Posted by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

I have more to say about fresh produce and children, but it can wait. This post, by someone whose opinions always make sense to me and whose way of expressing them I admire, is more important.

Jed Lewison’s explanation of why our economy is how it is and what needs to happen makes more sense to me than the dozens of opinion pieces by dozens of PhD economists that I’ve read. I’m cross posting it from his diary space on The Daily Kos.

Slash jobs, get a raise
by Jed Lewison
Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 09:46:03 AM PDT

As if you needed another reason to let the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy expire:

Study: CEOs of top 50 job-cutting companies earned $598 million in compensation

The nation’s biggest job-cutting companies paid their top executives an average of $12 million last year, according to a report released today.

The 50 U.S. chief executives who laid off the most employees between November 2008 and April 2010 eliminated a total of 531,363 jobs, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, a research group that works for social justice and against wealth concentration.

In “CEO Pay and the Great Recession,” the institute said the $598 million in combined pay for the 50 executives would have paid one month’s worth of average-sized unemployment benefits for each of the laid-off workers.

It’s obviously enraging to see that the people who really get the shaft in the midst of economic distress are the people who can least afford it, but it’s not really a surprise: in recessions, demand collapses, and when demand collapses one of the primary ways to maintain profit is to cut costs. As a result, in a recession, the private sector tends to reward retrenchment. So you end up with CEOs who get their pay raised after laying off workers. The obvious problem with this dynamic is that what you end up with is a vicious circle — the cost-cutting further depresses demand, which in turn leads to more cost-cutting, and even weaker demand.

To break this cycle, you need to find some way to boost demand — and only government can provide that boost, by way of economic stimulus. Without the stimulus, you end up with an economic death spiral. With the stimulus, you break the cycle and bring the economy back to health. The challenge is finding the right amount of stimulus, and the evidence shows that while we’re better off now than we would have been without the 2009 stimulus, we still need more. If we just sit on our hands, the only thing we’re going to get in return is more economic pain and suffering.

Posted on September 1st, 2010 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Economic Justice, Economy, Jobs, Taxes | No Comments »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

The outdoor market at Boston's Haymarket (hydephine/Flickr)

Doctors at three Massachusetts medical centers are writing “prescriptions” for free fruits and vegetables at local farmers markets. Clinicians look for families of overweight and obese children enrolled in the centers’ exercise and nutrition program that can’t afford and lack access to fresh produce.

Whole families are enrolled; the main requirement is that at least one child be overweight or obese. The $20,000 pilot project is meant to stimulate better nutrition and healthier lifestyles among some of Boston’s low-income families.

Speaking on WBUR, one of Boston’s NPR stations, Dr. Shikha Anand, the program’s organizer, explained

The goal really is to increase consumption – to increase availability of fruits and vegetables in low income neighborhoods, and consumption of those within the low income neighborhoods. A lot of our families don’t really have the means to purchase fresh produce, so we’re really taking away the barriers to access.

The clinics give enrolled families vouchers they can exchange at any of the more than 200 markets that belong to the Massachusetts Federation of Farmers Markets. They are good for fruits and vegetables only. Each “prescription” buys $2.50 worth of produce. The program allots a dollar per day for each person in the family; a family of four can purchase $112 of fresh produce in a month.

Because of economics and location, some families are not familiar with fresh produce. For them, the clinics arrange sessions with dieticians who provide information on meals and cooking.

The program hopes to enroll about 50 families, comprising 150 to 200 individuals, this year. The goal is to roll it out to all Massachusetts medical centers in 2011.

Preliminary results show that participating families are consuming more fresh fruits and vegetables, Dr. Anand said. A more detailed analysis will be done when the market season ends late in October.

Other plans are to expand the project into the winter months; despite its climate, some produce is grown in Massachusetts in the winter.

Obviously, the families are not the only beneficiaries of the “prescription” program. Farmers will take home more dollars, which will then spread out into local economies, Dr. Anand noted.

Posted on August 31st, 2010 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Childhood obesity, Farmers Markets, Nutrition | No Comments »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

Cropdusting in California / USDA Photo: Charles O'Rea

Agricultural pesticides, long suspected of being especially harmful to children, are receiving additional scrutiny, thanks to three recent studies. And – no surprise here – children who live in agricultural areas turn out to be particularly vulnerable.

Scientists are cautious in their conclusions, awaiting results of further testing. But two classes of pesticides, known as organophosphates and pyrethroids, are being increasingly implicated in relation to glandular and neurological disruptions among children. It’s hard to sort out which kind of bug killer is associated with which kind of problem, because when conventionally grown produce is examined, both are found on the same fruits and vegetables.

Organophosphates are directly related to the nerve gas Sarin and have recently been linked to an increase in attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Pyrethroids are primarily associated with mimicking the action of the body’s endocrine glands – those that secrete hormones directly into the bloodstream, such as the thyroid and reproductive glands.

