The Art of the Possible

Even though Reagan proved deficits don't matter, the Obama administration has proposed budget cuts that will affect Endangered Species Act protections:

The Obama administration has proposed to cut funding for listing of endangered species by 5 percent. Currently, there are 249 species that are designated as candidates for listing as endangered species. Candidate species, including the New England cottontail, yellow-billed loon, Yosemite toad, and many others, are species that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has determined do need protection, but for which they claim they lack the resources to actually provide that protection. Many animals and plants have been waiting decades for protection, and most are gravely endangered. To date, the administration has only protected two species under the Endangered Species Act. By comparison, the Clinton administration protected an average of 65 species per year....

The proposed budget also cuts funding for candidate conservation, which is supposed to provide protection to candidate species in the absence of listing, by almost 9 percent; cuts funding for endangered species law enforcement by almost 4 percent; and is nearly flat for recovery.

Oddly enough, the administration has also declined to raise the federal fee applied to livestock that are grazed on public lands:

On Friday the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management announced that in 2010 it would not increase the paltry $1.35 monthly fee charged for each cow and calf that the livestock industry grazes on western public land. The fee remains far below what the agencies spend to administer grazing permits, it remains far below market rates, and it remains far short of providing revenue needed to correct the severe ecological damage caused by livestock grazing.

Habitat destruction caused by livestock is a primary factor contributing to the decline of threatened and endangered species including the desert tortoise, Mexican spotted owl, southwestern willow flycatcher, least Bell’s vireo, Mexican gray wolf, Oregon spotted frog, Chiricahua leopard frog, in addition to dozens of other species of imperiled mammals, fish, amphibians, and spring snails that occur on western public land. Livestock grazing is also a primary factor contributing to unnaturally severe western wildfires, watershed degradation, soil loss, and the spread of invasive plants.

Could a higher grazing fee prevent cuts to ESA protections that are necessary in part because of the livestock industry?

Who knows? Who cares?

In other news, Phoenix, AZ will make up its budget shortfalls by taxing staple foods:

Phoenix's mayor argues that while people need to eat, they also need basic services like police and firemen, and without closing gaps in the city's budget with a food tax, they wont be available.

(Photo: "A trough stands out on a landscape made barren by grazing. - Awapa Plateau, Dixie National Forest." Via Utah Environmental Congress.)

The Final Frontier

Andrew Rice reports that Saudi Arabia is buying up African croplands. Amazingly, the headline asks whether there is "such a thing as agro-imperialism."

It's a strange question, given that most of the classic narratives of imperialism revolve around agriculture (e.g., tea, opium, rubber, bananas, palm oil). You wouldn't think it'd be necessary to invent a new, fashionably hyphenated name for the economic imperative that gave us the term "banana republic"...unless the goal is simply to treat established facts as controversial theories, so that business as usual can proceed while we quibble over terminology.

Maybe the confusion stems from the fact that in today's fully enlightened world, growing your country's food on a poorer country's land creates jobs and opportunities. This is a far cry from the imperialism of the bad old days, which was explicitly undertaken in the name of Radical Evil and had no use for humanitarian platitudes. In the 1800s, plantation owners paid their laborers starvation wages as an expression of racialist contempt. Nowadays, they do it out of love.

Or failing that, necessity.

A variety of factors — some transitory, like the spike in food prices, and others intractable, like global population growth and water scarcity — have created a market for farmland, as rich but resource-deprived nations in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere seek to outsource their food production to places where fields are cheap and abundant. Because much of the world’s arable land is already in use — almost 90 percent, according to one estimate, if you take out forests and fragile ecosystems — the search has led to the countries least touched by development, in Africa.

I'm not sure how you distinguish "fragile ecosystems" from the other kind. Maybe they don't withstand conversion to industrial monoculture? Or maybe the distinction has less to do with biology than with the power and visibility of a given ecosystem's human defenders. By that measure, California's remaining wetlands are probably a lot more "fragile" than most of Africa.

Either way, Ethiopia is one of the countries that may or may not be falling prey to agro-imperialism.

“We are associated with hunger, although we have enormous investment opportunities,” explained Abi Woldemeskel, director general of the Ethiopian Investment Agency.

As you can see, Abu Woldemeskel has a firm grasp of history. And that goes double for Robert Zeigler of the International Rice Research Institute:

“The idea that one country would go to another country,” says Robert Zeigler, “and lease some land, and expect that the rice produced there would be made available to them if there’s a food crisis in that host country, is ludicrous.”

I'll say. I can't come up with a single example of a country that exported food crops while its people died of starvation, and I've been trying for several seconds. The scenario is even more ludicrous given that we're talking about Saudi Arabia, which has very little clout in international affairs and tends to buckle under the mildest criticism.

But if you want a really clear-eyed view of history, you must consult Susan Payne of Emergent Asset Management.

“Africa is the final frontier,” Payne told me after the conference. “It’s the one continent that remains relatively unexploited.”

Roll over King Leopold, and tell Cecil Rhodes the news! Perhaps it's time for a new Berlin Conference.

Joking aside, there's an awful lot of money at stake here, so it's just as well that global warming turned out to be a hoax.

Pleasant Landscapes

Alan Oxley has been hearing a lot about "ethical" business decisions lately, and he's skeptical. The paradox here -- the aporia, if you will -- is that "denying opportunities for growth is clearly unethical."

