Alexis's Blog
There are proven and profitable agricultural practices that have the power to draw excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
But, before agriculture can be a climate change solution, it has to deal with its own greenhouse gas pollution.
Synthetic fertilizers and factory farms must be phased out, while regenerative organic practices that sequester carbon are ramped up.
There’s certainly a lot of potential, especially on grasslands where ruminant animals can forage for the entirety of their lives instead of being fattened on synthetic-fertilizer-grown grains in greenhouse-gas-polluting factory farm feedlots.
We can get grazing animals off grain and phase out of factory farms by increasing on-farm and farmer-owned processing capacity, so that farmers can act independently of the meat and grain monopolies.
But, it won’t be easy to steer clear of these multi-billion-dollar agribusinesses. They’re always one step ahead, working with their supporters in government on false solutions to perpetuate the industrial food system and avoid addressing the systemic causes of our climate crisis.
Emperor Gates has a new decree: “All rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef.”
Bill Gates has invested in Impossible Foods whose CEO, Pat Brown, says his genetically engineered synthetic meat substitutes will replace the use of animals by 2035.
You’d think the Impossible Foods pitch would be about the horrors of factory farming. Instead, Gates and Brown take aim at regenerative organic agriculture and grass-fed beef. According to Fortune.com: “Gates and Brown believe that genetically modified seeds and chemical herbicides, in the right doses––and not land-intensive organic farming––are crucial to curbing carbon emissions.”
That old lie about organic farming has been thoroughly debunked, and real climate activists know “It’s not the cow, it’s the how.”
There are plenty of things we can do to help the climate, from eating locally grown regenerative organic food to reducing our fossil fuel consumption by insulating our homes, installing solar power, taking public transit or driving an electric car.
But, most of us find ourselves responsible for carbon emissions that can’t easily be avoided, whether it’s from a flight we have to take or the natural gas lines into our homes.
Increasingly, businesses are making it easy for consumers to offset the greenhouse gas associated with their purchases by offering carbon credits. Some businesses even set carbon-neutral goals and commit to completely offsetting unavoidable emissions.
On January 27, 2021, President Joe Biden signed his “Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.” This historic action commited the U.S. to achieving “significant short-term global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and net-zero global emissions by mid-century or before.”
Biden’s climate EO was immediately likened to the Green New Deal resolution championed by the Sunrise Movement.
One big difference between the two is, while the Green New Deal sticks to direct government investment in proven climate solutions, Biden’s climate EO relies, in part, on “market-based mechanisms” and “robust standards for the market ... to catalyze private sector investment.”
The differences between the Green New Deal and Biden’s climate EO wouldn’t have us so concerned if it weren’t for the support for three dangerous false solutions that his Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack brings to the Biden-Harris Cabinet.
President Biden’s decision to reinstate Tom “Mr. Monsanto” Vilsack as Agriculture Secretary is a disaster for nutrition and farming, but his choice of Deb Haaland for Interior Secretary, managing the 500 million acres of public lands, could benefit the climate in ways that could also improve food security.
Following up on “Back to the Future with Tom ‘Mr. Monsanto’ Vilsack,” this is the second installment in a series of articles we’re doing on President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
If you haven’t already, please tell your U.S. Senators to vote NO on Vilsack.
In our last post, we listed the dozens of new genetically modified crops Vilsack pushed through the U.S.D.A. and cloned animals that he allowed to enter the market without review.
Today, we focus on Vilsack’s 2015 approval of dicamba-resistant cotton and soy. He knew these GMOs would unleash a raft of hellish herbicide drift incidents plaguing organic and conventional farmers alike. But, it was Monsanto's biggest product launch ever, supposedly a fix for the weed problems with Roundup Ready crops (resistant to glyphosate), so he turned a blind eye to the danger.
In this installment of the Gain-of-Function Hall of Shame, we add fellow anthrax alumnus David R. Franz, now an adviser to EcoHealth Alliance, the coronavirus-hunting funder of the Wuhan Institute of Virology that we covered in our profile of Peter Daszak.
Franz is a retired army colonel who served at USAMRIID beginning in 1987. He was Chief of the Cardiorespiratory Toxicology Department (1987-1989), Chief of the Toxicology Division (1989-1992), Deputy Commander (1993-1995), and Commander (1995-1998).
His years as commander overlap with those of the covert biological weapons programs described in Judith Miller’s book Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, and he was a source for much of the information about them in the book. These included Projects Jefferson (the genetic engineering of vaccine-resistant anthrax, something the U.S. military had been doing since the 1980s), Clear Vision (the production of “biobomblets” that could be used to disperse anthrax), and Bite Size and Bacchus, or BACUS, Biotechnology Activity Characterization by Unconventional Signatures (the production of anthrax simulant outside the lab, as a terrorist cell might).
President-Elect Joe Biden has nominated Tom Vilsack as Agriculture Secretary.
This is bad news.
Tom Vilsack was “Mr. Monsanto” even before he started at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2009. As Iowa’s governor (1999–2007), he had been named Governor of the Year by the Biotechnology Industry Organization. Today, he continues to serve agribusiness as the head of the US Dairy Export Council, which is deeply invested in perpetuating the system of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), the use of pesticide-drenched genetically modified feed, and the practice of keeping prices paid to farmers below the cost of production to drive the consolidation of ever-larger factory farms.
As USDA Secretary from 2009-2017, Vilsack approved more new genetically modified organisms (GMOs) than any Secretary before him or since.
In our recent profile of Bill Gates, we posed the following questions:
• Were his eerily accurate predictions of COVID-19 a form of wish fulfillment?
• Was he simply prescient, or did he have a hand in shaping the conditions that made the pandemic inevitable?
Most importantly, since SARS-CoV-2 may have escaped from a Chinese lab where gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses were funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Pentagon, has Gates been involved in the collection and manipulation of deadly viruses?
As this report will show, the answer is yes.
There are two leading scientists who claim to have physical evidence that the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, originated in bats and was transmitted directly, or through an intermediate host, to humans: Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and his collaborator Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
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