Estrogen is one of the hormones endocrine disrupters can imitate. Scientists trying to figure out why American girls are reaching puberty at seven or eight, four to six years earlier than in previous generations, might want to look at the current batch of pesticide research.

The first of the three appeared in July. It measured the types and amounts of organophosphates and pyrethroids in 239 food samples collected from 46 children participating in the Children’s Pesticide Exposure Study (CPES). Researchers found that 14% contained at least one organophosphate and 5% contained at least one phrethroid insecticide. A total of 11 organophosphates and three pyrethroids were found in the children’s food. The study did not look at possible ill effects from the pesticides, but it noted that

many of the food items consumed by the CPES children were also on the list of the most-contaminated food commodities reported by the Environmental Working Group.

In the largest study of its kind, published in August, scientists tested the urine of more than 1,000 children for byproducts of organophosphates. They found that those who tested positive had twice the chance of being diagnosed with ADHD. A CBS News report noted that organophosphates kill pests by interfering with communication in their nervous systems.

Another August-released study reported that children whose mothers had signs in their urine of prental exposure to organophosphates had higher rates of poor physical and mental development at age two. This study, conducted in the California’s Salinas Valley, one of the world’s most fertile agricultural areas, underscored the fact exposure to pesticide-contaminated produce need not depend on eating it.

[...]“take-home” pesticide exposure — on clothing and skin — was extremely high for the workers and their families whose homes, schools, and playgrounds were located very close to cultivated fields.

The good news to this story comes from a 2006 study in which children were fed an organic diet and their urine examined for evidence of pesticide exposure.

Researchers found that pesticide levels in children’s bodies dropped to zero after just a few days of eating organic produce and grains. “After they switch back to a conventional diet, the levels go up,

the study’s chief author said.

Experts emphasize that the solution to pesticide exposure from fruits and vegetables is not to stop giving them to children. That would be a step away from good nutrition, they say. Rather, buying organic produce or even produce grown close to home is the better option. This is one more argument in favor of patronizing farmers’ markets whenever, and as long as, they are open.

Posted on August 30th, 2010 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Agriculture, Buy Local, Farmers Markets, Food Safety | No Comments »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

Massachusetts Electronic Benefits Card

Good news first: A federal program intended to boost sales of fresh fruits and vegetables will target low-income families in Hampden County, Massachusetts, in the state’s southwestern corner. Several thousand of the region’s 50,000 food stamp recipients will get a 30% discount off the price of fresh produce that they buy using the debit-like card issued under the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food assistance program.

The US Department of Agriculture awarded the money to Massachusetts and a Cambridge-based research organization, hoping to find out whether lowering the cost of produce will encourage homemakers to prepare more nutritious meals. The program will also track health outcomes among participants, including the incidence of obesity, diabetes, and related ailments. Health and weight tracking will be carried out over a 15-month period.

Participating families get a 30 cent reduction for every dollar they spend on fresh fruits and vegetables. They can make their purchases in stores or at farmers markets that have the equipment to handle debit card transactions.

The families will be chosen at random from among the benefit-receiving population in Hampden County, a part of the Connecticut River valley with a population of some 482,000 that includes Springfield, Massachusetts’s third largest city.

The research firm will compare health outcomes not only with consumption of fresh foods, but also with race, age, and income. The program, authorized in the 2008 Farm Bill, is meant to help planners determine the extent to which financial incentives work to modify food choice behavior. Work is already underway to develop the next farm bill, which Congress will adopt in 2012.

The bad news: Although the program was approved in 2008, it won’t begin until the fall of 2011, which means it’s unlikely to have accumulated much data by the time the 2012 farm bill is drafted. Meanwhile, obesity, diabetes, and related ailments increase at a frightful rate, especially in low-income communities.

Behavioral scientists and others question whether the financial incentive will have much effect on behavior, not because it is only 30 cents on a dollar, but because it will be calculated when the recipient swipes her benefits card, and may therefore not be noticed.

According to the Boston Globe, Dr. Kevin Volpp, director of the Center for Health Incentives at the University of Pennsylvania, incentives work best when they are immediately visible.

Volpp suggests that the distribution of a discount coupon for future fruit and vegetable purchases might be a more effective way to influence behavior and increase consumption of healthy foods.

And even if the 30-cent discount does succeed in increasing produce consumption relative to those who pay normal prices, the government will need to fund future studies to see whether other types of financial incentives change behavior more efficiently, Volpp said.

Additionally, fresh foods are hard to find in low-income neighborhoods, which are typically shunned by supermarkets. Research into availability of fruits and vegetables should have been part of the program design, lest the results make it look like low participation is the result of lack of interest.

Furthermore, parents in low-income families often must work multiple minimum-wage jobs to pay the bills and think they don’t have time to cook fresh veggies for dinner. This, too, may make low participation look like the discounts are ineffective.