Palm oil plantations are a good case in point. "Environmentalists" keep saying they're "bad," because they lead to "deforestation" and the "destruction" of "habitat." But consider this:

[Palm oil] is a basic food product for the poor in the developing world.

Here, then, are two competing visions of the future: in one, the Virtuous Poor are burdened with acres of redundant forest comprising rocks and dirt and poisonous snakes. In the other, they're blessed with as much palm oil as they can drink. From a humanitarian standpoint, the choice is clear.

Besides, it's not transnational agribusiness that's bulldozing forests in the developing world; it's poor people who need food and firewood.

Researchers at the Food and Agricultural Organization report regularly that deforestation in developing countries is result of the search for firewood and land to house and feed people.

And besides that, Europe and North America had similar economic incentives for hacking down their own forests -- in addition to the Third World's -- and everything turned out just ducky, as demonstrated by the fact that you're probably reading these words in a reasonably modern house filled with electronic gadgetry.

This was how Europe and North America developed, and it is how the Third World is growing too. The Malaysian government promoted palm oil, making it the world's largest producer for several years as a deliberate and successful strategy to provide prosperity and economic security to previously landless workers.

The Malaysian government's seal of approval should be enough for anyone; after all, Malaysia has been reaping the benefits of palm-oil production ever since this sturdy West African plant was first turned into a cash crop by foreign entrepreneurs under British colonial rule.

Still, a few Negative Nellies persist in wringing their hands over the "loss" of "biodiversity." These people don't seem to realize that this battle is already over, and we won:

Five years ago the U.N. concluded that the biodiversity target of preserving 10% of the world's forests had been reached. There is more forest preserved in the developing world now than in Europe.

That being the case, how can anyone seriously object to additional deforestation? There's only one possible explanation:

This is now merely a campaign to satisfy a Western urge to see pleasant landscapes.

If you thought that colonialism had something to do with exploiting Third World resources and labor while patting oneself on the back for "civilizing" the natives, think again: the real colonialists are those Western snobs whose languid aestheticism is interfering with the world-healing operations of Cargill.

Like Martin Durkin's bolshevist fury at the bourgeois cult of global warming, and Brenden O'Neill's radical critique of eco-imperialism, Oxley's article showcases the growing usefulness of left-wing clichés to corporatist shills. Soon enough, I'm sure, we'll see child labor on cocoa plantations justified with quotes from Frantz Fanon, and Tom DeLay characterizing opposition to Saipan sweatshops as a new and worse form of Orientalism.

It may be that Oxley's happy talk about food and prosperity and biodiversity doesn't impress you much. If so, forget about it, and focus on the bottom line:

Shareholders ultimately rate companies by the business they do, not the causes they support.

A sobering message indeed. We're very fortunate that in this case, a profitable business opportunity also happens to be the salvation of the poor and a boon to the environment. Because if it weren't, we couldn't necessarily trust CEOs and shareholders to listen to humanitarian and environmental arguments against cashing in.

Garden Plot

The author of an editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal is worried because Obama intends to provide one billion dollars to the "Food Police," who will use the money to regulate the nation's supply of tainted food, instead of letting market forces decide how it should be allocated.

It's funny how times change. It wasn't very long ago that the most important test of government policy was whether it comforted security moms, who saw the safety of their children as non-negotiable, and therefore mistrusted John Kerry for being a windsurfer.

But now, the timeless conservative vision of women as safety-obsessed nurturers of the innocent runs up against the stark reality of the corporate bottom line, which means that the inspectors of peanut-butter factories must be cast as a new Holy Vehm. "Security moms" who have a problem with this are cordially invited to get bent.

The president will ask Congress for $1 billion in new funds -- for starters -- to add FDA inspectors and modernize laboratories. He further announced the Agriculture Department is moving ahead with a rule change banning sick or disabled cattle from the food supply.

"There are certain things only a government can do," Mr. Obama said. "And one of those things is ensuring that the foods we eat, and the medicines we take, are safe and do not cause us harm."

There's only one possible answer to that:

If "government is the answer," why is there a problem?

This is nearly too nice to talk about. Why does anyone use poppers, or huff solvents, when you can get precisely the same giddy euphoria from glibertarian kōans like this one, gratis and free of charge?

If medicine is the answer, why is there disease? If prison is the answer, why is there crime? If contraception is the answer, why is there unwanted pregnancy? If education is the answer, why is there ignorance? If anti-discrimination laws are the answer, why is there bigotry?

Or to put it another way, if perfection is unattainable, why fucking bother?

After a crescendo like that, the rest of the article can't help but be anticlimactic. The gist of it is that market forces and corporate branding are adequate to protect smart people from food poisoning, because smart people would rather eat at a bright and cheerful fast food restaurant than at some low-rent hash house filled with bikers and hippies and freelance abortionists and rats the size of poodles.

This theory can't survive a cursory rundown of the outbreaks of foodborne illness over the last decade or two, the most serious of which were serious precisely because they involved popular brands and therefore affected far more people than some filthy diner along the Ohio Turnpike. (If brand management is the answer, why are people getting sick from eating at McDonald's?) Furthermore, it's not obvious that people who choose to eat at non-branded restaurants deserve to get sick or die, just because they happened to be "adventurous."

