An earlier post, Liberal Myths, investigated the idea of a liberal arts education, a generalist ability to think with some clarity and learn continually as life requires. It applied some of Timothy Burke's thoughts on the subject to a particularly bad NYT article.

The article was so bad, such a good example of bankrupt journalism, that another post, Myth Makers referenced it too.

But there's still more defects in the article which Branden Berg reveals.

Back in January, I questioned Mark Bittman's claim in the NYT that Americans consume on average 200 pounds of meat per year.

I've found data from the USDA on loss-adjusted food availability--that is, edible parts actually available for consumption and not known to have spoiled or otherwise been wasted. . .

Total loss-adjusted weight (after adjusting for consumer-level losses) is 83g/52g/14g, or about 120 pounds per year. . .

Of the 2680 loss-adjusted calories available per capita for consumption each day, only 375, or 14%, come from meat of any kind. Compare this to 610 (23%) from flour, 480 (18%) from added sugars, and 640 (24%) from added fats, of which about 84% are seed oils. The typical American consumes more than four times as many calories from sugar, flour, and seed oils as from meat.

Apparently, those NYT fact checkers didn't actually get a liberal arts education, though I suppose that mistaken facts in an article that was so completely bad are to be expected.

The interesting bit to me is that so few calories come from meats of all kinds. Americans apparently live on flour, sugar and vegeatble oil. Now there's health food.

Got $10K to burn?

The Micro Fueler, a backyard fueling station, can create pure E100 ethanol from sugar feed stock. “It’s third-grade science,” says Thomas Quinn, founder and CEO of E-Fuel. “You just mix together water, sugar and yeast, and in a few hours, you start getting ethanol.” The $9995 Micro Fueler has a can fill its own 35-gallon tank in about a week by fermenting the sugar, water and yeast internally, then separating out the water through a membrane filter.

E-Fuel representatives claim that the initial cost of the machine can be offset by up to 50 percent by federal, state and local credits, and the cost of raw sugar can be brought down to $1 or below through a system of carbon trading coupons. The Micro Fueler can produce a gallon of ethanol from about 10 gallons of sugar.

OK, it makes no economic or environmental sense, but some people blow that kind of cash on worse things. It's yard art in a twisted sort of way.

The real war on science.

On April 30, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken ordered the Interior Department to decide by May 15 whether polar bears should be listed under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act.

Professor J. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School says, “To list a species that is currently in good health as an endangered species requires valid forecasts that its population would decline to levels that threaten its viability. In fact, the polar bear populations have been increasing rapidly in recent decades due to hunting restrictions. Assuming these restrictions remain, the most appropriate forecast is to assume that the upward trend would continue for a few years, then level off.

“These studies are meant to inform the US Fish and Wildlife Service about listing the polar bear as endangered. After careful examination, my co-authors and I were unable to find any references to works providing evidence that the forecasting methods used in the reports had been previously validated. In essence, they give no scientific basis for deciding one way or the other about the polar bear.”

Prof. Armstrong and colleagues originally undertook their audit at the request of the State of Alaska. The subsequent study, “Polar Bear Population Forecasts: A Public Policy Forecasting Audit,” is by Prof. Armstrong, Kesten G. Green of Monash University in Australia, and Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. It is scheduled to appear in the September/October issue of the INFORMS journal Interfaces.

Professor Armstrong is author of Long-Range Forecasting, the most frequently cited book on forecasting methods, and Principles of Forecasting. He is a co-founder of the Journal of Forecasting, the International Journal of Forecasting, the International Symposium on Forecasting, and forecastingprinciples.com.

The authors examined nine U.S. Geological Survey Administrative Reports posted on the Internet at http://usgs.gov/newsroom/special/polar_bears/. The studies include “Forecasting the Wide-Range Status of Polar Bears at Selected Times in the 21st Century” by Steven C. Amstrup et. al. and “Polar Bears in the Southern Beaufort Sea II: Demography and Population Growth in Relation to Sea Ice Conditions” by Christine M. Hunter et al.

Prof. Armstrong and his colleagues concluded that the most relevant study, Amstrup et al. properly applied only 15% of relevant forecasting principles and that the second study, Hunter et al. only 10%, while 46% were clearly contravened and 23% were apparently contravened.

Further, they write, the Geologic Survey reports do not adequately substantiate the authors’ assumptions about changes to sea ice and polar bears’ ability to adapt that are key to the recommendations.

Therefore, the authors write, a key feature of the U.S. Geological Survey reports is not scientifically supported.

The consequence, they maintain, is significant: The Interior Department cannot use the series of reports as a sound scientific basis for a decision about listing the polar bear as an endangered species.

The gross disregard for science over the past several decades by greens and nativists of all stripes, and continuing today, does not excuse other examples from different political and cultural sources, but it shows how ludicrous it is to claim that this is a partisan problem. It isn't, it's a political problem. Once politics of any flavor rears its ugly head science gets buried. Said another way, the often repeated accusation of a Republican war against science is merely politics, by Democrats, who are at war too and have been so for a very long time, and have a far larger body count to their credit.

Politics is stupid.

That's so there's room to keep lots of stuff up them.

Diversified, low-external-input (LEI) farming systems offer one possible approach for maintaining adequate productivity and profitability while reducing pollution by agrichemicals and still improving water quality.

Sounds kind of good, but what does adequate mean. In a world where there is a large and growing shortfall in ag production this doesn't sound so good after all.

Conventional rates of synthetic fertilizers were applied in the two-year rotation, whereas composted cattle manure and reduced rates of synthetic fertilizers were applied in the three- and four-year rotations.

Where did the manure come from? How was it produced? Isn't this just a hide-the-pea game again, a way to sneak fertilizer in by having some other grower launder it, like gangsters do with money by passing it through dummy corporations or offshore banks before they spend it at home?

Weed management in the two-year rotation was based on conventional rates of herbicides, whereas in the three- and four-year systems, herbicides were applied in bands in corn and soybean, greater reliance was placed on cultivation, and no herbicides were applied in small grain and forage legume crops.

Is cultivation low input? Is it even a good thing given the harm it does to soil quality? Doesn't it contribute to wind and water erosion as well as GHG emissions?

The objective of producing high yields with the least costs - in every sense, considering often disregarded externalities such as environmental harm - is worth while, it's what every grower does for a living. But researchers don't help when they aren't honest.

There isn't enough manure in the world to replace manufactured nutrients. It's worth about 10% if used wisely. Crop stubble and ag trash are worth more, but in both cases the real benefit isn't the fertilizer, it's the effects on soil structure and quality. Growers would benefit from it even if it had no fertilizer at all since it can help make more effective use of the fertilizer they apply, in part by holding nutrients in the root zone longer so that plants can use them.

In the past it was often more expensive to haul the large amounts of organics to the land and then spread it than to use manufactured nutrients. It is getting ever more expensive as fuel prices rise. But the cost of manufactured nutrients are rising too, and are likely to continue to do so. There may be some break even point where the cost of fuel, though high, is less than the cost of manufactured inputs.

This won't help much since there isn't much manure. In the end it's a make or buy decision: is it better for a grower to buy organics to amend land or grow it in place? Given that there isn't enough organics on the market for everyone to buy, the vast majority will have to be made on site.

Researchers would be more useful if they sought to quantify such real world issues rather than doing phony grade-school experiments.

For agriculture. This USDA report says nothing new, but it's all in one place and could be a useful reference.

Abstract

World market prices for major food commodities such as grains and vegetable oils have risen sharply to historic highs of more than 60 percent above levels just 2 years ago. Many factors have contributed to the runup in food commodity prices. Some factors reflect trends of slower growth in production and more rapid growth in demand that have contributed to a tightening of world balances of grains and oilseeds over the last decade. Recent factors that have further tightened world markets include increased global demand for biofuels feedstocks and adverse weather conditions in 2006 and 2007 in some major grain- and oilseed-producing areas. Other factors that have added to global food commodity price inflation include the declining value of the U.S. dollar, rising energy prices, increasing agricultural costs of production, growing foreign exchange holdings by major food-importing countries, and policies adopted recently by some exporting and importing countries to mitigate their own food price inflation. This report discusses these factors and illustrates how they have contributed to food commodity price increases.

