. "Now I want to feed a child and save a tree," he says with a grin. But can he do all that and grow fuel for the world as well? "Ah, now you've hit the nail on the head." Maggi says the biofuel boom is making him richer, but it's also making it harder to feed children and save trees. "There are many mouths to feed, and nobody's invented a chip to create protein without growing crops," says his pal Homero Pereira, a congressman who is also the head of Mato Grosso's farm bureau. "If you don't want us to tear down the forest, you better pay us to leave it up!"

Everyone I interviewed in Brazil agreed: the market drives behavior, so without incentives to prevent deforestation, the Amazon is doomed. It's unfair to ask developing countries not to develop natural areas without compensation. Anyway, laws aren't enough. Carter tried confronting ranchers who didn't obey deforestation laws and nearly got killed; now his nonprofit is developing certification programs to reward eco-sensitive ranchers. "People see the forest as junk," he says. "If you want to save it, you better open your pocketbook. Plus, you might not get shot."

The trouble is that even if there were enough financial incentives to keep the Amazon intact, high commodity prices would encourage deforestation elsewhere. And government mandates to increase biofuel production are going to boost commodity prices, which will only attract more investment. Until someone invents that protein chip, it's going to mean the worst of everything: higher food prices, more deforestation and more emissions.

Advocates are always careful to point out that biofuels are only part of the solution to global warming, that the world also needs more energy-efficient lightbulbs and homes and factories and lifestyles. And the world does need all those things. But the world is still going to be fighting an uphill battle until it realizes that right now, biofuels aren't part of the solution at all. They're part of the problem.

I am not a climate change fearmonger, but I grow increasingly concerned about my and my children's futures the more that I learn and see...

Wastewater Gumshoes 2, Pharma Water

Popular Science has a great article that forms a natural sequel to an article that I wrote about over two years ago (time flies) in Analytical Chemistry about how investigators are using wastewater (sewage) in measuring the concentrations of pharmaceutical and illegal drug byproducts and metabolites to gauge the drug usage by populations. As expected, the actual rates of drug usage by populations, as confirmed objectively in labs, is much higher than self-reported surveys tell us.

On a related note, CNN has an article about the levels of pharmaceuticals in our municipal drinking water sources. Although the levels of any one drug are very low, I do have to wonder about the multiplier effect and the issue of long-term exposure to human health. You can bet money that no one has ever conducted a study that replicates the cocktail of drugs we're exposed to over long periods of time. Maybe bottled water isn't so bad, after all...

More animal outrage

I just read the CNN article about the largest beef recall in American history, and watching the accompanying video made me want to cry and punch the slaughterhouse workers at the same time. They take these poor sick diseased animals that are unable to stand and jab them with electric prods, stab them with forklifts, drag them by ropes attached to one foot...

The animals literally scream in pain. It's horrible. If you can't see the ethical implications, you're not capable of rational thought.

If you want to see more animal abuse TV, see here. If you need rational arguments for becoming a vegetarian, or at least cutting meat down to a rare item in your diet, see here. As I said a few months ago, some people just don't understand the environmental impacts of the meat industry -- how much of our fresh water supplies are polluted and how much forest is burned simply to raise cattle. The toll is significant. It really can't be overstated. For those interested in sustainability and the relationship between oil and agriculture, the data is out there.

"Meet your Meat" (12:28), narrated by Alec Baldwin, follows below:

Oil industry conference

The question is not that at some point in the future, demand for oil will outstrip production. The question is whether it has already come.

Another CNN Money article examines the question of peak oil, which I've written on here and here within the past few months. There are a few eye-opening quotes from oil industry executives:

"An oil crisis is coming, and sooner than most people think," said John Hess, chief executive of Hess Corp (HES, Fortune 500)., the integrated oil and gas company with 2006 sales of $29 billion. "All oil producers are not investing enough today."

Rising income of consumers has propped up demand even as crude prices have spiked five fold in the past six years. Hess offered some perspective: On a unit-to-unit basis, oil is still about 10 times cheaper than a Starbucks latte.

Runaway growth in oil use in India and China - the two countries are expected to boast a combined 1.2 billion vehicles by 2050, up from 20 million a few years ago - is expected to push demand above supply sometime between 2015 and 2020, Hess said.

"It's not a matter of endowment, it's a matter of investment," he said.

A small but growing number of analysts disagree with Hess' assertion that there is enough oil in the ground. They say production of oil has peaked or will peak soon, followed by a slow but steady period of decline that could cause major social unrest.