Here's a riddle for you:

Should budget shortfalls require federal food regulatory agencies to shut down tomorrow, do we really believe manufacturers who have spent billions building up the reputations of things called "Cheerios" and "Campbell's Soup" would immediately start ignoring the long-term costs of adding harmful adulterants to make better short-term profits tomorrow?

The short answer: "Yes. Of course. What kind of demented fucking mongrel idiot doesn't understand that, at this late date?"

The long answer: We've seen some evidence, over the years, that insufficiently regulated businesses will do anything they can get away with in pursuit of short-term profits (cf. AIG, W.R. Grace). Also, this is a silly argument, because it assumes that the manufacturers necessarily believe that the adulterant in question is harmful, despite reams of industry-funded thinktank boilerplate that tells them otherwise. In other words, the editorial wants us to consider the problem in terms of radical evil, instead of the wishful thinking that more commonly gets American businesses into expensive or even deadly trouble. There's also the fact that regulation ideally prevents business from making excessive or fraudulent claims for their products (e.g., "eating three bowls of Cheerios per day will ward off the suppurating gleet!"), which can be as dangerous in some cases as adulteration.

By now, you probably have a pretty clear picture of the worldview we're dealing with: Business r00olz, government dr00lz, and the Invisible Hand will save everyone who's worth saving. That's not a very popular outlook in these dreadful times, so the last few paragraphs are devoted to a dystopian vision in which the fascist Obamabot Food Police come down on our crash pads and communes, and seize the zucchini that we were gonna, like, bring to the Dead show and barter for some weed:

Would HR 875 effectively ban seed banking and small-scale organic farming? Would it allow the Food Police to trespass on private property to "check our vegetables"? Would it mandate 24-hour GPS tracking of farm animals? Could lands and crops be seized for "non-compliance"?

A lot can be justified under the rubric of "food safety." Do we really believe granting a monopoly to large-scale factory farms, with their standardized artificial fertilizers and pesticides, is safest for our health and nutritional needs in the long run?

Of course it'd be safe! 'Cause the thing is, see, large-scale factory farms who've spent billions of dollars to build their brands would never dream of using dangerous or unproven fertilizers or pesticides, or producing food that was in any way unwholesome. That'd go against the dictates of rational self-interest. As would creating an elite counterrevolutionary force that goes door to door looking for heirloom tomatoes to trample.

What is this maniac talking about, you ask? Well, it seems that Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) is married to a consultant whose clients include Monsanto, and has introduced a bill that might conceivably become law, after the usual process of bickering and compromise and obstructionism and extortion and posturing. If that happens, it's conceivable that Obama might include it as part of his billion-dollar food-safety initiative. And if that happens, it's conceivable — just barely, provided you're crazy — that a new monocultural Staatssicherheit will make backyard gardens illegal, even though HR 875 currently doesn't provide for any such thing. Translation: Obama wants a billion dollars for teh Food Police, and you will soon have to pay Monsanto royalties for growing radishes. RIP America: 1776-2009.

Tom Philpott finds these worries to be groundless, as does Food and Water Watch. Without arguing in favor of HR 875, I notice that it contains provisions that might not appeal to the death-before-regulation crowd, including increasing the inspection of food plants and requiring imported food to meet US standards. Presumably, that's the real problem here, and all this nonsense about outlawing "backyard gardens" is intended to rile survivalists who are busy stockpiling food and guns against the coming Obamapocalypse.

In summation: Alarmism about food safety is misguided, actual outbreaks of mass poisoning notwithstanding, but alarmism about imaginary "Food Police" is perfectly sensible. Nothing's more important than the safety of our children, except for the principle that government shouldn't and can't protect them from anything but terrorism, collectivism, and rap lyrics. Security that doesn't have a 100-percent success rate is basically worthless, so let's give that billion to the Pentagon instead. You can trust the government to give people lethal injections or bomb foreign capitals, but not to conduct the occasional spot test for E. coli. You can count on big business to do the right thing for consumers...unless it might be influencing a "far-left" member of Congress, in which case Liberal Fascism is practically a done deal, and we don't even get organic arugula out of it.

At the risk of repeating myself, the road towards a non-insane conservatism seems to be an exceptionally hard one to travel.

A Confined Situation

A new report from the GAO suggests that contrary to everything we've been hearing lately, there may be a downside to the deregulation of politically powerful industries:

Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO) are large livestock and poultry operations that raise animals in a confined situation....[T]hese operations can produce from 2,800 tons to 1.6 million tons of manure a year....

EPA has not yet assessed the extent to which pollutants from animal feeding operations may be impairing human health and the environment because it lacks key data on the amount of pollutants being discharged by these operations.

Some might argue that the figure of "2,800 tons to 1.6 million tons of manure" per CAFO comprises "key data on the amount of pollutants being discharged by these operations," at least in terms of making a urgent case for action.

And indeed, an urgent case for action has been made:

The EPA's proposal, announced in December, would exempt animal-feeding operations from reporting emissions of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide above 100 pounds per day. A spokesman for the EPA said Tuesday that the goal of the proposal is "reducing reporting burdens and protecting public health and the environment.

As for the more pressing question of water pollution, the GAO reports that "EPA currently has no plans to conduct a national study to collect information on CAFO water pollutant discharges."

Fortunately, there's no evidence that relaxing oversight and easing regulations has ever caused any problem that taxpayers couldn't solve by bailing out the negligent parties.

(Photo: Flooded hog farm in North Carolina, ©Neuse River Foundation/Rick Dove.)