It's semi-large, 800k or so, PDF. With figures, tables and such.

The long term trend seems to be for ever higher prices though there could be some retreat from current highs if this is a good year.

The world really needs to get a lot better at this. That's not news but there are still some regressive pressures, arguments for peasant style systems that may be "almost" as productive as now. That's just silly. It's an exceedingly optimistic forecast for a system that isn't adequate even in that impossibly rosy scenario. Those who have taken a clear eyed look at the issue have been saying for years that production must double or even triple to provide food, fiber and perhaps fuel for 8 or 9 billion people. Given that there are nearly 1 billion that are food insecure or worse now the issue has some urgency.

What's bad is good, and the reverse.

Reduced sulphur dioxide emissions from less burning coal and increased sea surface temperatures in the tropical north Atlantic, are causing a heightened risk of drought in the Amazon rainforest. . .

Sulphate aerosol particles arising from the burning of coal in power stations in the 1970s and 1980s have partially reduced global warming by reflecting sunlight and making clouds brighter. This pollution has been predominantly in the northern hemisphere and has acted to limit warming in the tropical north Atlantic, keeping the Amazon wetter than it would otherwise be. Chris Huntingford of CEH, another of the co-authors, explains: “Reduced sulphur emissions in North America and Europe will see tropical rain-bands move northwards as the north Atlantic warms, resulting in a sharp increase in the risk of Amazonian drought”.

No win, no draw, no escape. . . unless, you know, the engineers have a go.

A poetic fantasy would be for Amazonians to begin making terra preta again in large quantities, and in so doing simultaneously sequestering lots of carbon and making their land more drought resistant. We could do it too, just to be good sports.

More Economist bashing. Reasoning from false premises gives false results.

Fertiliser, which has enabled the world to generate enormous growth in agricultural output, is largely produced from petroleum. This seems to place a long-term constraint on food output, absent some new innovation.

Nitrogen fertilizer is produced from methane, not petroleum, but that's not the first or only way to do it. Methane is just a convenient and still relatively cheap source of hydrogen - CH4 - and that is useful for making ammonia - NH3.

Water is also a source - H2O. Though not as rich it is certainly abundant compared to methane. That's one of Mother Nature's favorite methods. There are many ways to make hydrogen, none as cheap as methane at current prices, but that seems set to change.

It takes energy to make hydrogen from water. Mother Nature uses lightning. One recent suggestion is to use wind power, which is intermittent, but that doesn't matter when the energy is "stored" as hydrogen, or better yet, ammonia. Another suggestion is to use geothermal energy, especially in remote places such as Iceland that has it in abundance, but no good use for it. It can also be made from biomass, it is a byproduct of pyrolysis. There's a certain elegance to that method since the fertilizer would be used to grow more biomass.

Secondly, expanded agricultural output, especially in a place like Brazil, will likely mean deforestation. Forests are valuable carbon sinks, and so an increase in cultivated land could exacerbate climate change, reducing the long-term productive potential of the world's farms.

No, it won't likely mean deforestation. The greatest growth in Brazilian ag land is in the vast semi-arid cerrado, which is only 1/3 cultivated as yet. In the past it wasn't possible, but new technologies have made it bloom. The same sorts of land in Africa and other S. American countries are also ripe for development - no forests need be harmed.

Forests may be harmed, but it isn't due to the requirements of agriculture. It isn't necessary. This is a political issue. Will it be allowed or not? It would become less feasible politically if ding bat journalists stopped insisting that it was the only way to increase the extent of cultivated land.

Given these constraints, what is the optimal long-term solution? A global carbon price would clearly be ideal, but is also unlikely. Should developed nations heavily tax their beef cattle?

There's nothing ideal about a global carbon tax. That's like giving guns to children. All of that money in the hands of irresponsible politicians and bureaucrats? Some ideal! Besides, it wouldn't do diddly to relieve a food crunch. How did this non-sequitur end up in the discussion? Oh, right, the unnecessary forest clearing gaffe. No article or blog post is complete without genuflecting to the carbon tax gods.

One ding bat tax deserves another, so tax cattle too. But why? They eat grain. That makes sense - not. They don't need grain. Grass is all that is required, and in some of the places where they are raised in great numbers, such as S. America, that's how they are raised. Chickens and pigs, OTOH, can't survive on grass. They need rich foods such as grain, just like people.

We need better educated economists.

It might be worth expanding on the significance of part of the description of Brazilian ag from Grim Romance:

To give one remarkable example, the time between harvesting one crop and planting the next, in effect the downtime for land, has been reduced [to] an astounding thirty minutes.

But in the Ukraine:

Fallow agricultural land and steppe-formation processes are evidently capable of having a much greater effect on global air quality than was previously assumed, according to researchers who examined a dust cloud that formed over parched fields in southern Ukraine and led to extremely high concentrations of particulate matter in Central Europe. . .

Since the 1930s wind erosion in what was then the Soviet Union has increased considerably as a result of collectivisation in agriculture and the resultant large field areas.

In particular, this has affected the regions north of the Caucasus, the lower reaches of the Don river and eastern and southern Ukraine. It is possible that the process is also accelerated by climate change. In particular, previously unaffected semi-arid regions are continuing to dry out.

The problem isn't "a result of collectivisation in agriculture and the resultant large field areas". That's a false narrative, part of the boomer generational neurosis, the romantic idea of peasant agriculture.

Collectivization was in fact a crushingly dumb idea, but not because the fields were large. The problem then and now is failure to implement an effective agronomic system.

When the fallow period of land is brief, as in the Brazilian example, the threat of soil loss due to winds is greatly reduced. There are other ways to mitigate the threat, including no-till systems that don't destroy soil structure or leave bare ground exposed. Cover cropping and inter-cropping also have places. The problem is bare soil pulverized by cultivation, not large fields.

It's not a trivial issue.

A normal dust storm can result in 70 tons of the light black soil being whirled up per hectare per hour.

On 24 March 2007 the dust cloud spread across Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic to Germany. Peak concentrations of between 200 and 1400 micrograms of PM10 particulates per cubic metre were measured. By way of comparison: the EU daily average limit is 50 micrograms per cubic metre. Even if such meteorological conditions would appear to occur relatively infrequently, the unexpected scale of the phenomenon showed a need for a better understanding of the processes that lead to the formation and transport of such large quantities of dust. . .

The black soil in the south of the Ukraine is one of the most fertile soils in the world, but it is also very fine and therefore particularly sensitive to erosion. On 23 March 2007, gusts of wind with speeds of up to 90 kilometres per hour whipped up huge quantities of dust in the steppe. A dust cloud formed that was so large that it was later clearly visible on the weather satellite infrared pictures. . .

The researchers estimated the total mass of the dust cloud to be at least 60,000 tons. That is equivalent to more than 600 wagonloads of sand. The actual mass was probably much greater still, since the measuring devices register only those particles that are smaller than 10 microns (0.01 mm). Czech geologists estimated the total dust load must be about 3 million tons because this Ukrainian "plume" contained also bigger particles till size of 0.5mm. . .

"According to Russian studies, in the past 40 years there have been three to five such dust storms per year on average in the Ukrainian steppe,"

Erosion is only part of the problem of cultivation and fallow fields since it also causes tons of organic matter to be lost through outgasing, contributing large amounts of CO2 and methane to the atmosphere while impoverishing the soil. It also makes soil less able to hold moisture, and so can contribute to desertification in marginal lands.

The food crunch in India.

India "needs another green revolution", the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Unescap) recently urged. "Growth and productivity in agriculture are slowing, and the green revolution has bypassed millions."

India has the most to gain from improvements in agriculture because it is home to nearly two-thirds of Asia's poor, most of whom rely on farming, Unescap said.

Middle-class Indians are eating more and better food. Yet its population of 1.1bn is growing at about 1.4 per cent and food grain production increased just 0.9 per cent last year, according to ministry of agriculture statistics.

Agricultural growth has steadily decelerated because of years of under-investment as attention has focused on high-growth manufacturing and service industries.

It's somewhat understandable that this has happened given that the economic rewards for investment in manufacturing and service industries are high, and those for agriculture have been so low in the past. Food was cheap. But India has had some deadly famines in living memory, and faces big trouble if such things begin to happen again.

