From: The Guardian (Manchester, U.K.) ………………..[This story printer-friendly]
September 3, 2008
COAL PLANS GO UP IN SMOKE
[Rachel’s introduction: “The backlash against coal power in America has become the country’s biggest-ever environmental campaign, transforming the nation’s awareness of climate change and inspiring political leaders to take firmer action after years of doubt and delay…. The success of the US campaign is also now inspiring a global wave of protests, many in Europe, against similar schemes that plan to build coal-fired generators before carbon capture technology exists.”]
By Juliette Jowit
[Rachel’s introduction: the grass-roots anti-coal movement in the U.S., described earlier this year by Ted Nace, offers a unique opportunity for toxics activists to join coal activists and end the threat of coal-to-liquids, coal-to-chemicals, and coal-fired power plants, all of which are century-old dinosaurs preventing the emergence of modern sustainable alternatives.]
One day, historians might speculate that it was the ambition of the companies that sought to profit by building coal-fired power stations that triggered the beginning of the end for humans’ most polluting habit.
Four years ago, campaigners in the US raised concerns over plans to build 150 coal-fired power stations nationwide. Today, nearly half those plans have been defeated in the courts or abandoned, while half of the remaining proposals are being actively opposed. Just 14 of the 150 plants are being developed, and environmental lawyers are all still pursuing them.
“The enormity of what they were proposing to do provided a platform to have that whole debate about pollution, including global-warming pollution,” says Bruce Nilles , director of the national coal campaign for the Sierra Club, America’s biggest grassroots environment group.
Firmer action
In a few years, the backlash against coal power in America has become the country’s biggest-ever environmental campaign, transforming the nation’s awareness of climate change and inspiring political leaders to take firmer action after years of doubt and delay. Plants have been defeated in at least 30 of the 50 states, uniting those with already strong environmental records, such as California, with more conservative areas, such as the southern and central states.
The success of the US campaign is also now inspiring a global wave of protests, many in Europe, against similar schemes that plan to build coal-fired generators before carbon capture technology exists. If the European protesters succeed, Nilles believes US legislators will be likely to support presidential candidates’ promises to join international efforts to cut emissions. By implication, though, if the protesters fail in Europe, the impact on a US or international deal would be disastrous.
The US anti-coal campaign is being linked to protests against similar plans in Australia, Germany, Italy and the UK, where there are demonstrations at almost every public appearance by E.ON, the company that plans to build Britain’s first new first new coal power station for two decades in Kingsnorth, Kent, where protesters set up a protest camp against the new development in August.
US campaigners say they are concerned that if the UK and other European countries go ahead with new coal plants, the momentum to tackle climate change will be lost. ” The rest of the world has been leading on this, particularly Europe,” says Nilles. “Building new coal makes it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to meet [emissions] targets, so it’s critical the European community countries do not fail.”
Coal power returned to the US political agenda when vice-president Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy policy lifted key pollution restrictions. It took two years for environmental groups to see what emerged: state by state, project by project, a total of 150 new plants were put forward, almost all of them not to replace old coal but to augment it. Individually, some plants would have emitted more CO2 than some African countries. Together, the plants would have emitted an estimated1bn tonnes of CO2 annually — more than the total emissions cuts by countries that have signed the Kyoto protocol.
That realisation mobilised an incredible national campaign, led by a few national groups including the Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists and others, but driven by state and local membership of these and many more organisations and employing a wide array of tactics. The first job was to raise public awareness that the cumulative threat was far greater than each local project, says Nilles. “The projects were moving through the public process and nobody was paying any attention.”
Using town hall debates, local media and political connections, they stirred up interest and recruited new supporters to the cause, including powerful hunting and fishing interests and religious leaders in the Appalachian mountain states, where opencast coal mining is often affecting the poorest communities. Then the campaign began. State politicians were persuaded to legislate either against emissions, as in the case of California, or in favour of alternatives such as renewables and energy efficiency, in Minnesota. Campaigners targeted banks, telling them that investing in coal might be too risky because of the threat of international emissions caps and high carbon prices, prompting the banks to set tougher conditions on lending.
Then the environmentalists highlighted a little-noticed Federal grant fund that gave billions of dollars for new coal power; following their publicity six planned plants were dropped. Legal challenges successfully blocked more plants on the basis of local pollution in Illinois and Montana. It was also proven that burning coal was not the cheapest method of generating electricity, breaking state rules in Minnesota and Florida.
In 2007 the US Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases were a pollutant under the clean air act and so could be regulated. In July this year for the first time a coal plant in Georgia was blocked by a local court using this ruling. Meanwhile, concrete and steel prices have escalated so high that other projects have been dropped on cost grounds.
Extreme weather
It is not only energy policy that has changed: public opinion on climate change has been transformed during this time, thanks in part to extreme weather events across the US, says Nilles.
“The sceptics will say that you can’t say one flood is down to global warming. That’s right, but we can see an up-tick in extreme and unprecedented weather patterns: wildfires sweeping across California, the drought that stretches [across] the southern tier of states, extreme flooding up in the mid-west, and an up-tick in tornados across the Great Plains.”
Public opinion, in turn, has helped persuade at least six states, directly or through emissions limits, to put an effective moratorium on new coal power — California, Washington, Oregon and, perhaps more surprisingly, the conservative southern and midwest states of Florida, Idaho and Kansas. Governors of states that have taken action are also now putting pressure on their peers to stop them building generators that would wipe out their own hard-won emissions reductions. Nilles believes new coal power is now doomed in the US. “My sense is less than 10% [of the 150 plants proposed] will ultimately get built,” he says. After this campaign, protesters will turn their attention to existing coal power and the mining industry, he says. “Ultimately, we need to phase out coal entirely .We don’t need it and it’s very expensive. The US has some of the best [renewable energy] resources in the world.”
Growing resistance
In Germany, where 25 plants have been mooted, campaigners are winning local referendums and blocking the proposals. India has also had some resistance to new coal, for example in Chamalapura near the city of Mysore. China is facing a fierce public response to pollution caused by coal and other industrial sites: an environmental official in 2006 estimated there had been 51,000 pollution-related protests the previous year. In Australia, protesters kicked off six planned climate camps around the world this year by chaining themselves to a coal train and blocking access to two plants.