A Meaningful Difference

The EPA has come to a predictable conclusion on the legality of "pumping polluted water from farms and suburbs into the Everglades and Lake Okeechobee":

"Clean water permits should focus on water pollution, not water movement," said Benjamin Grumbles, an EPA assistant administrator....

The logic behind this distinction is that water occasionally needs to be transferred from one place to another for legitimate reasons. Flood control is the obvious example; you can see how contaminated water might be released into a sensitive area during a flood, or in order to avoid one, although you might also feel that other, better flood-control options should be pursued.

Allowing polluted water to be transferred without treatment, for what the EPA calls "later public use," is a bit more troubling, especially given the EPA's highminded insistence that its primary concern is "to stop polluters from dumping waste into the nation's waterways."

Essentially, the EPA's stance is that the South Florida Water Management District doesn't dump any waste into the water in question; it simply moves already-polluted water from one place (e.g., the farms and suburbs whose runoff it has the legal right and the moral obligation to monitor) to another (e.g., a source of public drinking water).

What seems to be at issue is whether there's "a 'meaningful difference' between where the pump draws its water and where it deposits it."

If only there were some way of settling this question.

In other news:

Water utilities would get earlier warning of viruses, bacteria or chemicals that could be introduced into drinking water systems by terrorists under a test monitoring program set for expansion beyond Cincinnati.

The pilot program ordered by the Department of Homeland Security in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks uses continuous monitoring of public water for contaminants that could sicken or kill millions of people.

Willing Buyers

John W. Schoen, a senior producer at MSNBC, has forfeited a few moments of his valuable time in order to help a confused reader understand the workings of the Free Market:

If the feds can help with cutting interest rates why can't they do something that really affects everything? Like high prices of gas. How can a billion-dollar industry still be allowed to make so much and affect so many people?
— Lori H., Dodge City, Kan.

There are measures the government could take to ease the pain at the pump, but it’s hard to see how the U.S. government could directly control the price of a global commodity like gasoline — any more than it could limit what you can charge for that big-screen TV you’re trying to unload on eBay. Gasoline prices — like all market prices — are set by a willing buyer and a willing seller. (You may not be a “happy” buyer right now, but your purchases are still voluntary.)

Absolutely correct. No one's holding a gun to Lori's head. If she doesn't want to buy gas at the current price, she has every right to sit at home in her counting-room, cackling over her doubloons and pieces of eight by the light of a tenpenny candle.

Sure, it's possible that she lives in one of those sprawling suburbs that were designed and sited on the assumption that gas would always be cheap, and that mass transit is a socialistic encroachment on the Liberty for which John Birch bled and died, and that only prostitutes and pedophiles would dream of walking anywhere. But if so, she can comfort herself with the fact that this, too, is the result of a voluntary buying decision on her part. She could just as easily live somewhere else, after all (the expense of moving to the Outer Hebrides is negligible when one considers the easy availability of peat).

So let's leave Lori to her malingering, and move on to bigger and better things. While in an unusually frolicsome mood the other day, I wrote a brief post on food deserts. Apropos of which, it's increasingly hard to find supermarkets in the NYC metro area:

The supermarket closings — not confined to poor neighborhoods — result from rising rents and slim profit margins, among other causes. They have forced residents to take buses or cabs to the closest supermarkets in some areas. Those with cars can drive, but the price of gasoline is making some think twice about that option. In many places, residents said the lack of competition has led to rising prices in the remaining stores.

These shoppers may not be happy right now, but whatever purchases they're able to make are, of course, voluntary. And lest we forget, many neighborhoods that lack supermarkets do have very affordable fast-food restaurants.

Granted, fast food is linked in some studies with poor health, but as Jot Contie of the California Restaurant Association says, "in the end, individuals control what, where and when they eat." People who'd rather have fresh vegetables than catsup packets, for instance, are perfectly free to hop in the the car and drive to the nearest supermarket. (If gas is too expensive, they can always eat invasive weeds...it's a nice way of giving back to one's community.)

There's also the fact that when a supermarket closes, it often creates entrepreneurial opportunities for local residents.

The larger point is that if consumer dissatisfaction were really widespread, multinational agribusiness would hardly be enjoying record profits:

Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (£275m) to $1.12bn. Its profits increased from $1.44bn to $2.22bn.

Cargill's net earnings soared by 86 per cent from $553m to $1.030bn over the same three months. And Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world's largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, increased its net earnings by 42 per cent in the first three months of this year from $363m to $517m. The operating profit of its grains merchandising and handling operations jumped 16-fold from $21m to $341m.

That's a lot of willing buyers, you'll agree. And given the fact that all this commerce is entirely voluntary, it's easy to see how fixing ADM's prices would be just as unfair as limiting the price you can charge on eBay for the belongings you need to sell in order to afford gas or grain.

You may not be happy right now, but at least you're free.

(Photo: "Food Protest in Mexico," via Treehugger).

Food Deserts and Fortifications

A paper in The International Journal of Health Geographics discusses the use of GIS to track the evolution of urban "food deserts":

The findings indicate that residents of inner-city neighbourhoods of low socioeconomic status have the poorest access to supermarkets. Furthermore, spatial inequalities in access to supermarkets have increased over time, particularly in the inner-city neighbourhoods of Central and East London, where distinct urban food deserts now exist.