There are ways to improve.

But big strides can be made with relatively simple measures. In Kurthia, which is 40 km from the bustling holy city of Varanasi, the e-choupal consists of a computer in a modest house rigged with a small satellite dish. Farmers pose questions that are e-mailed to ITC -agricultural scientists and experts at agricultural -institutes.

Yogesh Bhrigulanshi, a farmer and the ITC local manager in nearby Bisuari village, says rice yields have risen 70 per cent, to 3,900kg per acre, since the arrival of the e-choupal. "We used to use fertiliser without any knowledge," says Mr Bhrigulanshi. "We used to use pesticides for any disease on plants. Now we know which pesticide to use and if it needs to be used."

Activists try to profit from agricultural ignorance to advance their political agendas. It is common to hear claims that fertilizers or pesticides don't work in India, or are too expensive or any number of other FUD claims. Such claims make no sense but are believed and repeated by those who oppose their use.

The issue is proper use. Ag may seem simple to urbans, but it takes some skill and knowledge. Simply giving bags of stuff to people who have no understanding is unlikely to result in good outcomes. Education and experience are required, and that is increasingly available due to telecommunications.

ITC plans to invest $1bn on e-choupals in the period to 2015 to connect farmers to information, products and services. The hope is that as rural incomes rise, farmers will buy more products and services, ranging from seeds and fertilisers to insurance and healthcare.

It works. All parties benefit. Where already implemented such systems have raised farmer income and productivity. Getting market prices for their produce instead of being cheated by middle men gives them rewards now and incentives to work harder and better. This can help address the imbalance between population growth and food supply growth as well as raise the standard of living of farmers. ITC profits increase too. It pays for the e-choupals and then some. The only loss seems to be for the middle men that used to cheat the farmers. They need a better business plan.

When organic matter decomposes, rots, in anaerobic conditions the types of micro-organisms that do the work emit methane as a waste product. That's why swamps, rice paddies, lake bottoms and land fills emit so much methane. When there is air present, oxygen to be more precise, aerobic microbes that emit carbon dioxide wastes do more of the work.

Ruminants such as cattle, sheep and goats harbor anaerobic organisms in their guts, something like human intestinal flora, that decompose the tougher bits of grasses and forbs, the cellulose, and emit methane in the process. Though this is completely natural and has happened for eons as giant herds of ruminants roamed the continents before humans ever domesticated some of them (think bison), it has become a target of climate change nutters.

Scientists at Gramina, a joint biotech venture by Australia’s Molecular Plant Breeding Cooperative Research Centre and New Zealand rural services group PGG Wrightson Genomics, are developing a grass that will not only cut the amount of methane cows burp up when chewing the cud but will also grow in hotter climes, according to the latest issue of Chemistry & Industry.

This means that farmers should be able to maintain dairy herds’ productivity and profitability in the face of a changing climate, while cutting down their gaseous burps and reducing their contribution to global warming. . .

Gramina will use sense suppression technology to prevent the expression of the enzyme O-methyl transferase. Suppressing this enzyme leads to an increase in the digestibility of the grass without compromising its structural properties and therefore less burps and less methane. . .

However, some scientists suggest that a cow’s absolute methane emissions might go up.

Alistair Macrae, a lecturer in farm animal health and production at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says a diet too rich in highly digestible carbs can actually increase the amount of methane a cow belches out. This is because gut microflora convert more of these sugars into propionic acid, which creates a more acidic environment resulting in more methane.

Ian Givens, a professor of animal science, at the University of Reading, UK, says that more digestible forage could push up a cow’s absolute methane emissions but productivity gains would mean less methane per unit of milk.

Beever agrees and says, ‘It could increase methane emissions but it could also increase milk yields, effectively cutting the amount of methane produce per litre of milk.’

The weasel words that take back the talk about methane reduction and slide over to an emissions intensity argument mask the real story here: "an increase in the digestibility of the grass". This means more production, or less forage for the same production. If the grasses have other useful traits such as good nutrition and growth habits then this will be a great benefit for the continuing struggle to feed the world.

It's not just the Brits that are barmy, it's an international problem. Robin Hanson posts about an OpEd:

. . . top universities accept hundreds of individuals who have demonstrated the highest levels of citizenship. These teenagers have volunteered in more food banks, sponsored more fundraisers and lobbied more officials than any previous generation. ... Sometimes some of these students will denounce world hunger but be unfriendly to the homeless. They will debate environmental policy but never offer to take out the trash. They will believe vehemently in many causes but roll their eyes when reminded to be humble, to be generous and to "do what is right."

It is these people, though, who often climb America's ladder of success. They rise to the top, partly on their own merits yet also partly on the backs of equally deserving but "nicer" people who let them steal the spotlight. ... Watching the race for the presidency, I cannot help but wonder whether our candidates, with their prestigious degrees and impressive credentials, are nice people. I wonder if, in their trek to the top, they have pushed aside the kind of quietly brilliant altruists who mean what they say and say what they mean. I wonder if our society is crippling itself by subjecting its youths to an almost-Darwinian college selection process.

Supporting Amelia [Rawls, the author of the OpEd], here is a pict I took at Harvard Thursday:

There are many foot paths, but even so without fences students cut across and kill the grass, to gain that extra few seconds. (Fences come down when parents show up for graduation.) Many other campuses have social norms that keep folks off the grass, but not Harvard.

The comments following the post reminded Robin about "path's of desire", the insightful landscape and architecture notion that paved walks should be where people want them, where they actually walk, and that a good way to determine proper locations is to just let people wear paths going about their business and then pave those areas.

Robin rebuts them saying: "Guys, if you put in a path for every pair of points on the perimeter of a grass area, it will cover the entire area." This is wrong in some interesting ways. It never turns out that paths are everywhere, but if it did then the grass would not be trampled to death since traffic would not be concentrated in a few areas, it would be evenly distributed. Even if traffic was so heavy that it killed everything there would be some paths that stood out, that had the heaviest traffic. Pave those and people would use them preferentially since they keep their feet dry and clean while getting approximately where they want to go.

The real issue here is priggishness. It isn't about altruism, it is about selected ostentatiously altruistic behaviors that give "a Roundhead feeling of virtue as its own reward", as noted in the previous post, and also in the earlier post Enviro-Dorks where the green-exploitation journalist Michael Pollan complained:

Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue — a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue — became a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment — buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore — should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment.

There's nothing virtuous about driving a hybrid, locavorism or keeping off the grass. This is just fashion crime, priggishness, the Roundhead feeling of virtue as its own reward, without the substance.

This is an old subject here. A couple of years ago the post Adult Supervision noted the cruelty of priggish true-believers.

Bill "we're all gonna die" McKibben is frustrated.

I wrote a few paragraphs disparaging the most powerful of my local environmental groups, the Adirondack Council, for the way they'd worked on clean-air issues. Both criticisms were respectful -- I am my mother's son -- but they were also stern. . .

They were also, at some level, divisive. In both cases, you could truthfully say I was willing to inflict a little damage on an important part of the environmental movement. It doesn't mean, I hope, that I'm growing a mean streak. I think it means something else: the environmental movement is reaching an important point of division, between those who truly get global warming, and those who don't.

By get, I don't mean understanding the chemistry of carbon dioxide, or the importance of the Kyoto Protocol, or something like that -- pretty much everyone who thinks of themselves as an environmentalist has reached that point. By get, I mean understanding that the question is of transcending urgency, that it represents the one overarching global civilizational challenge that humans have ever faced. That it's as big as the Bomb.

I've always thought of McKibben as one of the meanest folks around, completely insensitive to other humans and indifferent to their concerns - a sociopath in other words - so it's surprising to hear how he thinks of himself. But he has a point. There are paleo-environmentalists who truly see climate change as being "like the bomb".

And that's revealing since while they were worrying about the bomb, or the population bomb, or any number of other emergencies de jour over the past couple of decades - nuclear winter? - the climate has been changing, heating up in ways that have a human signature. In each instance their analysis of the issue was deeply mistaken and their prescriptions for policy were ludicrous - mean spirited as well as ineffective.

Another way to see this is as grim green romanticism.