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From: The American Prospect …………………………[This story printer-friendly]
April 8, 2006
THE ONCE AND FUTURE CARBOHYDRATE ECONOMY
[Rachel’s introduction: For anyone wanting to understand biofuels (growing green plants to make liquid fuels, such a ethanol and biodiesel), this intelligent overview of the subject by David Morris is essential reading.]
By David Morris*
Less than 200 years ago, industrializing societies were carbohydrate economies. In 1820, Americans used two tons of vegetables for every one ton of minerals. Plants were the primary raw material in the production of dyes, chemicals, paints, inks, solvents, construction materials, even energy.
For the next 125 years, hydrocarbon and carbohydrate battled for industrial supremacy. Coal gases fueled the world’s first urban lighting systems. Coal tars ushered in the synthetic dyes industries. Cotton and wood pulp provided the world’s first plastics and synthetic textiles. In 1860, corn-derived ethanol was a best-selling industrial chemical, and as late as 1870, wood provided 70 percent of the nation’s energy.
The first plastic was a bioplastic. In the mid-19th century, a British billiard ball company determined that at the rate African elephants were being killed, the supply of ivory could soon be exhausted. The firm offered a handsome prize for a product with properties similar to ivory, yet derived from a more abundant raw material. Two New Jersey printers, John and Isaiah Hyatt, won the prize for a cotton-derived product dubbed collodion.
Ironically, collodion never made it as a billiard ball: The plastic, whose scientific name is cellulose nitrate, is more popularly known as guncotton, a mild explosive. When a rack of cellulose nitrate pool balls was broken, a loud pop often resulted. Confusion and casualties ensued in saloons where patrons were not only drinking but sometimes armed.
People did find other uses for collodion, however, in dentures and buttons. Later, a new cotton-based plastic called celluloid spawned consumer photography. To this day, many in Hollywood still call their films celluloids, although Steven Spielberg may not remember why.
At the end of the 19th century the names of chemical companies and products often contained a form of the word cellulose, a living chemical consisting of a long string of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen molecules (thus the word carbohydrate). The name of one of the country’s largest chemical manufacturers, Celanese Corporation, was a contraction of “cellulose” and “the easy feeling” of wearing acetate apparel. After celluloid, cellophane, the world’s first film plastic, was introduced to instant success.
By 1920, however, the nation had reversed the vegetable-mineral ratio, using two tons of minerals for every one ton of vegetables. Coal displaced wood for energy. Gasoline-powered cars roamed the streets. Yet outside the nation’s energy markets, living carbon still held its own against fossilized or dead carbon. Rayon, made from wood pulp, was the world’s best-selling synthetic fiber. The first injection molding machines in the 1930s made plastic products from cellulose acetate.
The Great Depression, the collapse of international trade, and then World War II spawned a worldwide effort to replace imports with domestically produced products. Brazilians made plastics from coffee beans, Italians made fine suits from milk protein, and by the 1940s, four million vehicles in European countries were operating on ethanol blends of up to 33 percent. Arthur D. Little wowed and charmed the world by literally making a silk purse from a sow’s ear.
In 1941, when Japan cut off access to Asia’s rubber plantations, the United States launched a crash synthetic rubber program. Washington drafted into service both the nation’s oil refineries and breweries. In 1943, most of America’s synthetic rubber was made from ethanol. By 1945, the United States produced over 600 million gallons of ethanol, a level not again attained until the mid-1980s. A small amount of ethanol was made from wood.
Up until the end of World War II, some companies were still hedging their bets on the material base of the future chemical industry. In 1945, the large British chemical manufacturer ICI still maintained three divisions: one based on coal, one on petroleum, and one on molasses.
Meanwhile, the carbohydrate economy was featured in the popular press and newsreels, reporting on such sensational developments as Henry Ford’s biological car. The body of the 1941 demonstration vehicle consisted of a variety of plant fibers, including hemp. The dashboard, wheel, and seat covers were made from soy protein. The tires were made from goldenrods, bred by Thomas Edison on his urban farm in Fort Myers, Florida. The tank was filled with corn-derived ethanol.
The next time you watch the obligatory Christmas showing of It’s a Wonderful Life, pay close attention to this scene: Jimmy Stewart is on the phone with his brother, who excitedly proclaims he is going to be rich because he is on the ground floor of the next major industry, soybean-derived plastics!
Yet only 25 years later, movie audiences hear Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate ask an older man for career advice. The man responds with one word, “plastics,” and everyone in the audience knows he means petroleum-derived plastics.
In a quarter of a century, the carbohydrate economy had virtually disappeared, a victim of remarkably low crude oil prices (the price dropped to under $1 a barrel in the late 1940s) and rapid advances in making an ever-wider variety of low-cost products from crude oil. American farmers didn’t mind; the Marshall Plan alleviated the 20- year-old agricultural depression by creating a large export market for U.S. surplus crops.
By 1975, not a drop of ethanol was in our nation’s gas tanks. Indeed, industrial ethanol was made from petroleum. Bioplastics disappeared. Mineral oil inks replaced vegetable oil inks. Americans used eight tons of minerals for every one ton of vegetables.
* * *
The Pendulum Swings Back
Beginning in the 1970s, the carbohydrate economy slowly began to reemerge, the result of three mutually reinforcing trends.
The first was technological. Advances in the biological sciences lowered the cost of making bioproducts. At first, entrepreneurs focused on high-priced and low-volume markets, like medicines and medical equipment. As production expanded and firms moved down the learning curve, costs dropped and larger markets opened up.
In the 1980s, for example, polylactic acid (PLA), a chemical derived from milk sugar (lactose), was used to make a suture that could be absorbed inside the body. The cost was high, some $200 per pound, but only an ounce or less was used in the surgery. By the late 1990s, the price of PLA, now made from less expensive corn sugar (fructose), had fallen to about a dollar a pound. PLA is increasingly competitive with petrochemicals for use as a textile, in car bodies, and in containers.
