maintaining spaceship Earth

About two years ago, I wrote about green energy company Clean Currents and its relationship with the very shady company Washington Gas Energy Services. In fairness, it's time for an update on that.

Four years ago, March 17, 2007, I celebrated Irish Pride Day in a bar in Osaka, Japan. It was part of a three month stay in Japan that changed my life -- my forthcoming book, Why Buddha Touched the Earth, grew out of things I wrote on that trip. (Got my first nibble from a literary agent about that book this week, by the way.) I'd been to Japan for shorter stays twice before that, and visited again in December 2007. And I've longed to return.

I only spent a little time in Tokyo, and never got as far north as the area devastated by the recent tsunami and earthquake. But like everyone who's been fortunate enough to spend time in Japan, my attention has been riveted on the horrible situation over there. While most of the people I met are much further south in the Kansai region, I've also met students and teachers in our Tokyo area Seido karate programs. So far as I've heard, all of them are safe, though I'm sure they're all affected by the difficult situation and it's probable that some have lost family or friends in the disaster.

There's a lot of attention focused on the nuclear disaster; there's good ongoing coverage at Mother Jones's "Blue Marble" blog. And there are certainly long term implications for energy policy there. Even if total disaster is avoided and the health effects are small enough to be lost in the statistical noise -- not at all a sure thing at this point -- the resources that could have been used to aid earthquake and tsunami survivors but had to be diverted to prevent a meltdown, are a stark example of the hazards of fission power.

But the other half of this -- the beautiful half, the half I hope more people see -- is the stories of how the people of Japan are dealing with this disaster. No looting or price gouging. Instead, a sense of community and a quiet resilience and forbearance.

And so tonight, as I do this time every year, as an American of partially Irish decent, I salute my Irish ancestors. But also tonight, as a student of Japanese martial and healing arts, I salute my forebearers in those arts, and all the people of Japan.

It's been clear for a while that Whole Foods Markets' dedication to organic standards is shallow and motivated entirely by profit rather than by any vision of ecological responsibility. Now comes news that Whole Foods, along with big organic companies Stonyfield Farms and Organic Valley, have come together to cut a deal with that form of Pure Concentrated Evil known to man as Monsanto.

Revelations about Big Organic's betrayal come on the heels of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's announcement that the USDA has approved the unrestricted planting of Monsanto's genetically modified "Roundup Ready" alfalfa. GM crops are in general a bad idea, but "Roundup Ready" crops are the absolute worst -- the idea is essentially to make it possible for farmers to apply Monsanto's toxic herbicide glyphosate indiscriminately, killing weeds and leaving the desired crop behind. But, rather like indiscriminate use of antibiotics, widespread application of glyphosate has already led to the evolution of resistant "superweeds". Australia currently ranks first in the world for weed herbicide-resistant weeds, but if trends continue the U.S. is due to overtake them. That's in addition to Roundup's demonstrated direct harm to human health.

According to Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association:

In a cleverly worded, but profoundly misleading email sent to its customers last week, Whole Foods Market, while proclaiming their support for organics and "seed purity," gave the green light to USDA bureaucrats to approve the "conditional deregulation" of Monsanto's genetically engineered, herbicide-resistant alfalfa. Beyond the regulatory euphemism of "conditional deregulation," this means that WFM and their colleagues are willing to go along with the massive planting of a chemical and energy-intensive GE perennial crop, alfalfa; guaranteed to spread its mutant genes and seeds across the nation; guaranteed to contaminate the alfalfa fed to organic animals; guaranteed to lead to massive poisoning of farm workers and destruction of the essential soil food web by the toxic herbicide, Roundup; and guaranteed to produce Roundup-resistant superweeds that will require even more deadly herbicides such as 2,4 D to be sprayed on millions of acres of alfalfa across the U.S.

...

According to informed sources, the CEOs of WFM and Stonyfield are personal friends of former Iowa governor, now USDA Secretary, Tom Vilsack, and in fact made financial contributions to Vilsack's previous electoral campaigns. Vilsack was hailed as "Governor of the Year" in 2001 by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, and traveled in a Monsanto corporate jet on the campaign trail. Perhaps even more fundamental to Organic Inc.'s abject surrender is the fact that the organic elite has become more and more isolated from the concerns and passions of organic consumers and locavores. The Organic Inc. CEOs are tired of activist pressure, boycotts, and petitions. Several of them have told me this to my face. They apparently believe that the battle against GMOs has been lost, and that it's time to reach for the consolation prize. The consolation prize they seek is a so-called "coexistence" between the biotech Behemoth and the organic community that will lull the public to sleep and greenwash the unpleasant fact that Monsanto's unlabeled and unregulated genetically engineered crops are now spreading their toxic genes on 1/3 of U.S. (and 1/10 of global) crop land.