Oil executives, while acknowledging that crude deposits are ultimately limited, said that new technologies should keep crude production rising for at least several decades.

"Many perceive the supply challenge as one of scarcity," said Mark Albers, a senior vice president at Exxon Mobil (XOM, Fortune 500). "There is no question oil is a finite resource, but it's far from finished."

Albers pointed to a U.S. government survey saying the world has three trillion barrels of oil left - compared to the one trillion used so far in history.

The question is how those three billion barrels are stored: are they heavy crude? Shale oil deposits? Far below conventional drilling limits at around 5 miles?

Many of these reserves would be more expensive to produce than the current price of oil would make profitable. Obviously, if we narrow our supply down to these reserves, the price would escalate further and make recovery economically feasible. However, at those same prices, producing energy from alternative and renewable resources would be morally, environmentally and economically superior.

Even as they claim that there is still plenty of oil left, they ignore the essential question of whether the rate of production can keep up with the rate of demand. The short and simple answer is...no.

Later in the article there are some admissions from executives that the oil industry will have to play a positive role in addressing climate change. They sound more realistic than the chimp-in-chief...whose days, by the way, are thankfully numbered:

Wake-up call for carnivores

My wife and I have been meatless for a long time now. It feels really good, and though we occasionally (once a month?) used to have fish/seafood, we are cutting that out entirely now. An eye-opening report in the NYT explains the global, environmental and economic impact of American's carnivorism.

Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

Read it all.

Some people just don't understand the environmental impacts of the meat industry -- how much of our fresh water supplies are polluted and how much forest is burned simply to raise cattle. The toll is significant. It really can't be overstated. For those interested in sustainability and the relationship between oil and agriculture, the data is out there.

Deep Thoughts (with Jack Handey): Oil, v2

In the first installment of deep thoughts on oil, I tried to distance myself from a claim that we're on the right side of the Hubbert curve with respect to oil production.

Even the most optimistic scenarios have the right-side of the curve pushed out to 2040 or so:

Now, as I pointed out in the first installment, along with the higher price of oil comes new methodologies of extraction, like shale oil. These same sorts of development may push the availability of oil out for another 500 or 1000 years, but the question/problem is the rate of production versus rate of consumption. At the risk of sounding like cursed Cassandra, I now have a few more authoritative voices to back up my fears: consider The Economist's article this week on C. de Margerie, CEO of Total Oil.

Mr de Margerie's opinions also stand out, at least within the ranks of senior oilmen. Last year he declared that the world would never be able to increase its output of oil from the current level of 85m barrels per day (b/d) to 100m b/d, let alone the 120m b/d that energy analysts predict will be needed by 2030. That is in stark contrast with the view of Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of Total's larger American rival, Exxon Mobil, who argues that the world is neither short of oil, nor likely to be any time soon. It also contradicts the line of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which claims that the only thing that prevents its members from producing more oil is the fear that no one will buy it.
...
Mr de Margerie is careful to point out that he is not predicting “peak oil” in a geological sense. His definition of peak oil is “when supply cannot meet demand”. He believes that the fuel that the world needs to keep its cars and factories running may well be out there, somewhere. It is just getting harder and harder to extract, for technical as well as political reasons. For one thing, he points out, the output of existing fields is declining by 5m-6m b/d every year. That means that oil firms have to find lots of new fields just to keep production at today's levels. Moreover, the sorts of fields that Western oil firms are starting to develop, in very deep water, or of nearly solid, tar-like oil, are ever more technically challenging. There is not enough skilled labour and fancy equipment in the world, he believes, to ramp up production as quickly as people hope.
...
Perhaps the best measure of Mr de Margerie's gloomy outlook for the oil industry is his eagerness to get Total into nuclear power. Though he says he is not about to increase Total's token 1% stake in Areva, France's nuclear-engineering giant, he clearly sees nuclear energy as part of Total's future. Why would an oil firm want to enter such a controversial field, unless it feels that it is already out on a limb?

Although I doubt we'll see doomsday scenarios like this one playing out any time soon, it is necessary to be mindful of how many other predictions about oil have been wrong -- like how, back in August, experts declared it would never go up to $100/barrel. I'm ready to buy that Honda hydrogen car & power station now.

Science Debate 2008

This is probably old news to some/most, but I wanted to highlight the Science Debate 2008 site and cause, as it's definitely in line with my reasoning for my YouTube question and the link to firstfreedomfirst's "Sound Science" ad.