The second factor was political. Fossil fuels are attractive because, under great pressure over eons, the oxygen contained in living material was squeezed out (hence the name hydrocarbon), leaving a very dense energy source. One pound of coal contains the same amount of energy as four pounds of wood.
However, the same geological pressure that squeezed out oxygen squeezed in several unnatural and unwelcome elements, like sulfur and mercury. As an environmental movement emerged and as governments began to regulate these pollutants, the cost of using hydrocarbons rose to reflect their true environmental cost, and biofuels and products became more competitive.
As a clean air measure, for example, the federal government required oxygenates in gasoline. That created a large market for oxygen- containing additives like ethanol. Regulations reducing sulfur levels in diesel helped open up a market for biodiesel. When governments required degradable plastics, bioplastics became more competitive. When phosphates in detergents were restricted, enzyme markets expanded.
The third factor was the rising price of oil and natural gas. In 1970, the price of crude oil was $1.80 per barrel. The price soared to $34 a barrel in 1982, and then fluctuated between $10 a barrel and $30 a barrel for the next 20 years. Finally, in 2005, high oil and natural gas prices seemed here to stay, a result of the rising cost of producing oil and the risk premium an unstable Middle East imposed on oil markets.
With oil at $50 a barrel, many biochemicals have become flat out competitive with petrochemicals. At $60 a barrel, ethanol derived from corn is competitive without subsidies.
These three factors made a significant market for bioproducts possible. They did not make their use inevitable. Remember, bioproducts must invade markets long controlled by the oil and petrochemical industry. In many cases, bioproducts actually need their competitors’ permission to enter these markets.
Consider the instructive history of fuel ethanol.
After World War I, car companies introduced high-compression engines. Existing fuels caused knocking, a result of uneven combustion. The industry feverishly sought an anti-knock additive. Ultimately, it narrowed the choice to two: ethanol or lead. Ethanol would require 10 percent of the gas tank. To achieve the same effect, lead needed less than 1 percent. The car companies, unsurprisingly, chose lead, and stuck to it even after outcries from the public health community about the effects of leaded gasoline.
In the 1970s, as part of its air quality efforts, the Environmental Protection Agency phased out leaded gasoline. Oil companies again could have substituted ethanol. Instead they chose to reformulate gasoline to increase the proportion of aromatic chemicals like benzene, toluene, and xylene. Then, in the late 1980s, the nation discovered these chemicals were carcinogenic and imposed limits on their use. The oil companies again could have switched to ethanol. Instead they chose MTBE, a product made from natural gas-derived methanol and isobutylene, a byproduct of the refinery process.
In the late 1990s, the nation discovered that MTBE was polluting ground water. Nineteen states began to phase out MTBE. So long as the Clean Air Act’s oxygenate requirement remained, highly polluted urban areas had only one alternative: ethanol. The phase out of MTBE is the primary reason U.S. fuel ethanol consumption has doubled in the last three years.
Regrettably, this does not necessarily mean the market is embracing biofuel. Beginning in 1999, California petitioned the federal government to exempt it from the oxygenate requirement. The oil companies, not surprisingly, liked this idea, and promised to formulate a gasoline that could meet all performance standards without compromising public health. Last August, the federal government eliminated the oxygenate requirement. California Senator Dianne Feinstein, the leader of the anti-ethanol fight, exulted. Instead of using 5.7 percent ethanol blends, California could now revert to a gasoline composed 100 percent of fossil fuels.
There’s an old saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. To which I would add: Fool me four times, I’m an idiot.
Despite the rocky road traveled by biofuels, it appears that they are now here to stay. Production has doubled in the last two years and may double again in the next three years. In Brazil, ethanol now constitutes 40 percent of all automobile fuel; 80 percent of new cars are flexible fueled cars, capable of using any proportion of ethanol and gasoline.
Half a dozen countries now mandate biofuels; a dozen more may soon. DuPont is developing a carbohydrate-based division. Vegetable oils have displaced 40 percent of black inks in newspapers. Hydraulic fluids increasingly are made from vegetable oils, not mineral oils. Bioplastics are here.
* * *
Fashioning the Rules
For the first time in 60 years, the carbohydrate economy is back on the public-policy agenda. We may be changing the very material foundation of industrial economies. Whether and how we affect that change can profoundly affect the future of our natural environment, our rural economies, agriculture, and world trade. It is an exciting historical opportunity, but one we should approach with deliberation and foresight.
As we design new rules we should keep in mind several key points:
** First, plants must play an important industrial role if we are to achieve a sustainable, renewable economy.
Plant-based energy sources and materials, often termed biomass, boast two essential features not found in other renewable resources, like geothermal, hydro, wind, sunlight. Biomass can be made into physical products and comes with built-in storage.
Wind and sunlight are intermittent. To count on them, we would need a way to store them. Plants are, in effect, batteries of stored chemical energy.
Wind and sunlight can be harnessed only to produce some forms of energy — heat, mechanical, electrical. Biomass can be used to make physical products. Thus biomass, but not wind or sunlight, can substitute for petrochemicals.
** Second, we need to pay attention to farmers.
The wind blows regardless of public policy. Policymakers can focus on developing effective harvesting technologies. But agriculture requires the enthusiastic participation of cultivators — farmers. Unless the farmers have the economic incentive, biomass energy and materials will not appear in significant quantities.
** Third, a carbohydrate economy could have grave environmental consequences.
Unlike most other renewable resources, biomass can be cultivated, harvested, and processed in nonsustainable ways. Soil erosion, fertilizer and pesticide runoff, and industrial pollution all can result from biomass inappropriately grown and processed. Public policy also needs to ensure that, when using biomass by-products such as cornstalks and wheat straw, farmland is not denuded of nutrients that nature needs to regenerate the land.
** Fourth, unlike other renewable resources, agriculture can satisfy a wide array of needs: food, fuel, clothing, construction, paper, and chemicals.