WFM and most of the largest organic companies have deliberately separated themselves from anti-GMO efforts and cut off all funding to campaigns working to label or ban GMOs. The so-called Non-GMO Project, funded by Whole Foods and giant wholesaler United Natural Foods (UNFI) is basically a greenwashing effort (although the 100% organic companies involved in this project seem to be operating in good faith) to show that certified organic foods are basically free from GMOs (we already know this since GMOs are banned in organic production), while failing to focus on so-called "natural" foods, which constitute most of WFM and UNFI's sales and are routinely contaminated with GMOs.

People panic as in a matter of weeks, large numbers of dead birds are found in Texas, Austrailia, and Russia, and hundreds of thousands of dead fish are found in California.

Whoops! Sorry, had the Guardian of Forever showing me the wrong year. That was 2007. This year, it's dead birds in Italy, Sweden, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Louisiana, and dead fish in Maryland and dead crabs in England

Mass bird and fish kills are not unprecedented. This is the third year in a row for the English crabs, while the Maryland Department of Environment counts 2,900 mass fish kills between 1984 and 2009. Forteans have have collecting stories of birds falling from the sky for decades.

It's certainly possible -- though I have no evidence either way -- that the frequency is increasing, due to pollution, climate change, and the generally shitty way we're treating our planet's life support systems. And that's a very legitimate concern.

But the current spike in observed mass deaths is partly a result of increased information and reporting. A century ago, the news of such an incident would be a local story. Even just four years ago, many fewer us us were rocketing stories around Facebook and the like. But now, thanks to the web, a dozen dead birds in a small town somewhere can fuel panic around the globe. And then once we're primed to look for them, every incident that would have passed with little mention just months ago becomes Part Of The Pattern. (It's a Law Of Fives sort of thing.)

So let's turn down the end-of-days talk and the deep-conspiracy-theory nonsense, okay? Then maybe we can look with a clear and level head at our impact on the planet. Thanks.

Being of an anarchic -- or Zenarchic -- disposition, I really hate to call the cops. I'd rather, to the extent possible, have people talk out their problems as a community of equals, rather than throwing "authority", with its dangers into the mix.

But when I see two young idiots racing their go-karts on the rainy street, presenting a hazard to navigation and raising the potential for traffic accidents, my choices are 1) let it go, and if an accident is caused, ah well; 2) try to chase them down on foot and, if I catch them, give them a stern talking-to; 3) try to chase them down on foot and, if I catch them, take more direct action, like pulling a wire out of their noisy little engines, or 4) call it in to the BCPD, knowing that not much is likely to come of it but at least I've done what I could.

Please, folks: don't behave in such a stupid manner that I have to make decisions like this. Thanks.

Bjorn Lomborg was one of the first high-profile "climate change skeptics". In 2001, he argued in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist that fighting global warming would be a waste of money.

Now, in a new book Smart Solutions to Climate Change, Lomborg is calling climate change "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today", and calling for a carbon tax to collect $50 billion a year.

The Week has a brief on him and five other climate "skeptics" who have come around.

This morning, while I was doing my usual Wednesday 10k-ish run my mind wandered all about, as it usually does. If I were a "real" runner I suppose I'd be worrying about improving my stride or something, but as a dilettante, all kinds of stuff goes through my head.

I was thinking about the need for (gentle! voluntary!) population control, about how mainstream economists insist we need to keep the population growing so we have enough younger workers to support the elderly, and how what we really need to do instead is to recognize and encourage the contributions that the elderly make to our society.

I had the beginnings of an interesting piece for the blog, about how ZPG -- and even a slight NPG -- ties in with better status for women and the elderly, about how it means more wealth for everyone, since wealth is limited by natural resources divided by population. Indeed, some say that the population reduction cause by the Black Death helped set the stage for the Renaissance, with a reduction in population meaning more stuff per per person, including lots of surplus clothing -- which could be turned into rag paper to feed the new printing presses.

But now, forget about it, we can't have a meaningful discussion about the topic for months if not years thanks to the poor doofus who stormed the Discovery Channel headquarters today with a gun and some bombs, insisting that they air "programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility."

He's dead now, and it will be impossible to have a serious conversation about a serious issue for a while. That's what violent extremism gets us.

NPR reports on a survey of wild rapeseed (better known as "canola" for "Canadian Oil", since someone figured out that "rapeseed" was an ugly word, though it derivies from nothing more offensive than a Latin word for "turnip") that found hundreds of genetically modified plants growing along the sides of North Dakota roads.

According to ecologist Cindy Sagers, who led the study, "What we've demonstrated in this study is a large-scale escape of a genetically modified crop in the United States." Moreover, these aren't just plants sprouted from GMO seed that spilled, or blew over from a nearby field: evidence "indicates that these things are probably self-perpetuating outside of cultivation and have been there for a couple of generations at least," according to Sagers.