Our longstanding agricultural romanticism has been compounded by our new-found environmental romanticism. In the United States fears of climate change have been manipulated by shrewd interests to produce grotesquely inefficient subsidies for bio-fuel. Around a third of American grain production has rapidly been diverted into energy production. This switch demonstrates both the superb responsiveness of the market to price signals, and the shameful power of subsidy-hunting lobby groups. . .

The ban on both the production and import of genetically modified crops has obviously retarded productivity growth in European agriculture: again, the best that can be said of it is that we are rich enough to afford such folly. But Europe is a major agricultural producer, so the cumulative consequence of this reduction in the growth of productivity has most surely rebounded onto world food markets. Further, and most cruelly, as an unintended side-effect the ban has terrified African governments into themselves banning genetic modification in case by growing modified crops they would permanently be shut out of selling to European markets.

Again, the feeling of virtue as its own reward, without the substance. It's toxic romance that has no interest in the realities of hungry people living lives of desperation, unable to educate their children, lacking even the energy to care for, much less better, themselves.

There are real environmentalists, people who work for true environmental preservation and remediation rather than squandering their energies on politics, movements, rent-seeking and self-congratulatory feelings of virtue though their analyses are mistaken and their policy proposals are deadly. There are those who quietly and effectively live and work in increasingly more benign ways while still delivering, still supporting their communities. They are realists who simply load the wagon and pull, knowing that there are many issues and that they must all be balanced in order to achieve true improvement on any of them. That broad view, whole systems approach prevents the counter-productive actions that come from pursuit of narrow objectives and indifference to consequences. The zealots break lots of eggs but make damned few omelettes.

Like Hanson, I can support the intent of the excerpt of the Amelia Rawls OpEd. There are "quietly brilliant altruists who mean what they say and say what they mean". They are pushed aside by ambitious climbers, and also by priggish zealots. Our system does select for this sort of thing, and it begins at an increasingly early age as the primary school system becomes more politicized and dogmatic. The rewards grow ever larger, accountability grows ever more lax, and cynicism increases.

But it is so obvious, and there are now so many pointing and laughing - amplified by the power of ICT - that I anticipate change. Even among those who call themselves environmentalists there is increasing awareness that politics and movements aren't the way to do effective environmentalism. All politics does is give power to the sociopaths who exploit the real concerns of others.

And there is growing sophistication in environmental thinking that takes broader and longer term views, recognizing that policies must be realistic, cures better than diseases. Bird brained environmentalism of the sort made infamous by Paul Ehrlich and Bill McKibben that flits from panic to panic squawking loudly all the while now seems ludicrous and archaic. Climate change was the last straw. What the green-exploitation industry thought was their killer issue, the one that would allow them to take control, is blowing up in their faces as people react to the policies implemented and proposed.

Or so I hope. It may be wishful thinking. This may just be a moment of lucidity in a downward spiral as happens for those who have progressive mental diseases: social Alzheimer's. Societies don't often alter course until great damage has been done, at least they haven't in the past. The hope that ICT can increase awareness and hasten change before great damage is just that: hope.

I've commented in the past that I was worried about the Brits, that they didn't seem to be in touch with reality. It's not that I know much, this is truly rootless bloviation, but they seemed to have contracted a virulent case of Euro disease, an affliction that affects the mind and leads to increasingly tenuous connections with reality along with heightened passions: agitated delusions. Then war breaks out. Perhaps I was too pessimistic.

"If someone drops litter, they should be arrested," Livingstone threatened during his campaign, thinking his resolve would impress rather than infuriate voters with its ecologically correct pettiness in a city otherwise awash in real crime.

Every tax and intrusion imposed by Labour in recent years was justified as being for voters' "own good." Ending global warming, reducing carbon footprints, lowering carbon emissions and raising public funding of renewable energy — all were excuses used to hit the voters' pocketbook with more taxes.

Yet none of these taxes improved the quality of life. Instead, just a few of them — the same ones the green lobby wants here — showed British voters this was a puritanical scheme to reduce the quality of life and substitute a Roundhead feeling of virtue as its own reward.

"In other words, don't even think about enjoying yourself," wrote Malcolm Davis on Reuters' site.

But in the meantime, crime rose, state services declined, the bureaucrats proliferated, the National Health Service deteriorated and British purchasing power evaporated. "Many feel the government is creating a green fear for monetary gain," Mark Hodson of Opinium Research told the Independent newspaper.

Worse yet, government's only strength seemed to be in harassing its own citizens. Britain, for instance, had been covered with security cameras — which no doubt would be used by Livingstone to nab litterbugs — but have done little to prevent terrorism. It's telling that last year a car full of bombs was detected not by anti-terror cameras, but by over-active tow trucks looking for illegally parked cars.

"Don't vote for a joke, vote for London," said Livingstone, urging Brits to turn away Tory mayoral candidate Boris Johnson. Amid rising green taxes, an increasingly intrusive state and government harassment, Brits took him up on his recommendation.

It isn't clear that anything has actually improved. The new bosses are often as bad or worse than the old ones. It's just politics. Still, it is encouraging that the old ones have been sacked, making change possible. Not probable, but possible.

I wonder if this will affect the coming US elections? I wonder if the developed world as a whole is becoming a tiny bit more realistic? Nah. It's just my imagination.

Some interesting comments by the panel of economists at an FT blog.

The remedy to high food prices is to increase food supply, something that is entirely feasible. The most realistic way to raise global supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market. To give one remarkable example, the time between harvesting one crop and planting the next, in effect the downtime for land, has been reduced [to] an astounding thirty minutes. There are still many areas of the world that have good land which could be used far more productively if it was properly managed by large companies. For example, almost 90% of Mozambique’s land, an enormous area, is idle.

Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is that we can afford them. In Africa, which cannot afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result, Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is generally not well-suited to innovation and investment: the result has been that African agriculture has fallen further and further behind the advancing productivity frontier of the globalized commercial model. . .

Our longstanding agricultural romanticism has been compounded by our new-found environmental romanticism. In the United States fears of climate change have been manipulated by shrewd interests to produce grotesquely inefficient subsidies for bio-fuel. Around a third of American grain production has rapidly been diverted into energy production. This switch demonstrates both the superb responsiveness of the market to price signals, and the shameful power of subsidy-hunting lobby groups. . .

The ban on both the production and import of genetically modified crops has obviously retarded productivity growth in European agriculture: again, the best that can be said of it is that we are rich enough to afford such folly. But Europe is a major agricultural producer, so the cumulative consequence of this reduction in the growth of productivity has most surely rebounded onto world food markets. Further, and most cruelly, as an unintended side-effect the ban has terrified African governments into themselves banning genetic modification in case by growing modified crops they would permanently be shut out of selling to European markets. Africa definitely cannot afford this self-denial. It needs all the help it can possibly get from genetic modification. Not only is Africa currently being hit by rising food prices, over the longer term it will face climatic deterioration in the context of a rapidly growing population.

Ox, meet gore.

Another issue is the lack of property rights in Africa.

Mr Mbeki, who is deputy chairman of the South African Institute of International Affairs, said that this vision would only be feasible as long as land ownership and political accountability were addressed at the same time.

He cited Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe's government has seized most of the country's commercial farms in the last eight years, as an example.

"We've seen the consequences of the farmer not having property rights in the destruction of agriculture in Zimbabwe," he told the BBC.

"Zimbabwe had a green revolution - for example their maize is hybrid maize, it wasn't just traditional seed they were using but the Mugabe regime took away the land."

I think it is worth emphasizing the cruelty of romanticism. It's merely fashion crime in Europe and USA since the net effects are comparatively small or at least affordable due to great wealth and the more advanced condition of the rest of the economy. But in Africa it is sometimes a death sentence and always a severe hardship.

Not said is that large-scale commercial agriculture is not inherently unsustainable and environmentally harmful. Peasant systems can be more so when the whole system is considered since they can't produce enough to meet demand. Such systems come apart under pressure and lose whatever virtue they possessed. History is littered with examples.

Large-scale commercial agriculture is improving in ways that make it more sustainable, and there is still a large upside, opportunities for continuous improvement. More knowledge of and attention to natural systems and their needs, coupled with increasingly non-intrusive higher technology methods and materials, shows promise of being able to meet out large and growing needs for food and fibre.