Policymakers must be careful if they introduce incentives that favor energy over other end uses of farming. In the hierarchy of uses of agriculture, food is still the highest and best use. And there may be other uses more valuable than making energy.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Congress subsidized garbage incinerators that generated electricity. Then we found that more fossil fuels could be displaced, at a lower cost, and with a more positive environmental impact, by recycling the paper and composting the grass and leaves.
Another case of misguided subsidy: Congress and the state of Minnesota recently offered handsome incentives for the generation of electricity from poultry manure. They overlooked the fact that it is a dry manure, high in nitrogen and inexpensive to transport, and an increasingly attractive substitute for natural gas-derived fertilizers. In Minnesota, most poultry manure is currently sold to farmers. But by the end of 2007, because of the new incentives, more than half the dry manure generated in the state will be diverted into making electricity, forcing farmers to look for fertilizer substitutes. Ironically, the fastest growing segment of agriculture is now organic foods, which cannot be grown using synthetic fertilizers.
** Fifth, biomass is not a silver energy bullet.
But it can play a crucial role in reducing our reliance on oil.
Worldwide, tens of billions of tons of biomass potentially are available for making chemicals and fuels. But we will need every one of those billions to meet even a minor portion of our future needs. Overall, biomass may satisfy 10 to 15 percent of our future energy needs. But it can displace a more significant part of our transportation fuels and an even more significant part of our oil fuels.
In the United States, about 60 percent of our oil is used for transportation. (An additional 15 to 18 percent is used to make petrochemicals.) Biofuels’ compactness and relative ease of transport make them attractive transportation fuels.
Sufficient biomass exists to potentially displace 100 percent of our petrochemicals and 50 to 100 percent of our oil-based transportation fuels.
** Sixth, even in transportation, biomass will be the minor partner in a dual-fueled strategy.
The most efficient and environmentally benign transportation system will be powered primarily by electricity. Electric vehicles get over 100 miles per gallon. Unlike today’s hybrid cars, which are internal combustion engine vehicles with a motor assist, tomorrow’s plug-in hybrid cars will charge their batteries from the electricity system and become electric cars with an engine backup.
Between 50 percent and 100 percent of the vehicle’s motive power will come from electricity. Sufficient biomass exists in this situation to provide 100 percent of the biofuels needed by the backup engine.
** Seventh, a carbohydrate economy will have a profound impact on agriculture and world trade.
The carbohydrate economy may have a far more profound impact on agriculture than on energy. Biomass may satisfy only a small part of our energy needs. But the additional amount required will be enormous, perhaps tripling the total amount of plant matter currently used for all purposes (food, feed, textiles, construction, paper). Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of biorefineries producing a variety of final products will dot rural landscapes.
Public policies to date have focused on expanding the use of biofuels. We need to pay as much attention to quality as we do on quantity. What do we want the new carbohydrate economy to look like? Aside from oil displacement, what are our long-term objectives, and our strategy for achieving them?
* * *
Farmers and Local Ownership
More than a century of bitter experience has taught farmers that when they simply sell a raw crop, they fall ever further behind. Farmers receive about the same price for their crops today as they did 30 years ago, while the cost of farm inputs has more than doubled.
In 1970, a bushel of corn could purchase about five and a half gallons of gasoline. Today, a bushel of corn is worth only three-quarters of a gallon of gasoline.
About 30 years ago, farmers reinvented the producer cooperative, a business structure in which farmers own the processing and manufacturing links in the value-added chain. The birth of the first modern producer cooperatives occurred in the 1970s: Minnesota and North Dakota sugar beet farmers learned that the area’s sole sugar beet processing plant would close, leaving them little market for their crop.
The farmers pooled their financial resources and bought the plant. The price of sugar soared. The sugar beet growers made a great deal of money. And in America, financial success begets imitation.
Other producer cooperatives emerged, slowly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then with increasing speed in the late 1990s and early years of the 21st century. Recently, the traditional cooperative has been joined by a new business form, the limited liability corporation.
Farmers today make substantial and ongoing investments in land and equipment. In the last decade they’ve discovered investing in a factory can be more financially rewarding than investing in land or equipment.
Iowa State University (ISU) estimates the five-year average after-tax return for an ethanol dry mill at 23 percent. On the other hand, 70 percent of Iowa’s counties averaged returns on farmland of 2.5 percent or less.
Farmers who own the factory benefit far more from increasing ethanol demand than those who do not. Increased ethanol consumption over the last 25 years may have raised the overall price of corn by 10 to 15 cents per bushel. Farmer-owners receive annual dividends four, five, even 10 times higher.
Farmer-owned biorefineries also serve as a hedge for farmers against volatile commodity prices. When corn prices decline, production costs of ethanol also decline. At least a portion of the income lost on the sale of the raw material can be recouped from the increased profits from the sale of ethanol.
Farmer ownership also benefits the broader rural community. An oil refinery gets its raw material from out of the state, perhaps from outside the country. A biorefinery usually purchases its raw material within 50 to 100 miles of the facility.
Moreover, virtually all the oil refinery’s profits leave the state for distant corporate headquarters and even more distant shareholders. Farmer- or local-owned biorefineries retain virtually all of the profits inside the state.
Consider Minnesota. For every dollar spent on ethanol in the state — assuming the ethanol is produced in-state in a farmer-owned biorefinery — some 75 percent stays in the state economy. For every dollar spent on gasoline, some 75 percent leaves the state economy. This equation makes biorefineries a powerful economic development vehicle.
How can we encourage farmer- and local-owned biorefineries? Here again, Minnesota’s record is instructive. In the early 1980s, Minnesota’s ethanol incentive mirrored that of the federal government by exempting ethanol sold in the state from a portion of the state gas tax.
The incentive worked. Minnesotans purchased ethanol-blended gasoline. But Minnesota didn’t produce the ethanol. In the mid-1980s, farmers persuaded the legislature that public subsidies could more clearly benefit the state economy.
The legislature converted part of the tax exemption into a direct producer payment. The new incentive had three important features:
1. Production had to occur inside the state.
2. The biorefinery could receive payments only for the first 15 million gallons of ethanol produced each year. This encouraged smaller facilities, which in turn enabled farmer and local ownership.