The problem of spatial inequalities isn't confined to southern Ontario, needless to say. Cervantes goes so far as to suggest that the current food shortage deserves some of the attention that's currently being given to lapel pins and bowling scores:

This is not a temporary problem. It's a long-term, secular (as the economists say) trend. The planet is running out of stuff -- water, land, topsoil, petroleum, atmosphere.

In America, at least, higher food prices may have some connection with the crackdown on immigrant workers, as well as hard-right hysteria over the AgJOBS Act. Still, this is the sort of situation that can trigger mass migration and civil unrest, making border security -- regional, national and local -- more important than ever.

The $20 million prototype for the virtual fence near Tucson may've been scrapped -- along with the law it was supposed to protect and represent -- but the outlook for solid walls and barriers is very promising indeed, especially when it comes to protecting microborders. Whether you're planning "a gated community or an insurgent holding pen," or some convenient amalgam of the two, blast walls are de rigeur in the modern City of Refuge (which will ideally protect us not only from being punished for unintentional killing, but also from being accused of it).

Unfortunately, simply building walls isn't enough to protect yourself from the tired, and the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. You also have to make sure that no one gets around, under, or over them. In that regard, knowledge is power, especially when it confirms what you already believe.

The Drug Enforcement Agency wants to find a small business with a Top Secret security clearance that can snoop on Spanish language conversations transmitted over foreign communications systems and "instantaneously" translate those conversations from Spanish into English....

The translation company would be expected to create online records of "complex foreign voice radio transmissions containing technical terminology, advanced grammar and syntax, and colloquial conversational forms"....

The problem is, when people know they're being overheard, they can use codes, or intentionally spread misinformation, or simply agree to meet up in person. That's why DARPA's Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (HI-MEMS) is so exciting:

These half-bug, half-chip creations — DARPA calls them "insect cyborgs" — would be ideal for surveillance missions, the agency says in a brief description on its website.

Scientist Amit Lal and his team insert mechanical components into baby bugs during "the caterpillar and the pupae stages," which would then allow the adult bugs to be deployed to do the Pentagon's bidding.

The article ends with a joke that has considerably more than a grain of truth to it:

Presumably, enemy arsenals will soon be well-stocked with Raid.

It's easy to imagine pesticides being the first line of defense against these cyber insects, regardless of any collateral damage to "useful" species; one thing DARPA will probably want to do is create hybrids that are immune to common pesticides (particularly in Latin America, where a much wider range of chemicals is used).

At that point, I suppose evildoers would have to clear their confidential meeting places with flamethrowers, or perhaps jamming signals. There's also the possibility that natural predators -- for lack of a better term -- will eat some of these semi-mechanical bugs; they should probably be equipped to deliver an electric shock, or a squirt of some noxious liquid, that'll discourage hungry birds and bats.

Surely none of these problems is insurmountable, given what's at stake in a world that's low on resources (or finds it impractical to distribute them equitably, which amounts to the pretty much the same thing).

In completely unrelated news, Bruce Schneier asks a serious question, and provides a serious answer:

[G]iven a security patch, can you automatically reverse-engineer the security vulnerability that is being patched and create exploit code to exploit it?

Turns out you can.

Frightening, isn't it? There oughta be a law.

(Illustration from The War Illustrated, April 3 1915.)

The Politics of Possibility

As the price of oil skyrockets, and we discuss past and future "surgical strikes" on Syria and Iran, the U.S. Energy Secretary asks our Middle Eastern friends whether they've ever considered the advantages of nuclear power:

Gulf Arab oil exporters and countries around the world should look into nuclear power as an alternative to hydrocarbons, U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said on Monday.

"Nuclear power should be an alternative for Gulf countries and other countries around the world," Bodman said in the United Arab Emirates during a visit.

Meanwhile, in the American Southeast, the ongoing drought may force nuclear plants to shut down:

Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.

Utility officials say such shutdowns probably wouldn't result in blackouts. But they could lead to shockingly higher electric bills for millions of Southerners, because the region's utilities may be forced to buy expensive replacement power from other energy companies.

And in the American Southwest, people are falling in love all over again with oil shale, the perennial fuel of the paleo-future. Estimates of how much water it'd take to develop this low-grade oil range from ghastly to staggering; one thing it's fairly safe to say is that a (subsidized, artificial) oil shale boom would result in a massive influx of thirsty new residents, much as the tar sands boom did in Alberta.

With these stories in mind, it's interesting to learn that farmers in California are thinking it might be more profitable to sell their (subsidized) water to cities, instead of using it to grow crops:

In a state where water has become an increasingly scarce commodity, a growing number of farmers are betting they can make more money selling their water supplies to thirsty cities and farms to the south than by growing crops....

"It just makes dollars and sense right now," said Bruce Rolen, a third-generation farmer in Northern California's lush Sacramento Valley. "There's more economic advantage to fallowing than raising a crop."

All of which can only mean one thing: it's time to transcend the politics of limits, and embrace the politics of possibility.

(Photo: Ship stranded in Aral Sea.)

Getting Richer, Faster

Bjorn Lomborg worries that we're worrying too much:

Since time immemorial, people have worried about the earth’s future. We once believed that the sky would fall. More recently we worried that the planet might freeze, and then that technology would grind to a halt because of a computer bug that was supposed to be unleashed at the turn of the millennium.

Those fears melted away, but today the world has many real, pressing problems.