I can imagine a future where this is even more human scale, but it will be a result of non-human technologies - ag bots. Roomba for crops rather than carpets. Beyond that I suspect the bots will be replaced by engineered biological solutions. At small scales the difference between biological and mechanical systems diminishes, but I think that biological systems have a competitive advantage and there is already an extensive tool kit to speed development.

Perhaps the various soil improvement agronomic system ideas that have been expressed here (and many other places, of course) will be more memorable if expressed in conventional crisis terminology: Peak Soil, like peak oil.

By 2050, according to Rattan Lal, a professor of soil science at Ohio State University, "All the necessities of food, feed, fiber, and fuel are going to be met by less than one-tenth of an acre per person, on average. And we already have seriously degraded a lot of the available land. So unless you can restore some of it you will just run out."

People have been improving as well as degrading soil for millenia. Some civilizations develop more successful systems than others. The results can be catastrophic. It may be that we can learn to make soil, in a formal way.

Dick Haynes, a soil scientist at Australia's University of Queensland, has created a synthetic soil from industrial waste products: fly ash from power plants and byproducts of aluminum processing for its mineral components, poultry litter and manure for its organic matter. Haynes has said he wants to launch a soil-making industry in Australia, a country that has seen its limited fertile soil threatened by a decade-long drought. He hopes to have a product on the market within a few years.

Though Haynes has described his dirt as the world's first artificial soil, there are some precedents. In the mid-1990s, a Purdue University engineering graduate student named Jody Tishmack created a similar soil from power plant waste, biosolids left over from antibiotics production at a nearby Eli Lilly plant, and animal bedding from the veterinary school. The university used it for reclamation and landscaping projects around campus.

Today, Tishmack is still working on artificial soil, and her experience illustrates a key obstacle to its widespread adoption: cost. Synthetic soil is a very expensive way to replace a resource that is, however troubled, free.

She founded a company called Soilmaker, which uses a slightly less exotic recipe for its soil and sells it to gardeners and landscapers. Asked whether her product could work on an agricultural scale, she responded, "I can make it, but that doesn't mean that you can afford it. It would cost you $30,000 to put an acre of it down."

If nothing else the costs of shipping massive quantities around is high and rising. If soil making is ever to become practical it would seem that it would need to be made on site. Farmers just looking to reduce their fertilizer costs are coaxing CAFOs to locate on a portion of their farms so that they can use the manure produced for a portion of their fertilizer. Hauling such quantities is a large expense, so having a local source is valuable.

These aren't political issues, but politicians are seeking ways to exploit them.

The loss of soil that feels so urgent to geologists averages out, over all the world's farmland, to just one millimeter per year. That rate is slow enough to create a political problem: It's outside the time frame of the politicians - and in many cases the farmers - who are key to fixing any problem as big as disappearing soil. . .

Ultimately, it may be the issue of climate change that drives public interest in soil.

As Daniel Hillel, a research scientist at Columbia University's Center for Climate Systems Research, points out, climate change is in part a soil problem. Carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide released from cultivated earth are in essence lost plant nutrients, and they're also major greenhouse gases.

Caring properly for soil, whether through additives like biochar or techniques like crop rotation and no-till agriculture, may have a serious role to play in mitigating greenhouse gases. Part of biochar's appeal, in fact, is that it keeps carbon locked up in soil for the many years the charcoal takes to break down. Currently, researchers at England's Newcastle University are working on a calcium-rich soil that they believe will have enhanced carbon-storing capacities.

I think that this is wrong. Growers are always concerned about soil, but it's one of many concerns. They do what they must to stay in business, and there are often higher priorities. They can't care for the soil if they go bankrupt. But, things are changing. As the cost of inputs rise techniques to enhance soil and so reduce the need for purchased inputs become competitive. Politics or not, climate change regulation and subsidy or not, improved soil management is becoming ever more cost effective. The ideas aren't new, but the economic climate is changing in ways that favor them.

Horrors! Swedish researchers have discovered that adding biochar to soil causes microorganisms to increase in number!

In their study, charcoal was prepared and mixed with forest soil, and left in the soil in each of three contrasting forest stands in northern Sweden for ten years.

They found that when charcoal was mixed into humus, there was a substantial increase in soil microorganisms (bacteria and fungi). These microbes carry out decomposition of organic matter (carbon) in the soil, and consistent with this, they found that charcoal caused greatly increased losses of native soil organic matter, and soil carbon, for each of the three forest stands. Much of this lost soil carbon would be released as carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Therefore, while it is true that charcoal represents a long term sink of carbon because of its persistence, this effect is at least partially offset by the capacity of charcoal to greatly promote the loss of that carbon already present in the soil.

The study finds that the supposed benefits of biochar in increasing ecosystem carbon storage may be overstated, at least for boreal forest soils. The effect of biochar on the loss of carbon already in the soil needs to be better understood before it can be effectively applied as a tool to mitigate human-induced increases in carbon-based greenhouse gases.

I think that if they looked more closely they'd find that new organic matter is being produced at a higher rate too. More is produced and more is consumed since the soil is more alive. And I think they may be using the word humus in a confusingly loose way. Humus is quite stable in soil, the residue of raw organic matter that has already been processed by soil micro and macro organisms. It seems that they are referring to the raw, undigested organic matter as humus. I've heard this done before, and it isn't always an important distinction, but it is in this case. Both biochar and fully mature humus will remain in soil and accumulate over time, while the more ephemeral raw organic matter is produced and consumed cyclically in the production of ever more of the truly durable humus.

Other tests have established that biochar stimulates mychorrizal fungi and rhizobial bacteria, two of the most beneficial soil microorganisms. That it also stimulates other types of bacteria and fungi that decompose - i.e. rot - dead organic matter is no surprise.

It's important to parse the claims of these researchers. Organic matter will rot and release GHGs whether there is biochar present or not. It will not accumulate unless there are special conditions such as an acidic peat bog inimical to soil microorganisms. Biochar may accelerate decomposition by stimulating soil microorganisms, or by merely raising the PH, sweetening acidic soil. These are not bad things and will result in increased growth of new organic matter, sucking down CO2 released earlier.

A more important question is "just how durable is biochar?" We have some information about this but not full knowledge.

Stewart Brand reports a presentation to the Long Now foundation given by historian Niall Ferguson and futurist Peter Schwartz.

In Schwartz’s opening remarks, he said that his plans to write a book titled THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM were derailed by reading Ferguson’s WAR OF THE WORLD. He’s been grappling with the issues Ferguson raised for 18 months. “You do alternative pasts, I do alternative futures. Where historians commune with the dead, futurists have imaginary friends.”

Schwartz characterized Ferguson’s view of history as basically down, with an upside possibility, whereas his own view was of history as basically up, with always the possibility of getting things wrong. . .

Ferguson said, “I think our difference is that I’m a pessimist and you’re an optimist. You’re Pangloss and I’m Cassandra.” Schwartz noted that since his parents were in slave-labor camps in World War II, and he was born in a displaced-person camp after the war, “It would be churlish not to be an optimist.” Ferguson said, “That would make me skeptical about technology. The world leader in science and technology in 1940 was Nazi Germany.”

I've praised and criticized all of these fellows in the past. I usually find fault with their work and usually find value as well. That makes them interesting to me.

A perhaps not so loosely related thought on the Agriculture of Tomorrow. [via Cosma, in an indirect way which involved some searching inspired by a tossed off comment that he probably could have given a citation for and saved me the work, but no, he speaks mostly to insiders who don't need to search it up. Their jokes may be numbered, to save them the time needed to tell them. ]

The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural. Consider so simple and time-honored a process as the milking of a cow. The milk which should have been an intimate and almost sacramental bond between mother and child is elicited by the deft fingers of a milk-maid, and drunk, cooked, or even allowed to rot into cheese. We have only to imagine ourselves as drinking any of its other secretions, in order to realise the radical indecency of our relation to the cow. {6}

No less disgusting a priori is the process of corruption which yields our wine and beer. But in actual fact the process of milking and of the making and drinking of beer appear to us profoundly natural; they have even tended to develop a ritual of their own whose infraction nowadays has a certain air of impropriety. There is something slightly disgusting in the idea of milking a cow electrically or drinking beer out of tea-cups. And all this of course applies much more strongly to the sexual act.