Pro-GMO researchers say there's nothing to worry about because these GMO canola plants won't out-compete wild plants. Which misses the point entirely: if GMO canola is in the wild, it's certainly in canola fields where supposedly non-GMO canola is being grown. Of course no one with a lick of sense who's considered the issue for more than thirty seconds would be surprised at that conclusion.

(For the roasting and sauteing that I do, I stick with organic extra virgin olive oil, and with coconut oil to grease my cast-iron skillet.)

So here's an interesting pair of trends: the price of solar photovoltaic power continues to drop, due to economies of scale and improvements in technology and manufacturing, while the price of building nuclear fission power is rising. According to this study from the North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network (NC-WARN), the trend lines have now crossed, and in North Carolina solar power is now cheaper than nuclear. (The report was prepared for the state government; the exact results will be different in other states in depending on insolation, but the trend is going to be the same everywhere.)

The prices compared by the study are the prices to consumers and include government subsides for both solar and nuclear; but even if the solar subsides were removed, the crossover point would be delayed no more than ten years. And the solar includes only PV, with no accounting of the potential of concentrating solar power.

According to the New York Times, the construction of the first round of nuclear plants in the U.S. resulted in electricity users getting stuck with nearly $100 billion of costs from bankruptcies and "stranded costs", and a report by Citigroup Global Markets last November termed the financial risks for a new generation of nuclear plant "so large and variable that individually they could each bring even the largest utility to its knees."

Meanwhile, the proposed American Power Act is set to give away about $56 billion to the unsustainable nuclear power industry, including tax credits, access to bonds, an increase in government insurance against regulatory delays, and loan guarantees -- guarantees which leave the American taxpayer on the hook in case of default.

The risk of default for these nuclear industry loan guarantees is about 50 percent.

So, we can get stuck with the bill from the nuclear fission industry as they give us a power source with huge security, waste disposal, weapons proliferation, and safety concerns; or we can make clean, efficient, and effective use of that large nuclear fusion reactor that Providence has provided just 93 million miles away.

Eating "local" is a trendy thing these days, with hipsters making much of going to the farmers' market and "Locavore" bumper stickers all over the place. And certainly, all else being equal, it's more energy efficient and gives fresher produce to choose apples from an orchard within 100 miles than to buy apples shipped over from New Zealand.

But, as is often the case, when we look more closely we see that all other things are not necessarily equal.

First off, food coming from far away will tend to use highly efficient rail transport, or moderately efficient tractor-trailers, while your local farmer is probably delivering his goods in a panel van or pickup truck.

The difference is enormous. I got curious, so I ran some rough numbers.

As you may have heard in those CSX ads, rail can move one ton of cargo 436 miles on a gallon of fuel; that works out to moving a pound of food (or other stuff) 872,000 miles on one gallon of fuel. A typical tractor-trailer might haul 50,000 pounds at 5 mpg: that's one pound moved 250,000 miles on one gallon. Now consider a panel truck that gets 20 mpg, carrying a two tons of food: it moves one pound only 80,000 miles on one gallon. (Pretend the panel truck runs on diesel, but since these are back-of-the-envelope calculations it doesn't really matter.)

The tractor-trailer and the panel truck both have to make empty return runs, while the train picks up new cargo for the next leg of its loop; so we should half the numbers for both types of truck.

Rail: 872,000 pound-miles per gallon.
Tractor-trailer: 125,000 pound-miles per gallon.
Panel truck: 40,000 pound-miles per gallon.

That means that, for the same amount of fuel it takes a small farmer to move food 100 miles in their truck, rail transport might move that same food over 2,000 miles! Of course, it has to be moved to and from the train depot, but this illustrates the issue: it's quite possible for food coming from far away to use the same or less energy to transport, than "local" food.

(Of course the most local food is what you garden or forage yourself; there's no transportation cost when I walk out front and pick a few leaves of kale, and I'm thinking of trying some experiments with the plantain that's taking over the yard...)

So in terms of transportation efficiency, local food may not be a big win, or indeed a win at all. But more than that, transportation is a small piece of agricultural energy usage, as this WorldWatch article explains. Final delivery from producer or processor to the point of sale accounts for only 4 percent of the U.S. food system's greenhouse gas emissions; add in "upstream" miles and transport of things like fertilizer, pesticides, and animal feed, and transport still only accounts for about 11 percent of the food system's greenhouse gas emissions.

80 to 90% of greenhouse gas emissions from the food system come from agricultural production. So reducing those is far more important than reducing transport emissions. And how can we shift to more efficient food production? You know what I'm going to say: plant-based diets.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that 18 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock, a bigger share than the total of all transport. Livestock account for about 20 percent of the total terrestrial animal biomass. Grazing occupies a stunning 26 percent of the Earth's land area, while about a third of all arable land is devoted to feed crops for livestock.