Here's a nice argument from an op-ed in the Wichita Eagle that I think summarizes the issues well:

Presidential race needs science debate

Science and technology are central to many of America's most pressing challenges and controversies: Climate change. Energy independence. Stem cell research. Nuclear proliferation. And on and on.

You wouldn't know that, though, by listening to the presidential debates so far.

If these questions do come up, they're often swiftly dispatched with a boilerplate answer or two.

Too often, science is pushed to the sidelines of presidential debates to make way for presumably weightier topics, such as whether Hillary Clinton is really likable or whether Dennis Kucinich saw a UFO.

In one forum, Mike Huckabee responded to a question about a proposed Mars mission by suggesting that Clinton should be the first passenger.

OK. But can we get serious for a moment?

The next president faces difficult, historic decisions in science and technology that will shape our country's future for decades to come.

That's why voters should support a bipartisan effort now gaining steam to hold a presidential science debate.

A grassroots group called Science Debate 2008 is pushing for a televised debate sometime after the Feb. 5 primaries to plumb the candidates' views on energy and the environment, technological and scientific innovation, and medicine.

Organizers say the purpose is simply to acknowledge the overriding importance of science and technology to our nation's prosperity and future.

That future is hardly assured.

A recent report from the National Academies of Science, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm," reported that the "scientific and technological building blocks critical to our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations are gathering strength."

Just a few examples:

• The United States is now a net importer of high-technology products.

• In 2003, American 15-year-olds ranked 24th out of 40 countries in an examination of students' ability to use mathematical skills to solve real-world problems.

• China and India are leaving the United States behind in producing new engineering doctorates.

For the most part, the candidates have offered few specifics about science policy or they've dodged the questions altogether.

Why? Because science isn't one of the issues the bases of either party are fired up about right now. And candidates aren't always eager to talk about these complex issues.

No one expects them to be experts on nuclear physics or the intricacies of evolutionary theory. But voters deserve to know whether a candidate has some scientific literacy, is comfortable discussing and evaluating technological issues, and employs good science and standards of evidence in decision-making.

Among the questions that could be asked at a debate:

Is it realistic for the United States to achieve energy independence? How do we get there?

What is the government's role in fostering innovation and the new generation of alternative energy technology?

How can our schools better prepare students to compete in science and mathematics?

Should creationism and intelligent design be taught in our schools?

How do you assess the evidence for climate change, and are specific measures needed to control greenhouse gases?

What is the future of NASA's manned space program?

How can we continue to attract the world's best and brightest scientists to study and live here?

Democrats charge that under President Bush, scientists' advice has been censored and politicized. Is that true? If so, what would you do to restore the integrity of science?

Americans deserve clear, specific answers to these and a host of other questions.

Admittedly, a science debate will be difficult to pull off amid the tight election-year schedule. Don't expect the candidates to jump at the opportunity. But a growing number of leading science organizations, university presidents, business leaders and politicians are endorsing the idea.

The timing is right for citizens to make a difference.

To get involved, check out the group's Web site at sciencedebate2008.com and sign the petition. At the very least, let the candidates and media know you want a more meaningful discussion of science policy.

We can't afford not to talk about science and innovation. America's future depends on it.

Randy Scholfield is an Eagle editorial writer. His column appears on Fridays. Reach him at 316-268-6545 or rscholfield@wichitaeagle.com.

Indeed.

The future is now

Honda has thrown down the gauntlet on H₂ fuel cell vehicles.

Availability of H₂ filling stations will hinder the distribution of the vehicle, although hydrogen infrastructure will eventually morph into existing gasoline stations. And, if it doesn't, no worries: the home power station Honda has been working on for years can solve that problem.

The idea is simple -- use solar cells to "split water" and form your own fuel at home, as shown in the figure below:


The most beautiful thing about this is that gas/oil/coal companies can't do a goddamned thing to stop people from buying these home units and choosing hydrogen. They can (and probably will) slow the distribution of hydrogen at filling stations by basically refusing to integrate the new technology at the rate at which they are capable. This compounds the already-noted issues with transitioning to a hydrogen economy.

I can't wait until oil goes the way of the dodo. Unfortunately, that won't probably happen for a loooooong time.

Kudos to Honda.

The new skepticism

I was reminded this morning in thinking about things like climate change and evolution how starkly different the certitude level on issues in "pure" politics (like war, foreign policy and economic policy) is from scientific issues. I was thinking about how King W will come out and feign cautious, wise skepticism to reserve judgment on things like whether humans are causing global warming and on ID-creationism. The way these issues are framed appeals to American's sense of fairness and objectivity - "let's sit down and discuss all the rational possibilities, and at the end of it, since these issues are so complicated, we'll still have uncertainty, and thus cause for further debate," this frame says. And conservatives love to toe the party line on this in all discussions about climate change and evolutionary biology.