One problem that's not real or pressing is deforestation, because it's been solved by the Free Market. Or will be. Or could be, in theory.

[D]eforestation is a diminishing problem. The solution wasn’t found in condemnation from the West of developing country practices, or in protests by well-meaning environmentalists, but in economic growth. Developed countries generally increase their forested areas, because they can afford to do so. Developing countries can’t. To encourage less deforestation – and more reforestation – the best thing we can do is help undeveloped nations get richer, faster.

After reading this, I was placed in three vats of cold water to extinguish my wrath. The first vat burst its staves and its hoop. The next boiled with bubbles as big as fists. In the third vat, the water grew hot enough that some might endure it and others might not.

Honestly, I hardly know where to start. Lomborg ignores the fact that undeveloped nations often get “rich” (or failing that, pay a bit of the interest on their debts) by mowing down their forests. While it’s possible that these countries will reforest as they become wealthier, it’s not a foregone conclusion by any means. And even if they do, what they'll end up with is likely to be a far cry – both in terms of acreage and biodiversity – from what they had. To Lomborg, though, "forested areas" are as interchangeable as hotels in Monopoly.

As usual, he accompanies this sort of lunatic assertion with arguments that almost sound reasonable. Why are we so worried about pesticide pollution, he wonders, when “fumes from cooking indoors with firewood and dung will kill more than 1.5 million people this year”?

It’d arguably be possible to address both problems at once, given the relationship between global agribusiness and third-world poverty. But Lomborg refuses to make these connections; what tends to matter to him are the dangerous “choices” made by victims. If we can prevent these backwards people from asphyxiating themselves, they may actually live long enough to be sickened by pesticide run-off. You can't deny that this would be progress!

He applies the same logic to climate change. We shouldn’t waste money on climate research, he says, let alone on reducing emissions; a better use of that money would be to “discourage people from living in foolhardy locations.”

I’m not sure any other kind of location can be said to exist on a planet that calls Lomborg “the 14th most influential academic in the world.”

(Photo: Clearcut forest, Sumatra. Taken by Jens Wieting.)

The Latest Concern

Homeland Security officials are allegedly worried that terrorists will target propane tanks on chicken farms:

In 28 years of raising chickens, Virgil Shockley has had his share of worries, from bird disease to pollution. But nothing prepared him for the latest concern sweeping the poultry industry: Local farms could be deemed terrorist targets by the U.S. government.

It sounds pretty outrageous, until you realize that the author simply decided to find and interview someone like Shockley, whose farm "could be subject to proposed rules."

Elsewhere, the article claims that objections to these regulations are coming from "industry groups and politicians." But there's no doubt that Mr. Shockley's amiable, down-home befuddlement makes for a more entertaining story.

Here's the part I like best:

[T]he controversy illustrates a continuing dilemma for the government: how to strike the right balance between safety and the freedom to conduct one's business.

This use of "the government" is interesting, in that it conjures up a phalanx of faceless bureaucrats rather than the impish grin and laughing eyes of our Dear Leader.

I'd argue that finding "the right balance" between safety and business is as easy for Bush as falling off a Segway, whether we're talking about food safety, mine safety, or the use of mercenaries and torturers in Iraq. But that's probably because I don't understand how "the government" works:

[F]or years, Congress and the Bush administration couldn't agree on how to regulate the industry. That changed last fall, when Homeland Security was put in charge of setting security standards for businesses that manufacture, use, store or distribute certain chemicals.

So Congress and BushCo formerly "couldn't agree on how to regulate the industry" (which one?), but this changed once DHS "was put in charge" by someone or other. Now, the government simply faces a "continuing dilemma," as politicians and lobbyists complain that proposed regulations are too burdensome.

That's clear enough, isn't it?

God knows I don't mean to imply that these regulations are necessarily reasonable (particularly as regards lab chemicals). I just thought this article managed to strike a nice balance between the spuriously concrete and the purposefully vague.

Also, I'd question the underlying assumption that terrorists couldn't possibly be interested in blowing up small farms and family campgrounds, if only because the media's penchant for generating hysteria arguably makes even the smallest, silliest attacks worthwhile from a PR perspective.

That said, dirty bombs are a far more terrifying threat, as this article demonstrates:

The U.S. nuclear weapons program has sickened 36,500 Americans and killed more than 4,000, the Rocky Mountain News has determined from government figures.

Those numbers reflect only people who have been approved for government compensation. They include people who mined uranium, built bombs and breathed dust from bomb tests.

Let's pray it never happens here!

(Photo by Sarah Pickering, 2004).

The Ladder of Perfection

Betsy Hart x-rays the souls of people who buy organic produce, and scolds them for feeling unjustifiably "virtuous."

Buying organics is a simplistic, quick-fix path to self-satisfaction, you see. Achieving true moral excellence requires nobler and more thoughtful efforts (beating up on queers, for instance).

Hart's arguments are fairly standard, initially:

In "Rethinking Organics" by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the doctor writes that while few things make people feel more "virtuous" than eating organic food, there's little evidence that they are either more nutritious or any safer for our bodies than traditionally grown produce with their fertilizers and pesticides.

Gee, you mean "organics" won't save the world after all?

So people buy products in order to make themselves feel better, eh? I'm not sure why this is news, given that we live in a country whose president told us to go shopping after a massive terrorist attack.