DAEDALUS: or Science and the Future
A paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on February 4th, 1923
by J. B. S. Haldane

Emphasis added by me.

Something was missing.

Since electronics was developed, engineers have made circuits using combinations of three basic elements – resistors, capacitors and inductors.

But in 1971, a young circuit designer called Leon Chua at the University of California, Berkeley, realised something was missing. He was toying with the non-linear mathematics that describes how the four variables in a circuit – voltage, current, charge and flux – behave in the three basic elements.

The three building blocks each relate two of the four electronic properties of circuits, creating a chain linking charge to flux via voltage and current. But his calculations showed there should be a fourth device to directly link flux and charge.

But, no one could make such devices and the idea was mostly forgotten. . . until some fellows worked out why their work to develop titanium dioxide memory circuits was glitchy.

. . . these efforts have been dogged by bizarre electronic effects, says Williams, who has now worked out the reason. His titanium dioxide works as a memoristor – the mythical device has been found. . .

The way memristors handle current and voltage is startlingly similar to the way synapses between brain cells do, says Chua. Both build up voltage to a threshold before firing and letting a current pass.

Williams agrees. "The memristor equations do a very good job of modelling the known behaviour of synapses," he says.

I could use a little prosthetic help for my high mileage brain. They say it's the second thing to go.

Continuing the trail from Lost At Sea: The North Pacific Gyre Oscillation.

Since 1945, fishermen in the California current of the Pacific Ocean have been tracking temperature, salinity and nutrients, among other things, in the ocean to help them predict changes in fish populations like sardines and anchovies that are important for the industry. Studying this data, along with satellite images, Di Lorenzo discovered a pattern of current that he named the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation.

Recent satellite data suggest that this current is undergoing intensification as the temperature of the Earth has risen over the past few decades.

"Although the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation is part of a natural cycle of the climate system, we find evidence suggesting that its amplitude may increase as global warming progresses," said Di Lorenzo.

If this is true, this newly found climate pattern may help scientists predict how the ecosystem of the Pacific Ocean is likely to change if the world continues to warm, as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This is a very short term study, especially since we already know of oscillations in the region (PDO) that have periods longer than the length of this study, so it's reaching to claim that a trend has been observed. Still, it's one more tool in the kit for practical application, and if further study can link the various oscillations over longer time periods we might begin to have some predictive capability.

So to speak.

No meteorologist or television station kept records of what they predicted, nor compared their predictions to actual results over a long term. No meteorologist posts their accuracy statistics on their résumé. No station managers use accuracy statistics in the hiring or evaluation of their meteorologists. Instead, the focus is on charm, charisma, and presentation. Their words say they care about accuracy, but their actions say they do not.

Robin Hanson asks:

Why should we expect this to be any better for other kinds of news? If viewers can watch the same person day after day making predictions about something they care about and personally verify day after day, and still not care much about accuracy relative to looks and charm, how much can we really expect people to care about accuracy of news on unrest in Thailand, the credit crisis, or a new medical study? Can we really expect people to track the accuracy of advice from their doctors, lawyers, or interior decorators, relative to their looks, charm, and general impressiveness?

It's entertainment, and people often parrot the views of entertainers. They depend on entertainers to protect them from ridicule, not error. It's worse to be unfashionable than to be wrong.

Think of RepRap as a China on your desktop.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer . . . - a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the component up in layers of plastic. . .

what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €400). That way it's accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can make another and give it to a friend...

We hope to announce self-replication this year - 2008 - though the machine that will do it - RepRap Version 1.0 "Darwin" - can be built now - see . . . Make RepRap Darwin. . .

Not a new idea, but apparently immanent. Resistance isn't just futile, it's self punking.

Continuing an old thread most recently discussed in Rootless Bloviation: More about African Ag

The wheat is a new variety, one that is high yielding and resistant to drought. As a result, small farming families are realizing harvests on farmlands once considered too poor to cultivate, to the country´s social and economic benefit.

The progress is life-saving at a time when wheat crops in Kenya and other African countries are plagued by a virulent new strain of fungus called "wheat rust" that threatens the region´s farmlands. . .

Scientists and crop researchers at Kenya´s Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) developed the new wheat seeds over the past decade. Through a process called "mutation plant breeding", they applied radiation-based techniques to modify crop characteristics and traits.

The story is from the International Atomic Energy Agency. I've always been stonkered about the acceptance of mutagenic cultivars produced by heat, chemical and radiation induced mutation, while controlled genetic alteration is treated with suspicion.

There are some interesting rice cultivars seeing increasing use, those called upland rice, which use far less water, more like other field crops such as wheat than varieties grown in flooded paddies. They still use more water than wheat, but far less than other rice. This expands the amount of land suitable for rice cultivation, and reduces use of an increasingly scarce resource.

These would be good places to consider the use of biochar too. It increases the water holding capacity of soil, keeping it in the root zone where plants can access it rather than flowing away or seeping below plants. It has an analogous affect on soil nutrients, and water management is a part of that. More growth with fewer inputs of nutrients and water.

The combination of improved crop varieties and improved agronomic systems can reduce, perhaps eliminate, the so-called food crisis.

Emphasizing the ideas voiced in Part Duh that the notion of subsidizing "avoided deforestation" was a stupid idea. Beetle Mania.

natural events can upset a forest’s carbon calculus. Big fires, for instance, spew plenty of CO2 into the atmosphere, and the dead trees that remain eventually decompose by microbial action, releasing more of the gas.

By killing trees by the thousands, widespread insect infestations can do the same thing. But rarely have insect blights been considered when determining a forest’s carbon balance.

Now Werner A. Kurz of Natural Resources Canada and colleagues have calculated the impact of an infestation of mountain pine beetles on pine forests in British Columbia. The effect, they report in Nature, is startling: the forests are now a large carbon source, and will remain so at least until 2020, long after the infestation peaks.

At more than 32 million acres and counting, the pine beetle blight is at least an order of magnitude larger than any previous recorded infestation by the insect. And global climate change, Dr. Kurz said, is partly responsible: winter temperatures no longer get low enough to kill off the beetle, and warmer summers allow greater reproductive success.

I've been writing about this for years. It isn't just the higher minimum winter temperatures that have allowed the beetles to prosper, it is also summer drought and fire suppression.

The beetles attack weak stands of trees. In the past this benefited the forest. Weak trees died, then burned, making room for new growth. The result was a vibrant mixed-age forest more resilient than a monoculture of same aged trees.

Suppressing fire - something that has been going on for many decades - reduced stress on the beetles, allowing them to better thrive, and setting the stage for spectacular burns when the standing dead finally did catch since there was more fuel.

The combination of changes means that there will be less pine forest in the area. The carbon sequestered by trees is being released. We should expect that every forest will have future impacts and we should focus on sensible forest management, even when that means clearing areas and letting natural fires take their natural course, rather than trumped up climate wheezes.

BTW, there have been some efforts to make the most of the beetle infestation. There is a fungus that infects trees attacked by beetles. Its growth stains the pine wood a blue color. Lumber made from such trees is called "denim pine" and is sold as a specialty product. The wood is just fine, as strong as wood from fungus free trees. When such wood is used for home building the carbon in it is in effect sequestered more durably than leaving it to burn or rot in the forest.

Green is the new gold.

Mendel will make use of Monsanto’s crop testing, breeding and seed production to develop high-yield, low-input perennial grasses to serve as a feedstock for cellulosic biofuel production. . .

Monsanto is able to aggressively invest in next-generation biofuels as first-generation biofuels have created windfall profits for the company. Monsanto tripled its profits last year, due in large part to the corn ethanol boom.

Now Monsanto needs to move into cellulosic ethanol, as food-based biofuels, especially corn, have taken a beating. There have been numerous frozen ethanol refinery projects and the public backlash in the food vs. fuel debate has further dampened food-based ethanol investments. Though it will probably take a few years to develop and pay off, Monsanto’s play into cellulosics will likely further increase that profit growth.

Then, after a while, there will be a new round of frozen ethanol refinery projects and public backlash when people finally grok the consequences of growing crops for fuel, even though the crops are lower input cellulose producers such as grasses. But, another round of triple profits will have been tucked away, and a new lemony fresh opportunity will be in the works.