The Globe also reports that

About half the grant will go to Abt Associates Inc., a consulting company that will conduct three surveys during the research period to determine whether the produce consumption of those receiving the subsidy is markedly different from that of other families.

Up to $4 million could go toward the subsidies and about $6 million will go toward equipment and administrative costs.

Maybe it’s just me, but I have a problem with a nutrition program in which 25% goes toward feeding people in need and the rest goes to the researchers. Why not a 50% discount on the fresh food and more economical “equipment and administrative costs?”

This smells like those multimillion dollar corporate class action suits in which each wronged consumer gets a check for $5 and the lawyers walk off with the millions. If only, just once, the money would go into the pockets that need them, rather than those already full.

Posted on August 23rd, 2010 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Federal Programs, Nutrition, USDA | 1 Comment »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

Stink bugs hatching / Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes things bug me (I’m sure this doesn’t surprise you.) Sometimes something comes along that I’m itching to tell you about, but I’ve got other things to write. Mostly they get away from me, because I forget to write them down.

No more. “Bugs and Itches” will be the title for occasional posts of miscellaneous items I want to share with you.

But I live on a two-way street. I’m inviting you to post your bugs and itches in the comments that follow this post – and future Bugs and Itches posts as well. If you want to take me up on this invitation, here’s what you should know:

I get to read all comments and accept those I find acceptable. So far, that’s been almost all of them. (Total spam gets deflected before I see it.) I throw away posts promoting sites that have no purpose other than to sell something. Anything else, as long as it’s not abusive, gets approved, even if I don’t like it.)

If you want to comment anonymously, tell me about something you’d like me to blog about, or ask a question, put PRIVATE in the subject line and you can be sure it won’t get posted. If you want me to write back, put your email address in the message. I don’t know why, but the email addresses that show up in the comments when they come to me by email usually don’t work. write to me at TB40/at/mwilliamson.com (you know what to do with that address, I’m sure.)

It turns out that once you have been approved to post comments, your comments go straight to the site, before I see them.  Writing to me directly guarantees your privacy. And I wish you’d do that. I want to hear what you’re thinking, and learn some of what you know.

I hope you’ll take me up on this. Send in your Bugs and Itches.

Here are mine for today:

Bug: The Jobless Recovery

Big companies have plenty of money. For them, the recession is over and the economy is flourishing. Nonfinancial companies were sitting on about $8.4 trillion in cash as of the end of March, or about 7% of all company assets, the highest level since 1963. This comes from no less a source than the Wall Street Journal.

Jobs with Justice (disclosure: I’m on their Western Mass. Workers Rights Board) says

Corporate America is sitting on so much cash reserves that only 20% of that money could provide a $70,000/year job to 5 million Americans … for 5 years.

On September 15, Jobs with Justice coalitions and allies across the country will be asking Congress to declare what the rest of us have known for a long time: we are in a Jobs Emergency.

Meanwhile, Newsweek writes

The economy has been growing for a year, and corporate profits have surged—Standard & Poor’s estimates that income of the S&P 500 rose nearly 52 percent in the second quarter of 2010 over the same period in 2009. Much of that impressive growth has been driven by the remarkable gains in efficiency and productivity that corporate America has notched since the recession took hold. Last year, productivity—the ability to produce more with less—soared 3.5 percent, up from 1 percent growth in 2008 and 1.6 percent in 2007.

You know what the makes productivity grow? Management squeezing more and more work out of fewer and fewer employees.

That’s right: Corporations are hanging onto their money, refusing to hire more people because the workers who have jobs are scared to death to say, “Enough!”

You can’t blame the workers; they have bills to pay and families to feed. But you can stand with Jobs with Justice on September 15 and contact the people elected to serve you.

Itch: Bush Tax Cuts Due to Expire

Certain members of a certain political party are conveniently forgetting that the Bush tax cuts they passed in 2001 and 2003 are required by law to expire at the end of this years because they added to the deficit and were enacted using the <gasp!> budget reconciliation rule that required only a majority vote. Said party was then in the majority, so they crammed the tax cuts – which benefited the vastly rich far more than the other 90% of us – down the throats of the minority party.

Now the question comes to Congress: Do the tax cuts get allowed to expire across the board, should those for people in the lower income brackets be continued and the rich people’s tax cuts expire, or should they all be continued? If Congress does nothing, they all expire at the end of the year.

The Washington Post has an interactive site that tells you what the implications are of each decision. Go look, then come back and tell the rest of us what you want to see happen.

Posted on August 19th, 2010 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Economic Justice, Social Justice | No Comments »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

Collecting water for drinking in Ethiopia / waterdotorg

The United Nations has declared access to clean and accessible water a fundamental human right. Apparently this is not the same as amending  the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , making water the 31st on the list of fundamental human rights. The UN’s UDHR page has not yet been amended to show an Article 31.