But look how starkly different these conservatives are when asked to discuss the realities of the Iraq war and our general muscular, hawkish foreign policies, or economic policies. Then, "debate" is not so welcome, and instead you become a terrorist sympathizer or a limp-wristed sissy whose idealitistic notions deserve the label of "flower child"...

Scientists have always been promoters of skepticism. The scientific method is conducive to doubt, as its goal is to provide explanations for natural phenomena which have been thoroughly tested in an effort to debunk their validity. Most of the progress we make in science, contrary to public misconception, is based on what we prove wrong. For example, if I have a hypothesis about how a cell regulates its own MAPK proteins, and I test it and falsify it, then we have progress in the form of eliminating possible rational answers. Cumulatively, these falsifications build up until there are only so many rational alternatives left, and these become, if you will, scientific orthodoxy. But even the most hardened orthodoxy, it is understood, is still subject to modification: that's the beauty of scientific knowledge -- it can always be improved and progress is the goal, not just a possibility.

All that said, I want to point out that it is this very tentative nature of science which those who want to exploit the lack of dogma seize on. Any "controversy" in science, real or imagined, can be created because people understand that a white lab coat is not the same thing as a Roman collar -- our lack of dogma makes it easy to challenge the status quo and current thinking. We eschew rigidity and faith in favor of evidence and questioning.

Those with agendas have exploited this feature of science to no end, emphasizing the fact that "all the facts are never in" -- that it is always possible to find new data that would modify our current interpretations of existing data. Sharon Begley explores this theme in climate change at length in an August Newsweek article, "The Truth About Denial". She carefully chronicles the years-long efforts on the part of energy and oil companies to inject doubt into the mainstream American consciousness about the science behind climate change. It is a powerful strategy, and difficult to overcome.

Just yesterday, I had a surprising conversation with the physics teacher at our school, Mary Peterson, who told me that both she and her husband are "climate skeptics". I started a conversation with her, and she told me that the sorts of scientific issues she feels are unresolved involve such things as Mars warming and the decay of the magnetic field of the earth. What was amazing to me was that, although her degree and background are in mathematics and not physics, she certainly had the available faculties to look up and investigate the veracity of these objections for herself, but hadn't. I found out that she had heard this somewhere (Faux News, probably), and had simply believed her source enough not to even go check it out. Little did she know that scientists have addressed all these possible alternative explanations for years, and that they have all been found lacking in merit for various technical reasons.

I really recommend the following index and "guides" for point-by-point refutations of the common objections to man-made climate change:

• The IPCC AR4 report FAQ section (pdf)
  
• Coby Beck's How to talk to Global Warming Skeptic
• New Scientist: Climate Change: A guide for the perplexed
• RealClimate: Response to common contrarian arguments
• NERC (UK): Climate change debate summary
• UK Met Office: Climate Change Myths
• Brian Angliss A Thorough Debunking
• John Cross Skeptical Science

These are all excellent resources with scientific references that should be shared amongst all your friends and colleagues, especially those with whom you think contentious discussions on climate change could take place.

What is so amazing to me is how easily duped people are who feign prudent skepticism towards scientific consensus, but display credulity by swallowing and mindlessly repeating talking points in politics (such as "if we fight them there, we won't have to fight them here" &c.). Is it just that people self-select their news sources in accordance with their pre-determined policy positions, and refuse to budge? Am I the same way? Is it possible to be that way (ignore one side's perspective) if there are actual facts which we can analyze to determine who is right and who is wrong?

Upon further analysis, the president's rationale for invading has been shown a farce and a lie, and every single rationale for the surge and every claim and metric used to support that "the surge is working" falls apart. The central issue of, "Even if we make Iraq 100% safe militarily, that doesn't solve the ethno-sectarian conflict and magically create a unified central government," is continually ignored now, even though Cheney admitted this kept them out of Iraq in 1994.

The numbers get spun in order to keep current policies in place, and people get shuffled when they are no longer willing to spin the right way. As Greenwald recently noted, when Bush is unable to find generals who tell him what he wants to hear, he simply replaces them with those who will. And now, as war with Iran is planned by the right, precipitated by lack of diplomatic progress, and with Faux News dutifully banging the war drums, we need skepticism and cynicism more than ever before. Will it manifest itself? God I hope so.