You get what you manage for, whether you understand what that will be or not.

There was once a food economy and an energy economy, but the boom in biofuels is now merging the two. . .

Global fertilizer prices rose more than 200% in 2007 as farmers applied more fertilizer to maximize production of corn -- now used for ethanol -- at record prices; hardest hit are African farmers who need fertilizer to replenish nutrient-depleted soils.

The unprecedented rise in fertilizer prices - more than 200% in the past year - is creating a fertilizer crisis for resource-poor farmers in developing countries. . . Particularly hard-hit are farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. Farmers there need fertilizers desperately, to replenish their nutrient-depleted soils. But fertilizer use in Africa is the world's lowest - about 8 kg per hectare. The lack of fertilizers in Africa accentuates hunger and poverty.

The biofuels debacle accentuated and accelerated a problem that was always there and growing ever more focused. There never were two economies - food and energy - they were always one. Even in pre-industrial times this was so: animal dung was used both as an energy source - burned for heating and cooking - and fertilizer for fields. The invention of gunpowder - a mix of nitrates, charcoal and sulfur - amplified the conflict since a key source of nitrates was from rotted dung piles. (see Fossil Fertilizer)

Adding military imperatives to the conflict shaped it, affecting geopolitics from the 13th through the 20th centuries. Ammonia synthesis from fossil fuels - at first a byproduct of metal smelting activites in the production of coke from coal, then a primary product using fossil methane as feedstock as well as the heat source - continued the conflict during the industrial and military boom of the 20th century.

Nitrogen gets most of the attention but phosphorous and potassium fertilizers are just as important and in just as much conflict. During much of the 18th and 19th centuries the forests of the new world were burned to make potash - from which the word potassium is derived. It was used in Europe, especially Britain, to make soap, glass, and gunpowder as well as fertilizers. One of the first American patents, in 1790, was for an improved method for making potash that increased both the quantity and quality of the product. (see Secret Ingredients) During the same time period England was robbing the graves of the world to get bones to get the phosphorous they contained. (see Rock Fertilizer)

Prices of phosphate fertilizers rose more steeply than the price of nitrogen-based urea because production sources are more limited. . . Most of the world's phosphate fertilizers are produced in the United States, Morocco, and along the Baltic Sea. Canada produces 70% of the world's muriate of potash. But plants to manufacture urea, for which natural gas is the main raw material resource, are dispersed worldwide. The world is currently short of urea, but global production may increase because at least six large new urea plants are projected to open in 2008: two in Iran and one each in Egypt, Nigeria, Oman, and Russia.

Nitrogen is not stored in soils, use it or lose it, but other nutrients, though present, may be unavailable to plants, locked up so to speak in compounds that plants can't access. Attention to soil chemistry, especially its PH, can release nutrients (Lime, sulfur, biochar). Attention to soil structure can reduce nutrient loss, and so reduce the amounts that must be provided. (Think organic matter, biochar.) Attention to relative amounts of various nutrients, keeping them in balance, can reduce loss of relative excesses. Attention to secondary nutrient minerals, such as manganese which acts something like a catalyst enhancing chemical processes in soil, can reduce total needs. As a bonus ot sorts, food and fodder produced on soils with balanced fertility are more nutritious. Better food as well as more food.

Calls for increased availability of fertilizers for hungry developing nations, often recommending various forms of subsidy, are not the whole answer and not the best answer. Dumping more fertilizer on soils in a willy-nilly fashion without attention to a complete and balanced agronomic system will not give satisfactory results and will increase problems over time. Doing the wrong things more vigorously, or even the right things to excess, doesn't help.

There is a science to all of this, one that is not widely understood. The confusion is increased by lack of a shared knowledge base and vocabulary. Growers often have understandings and insights that are expressed in terms that institutional scientists don't understand, and the reverse. In my view it is the scientists who are best placed to act as translators and communicators. They could help a lot by acquiring a broad understanding of the practice as well as the science and formulating agronomic systems that are particular to places and expressed in terms that can be understood by locals.

In a sense the run up in food, fertilizer and energy prices presents an opportunity. Growing more food using fewer inputs is a thing worth doing now more than ever. It was always smart, but may now be more clearly a life and death as well as an economic issue.

Just a reminder.

Scientists already know that in many animals, more sons are produced when a mother has plentiful resources or is high ranking. The phenomenon has been most extensively studied in invertebrates, but is also seen in horses, cows and some species of deer. The explanation is thought to lie with the evolutionary drive to produce descendants. . .

New research by the Universities of Exeter and Oxford provides the first evidence that a child?s sex is associated with the mother's diet. . . the study shows a clear link between higher energy intake around the time of conception and the birth of sons. The findings may help explain the falling birth-rate of boys in industrialised countries, including the UK and US. . .

As well as consuming more calories, women who had sons were more likely to have eaten a higher quantity and wider range of nutrients, including potassium, calcium and vitamins C, E and B12. There was also a strong correlation between women eating breakfast cereals and producing sons.

Breakfast of champions. There are other reasons to eat a good breakfast, ones that apply to everyone.

Those who oppose progress do their best to prevent it, and have done so for decades. They now use the lack of progress during those decades as an argument against the possibility of future progress.

It's worth noting that if we had to build today's energy infrastructure working under the current regulatory and NIMBY burden, it probably could not be done. So it shouldn't be surprising that building a new energy infrastructure is proving so hard. There's a reason why many of us think deregulation is a big issue and it's not because we want to see people poisoned by Chinese botchagaloop.

Opposition to nuclear energy is one glaring example of the problem cited here in the past, but there's a general drag on progress from a crufted up bureaucracy. Each petty fiefdom diligently pursues its regulatory opposition to everything it can grab, since that's what pays the wages. They make careers out of obstruction and delay, and use the long delays caused by their behavior to lobby for increased staff and funds. They more they get, the worse things get, and the more they want.

We really are.

THE oceans of the world are covered in mysterious "stripes", scientists have discovered.

Oceanographers have uncovered a regular pattern of currents imprinted on every sea on the planet. It is the first time the strange phenomenon has been spotted after researchers collected data from a global network of 3,000 free-floating buoys that measure the temperature and salinity of the oceans and are tracked by satellites. . .

The scientists found the 93 mile-wide bands covered almost every ocean basin. They recorded the striations flowing in opposite directions at about 0.022 mph, says the study published in Geophysical Research Letters. This is slower than most known currents – which is possibly why they have remained hidden until now.

The researchers also found the striations extend below the surface to a few hundred metres and the eastward bands are slightly hotter than westward ones. This could turn out to play a role in the circulation of nutrients.

Ya think?

Mystery 2

While the recent Arctic summer was the warmest on record satellite images from the Antarctic summer have shown the largest sea-ice extent ever recorded. . . Warming is a lot less global when you get south of Chile, it seems.

And there's the coccolithophore discoveries that were mentioned earlier.

Ocean water today is somewhat alkaline, at 8.1, down from 8.2 at the start of the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago.

The laboratory findings agree with what has been observed in the oceans. Over the past 220 years, the average mass of a coccolithophore increased 40 percent as ocean pH levels dropped.

More acid oceans - actually, less alkaline, but acid ocean sounds more frightening - turn out to be good for building "single-cell, carbonate-encased algae that are a major link in the ocean food chain" since when levels of carbon dioxide in the water rise — speeding up the algae’s photosynthesis machinery — as well as levels of bicarbonate ions - the building material for the carbonate disks - coccolithophores are fat and happy.

Lot's of discoveries lately, and many of them refute things we already knew that weren't so. All told, it's not all told. We are just eggs.

Even those who have at last gotten some glimmer of comprehension about natural systems cling to their old ways. Their analyses have been demolished, but they have not yet abandoned unworkable prescriptions.

Mr. Bush . . . set a target for halting the growth in carbon dioxide emissions by 2025, without specific mandates to achieve that, and in the meantime he blasted proposed Senate legislation for tougher measures as unnecessary.

Unnecessary? When scientists detect accelerating melting in the Arctic and confidently predict centuries of coastal retreats and climate shifts, endangering the only planet we have? . . .