A resolution on the matter was approved July 26, one year and seven months after the human rights declaration amendment was proposed, and a week after you read about it here and may have signed the international petition asking the UN to vote on it.

The resolution was supported by 122 member nations. None voted against it, but 41, including the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia,  abstained. According to the BBC.

Abstaining countries said the resolution could undermine a process in the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva to build a consensus on water rights.

Some countries said the resolution did not clearly define the scope of the new human right and the obligations it entailed…

Nearly 12 years ago, Peter H. Gleick, co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute, published an article entitled “The Human Right to Water,” in the journal Water Policy.  In a current Huffington Post article, he notes that the world had already

acknowledged rights to health, well being, food, freedom from political persecution, and much more. But not water and sanitation.

The United States, which has typically been a world leader on protecting and enhancing political human rights, has always had a flawed position on “economic and social” human rights, including the human right to water – a position characterized by bad logic and a narrow and inconsistent interpretation of human rights law.

Those flaws were evident again last week. The U.S. deputy representative to the UN’s Economic and Social Council, John Sammis, tried to justify the U.S. abstention, saying “This resolution describes a right to water and sanitation in a way that is not reflective of existing international law; as there is no “right to water and sanitation” in an international legal sense as described by this resolution.”

Abstaining can mean the voter hasn’t made up her mind, or doesn’t have the courage to say no.  The mind boggles at the thought that the United States, and the other countries that abstained, aren’t sure whether human beings have a right to clean and accessible water. And it absolutely balks at the thought these countries would say there is no such right.

Glieck writes,

Is it possible that that is the official position of the United States of America? That there is NO human right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation? What kind of a position is that? And if the U.S. (and Canada, and Japan, and the other abstainers) believe there is a human right to water, but are concerned about working out the details on responsibilities and duties, they should say “We accept that there is a human right to safe drinking water and sanitation. We’re happy to say so, and work out the fine details later.” I’ve held my breath for over a decade waiting for the U.S. to say this. I’d rather not hold it much longer.

To which this scribe says, “Amen, brother.”

Posted on August 17th, 2010 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Clean Water, Social Justice, Water quality | No Comments »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

Photo: National Parks Service / Wikimedia Commons

Previously on “Climate Change”: When Democrats said they might try legislating to restrict greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the climate to change in a not-good way, Senate Republicans threatened to haul off and give them a dirty look.

Afraid of being embarrassed by showing how the Republicans care more about their corporate sponsors than the well being of their constituents, not to mention the future of the planet, the Democratic leadership retreated on climate change legislation (listen to the press conference). Instead, they said they’ll introduce a more modest bill that maybe they can get a Republican to vote for (read the Democrats’ pitch for the bill, and the draft bill itself.)

In this episode, we fight against despair by looking into what others can do while the Senate fiddles and the planet burns.

We open with a view of the World Resources Institute, which describes itself as “an environmental think tank that goes beyond research to create practical ways to protect the earth and improve people’s lives.” If practicality includes planning for what to do if what you want to happen doesn’t, then WRI’s self-description is particularly apt.

Six months before the Democrats bailed on climate change legislation, WRI was starting to figure out how much could be accomplished at the federal level under existing laws and regulations, and what states that have already announced emissions-regulating actions could add.

The result, released in July, is a 60-page report entitled “Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the United States Using Existing Federal Authorities and State Action.” Accompanying documents, all available at no charge, are a 24-page summary, a PowerPoint presentation, and a Q&A for those who want just the key findings.

The Institute makes no pretense at discounting the importance of legislative action. But the report notes that the key federal agencies that have a say in polluting emissions – the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, and the Federal Aviation Administration – together could enact regulations reducing greenhouse gas emissions by about 12% from 2005 levels. If the states that have already acted follow through, they’ll get us to a 14% reduction – 3% less than President Obama committed to in Copenhagen by 2020.

But WRI adds, the world needs a 75% to 90% reduction by 2050. The WRI report is encouraging, but only in the short term.

On the regulatory front the EPA, having survived threats of of mayhem and disembowelment by Senate action, is beginning to flex its muscles. Things looked hopeful back in April 2007, when the Supreme Court ruled that EPA had both the authority and responsibility to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. EPA had said the Clean Air Act didn’t give it the authority and, besides, it  needed more scientific evidence. (Note the year of the decision. EPA refusal to act came in the Bushtime.)

It took a while – and a new EPA administrator – but in December 2009 the agency issued a finding that such emissions endanger the public health and safety and that the exhausts from new cars and trucks contribute to those emissions. This was the shot across the bow of climate change deniers. It gave EPA the right to regulate such emissions.

The deniers wasted little time before trying to reverse EPA’s finding. But in June 2010, the senate rejected a resolution by Lisa Murkowski designed to gut the Clean Air Act and strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to enforce it.