3. An individual plant could receive the incentive only for 10 years. It would not become a continual drain on public resources.
The incentive proved remarkably successful. Today, 12 of Minnesota’s 16 biorefineries are majority-owned by Minnesota farmers. Some 25 to 30 percent of Minnesota’s full-time grain farmers own shares.
We need to redesign the federal incentive with the Minnesota experience in mind. We could begin by converting half the federal incentive of 51 cents per gallon of ethanol into a direct payment to the producer. (The other half could be retained as an excise tax exemption but should be tied to an index comprised of the price of corn and the price of wholesale gasoline. When the spread between them rises above a certain level, the tax incentive disappears.) A producer could receive payments for no more than 10 years, and only on the first 20 million gallons of annual production.
The federal producer payment could differ from Minnesota’s in two respects. Production would not be required in any specific state. And farmer- and/or local-owned biorefineries would be favored.
* * *
The New Brotherhood of the World’s Farmers
The carbohydrate economy has the worldwide potential to catalyze a cooperative farmer movement that displaces the traditional farmer- versus-farmer battles. Traditionally, the carbohydrate has battled other carbohydrates for market share. High-fructose corn sugar versus sugar cane. Brazilian soybeans versus U.S. soybeans. In the future, producers of carbohydrates can cooperate to capture another huge, untapped market: hydrocarbons.
Farmers have been slow to recognize this opportunity. In fact, U.S. agricultural organizations allied themselves with the coal and oil industries to attack the Kyoto treaty. Such an alliance is reasonable if farmers view themselves simply as consumers of fossil fuels. If they view their crops as competitors to fossil fuels, however, opposing Kyoto makes no sense. They should enthusiastically embrace treaties to reduce global warming because these treaties invariably impose penalties on the dead carbon contained in coal and crude oil, while offering rewards for the living carbon contained in crops and trees.
Today, agriculture is one of the most contentious issues in world trade. A carbohydrate economy can reduce and perhaps even eliminate that tension. Rather than Indian and Brazilian and Nigerian farmers fighting for European and American markets, they can sell into vast new domestic energy and industrial markets. Indeed, the case for import substitution is even stronger in the south. Most southern countries can buy imports only with hard currencies. They can obtain hard currencies only by increasing exports or borrowing from the IMF or other banks. Thus, displacing oil imports with domestic fuels can reduce their external debt while bolstering their rural economies.
* * *
We live in an era of tumultuous change. Yet we should recall Bertrand Russell’s distinction between change and progress. Change, he argued, is inevitable. Progress is controversial. Change is scientific. Progress is ethical.
We will have change, whether we want it or not. But progress comes only when we design rules that channel human ingenuity and entrepreneurial energy and investment capital toward constructing a society and an economy compatible with the values we hold most dear.
The carbohydrate economy beckons.
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* David Morris is vice president of the Minneapolis and Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance and directs its New Rules Project. He has been an advisor to the energy departments of Presidents Ford, Carter, Clinton, and George W. Bush. He is the author of The Carbohydrate Economy (1992) and A Better Way (2003).
Copyright 2006 by The American Prospect, Inc.
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From: Washington University Committee on Space Sciences ..[This story printer-friendly]
May 10, 1965
EARTH AS A SPACE SHIP
[Rachel’s introduction: In this path-breaking essay from 1965, Kenneth Boulding described the Earth as a space ship, on which we are all passengers: “In the imagination of those who are sensitive to the realities of our era, the earth has become a space ship, and this, perhaps, is the most important single fact of our day,” he wrote. We passengers are just now beginning to understand the profound implications of Boulding’s 1965 insight.]
[Rachel’s introduction: The year after he published this pioneering essay, Kenneth Boulding fleshed out these ideas in his important paper, “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.”]
In the imagination of those who are sensitive to the realities of our era, the earth has become a space ship, and this, perhaps, is the most important single fact of our day. For millennia, the earth in men’s minds was flat and illimitable. Today, as a result of exploration, speed, and the explosion of scientific knowledge, earth has become a tiny sphere, closed, limited, crowded, and hurtling through space to unknown destinations. This change in man’s image of his home affects his behavior in many ways, and is likely to affect it much more in the future.
It is not only that man’s image of the earth has changed; the reality of the world social system has changed. As long as man was small in numbers and limited in technology, he could realistically regard the earth as an infinite reservoir, an infinite source of inputs and an infinite cesspool for outputs. Today we can no longer make this assumption. Earth has become a space ship, not only in our imagination but also in the hard realities of the social, biological, and physical system in which man is enmeshed. In what we might call the “old days,” when man was small in numbers and earth was large, he could pollute it with impunity, though even then he frequently destroyed his immediate environment and had to move on to a new spot, which he then proceeded to destroy. Now man can no longer do this; he must live in the whole system, in which he must recycle his wastes and really face up to the problem of the increase in material entropy which his activities create. In a space ship there are no sewers.
Let me suggest, then, some of the consequences of earth becoming a space ship. In the first place, it is absolutely necessary for man now to develop a technology that is different from the one on which he now bases his high-level societies. High-level societies are now based on the consumption of fossil fuels and ores, none of which, at present rates of consumption, are likely to last more than a few hundred years. A stable, circular-flow high-level technology is conceivable in which we devote inputs of energy to the concentration of materials into useful form, sufficient to compensate for the diffusion of materials which takes place in their use. At the moment we take fuels and burn them, we take concentrated deposits of iron ore for instance, and phosphates, and we spread these throughout the world in dumps, and we flush them out to the oceans in sewers. The stable high-level technology will have to rely on the oceans and the atmosphere as a basic resource from which materials may be concentrated in sufficient quantity to overcome their diffusion through consumption. Even this, of course, will require constant inputs of energy. There is no way for the closed system to prevent the increase of entropy. Earth, fortunately, has a constant input of energy from the sun, and by the time that goes, man will probably have abandoned earth; and we have also the possibility of almost unlimited energy inputs from nuclear fusion, if we can find means of harnessing it usefully.