Why is it that the new skepticism is strongly directed towards scientists, but not towards politics with the same intensity and fervor?

11 of last 12 years warmest T since recording began

Damn those hippie, tree-hugging scientists.

Saving the Earth with a smile: reducing your junk mail

You can do two things, right now, that will take you 3 minutes max, save a number of trees [over the course of years] PLUS save you time and effort for years to come*:

1. Opt out of sharing your credit information via credit agencies
2. Contact centralized direct mail service (DMA) to request removal of your info (costs $1)
   

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1) This will stop a huge amount of the junk mail that you get, especially the damned credit card, mortgage and insurance offers.

Call 1-888-5 OPT OUT (1-888-567-8688) 24/7, all you need is your name, current address, SSN & DOB.

2) Use the DMA Customer Assistance website to opt-out of general mailing lists using these directions. You can do it in 20 seconds with this online form. It only costs you $1, and it is well worth the price in terms of trees saved and frustration avoided.

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This saves trees and it saves your the aggravation of sorting out a pound of junk mail every day. Recycling the junk mail is not nearly as efficient or environmentally friendly as stopping it.

What a simple way to use 3 mins of your time for a good cause and out of self-interest. Do it.

Now.

For more suggestions on junk mail reduction, see here and here.

*(Some of the mail will stop within a week or two, but there is a lag time for you to see the total cumulative effect, since so many companies have been given your info. However, they all refresh their databases at least once every six months to troll for credit score changes, and so the effect will show up soon enough.)

Common Misconceptions

I asked an old friend of mine, Crazilla, if he had anything interesting to say lately...and he sure did. The following are his thoughts, or you can view them at their original source:

Common Misconceptions, by Crazilla

FYI, in a spirited but lighthearted tone:

• There is no "free trade vs. fair trade" conflict. Anyone with a conscience and an understanding of the term desires fair trade; from what i've gathered, its meaning is little more than literal. Free trade, on the other hand, has to do specifically with lessening the restrictive effects of legislation and taxation on the flow of resources, materials, products, labor, and capital across boundaries. It is opposed by many--but, it seems to me, supported, in concept, by many more--proponents of fair trade. The central problem with free trade seems to be that a product (or labor) that comes cheap from one source has the ultimate advantage over the corresponding products (or workers) from other sources of comparable quality, hence free trade undermines competition between sources of differing standards; for example, manufacturing plants in China that pay workers Jack Shit In A Can draw business from the U.S., which has become dependent upon low prices, and as a result businesses that pay U.S. workers decent salaries are sold out. (Overall, i see this as a positive effect of free trade; in the long run it will incite workers the world over to establish criteria of fairness which no company will be able to escape by simply changing location. This is a long way off, however.) Anyway, most advocates of fair trade seem to support relatively free trade on the condition of transparency. The popular myth that free trade and fair trade are opposing ideals seems, as far as i can tell, to stem from misleading reports that focus only on (apparently marginal) calls for balancing tariffs, which would merely serve to price foreign products similarly to domestic products; that is, establishing fairness for the companies in the eyes of the consumer (particularly the U.S. consumer)--the two most overprivileged entities in the trade system (far behind, for example, the farmers, laborers, and undeveloped governments). I obviously am very fresh on this subject, so any further suggestions for reading or thinking (and especially personal opinions) are encouraged.
• You are a feminist. To some extent, you support fairness between (among?) the sexes and (nearly) equal opportunity for men, women, and whomever else in endeavors for which they're comparatively qualified. (If you read through the article, or at least this definition, and do not fit the description, I apologize; among my LJ friends i find no one known to me to oppose this concept. Speaking of which, what in blazes is the matter with you!?)
• Everybody seems to like making fun of vegans. I kinda do, too--at least the ones who found their moral principles on the well-being of animals, particularly in an age when at least a quarter of people the world over are living on less than $1/day. However, it is important to note that many vegetarians and vegans care little (or, as in my case, not at all) for animals' so-called "rights" and humane treatment, and instead found the habit on the larger concern of sustainability--that is, they do it for the betterment of the world human population as a whole, and to better enable our species to fulfill its purpose of avoiding extinction and, in the meantime, to provide better living conditions to those without. However misguided you may feel some of these tactics to be, the cause itself is the noblest possible, and in any case meatless diets cause no one (except, in rare cases, the dieter) harm.

So, no one wants to join me for wine and cheese?

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Technorati tags: Free Trade, Fair Trade, Feminism, Vegan, Vegetarian, Sustainability