And, on July 29, EPA rejected 10 petitions asking it to reconsider its finding of endangerment and cause. It’s hard to imagine where those who won’t take No for an answer will turn next. The Supremes have already spoken, and don’t have to deal with the matter any more.

Sources say that EPA is now weighing its regulatory options, figuring out how to deal with the biggest industrial polluters – oil refineries and power plants, mainly.

“Living on Earth” reports

…A new permitting process is starting January, which will ensure that new facilities are as low-carbon as possible. But the step is even trickier – it has to figure out how to deal with existing emitters. One idea is to cap emissions industry by industry and allow companies within a specific industry to trade pollution permits amongst themselves.

It is cap-and-trade, but a little more limited. You could sell your allowances or you could hold on to them for later when you actually need them as the cap gets lower and lower. The idea is to make cutting carbon as cheap and flexible as possible. But if you are a cement plant then you wouldn’t be able to trade allowances with say a coal-fired power plant or a car factory. So the EPA wouldn’t be regulating into existence a huge single carbon market—that is really controversial.

A third approach to cap-and-trade is spreading through the Western U.S. and Canada, thanks to the Western Climate Initiative. This group of seven U.S. states and four Canadian provinces has been working for two years toward the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 15% from 2005 levels by 2020. They plan to accomplish this by

• Creating a market-based system that caps GHG emissions and uses tradable permits to incent development of renewable and lower-polluting energy sources
• Encouraging GHG emissions reductions in industries not covered by the emissions cap, thus reducing energy costs region wide, and
• Advancing policies that expand energy efficiency programs, reduce vehicle emissions, encourage energy innovation in high-emitting industries, and help individuals transition to new jobs in the clean-energy economy.

Start date for the planned program is January 2012. You can see a map of partners – states and provinces – and other states and provinces who are observing (presumably thinking of joining) here. Some 25 other U.S. states have emission regulations in effect; a linkup is not beyond possibility.

As encouraging as it is to see so much activity, it’s not enough without Congressional action. While Congress is on vacation, it’s a good time to call your Senators’ offices and tell them how much you’ve enjoyed the weather this summer, and how much you’re looking forward to winter. And next summer. And so forth.

We have no previews of the next episode. Will the White House support EPA’s efforts at a scaled-back cap-and-trade model? Will EPA walk it back? Will enough American voters demand that Congress act on their behalf? You’ll jut have to tune in again and again, and again, to find out.

Posted on August 15th, 2010 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Climate Change, Climate Change Legislation, Global warming, Senate | 1 Comment »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

Misissippi River Basin Showing the Dead Zone / Wikimedia Commons

The Environmental Protection Agency decided in December 2009 not to decide until mid-2010 whether to allow a 50% increase in ethanol in gasoline. Gas is currently required to be 10% ethanol (E10). Allowing a maximum of 15% (E15) does not mean 15% will be required, only allowed – at least for now.

Indications are that newer car models can handle the increase, but that older cars cannot. I wonder if that means we’ll have to read the ethanol label on the pump when we drive up for a refill.

We’re a bit past midyear now and EPA hasn’t announced a decision. Lobbying has got to be fierce. Strong arguments exist on both sides – reducing American dependence on foreign oil is one. For legislators in corn-growing states, the enormous subsidies the government pays their cor-growing constituents is another, although often left unmentioned in the public debate.

In true “one man’s poison is another man’s meat” tradition, an organization representing ethanol producers has been running ads on TV pointing out that there has never been an ethanol spill in the Gulf of Mexico or anywhere else.

Automotive and marine interests say increasing ethanol will harm engines. At present ethanol is practically synonymous in the public mind with corn, so arguments abound over the morality of using food to run automobiles. It’s easy to see what diverting corn to fuel did to the price of tortillas, animal feeds, and the animals the feeds feed.

None of this is going to be resolved in this essay. This one’s about the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, how corn ethanol feeds it, and how increasing ethanol’s use will enlarge it.

If “the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico” sounds Stephen King-ish and creepy, it should. It is. Put aside for now the BP oil spew of the past few months, which doubtless contributed to the Gulf’s dead zone but didn’t create it.

Nothing lives in the dead zone. A really, really dead pond is startlingly clear and inviting to the eye. Trouble is, it’s dead because it has no oxygen. Anaerobic bacteria, the kind that make a closed garbage can stink, cannot live or grow in the presence of oxygen. They’re the only organisms about which that is true. (Aerobic is the opposite of anaerobic. You do aerobic exercise to increase the amount of oxygen in your bloodstream.)

The dead zone in the Gulf isn’t the only one in the world; it’s simply the largest. That title used to belong to one in the Black Sea, but it pretty much disappeared between 1991 and 2001, thanks to diminished agriculture in the area bordered by Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine.

By the way, the Dead Sea, bordered by Jordan and the West Bank, is too salty to support organisms big enough to be visible, but it’s not a dead zone; it’s populated by microscopic bacteria and fungi.