Not surprisingly, Hart ignores issues like pesticide run-off, land use, climate effects, and so forth. If each mouthful of organic food doesn't directly reduce your personal risk of developing cancer, there's no conceivable reason to buy it.

I should pause here to mention how tired I am of conservatarian blowhards pretending that some virtually nonexistent belief constitutes an oppressive orthodoxy:

Frozen vegetables — yikes — will typically preserve their nutrients more than fresh ones, of whatever organic or nonorganic stripe. Like any other living thing, vegetables start to break down once they are no longer living.)

Let this be a lesson to all those misguided souls who'd rather eat month-old carrots than frozen ones. (Don't count on organic farms to start selling frozen vegetables, though; it'd interfere with their pursuit of cheap grace.)

Next, we learn that organic produce is expensive. This would be an ideal place to discuss things like agricultural subsidies, antibiotic resistance, monoculture, pollution, the political clout of agribusiness, and so forth...but that'd distract readers from the main point, which is that people who buy organic food are stuck-up stickybeaks. Hart goes on to argue that if these modern Trimalchios insist on buying organic milk and eggs, they'll have less money left over for fruits and vegetables, and thus will end up in worse shape than before. It doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense to me, but she must know what she's talking about or they wouldn't have given her a radio show.

You know what the organic food movement is like, come to think of it? A religion!

But what most bothers me is that some of the claims of organic advocates almost resemble a crusade about saving family farms, and the environment and maybe next our souls by eating organic. Hence the slogan, "Think locally, act globally, buy organic."

So she has heard of the environment, after all. But if you're expecting her to demolish the claim that organic farming has any environmental benefits, forget about it. It's sufficient to say, yet again, that people who believe such things are preening grandstanders who ought to be kicked:

It's so easy to think of organics — or, rather, feel about organics — as some kind of cure-all and inherently virtuous along with things like recycling. (Never mind if the newspapers we self-righteously lug to the bottom of the driveway typically sit in huge warehouses before they're finally burned or buried.) It's no fun to have to think through a cost-benefit analysis. That requires, well, thinking.

On the other hand, it's sheer goddamn untrammeled bliss to be lectured about cost-benefit analysis by someone who believes that the price of conventional crops has something to do with their total cost of production.

After defending rationality by fixating on the haut-bourgeois filth who read and recycle newspapers, and recommending cost-benefit analysis while ignoring the political economy of agribusiness, Hart rejects smug, self-coddling consumerism by presenting it as her own ladder of perfection:

[I]n our culture, it's just easy, it just feels good ... to feel good.

Well, this is one gal who "thinks" it's just fine to buy lots of cheap, luscious-looking produce from the conventionally-farmed-food aisles at the grocery. I'm thinking locally, all right. About what's best for my family.

As you can see, Ms. Hart holds with Tertullian that "no soldier comes out to the campaign laden with luxuries, nor does he go to action from his comfortable chamber, but from the light and narrow tent, where every kind of hardness, roughness and unpleasantness must be put up with."

I hope you'll be inspired by her example the next time you're tempted to take the Easy Way Out.

Water, Water Everywhere

The debate over ethanol crops in Iowa offers some useful insights into the cornucopian imagination.

Certain people - let's call 'em "terrorists" - are arguing that because expanding ethanol crops will consume billions of gallons of water, the amount of water available in Iowa's aquifers has some bearing on whether the project is viable. Basically, they're attempting to balance supply with demand, and coming up short. Therefore, they see conservation - including mandatory water recycling - as a necessity.

Other people - we'll call them "realists" - point out that these policies might prevent them from doing something they really, really want to do:

Such mandates could damage Iowa's growing renewable fuels industry, they said.

In other words, making an elementary concession to reality could stunt the growth of an industry based on fantasy. Never mind the polite concessions regulators are already making to the fiction that ethanol is economically viable whether there's an inexhaustible supply of water or not; we must cast away all doubt, or be revealed as enemies of Progress.

And what exactly is "water shortage" supposed to mean, anyway? The stuff falls from the sky daily in the rainforest, thunders by the cubic mile over Niagara Falls every week, and is a copious byproduct of melting ice. What with the progress being made on desalinization, we may even be able to harvest the tears of the poor. For now, though, the market decrees that these options are less economical than pumping out aquifers that supply roughly 80 percent of Iowans with their drinking water:

For $25, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources grants a 10-year license for [ethanol] plants to pump as much water as they need from the ground.

This system works, obviously, and will continue to work until someone can prove that it doesn't:

State Sen. David Johnson, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, said he will not support regulations on how ethanol facilities use water until he sees proof that Iowa's aquifers are in trouble.

As for me, I refuse to stop writing checks until I see evidence that I'm overdrawn. In fact, I'm going to write a check for two dollars this very morning, in order to buy Sen. Johnson a copy of Iowa's Groundwater Basics: A Geological Guide to the Occurrence, Use, and Vulnerability of Iowa's Aquifers, which was published by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, and includes this passage:

Where numerous wells withdraw large quantities of water over time...regional declines in water levels may occur. In Iowa, the most widespread of these declines has occurred in the extensive Cambrian-Ordovician aquifer. Regional water levels have dropped about 100 feet in this aquifer since use began in the late 1800s, with the greatest lowering of water-levels near major pumping centers. Other declines of a more local nature have occurred, such as those in the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City areas where the Silurian aquifer is heavily used.

