Gary Boyd's List: Crisis in the Making

• UPDATE 12/25/08: A number of tragic events in the past several years have exposed the multiple costs of continuing to neglect our deteriorating infrastructure: to human lives, to quality of life, to the economy, to the future health and competitive prospects of our country. President-elect Barack Obama is working with Congress to put together a New-Dealish economic stimulus package that could total $850 billion, with a big chunk of those funds dedicated to projects that will repair, rebuild, and upgrade the nation's infrastructure.

• The Peak Oil Crisis: Confusion In the Markets 

  If you don't understand what is going on with the price of gasoline and demand for the world's oil supply, then join the club. 

   Analysts, pundits, government officials, oil ministers, oil executives, and oil traders are all over the board in trying to explain what is happening and more importantly what is going to happen. Some are saying that $30 oil will be with us until the economy recovers while others are talking of a spike to $200 in 2009.

• Beyond the Point of No Return              

                        

   

  It's too late to stop climate change -- so what do we do now? 

   

   

   

  As the pace of global warming kicks into overdrive, the hollow optimism of climate activists, along with the desperate responses of some of the world's most prominent climate scientists, are preventing us from focusing on the survival requirements of the human enterprise.

   

   

   

  The environmental establishment continues to peddle the notion that we can solve the climate problem.

   

   

   

  We can't.

   

   

   

  We have failed to meet nature's deadline. In the next few years, this world will experience progressively more ominous and destabilizing changes.  These will happen either incrementally -- or in sudden, abrupt jumps.

   

           

   

  Under either scenario, it seems inevitable that we will soon be confronted by water shortages, crop failures, increasing damages from extreme weather events, collapsing infrastructures, and, potentially, breakdowns in the democratic process itself.
• We are all adrift in the same boat -- and there's no way half the boat is going to sink.

• The economy we're moving into will have to be one of real work, producing real things of value, at a scale consistent with energy resource reality. I'm convinced that farming will come much closer to the center of economic life, as the death of petro-agribusiness makes food production a matter of life and death in America -- as opposed to the disaster of metabolic entertainment it is now. Reorganizing the landscape itself for this finer-scaled new type of farming is a task fraught with political peril (land ownership questions being historically one of the main reasons that societies fall into revolution). The public is completely unprepared for this kind of change. We still think that "the path to success" is based on getting a college degree certifying people for a lifetime of sitting in an office cubicle. This is so far from the approaching reality that it will be eventually viewed as a sick joke -- like those old 1912 lithographs of mega-cities with Zeppelins plying the air between Everest-size skyscrapers.

• Supporting yourself generally requires land, tools, weeding, composting, practice, and finally the months of waiting for things to finish growing.
• The Chinese have sprouted for at least 5,000 years, and many Westerners have found growing sprouts an easy source of nutrition in lean times. Captain Cook used sprouting as a source of Vitamin C to avoid scurvy on long ocean voyages, as did soldiers in World War I and Indians during the famine of the 1930s. Sprouts are also high in protein – seven cups have an average person’s daily recommended allowance.

• The coal ash pond that ruptured and sent a billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres of East Tennessee last month was only one of more than 1,300 similar dumps across the United States — most of them unregulated and unmonitored — that contain billions more gallons of fly ash and other byproducts of burning coal.
• Like the one in Tennessee, most of these dumps, which reach up to 1,500 acres, contain heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium, which are considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be a threat to water supplies and human health. Yet they are not subject to any federal regulation, which experts say could have prevented the spill, and there is little monitoring of their effects on the surrounding environment.
• In fact, coal ash is used throughout the country for construction fill, mine reclamation and other “beneficial uses.”
• The industry has promoted the reuse of coal combustion products because of the growing amount of them being produced each year — 131 million tons in 2007, up from less than 90 million tons in 1990.
• State requirements for the handling of coal ash vary widely. Some states, like Alabama, do not regulate it at all, except by means of federally required water discharge permits. In Texas, the vast majority of coal ash is not considered a solid waste, according to a review of state regulations by environmental groups. There are no groundwater monitoring or engineering requirements for utilities that dump the ash on site, as most utilities do, the analysis says.

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• For half a century, meat producers have fed antibiotics to farm animals to increase their growth and stave off infections. Now scientists have discovered that those drugs are sprouting up in unexpected places.

  Vegetables such as corn, potatoes and lettuce absorb antibiotics when grown in soil fertilized with livestock manure, according to tests conducted at the University of Minnesota.

  Today, close to 70 percent of the total antibiotics and related drugs produced in the United States are fed to cattle, pigs and poultry, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Although this practice sustains a growing demand for meat, it also generates public health fears associated with the expanding presence of antibiotics in the food chain.
• People have long been exposed to antibiotics in meat and milk. Now, the new research shows that they also may be ingesting them from vegetables, perhaps even ones grown on organic farms
• “The antibiotic accumulation in plants is just another negative consequence of our animal agriculture industry and not surprising given the quantity fed to livestock,” said Steve Roach, public health program director for the non-profit Food Animal Concerns Trust.
   
  For highly processed plants such as corn, the drugs would most likely be removed, added Dolliver. But many food crops such as spinach and lettuce are not processed, only washed, allowing antibiotics to remain.
• One finding that particularly worries food scientists is the accumulation of antibiotics within potato tubers. Tubers are an enlarged, underground stem that uptake and store nutrients from the soil. In crops like potatoes, carrots and radishes, it is the part humans eat.
   
    “Since these tubers and root crops are in direct contact with the soil they may show a greater propensity for (antibiotic) uptake,” said Gupta.
   
  Health officials fear that eating vegetables and meat laced with drugs meant to treat infections can promote resistant strains of bacteria in food and the environment.

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• HORTIDEAS For the Hard Core Horthead 

   

   

   This is the 25th year anniversary of a horticulturally intense, informative and ultra-geeky newsletter called HortIdeas. The Big News is that its founders Greg & Pat Williams are now offering online subscriptions as well as a free online sample. All you gotta do is ask.
  
  If this is the first you've heard of HortIdeas, let me introduce you to some classic content:
  
  

  Earthworms and Water Pollution from Farm Fields
  It seems hard to believe, but intentional destruction of earthworms might become a routine practice of commercial growers worried about chemical and/or microbial pollutants from their fields reaching streams and rivers.
  That’s because evidence is accumulating that chemicals applied to the soil in fertilizers and pesticides, as well as microorganisms in manure, can move quickly to subsurface drainage pipe networks via “macropores” made by earthworms.