We have in the Gulf of Mexico a dead zone of more than 8,500 square miles, about the size of New Jersey. And its presence has nothing to do with activities in the states along the Gulf coast.

The cause of the deadness is America’s breadbasket, the midwest, where corn is king and the growing thereof depends heavily on nitrogen fertilizers. Corn can’t grow without nitrogen. Animal manure is rich in nitrogen; organic farmers treasure it. But big farms can’t be bothered collecting manure and spreading it on their thousands of acres of corn fields. Petroleum-based nitrogen is cheaper; it’s easier to spread; and its potency is uniform, a known quantity, unlike manure, which varies depending on what the producing animals are eating.

Organic farmers use only as much fertilizer as they must, because it’s expensive, and because too much manure can cause crops to burn – not as in fire, but as in brown leaves and poor yield. Fossil-fuel based fertilizers can be used more liberally, and they are. And so when the rains come – and they’re certainly coming this summer – nitrogen washes into the Mississippi River and its tributaries, and winds up in the Gulf as the Mississippi heads toward the sea.

Nitrogen doesn’t only nourish corn, it nourishes everything it touches. In the Gulf it is a potent nutrient for algae, those tiny green plants that, after a heavy rain, grow into huge algal blooms. In time, as all things do, these plants die, sink to the bottom of the water and decompose. When things decay they consume oxygen. Decaying algae consume all the oxygen available. The lack of oxygen for the little sea creatures – shrimps, clams, oysters, lobsters, fishes – kills them as surely as if you’d sealed them in a plastic bag.

You might think that fish, at least, would swim away from the low-oxygen waters, but they don’t. The seem to lose consciousness before they become aware of the threat. And the slow-moving shellfish don’t stand a chance of escaping.

About one third of all corn grown in the midwest goes to make ethanol.

To compound the problem, we have Public Law 110-140, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which requires the production of 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol by 2022 – three times the current rate of production, requiring that three times the current amount of corn be produced.

More corn, of course, means more nitrogen as fertilizer, which means more runoff in the Gulf and elsewhere.

Demand for gasoline consumption dropped nearly 7% between 2007 and 2009, and there is no reason to believe that trend isn’t continuing in 2010. A corresponding decrease in ethanol use is a certainty, since its inclusion in every gallon of gasoline is mandatory. In February 2009, 21% of U.S. ethanol production facilities stood idle, and the nation’s second-largest producer had filed for bankruptcy.

It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out that a 50% increase in ethanol in gasoline means a boon for ethanol producers. One wonders how much distance will there be between an allowed 15% ethanol component and a required 15%, and whether those of us who drive 10-20 year old automobiles will find ourselves being driven off the road.

A report in the March 18, 2008 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says that increasing corn production to meet the P.L.110-140 goal will increase the nitrogen load in the Gulf’s dead zone by 10% to 18%. This is twice the level recommended by a task force composed of federal, state, and tribal agencies that has monitored the dead zone since 1997. The task force says it would take a 30% reduction in nitrogen runoff to shrink the dead zone.

When the laws of the United States run counter to the laws of nature, you know which win in the short term. Unfortunately, it seems part of the American psyche to major in short-term thinking. Even more unfortunately, nature bats last.

Posted on August 11th, 2010 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Biofuels, EPA, Environment | 1 Comment »

By Daphne Bishop

Presenters Jack Oswald, CEO Syngest; Heidi Garrett-Peltier, Policy Economy Research Institute; Lora Wondolowski, MA League of Environmental Voters

This summer brought us the Senate’s egregious failure to pass a comprehensive climate change bill. But it also witnessed a burgeoning collaborative effort to ride the “wave of the future,” and get down to the nitty gritty of building an economy that is not tied to fossil fuels or fossilized ways of thinking about energy.

The Western Massachusetts Clean Economy Round Table took place in the former paper mill city of Holyoke, Massachusetts. That’s a place already known for its progressive models of building reclamation and farm to school food programs. Sponsored by RuralVotes, the Clean Economy Network and Ceres, the conference brought together civic leaders and entrepreneurs in emerging “clean energy” industries; employment specialists and researchers into the economic pluses of green manufacturing.

Attendees noted the link between desperately needed job creation and the need to wean ourselves away from unsustainable energy practices. And while Massachusetts may be blazing trails by having the highest energy efficiency rate in the nation, according to data provided by Lora Wondowloski of the MA League of Environmental Voters, adequate leadership on a national level is sorely lacking. More banks and private investors need to be involved in what will be a gradual transition from an economy held hostage to dwindling fossil fuels. The bread and butter concerns of businesses small and large need to be addressed with concrete solutions.