Man is finally going to have to face the fact that he is a biological system living in an ecological system, and that his survival power is going to depend on his developing symbiotic relationships of a closed- cycle character with all the other elements and populations of the world of ecological systems. What this means, in effect, is that all the other forms of life will have to be domesticated, even if on wildlife preserves.
The consequences of earth becoming a space ship for the social system are profound and little understood. It is clear that much human behavior and many human institutions in the past, which were appropriate to all infinite earth, are entirely inappropriate to a small closed space ship. We cannot have cowboys and Indians, for instance, in a space ship, or even a cowboy ethic. We cannot afford unrestrained conflict, and we almost certainly cannot afford national sovereignty in an unrestricted sense. On the other hand, we must beware of pushing the analogy too far. In a small ship, there would almost have to be a dictatorial political system with a captain, and a planned economy. A voyaging space ship, like a battleship, almost has to be a centrally planned economy. A large space ship with three billion passengers, however, or perhaps ten billion, may have a very different social structure. Large social organizations are very different from small. It may be able to have much more individual freedom, a price system and a market economy of a limited and controlled kind, and even democratic political institutions. There must be, however, cybernetic or homeostatic mechanisms for preventing the overall variables of the social system from going beyond a certain range. There must, for instance, be machinery for controlling the total numbers of the population; there must be machinery for controlling conflict processes and for preventing perverse social dynamic processes of escalation and inflation. One of the major problems of social science is how to devise institutions which will combine this overall homeostatic control with individual freedom and mobility. I believe this problem to be not insoluble, though not yet solved.
Once we begin to look at earth as a space ship, the appalling extent of our ignorance about it is almost frightening. This is true of the level of every science. We know practically nothing, for instance, about the long-run dynamics even of the physical system of the earth. We do not understand, for instance, the machinery of ice ages, the real nature of geological stability or disturbance, the incidence of volcanism and earthquakes, and we understand fantastically little about that enormously complex heat engine known as the atmosphere. We do not even know whether the activities of man are going to make the earth warm up or cool off. At the level of the biological sciences, our ignorance is even greater. Ecology as a science has hardly moved beyond the level of bird-watching. It has yet to become quantified, and it has yet to find an adequate theory. Even to an economist, its existing theoretical structures seem fantastically naive, and when it comes to understanding the world social system or the sociosphere, we are not only ignorant but proud of our ignorance. There is no systematic method of data collection and processing, and the theory of social dynamics is still in its first infancy.
The moral of all this is that man must be made to realize that all his major problems are still unsolved, and that a very large and massive intellectual effort is still necessary to solve them. In the meantime we are wasting our intellectual resources on insoluble problems like unilateral national defense and on low-priority achievements like putting a man on the moon. This is no way to run a space ship.
Kenneth E. Boulding Papers, Archives (Box # 38), University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries.
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From: Nature Magazine ………………………………[This story printer-friendly]
September 3, 2008
HURRICANES ARE GETTING FIERCER
[Rachel’s introduction: “The maximum wind speeds of the strongest tropical cyclones [aka hurricanes] have increased significantly since 1981, according to new research. And the upward trend, thought to be driven by rising ocean temperatures, is unlikely to stop at any time soon.”]
By Quirin Schiermeier
As this year’s Atlantic hurricane season becomes ever more violent, scientists have come up with the firmest evidence so far that global warming will significantly increase the intensity of the most extreme storms worldwide.
The maximum wind speeds of the strongest tropical cyclones have increased significantly since 1981, according to research published in Nature this week.[1] And the upward trend, thought to be driven by rising ocean temperatures, is unlikely to stop at any time soon.
In May 2008, Cyclone Nargis killed more than 100,000 people in southern Myanmar. New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina wrought havoc in 2005, was luckily spared another flood disaster this week as Hurricane Gustav had weakened by the time it hit the coast of Louisiana.
One of the most contentious issues in the climate-change debate has been whether the strength, number and duration of tropical cyclones will increase in a warmer world. Basic physics and modelling studies do suggest that tropical storms will become more intense, because warmer oceans provide more energy that can be converted into cyclone wind. But others believe that atmospheric changes might have an inhibiting role. Increasing shearing winds — another predicted consequence of global warming — are thought to suppress the cyclonic rotation of the storms, for example.
James Elsner, a climatologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, and his colleagues have now found that the strongest tropical storms are getting stronger, with the most notable increases in the North Atlantic and northern Indian oceans. Very strong storms, Elsner says, can more easily overcome any inhibiting effects of shearing winds than weaker storms, and go on to reach their maximum possible strength.
Feel the heat
The team statistically analysed satellite-derived data of cyclone wind speeds. Although there was hardly any increase in the average number or intensity of all storms, the team found a significant shift in distribution towards stronger storms that wreak the greatest havoc. This meant that, overall, there were more storms with a maximum wind speed exceeding 210 kilometres per hour (category 4 and 5 storms on the Saffir-Simpson scale).
Rising ocean temperatures are thought to be the main cause of the observed shift. The team calculates that a 1 �C increase in sea- surface temperatures would result in a 31% increase in the global frequency of category 4 and 5 storms per year: from 13 of those storms to 17. Since 1970, the tropical oceans have warmed on average by around 0.5 �C. Computer models suggest they may warm by a further 2 �C by 2100.
“It’ll be pretty hard now for anyone to claim that cyclone activity has not increased,” says Judith Curry, an atmospheric researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who was not involved in the study.
Strongest storms matter most
Three years ago, Curry and her team calculated that category 4 and 5 storms have almost doubled in number and proportion since 1970.[2] The study, published two weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck, was later criticized for using a mixture of data taken by various worldwide projects that used different protocols. The new analysis is instead based on a single set of wind-speed data inferred from infrared satellite imagery.
The results, says Peter Webster, a hurricane expert also at the Georgia Institute of Technology, add urgency to the need to find ways of improving forecasting and warning systems, particularly for poorer countries.
“A warning lead time of two days may be long enough here, but it is clearly not long enough in Myanmar or Bangladesh,” he says. “Communicating more accurate forecasts to people in coastal areas more quickly can reduce the death toll enormously.”
