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26 Oct 09

Climate change and warfare: Cool heads or heated conflicts? | The Economist

  • The chart shows the correlation between the number of conflicts and the average temperature during most of the second half of the millennium, the period for which the data are best. Until the mid-18th century, this correlation is continuously and significantly negative (the line remains close to the 95% confidence level, suggesting there is only one chance in 20 that it is an accidental, random effect). In other words, lower temperatures mean more wars. Then, suddenly, the negative correlation vanishes. The line goes into positive territory, but not enough to be statistically meaningful. The inverted correlation between temperature and conflict has therefore disappeared.
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20 Oct 09

Bioneers 2009: Michael Pollan Drinks Oil : TreeHugger

  • A key element of Pollan's work is pointing out how much fossil fuel we consume for every calorie of edible food we consume. If you haven't heard the figure before, it's eye-opening.
  • We have shifted from a food economy that yielded two calories of food for every one calorie of fossil fuel we burned to grow, harvest, process and distribute the food, to a food economy that yields one calorie of food for every ten calories of fossil fuel we put into obtaining it.
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07 Oct 09

Stop Crying Wolf! Cap-and-Trade Will Increase Farmer's Production Costs Less Than 1% : TreeHugger

  • The Environmental Working Group has just released a report that shows the added costs to agriculture of the American Clean Energy & Security Act will be entirely minimal:






    Overall the costs to farmers of implementing cap-and-trade under ACES amount to less than a 1% increase in the cost of production between 2012 and 2018 -- $0.45 per acre for soybeans, $0.66 per acre for wheat, and $1.19 per acre for corn. These increases would result from, essentially, the cost of fossil fuels and the cost of fossil fuel-derived fertilizers increasing.

30 Aug 09

Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food - TIME

  • Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009.
27 Aug 09

The U.S. versus Monsanto? - How the World Works - Salon.com

  • This is not idle speculation. On Aug. 7, Philip Weiser, a newly appointed deputy assistant attorney general in the antitrust division, gave an important speech in St. Louis, which just happens to be where Monsanto is based. The title of the speech: "Toward a Competition Policy Agenda for Agriculture Markets."
  • At the same time, this technological revolution and accompanying market developments have facilitated the emergence of large firms that produce these products, along with challenges for new firms to enter this market.
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12 Aug 09

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • Pollan’s hopes for a different kind of agriculture rests
    exactly and wholly upon the wealth generated by free markets. It
    demands a very high level of per-capita income to afford milk at $3.79
    per half gallon.
  • Pollan does some of his best work
    identifying the wasteful externalities concealed by agricultural
    subsidies. The corn that feeds Walmart’s cows may be genuinely cheaper
    than the grass that nourishes the cows yielding my expensive milk.
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