There wasn’t any speculative discussion about whether greenhouse gases are warming the planet. In fact, the conference highlighted green energy projects that already exist or are in development. These include: the Northeast Biodiesel plant that just broke ground in Greenfield, MA and plans to produce 3.5 million gallons of recycled vegetable oil biodiesel by early 2011, and sweeping energy efficiency measures in the Chicopee school system. The latter have already saved the city two million dollars, according to city Mayor Michael D. Bissonnette. That’s money that can be better spent on saving teachers’ jobs and upgrading textbooks, no mean feat in these tough economic times.

The keynote speech by entrepreneur Jack Oswald, CEO of San Francisco based SynGest, Inc., was about an ambitious project to create nitrogen fertilizer with clean energy.

You might not see the relevance of that last one until you consider that most of our country’s food supply is grown with nitrogen fertilizer. And sixty- percent of it is made and imported from places like Russia, Trinidad and Venezuela.

A little more concerned now? As Oswald emphasized, the safety of our food growing and distribution system should be a priority. And yet little or no attention is being paid to this as a national security issue that is at least as important as terrorist threats.

Oswald has spearheaded the development of a novel project that is about to get off the ground with the construction of a first manufacturing plant in Iowa. It’s a new process for converting non-food biomass like corn cobs and wood chips into nitrogen fertilizer. He calls it the intersection of energy and agriculture or “The Three F’s: Food, Fertilizer and Fuel.” After an earlier career in Silicon Valley, Oswald had what he called “the conversion moment.” He began to educate and recreate himself as “a clean energy person,” something he said that any of us can readily do.

He believes that utilizing and refurbishing our existing infrastructure – instead of trying to create it from scratch – is the way to go. Changing human behavior is very difficult, he notes. Yet if you can show that an old way of production is more costly and a new “greener” way that uses materials already on hand is cheaper and more efficient, people will invariably go for the green model.

Finding a way to take the wasteful energy out of nitrogen production became his goal. This meant creating a process that efficiently utilizes each component of that corn cob rather than just grinding it up into one undifferentiated mass. He wryly compared the two methods to food production to make his point. The old method would be like grinding up a whole cow into one big mass, rather than carefully separating the animal into discreet, fine cuts of meat.

The commercial slogan utilized by this soon to be built biorefinery plays up that refined process by noting that, “You can now have your fuel and eat it too.” The best part about splitting the corn cob into multiple parts isn’t just multiple products, according to Oswald, but the fact that the model is cost competitive. That is something of increasing concern in a world where countries like China have surpassed us in producing most of the goods we consume.

Our elected officials have also failed to grasp that China is heavily invested to win in the clean energy future, says Oswald. That country’s dramatic conversion to alternative energy sources from solar hot water heaters on rural shacks to urban freeways illuminated with LED lights should scare us out of our complacency. We should demand that our senators go and see for themselves how far ahead of us China is yet again, rather than arguing about whether a climate change bill is part of an anti-business agenda.

If the clean energy sector offers the largest growth potential in human history, as Oswald believes, than maintaining the status quo will not only lead to more and more American jobs lost, but it will hold us in thrall to countries that do not have our best interests at heart.

The potential for new jobs and for completely recreating our once thriving manufacturing system exists in every sector of our economy. One example Oswald mentioned was the company Proterra which creates zero emission electric buses that can travel thirty to forty miles before needing a recharge, and can then recharge in about ten minutes. The best part about these buses, says Oswald, is the fact that ninety- percent of their component parts are made in America.

Oswald and other conference participants suggest we don’t waste time arguing about “climate change,” but talk to our leaders, as well as our neighbors, about a comprehensive economic development model that happens to be “green” and that will revitalize our economy That is the real bottom line affecting everyone in this country, regardless of political party or beliefs.

Ed Maltby of the Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance expressed concern that Oswald’s clean energy model will be supporting an arguably wasteful industrial model of food production. Oswald agreed that much of American farming is currently devoted to monoculture, not the small or organic family farms that more Americans want to get their food from. But as he noted, this is a transitional time in our history.

“I can’t change the food model overnight,” he said, “but I can take the energy out of it.” Oswald sees SynGest’s work as a way to “sneak into the tent,” and thereby be a conduit for new practices that could remold our economy and improve the lives of more citizens.

The means to that gradual but methodical transition, and to imagining a future in which more of us can thrive, was what the Western Massachusetts Clean Economy conference was all about. And you can be sure that RuralVotes will continue to bring you the latest ideas and accomplishments as conference participants join with others to get this vital work accomplished.

Posted on August 9th, 2010 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Carbon footprint, Economy, Environment, Jobs | 3 Comments »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson 

Not long ago I found myself wondering whatever became of the hole in the ozone layer. Before I found time to do my own search, a segment on the NPR program “Living on Earth” gave me the answer: It’s still there, but it’s closing.

Another 60 years will pass before the layer protects us from skin-cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation, as it used to do. But protect us it will, and what happened to reverse its destruction is a lesson in human misbehavior and corrective intervention that we desperately need today.