The US National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center predicts that 14-18 named storms and 3-6 major hurricanes will form this season. An average season has 11 named storms and 2 major hurricanes.
“People should now stop saying ‘who cares, storm activity is just a few per cent up’,” says Curry. “It’s the strongest storms that matter most.”
References
[1] Elsner, J., Kossin, J. P. & Jagger, T. H. Nature 445, 92-95 (2008).
[2] Webster, P. J., Holland, G. J., Curry, J. A. & Chang, H.-R. Science 309, 1844-1846 (2005).
Copyright 2008 Nature Publishing Group
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From: New Statesman (London, U.K.) …………………..[This story printer-friendly]
September 4, 2008
INEQUALITY KILLS
[Rachel’s introduction: A new report from the World Health Organization delivers a powerful message: “Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale.”]
By Peter Wilby
When a report from the World Health Organisation came out a few days ago, the media highlighted an extraordinary fact: that life expectancy in one deprived area of Glasgow is lower than in India, Philippines, Poland, Mexico and Cuba. This, you might think, is attributable to booze, fags, bad food and lack of exercise.
You would be right — but only partially so. The WHO report (Closing the Gap in a Generation) has a much bigger message, summed up in a single sentence: “Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale.” That means what it says. Fat, sugar, cigarettes and alcohol are certainly killers, and a propensity to indulge in them is itself related to income and social status. But even if you eschew bad habits and lead a blameless life, your socio-economic status is likely to get you in the end. Inequality is the biggest killer of the lot.
The evidence was set out in The Status Syndrome, a book published in 2004 by Michael Marmot, the British professor who headed the commission that produced the WHO report. He quoted a study of office- based civil servants that first highlighted health’s “social gradient” in the 1990s. It found that, at each grade down the Whitehall hierarchy, mortality increased. Between the ages of 40 and 64, those in the bottom grade were four times more likely to die than those at the top. Beyond retirement, the gap narrowed, but even in their seventies and eighties, men in the lower grade had twice the risk of death. As Marmot put it, “differences in lifestyle provide only a modest explanation”. For example, smoking, cholesterol, blood pressure and so on explained only a third of the difference between the top and bottom grades in the risk of dying from coronary heart disease.
Without the right social policies, economic growth “brings no benefit to health”
I do not think we have yet grasped the import of this and similar research. We traditionally assume that health improvement is delivered by medical advances, better hospitals, more doctors and more spending on health services. Most political argument is about how to achieve these ends, with the role of preventative health — improved lifestyles — now adding a further dimension. The WHO report is saying something quite different: health is political in the broadest sense because it is influenced by the distribution of power, income, goods and services. Here are some more facts. US blacks are rich by world standards but, in a highly unequal country, most are very poor by local standards. People from Tunisia, Jamaica, Panama, Libya, Lebanon and Cuba all have higher life expectancies than the US black population. If black mortality rates were the same as those for US whites 886,202 deaths would have been averted between 1991 and 2000. Over the same period, 176,633 lives were saved by medical advances.
The WHO report shows that, if we want to achieve health equity and close the gap between rich and poor, we have to abandon the “Washington consensus” that has dominated western political and economic thinking for 25 years. Take the “flexible workforce” sought by new Labour as well as the Tories. Temporary, part-time and insecure work are all associated with poor health, according to the WHO report. Take the trend towards harsher social security schemes, means-tested and “targeted” at the “deserving” poor. The WHO insists that “generous universal social protection systems are associated with better population health”.
Access to free education as well as free health services is important; the WHO deplores the user charges being imposed on many developing countries in the name of balancing state budgets. Progressive taxation, a strong public sector and private-sector regulation are all essential, the report argues. “Community or civil society action,” it adds, “… cannot be separated from the responsibility of the state to guarantee a comprehensive set of rights and ensure the fair distribution of essential… goods… Top-down and bottom-up approaches are equally valid.” Are you listening, David Cameron?
Above all, we should abandon the belief that everything must be sacrificed to economic growth. Without the right social policies, says the WHO report, growth “brings no benefit to health”. Up to a certain, quite low level (which most of sub-Saharan Africa hasn’t reached), higher national income brings dramatic health gains. Beyond that, the effect is slight and inconsistent.
The WHO report demands a revolution in current political thinking. The case for social justice, it shows, does not rest on ideology or class envy, but on “an ethical imperative”, a preference for life over death.
It should be read, in full, by every politician on earth.
Copyright New Statesman 1913-2008
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From: Chicago Tribune ………………………………[This story printer-friendly]
August 30, 2008
STUDY: WOMEN LIVING IN MERCURY’S SHADOW
[Rachel’s introduction: In the northeastern U.S., nearly one in five women of child-bearing age have eaten so much mercury-contaminated fish that the toxic metal in their blood would pose a risk to their fetuses, compared with one in 10 nationally.]
By Michael Hawthorne, Tribune staff reporter
The nation’s first region-by-region analysis of mercury in women’s blood shows vast differences based on where they live, with the highest levels found in the Northeast.
There, nearly one in five women of child-bearing age have eaten so much contaminated fish that the toxic metal in their blood would pose a risk to their fetuses, compared with one in 10 nationally, the federally financed study found.
Women in the Midwest generally had much less mercury in their bodies; less than 3 percent exceeded a safety level intended to protect the developing brain before birth.
The study also found that women who make more money tend to have higher mercury levels. That may be because they are better able to afford expensive seafood, such as swordfish or high-grade tuna, that often is more contaminated.
Within the otherwise troubling analysis there were some glimmers of welcome news. Nationally, the percentage of women with high mercury levels declined from 16 percent in 2000 to 10 percent four years later, the most recent data available. Levels of mercury also dropped most dramatically among the women with the most exposure–a decline that occurred, the authors noted, even though those women were eating the same amount of seafood.
That finding suggests consumer advisories about mercury in fish are starting to work, the researchers argue. The seafood industry and top officials with the Food and Drug Administration have insisted that advising women about high- and low-mercury species would scare women away from eating seafood altogether.