Unnecessary since they would be insufficient, ineffective, just feel good wanking for the twittering set.

imagine that we instituted a brutally high gas tax that reduced emissions from American vehicles by 25 percent. That would be a stunning achievement — and in just nine months, China’s increased emissions would have more than made up the difference. . .

“If we approach this from reducing emissions we get nowhere. Driving Priuses may be good, but it’s not going to accomplish what we need.” . . .

Obviously. That's what thoughtful analysts have said all along. It's amazing that this seems to be news, that there are people who can read that are not fully aware that all the Kyoto style mumbo-jumbo was just a jobs program for bureaucrats.

Mr. Bush has used modest investments in hydrogen as a substitute for immediate action, while what we need is vast investments on top of a drive to curb emissions through a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade system. In the best of worlds, it will be enormously difficult to persuade China and India to rely less on coal-fired power plants, and it will be utterly impossible unless we take serious steps ourselves.

Does anybody, anywhere, fall for this crap? All we have to do is set our tails on fire and run in circles, and that will convince the governments of billions of impoverished but aspiring people to suck it up and abandon their hopes?

So the next president should start a $20 billion-a-year program (financed by a pullout from Iraq) to develop new energy technologies, backed by a carbon tax and cap-and-trade system. Each of the presidential candidates favors some form of a cap-and-trade and would mark a step forward from President Bush’s passivity — although John McCain’s recent proposal for a summer holiday from the gas tax would be a deplorable step in exactly the wrong direction, unless he hopes to turn his land in Arizona into coastal property.

The bottom line is that none of the candidates focus adequately on climate change, for this will be one of humanity’s great tests in the coming decades — and so far we’re failing.

Amazing. This fellow gets paid to say this stuff and there are probably droids who nod and agree with this illogical crap. It's magic! All the gov has to do is wish hard enough, an extra $20 billion-a-year worth, and solutions will surely appear. And while we're at it, cripple the productive parts of the economy, set up a jobs program for bureaucrats, hold unannounced short arm inspections randomly, and talk, talk, talk. Baffle them with bull shit.

Still, this is progress. At least they see that the old politics of limits won't do diddly about the climate and that it's just ritual self flagellation. It isn't impossible that they will come to better understanding in some years time.

More about enviro-dorks.

Even before Kyoto, policy experts were considering an enticing concept: “avoided deforestation.” After all, existing rain forests, in particular, are crucial carbon sinks, and from Indonesia to Brazil, they are being cut down — mainly for grazing land and timber. This doesn’t just lead to the loss of a carbon sink; in many cases the forests are cleared by burning, which itself pours carbon into the atmosphere. It’s widely reckoned that global carbon emissions would be 20 percent lower were it not for the destruction of forests and the resulting loss of their carbon-storage capacity.

It's actually soybeans and palm oil plantations that are replacing rain forests, but even so there is no real loss of carbon-storage capacity. More carbon could be stored in the soil than in the forest, and it could be done in a truly durable way. If the biomass from the forest, and wastes from continuing operations, were returned to the soil as biochar the net effect would be greater than the forest and would accumulate over time.

That doesn't mean that forests have no value, but there are far better reasons to wish to preserve them. Trying to loop them into the climate change hustle is no good for forests.

An avoided-deforestation market relies on stable governments for its functioning — like carbon markets generally, only more so. A government cannot promise to preserve a forest unless it controls that forest. That, to some, is the idea’s great weakness. “I’m bearish toward that particular section of the market,” says Cindy Dawes, who trades carbon credits in the European market. “The main obstacle is governance, because most of these activities are in markets that are politically difficult.” Indeed, the biggest recent news in avoided deforestation is the certification by conservation groups of a plan to preserve, and generate carbon credits for, Indonesia’s vast Ulu Masen forest, an extreme example of “politically difficult” — it is in Aceh province, which has seen decades of insurgency. But it is in just such places that the battle against climate change may be won or lost.

This is a really, really stupid idea. If nothing else, they can burn up, and surely will do so at some point, and release all the carbon back to the atmosphere. When you add political instability, also a surety over time, even in old world Europe, the foolishness of such approaches comes clear. It's just rent seeking by political grifters.

Or perhaps enviro-whiners.

Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue — a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue — became a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment — buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore — should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment.

The answer is obvious: being a green fashion victim is not virtuous, it is softheaded at best but likely worse. It accomplishes no more than changing your hat color. That isn't virtue, it's dim wits.

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted.

Nonsense. It depends on which models you look at, and when you look, as well as what empirical measurements you select. Wait a few months and you'll have even more confusion. We have suspicions about climate but very little knowledge.

But the real idiocy here - not surprising for a green tard - is that the alternative to empty green consumption gestures is not doing nothing, it is doing useful things like capturing and sequestering atmospheric carbon.

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live.

Nonsense. Laws, money and empty consumption gestures, assuming that the money bit means some sort of government wheeze, are all do nothing feel-good gestures for political effects, the things politicians do instead of meaningful governance.

climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

This is the real agenda, the same old politics of limits that has been shown to be wrong repeatedly in the past, but has been tarted up like an octogenarian debutante for a few last turns in society. It's sick.

Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you suddenly need to do for yourself when the power goes out — up to and including entertaining yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure causes your neighbors — your community — to suddenly loom so much larger in your life. Cheap energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it possible to sell our specialty over great distances as well as summon into our lives the specialties of countless distant others.

Here’s the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

The “cheap-energy mind,” as Wendell Berry called it, is the mind that asks, “Why bother?” because it is helpless to imagine — much less attempt — a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant. Since the cheap-energy mind translates everything into money, its proxy, it prefers to put its faith in market-based solutions — carbon taxes and pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it believes, the economy will properly value everything that matters and nudge our self-interest down the proper channels. The best we can hope for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has no use for.

And while we're at it, let's rail about the pernicious effects of books! We have lost our oral culture and are now dependent on reading and writing as well as all manner of methods for distribution - everything from newspapers to the freaking internet! Berry at least avoids having a damned computer, he just has his wife type his stuff up for him on a manual machine.

Energy is what civilization is about. It always has been - from the first folks who learned to control fire to the newest technologies of today. It's just plain dumb to attack our use of energy, though we can make good arguments for developing and using better methods.

Our current problem set is not about personal virtue. There are no moral or ethical dilemmas. There are no political opportunities. We are in the process of maturing a bit more, and though it may be frightening for the rigid and backward looking it's what we have done many times before, and will do many times again. If you need an example to understand the concept look up the history of whale oil.

If you get it, and want to take an active part in change, you can make some bets on appropriate solutions. Perhaps you would be satisfied to lower emissions, as with solar or nuclear energy. Lower emissions won't actually help though, since what is needed is negative emissions, the actual removal of existing carbon from the air. There are systems to do that that need your financial support, and which might make you a bundle some day if you place your bets now.

My current fave is biochar. All I need is about U$3 mil to get started. Sure, I can make bath tub biochar at home, but it would be much better if I made it for my whole neighborhood. We have a lot of dirt around here, and make a lot of biomass, so it's appropriate. While the green tards whinge about fashion crime, we could save the world.

A.K.A. nuclear batteries.

Hyperion Power Generation, a startup based in Santa Fe, N.M., is working on a self-contained compact nuclear power reactor unit that it says is “about the size of a typical backyard hot tub” . . .

Because the device is small, portable and self-contained, the company says it can be delivered where it is needed and then sent back to the factory for refueling every five years. That makes it a good fit for remote, rural locations that are disconnected from the power grid.

The technology can also bring down the cost of nuclear power significantly, says the company — a 30 percent reduction over traditional nuclear in capital costs and a 50 percent reduction in operating costs.

It's good to see some nuclear progress. Toshiba's talk about nuclear batteries two or three years ago was interesting, but seeing VC money go to new ventures is more so.

Hyperion says the device’s self-contained and portable design also makes it safer. Because it isn’t meant to be opened until it’s sent back to the factory, it could cut down on human error. And because it is designed to be buried at the generation site, there could be less potential for tampering with it.

The heavily advertized fear of nuclear reactors and materials has never made sense to me. It isn't as if there are not softer and more dangerous targets for evil doers. It's just an aspect of boomer neurosis, another bit of foolishness from the foolish generation.

For a hot-tub-sized device, it can also deliver a nuke-sized amount of power: 70 mega