LOE broadcast its 1000^th show the week of July 30. The first was April 5, 1991, and it began with a brief newscast about a hole in the ozone layer. Jan Nunley was the reporter.

NUNLEY: The Bush administration is reviewing new research data that show the ozone layer over the United States is disappearing at twice the rate previously estimated. The Environmental Protection Agency is now predicting that 12 million Americans will develop skin cancer in the next 50 years as a result of increased exposure to ultraviolet light. Agency administrator William Reilly says the US should reappraise its policy on control of ozone-destroying chemicals.

Picking up the story for present-day listeners, LOE founder, executive producer, and host Steve Curwood explained that ozone is a pollutant at ground level, but high in the stratosphere it forms a thin layer that screens out ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Without it, life on Earth would not be possible.

Earlier, in the 1980s, a large hole in the ozone layer suddenly appeared over Antarctica. Shortly before that happened, the National Academy of Sciences research council completed a series of assessments and concluded that the problem was not as serious as had been thought. And then, said Diane Dumanoski, environmental journalist and author of The Long End of Summer,

…we have this report out of left field about this dramatic loss of ozone. And you had the scientific community debating about whether this was man-made, or a natural event. And a whole lot of people found the idea that man-made chemicals could cause this bizarre disappearance of ozone to be inconceivable, basically. They thought the planet was robust and how could humans do enough, even with the modern scale, the modern industrial enterprise, to perturb it?

It turned out that the ozone depletion was caused by the action of chlorine, derived from manmade chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that migrated to the stratosphere and were broken down by solar ultraviolet light. CFCs were (and are no longer, which is key to the story) a major component of refrigerants in air conditioners, freezers, and refrigerators.

So how did the world avoid destruction of the ozone layer and, with it, life on earth? Surely the continued release into the atmosphere of CFCs was important to the profits of an entire industry, just as continued release of carbon is today.

Dumanoski picks up the story on LOE.

…when ozone depletion showed up, it showed up in a place never forecast, in a much more dramatic way, and via a chemistry that hadn’t even been thought of. So it was a complete surprise that blindsided scientists. Where you had basically 50% of the ozone layer over the South Pole disappearing in a matter of weeks. I mean it was just this science fiction event that was so bizarre and so beyond what was thought possible that the NASA computer kept consigning the data that the satellite was seeing to the junk file for further analysis later.

Look at the chronology: Scientists started watching a tear in the ozone layer over the South Pole between 1981 and 1983. They announced the hole’s existence in 1985. The first international conference on the protection of the ozone layer took place in Vienna in 1985. By 1987 chlorine was implicated beyond doubt. The Montréal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, which called for the phasing out of chemicals implicated in the damage, was opened for signatures September 16, 1987 and took effect January 1, 1989. Eight years from observation to action. That’s lightning speed in both science and politics.

Curwood observed,

So the ozone story can be seen, actually, as a fairly good story. It’s still a problem but it’s not a catastrophe. A treaty was put together. Caps were put on this. We took these chemicals as much as possible out of industrial circulation.

Dumanoski recalled,

…at the time there was huge optimism that this would be a model that we could follow and move on quite swiftly to climate change. I can, in fact, remember the day I was in a room in Montréal, when the treaty events were concluding, and I remember speaking with a Norwegian diplomat who was saying to me “well onto climate change.” And there was a feeling that we were going to roll forward to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and really get moving and deal with these problems of global change. We went to Rio, but we seemed to go home and take off on another track.

Another track, indeed. Dumanoski, whose book takes a global view of what we must do to survive in the era of climate change and global warming, said the lesson to be drawn from the ozone layer experience is that

…we’re playing a game where nature holds a lot of wild cards. And that we’re likely to go through the century knocked off our feet by surprises. So I think uncertainty is no reason to continue playing this Russian roulette with the planetary system. Uncertainty could mean that we do not emerge at the end of the century with organized human life.

Dumanoski’s more judicious than I’m inclined to be. I think that money from corporate interests is playing a larger role in the scheme of things now than it did even 20 years ago; that thanks to the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision it will play an even greater role this year and on onward; that Earth’s climate is changing less radically, but no less certainly, than the ozone layer did; and that people are too scared about their own economic situations (a fact not unrelated to the money from corporate interests playing a larger role now) to be as scared of famine and flood as they were of skin cancer when the ozone layer opened up.

One of these days, soon, a cataclysmic event like Katrina will occur in a place inhabited by mainly white, mainly well-off people. And that will scare enough folks to make them rise up in fury and demand that their senators, forty-some of whom present the barrier to serious action to save the rest of us, stop counting their money and their votes long enough to do something constructive about climate change, as their predecessors did about the ozone layer.

Posted on August 4th, 2010 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Climate Change, Global warming, Ozone layer | No Comments »