In related news, ever-expanding ethanol crops in the vicinity of Chesapeake Bay are expected to poison it with agricultural runoff:

The study forecasted that farmers in the bay watershed area will field more than half a million acres of corn over the next five years, reports The Washington Post. Corn fields usually produce more polluted runoff than other crops, creating a problem for the bay.

“It’s going in the opposite direction from where we want to go,” Jim Pease, a Virginia Tech professor and one of the study’s authors, told the newspaper.

It seems logical that increased runoff from the ethanol boom could pose a problem for Iowa's groundwater, too.

But I suppose we'd better wait until we see evidence. We wouldn't want to be irresponsible.

(Photo: Coffee Cup Watertower at Stanton, Iowa. Via Roadside America.)

Saturated Fat and Excess Sugar

Mona Charen is troubled because Oregon governor Theodore Kulongoski is attempting to feed himself on $21 worth of food stamps per week.

There really aren’t any logical reasons for her to be annoyed by this, but she didn’t rise to her current eminence in conservatarian circles by being unable to manufacture overdetermined grievances on the fly. Thus, we learn right off the bat that Kulongoski is prone to grandstanding:

Associated Press photos showed the governor pushing a shopping cart and ostentatiously relinquishing a noodle cup and two bananas at the checkout counter when his total topped $21.

A typical liberal! He’s supposed to be calling attention to the plight of the poor, and instead he’s swanning around in ruffles and frills, ostentatiously relinquishing noodle cups like some debauched princeling out of Ronald Firbank. The fucker probably windsurfs, too.

Onwards and upwards. Just as piranhas must swim and mosquitoes must fly, Charen must display ostentatiously display her credentials as a Caring Person before beating up on the untermenschen:

Let us stipulate that in a country as wealthy as ours, the idea that anyone should go hungry is unacceptable.

With that humanist boilerplate out of the way, it’s open season on the ungrateful poor and their pathetic liberal courtiers (many of whom, you may be interested to know, are still living in the sixties).

Why is it that whenever you listen to a Democrat you feel that the year is 1966? They seem to live in a time warp in which no progress has been made on race relations, poverty, childhood malnutrition, and on and on.

We’ll hear more about that “progress” in a moment. Meanwhile, Charen notes that “a family of four with no income…is entitled to $518 monthly or about $32 weekly [in food stamps] for each person.” In other words, by trying to support himself on the average recipient's income, Kulongoski’s making things worse than they need to be, to the tune of eleven whole dollars. Think how many noodle cups he could’ve bought with that windfall!

Because this is such an important point, Charen conscientiously dumbs it down for the chumps in the nosebleed seats:

Perhaps the governor’s office is correct that the average food stamp allotment in the state is $21. But that means some get more and some less.

I advise you to cling to that scrap of logical thought as to a life-preserver, because the seas are about to get very rough indeed.

Charen concedes that $32 isn’t much more money than $21, but points out that it’s “only a small part of the largesse provided by the U.S. government.”

It doesn’t count hot breakfasts and lunches at school (which push high-calorie, high-fat diets on kids).

This is odd for two reasons. The first, obviously, is that stuffing children with dirt-cheap, low-quality, unhealthy food hardly qualifies as “largesse.”

The second is that Charen goes on to cite obesity as evidence for her claim that “progress” has been made on malnutrition since 1966:

Douglas Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute notes that while he can recall visiting rural Mississippi in the 1960s and seeing severe cases of malnutrition, the problem among the poor today is more likely to be obesity.

And as everyone knows, malnutrition and obesity are mutually exclusive.

Charen seems to feel that welfare programs, or "entitlements run amuck," are behind at least some of the nation’s obesity problems. And she’s right, inasmuch as the low quality of school food (and the presence of soda and fast-food vendors in lunchrooms) has a great deal to do with agribusiness subsidies. And I’m not just talking about our heavily subsidized overproduction of corn (and high-fructose corn syrup). There’s also the fact that the school lunch program itself comprises a gigantic handout to agribusiness:

"Basically, it's a welfare program for suppliers of commodities," says Jennifer Raymond, a retired nutritionist in Northern California who has worked with schools to develop healthier menus. "It's a price support program for agricultural producers, and the schools are simply a way to get rid of the items that have been purchased."

Solving this problem would, among other things, require a national rejection of the crony corporatism that Charen and her co-religionists at NRO have devoted their careers to defending, so it’s not surprising that the remedy she suggests is a trifle...lackluster:

We are pushing food at the poor as if hunger and malnutrition still crouched at the door when the bigger threat these days is saturated fat and excess sugar. The Food Stamp program arguably needs a massive reform, offering cash grants instead of vouchers or credit cards, which encourage over-consumption.

This is surely the handiwork of wisdom, because I don’t understand a word of it. Who’s pushing unhealthy food at the poor, according to Charen, and why? It’s hard to say. What’s any of this got to do with Gov. Kulongoski’s attempt to highlight the difficulty of living on $21 per week? Your guess is as good as mine. How do food stamps “encourage over-consumption,” and why wouldn’t “cash grants” do the same or worse? I can’t begin to imagine.

It's interesting how she wavers momentarily on the threshold between her world and ours, as she tries to tease out the connection between childhood obesity and government welfare programs. But in the end, of course, she recognizes it as the only thing it can be: Yet another unintended consequence of the Nanny State.

Clearly, we need to get private business involved...