“Women are a lot smarter than they have assumed,” said the study’s lead author, Kathryn Mahaffey, who until this week was a top scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “They’re eating fish, but they’re choosing more wisely.”
Medical experts agree that on balance, eating fish is good for most people. Seafood generally is a low-fat source of protein, and some fish, such as salmon and sardines, are rich in omega-3 fatty acids that are thought to help prevent heart disease and stimulate brain development.
But studies have found that regular consumption of mercury- contaminated fish can offset those benefits. Exposure to mercury in the womb, mostly from fish eaten by mothers, can irreversibly damage the brain before birth, causing subtle delays in walking and talking as well as decreased attention span and memory.
After an extensive review, the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s leading scientific advisory body, concluded two years ago that Americans need to eat more fish but should vary their choices and, in some cases, avoid certain species altogether because of mercury contamination.
The newest study–financed by the EPA and based on blood samples and fish consumption data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention–was posted this week on the Web site of Environmental Health Perspectives, a journal published by the National Institutes of Health.
The peer-reviewed study found that 10 percent of U.S. females ages 16 to 49 had mercury levels in their blood exceeding 3.5 parts per billion. Previous studies have shown that level causes the amount of mercury in a fetus to exceed the EPA’s safety limit of 5.8 parts per billion.
In coastal states, 16 percent of women exceeded the limit, compared with 6 percent among their inland counterparts, who generally eat less fish.
Levels among the most exposed women are dropping but remain a concern, said Mahaffey, who had a long career at the EPA as one of the agency’s top toxicologists. Her analysis found that the amount of mercury in those women has declined from 7.2 parts per billion to 4.4 parts per billion since 1999.
Michael Bolger, an FDA toxicologist, agreed that more awareness of mercury’s dangers appears to have led many women to choose seafood that tends to be less contaminated. But Americans still don’t eat enough fish, Bolger said.
The FDA in particular has been criticized for failing to do more to protect women and children from mercury exposure. A 2005 Tribune investigation found that supermarkets routinely sell fish that are highly contaminated with the toxic metal, in part because the federal government does not inspect seafood for mercury before it is sold.
Moreover, the government’s consumer advisory does not reflect its own testing data. The FDA/EPA advisory tells pregnant women, young children and other at-risk groups to not eat shark, swordfish, king mackerel and tilefish because of high mercury levels. It also cautions those groups to limit their overall fish consumption to 12 ounces a week, including no more than 6 ounces of canned albacore tuna.
Yet the advisory is silent about other commonly sold fish that contain even more mercury than albacore, including grouper, orange roughy, Chilean sea bass and marlin.
In response, physicians groups and several states, including Wisconsin and Minnesota, have issued their own warnings that caution women and children against eating a wider variety of species. Likewise, many supermarket chains have posted warnings.
The seafood industry has financed research suggesting that mercury warnings are scaring women away from seafood. As a result, industry representatives contend, those women are depriving their children of important nutrients.
“There is a lot of confusion out there about what women should do,” said Jennifer Wilmes, a dietitian for the National Fisheries Institute, an industry trade group. “The worst thing you can do, of all of your options, is to eat no fish or very little fish.”
Copyright 2008, Chicago Tribune
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From: Michigan State University ……………………..[This story printer-friendly]
August 23, 2008
PUBLIC INPUT IMPROVES ENVIRONMENTAL DECISIONS
[Rachel’s introduction: With their intimate knowledge of local environments, ordinary citizens can help government agencies “get the science right, and get the right science.”]
EAST LANSING, Mich. — When it comes to environmental issues — anything from cleaning up a polluted river to dealing with Superfund sites — public input can make the process smoother and lead to better outcomes, says a new report from a National Research Council panel.
The panel that issued the report was chaired by Thomas Dietz, a Michigan State University professor of sociology and crop and soil sciences and director of the university’s Environmental Science and Policy Program.
Federal agencies have increasingly involved the public in recent decades when deciding, for example, how to manage public forests or Superfund sites, Dietz said.
But critics claim that including people with limited scientific knowledge can slow the process and lead to poor decisions.
“Such claims have logical validity in that they could be a problem,” Dietz said. “But our assessment is that if you run the process right, none of those things happen.”
Indeed, with their intimate knowledge of local environments, ordinary citizens can help agencies “get the science right, and get the right science,” Dietz said.
By listening to affected parties and considering their personal values, he added, agencies can reach more legitimate decisions with less likelihood of protests or lawsuits.
Furthermore, people involved in decision making are likely to learn more about environmental science and become better participants in future decisions.
Dietz said decision making should be inclusive, and that agencies should commit adequate resources to the process and make clear exactly how public input will be used.
But the panel “can’t provide a cookbook,” he said. Instead, agencies must adjust their process to the decision at hand.
Dietz said public participation is a relatively new field for research, but one in which Michigan State is highly involved.
“I think this is an area where MSU could be a leader,” he said.
The report was sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Energy, Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
It is available online at http://national-academies.org.
For more information on MSU’s Environment Science and Policy Program, visit the Web at http://environment.msu.edu.
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Michigan State University has been advancing knowledge and transforming lives through innovative teaching, research and outreach for more than 150 years. MSU is known internationally as a major public university with global reach and extraordinary impact. Its 17 degree-granting colleges attract scholars worldwide who are interested in combining education with practical problem solving.
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Rachel’s Democracy & Health News highlights the connections between issues that are often considered separately or not at all.
The natural world is deteriorating and human health is declining because those who make the important decisions aren’t the ones who bear the brunt. Our purpose is to connect the dots between human health, the destruction of nature, the decline of community, the rise of economic insecurity and inequalities, growing stress among workers and families, and the crippling legacies of patriarchy, intolerance, and racial injustice that allow us to be divided and therefore ruled by the few.
In a democracy, there are no more fundamental questions than, “Who gets to decide?” And, “How DO the few control the many, and what might be done about it?”
Rachel’s Democracy and Health News is published as often as necessary to provide readers with up-to-date coverage of the subject.
Editors:
Peter Montague – peter@rachel.org
Tim Montague – tim@rachel.org
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