If content is king, why is there so little of it on the web? And why are content providers like Salon always whining about their huge bandwidth costs, given that 99% of what they ship — and that is an exact measurement, not hyperbole — is spam?And he's got a 10mbps cable modem connection, while I'm out here in the boonies with glitchy dial up over a barbed wire and boogers telco system. It's a good thing that sites like Salon are mostly crap since I'm not missing anything by avoiding them.]]>(Note: these are rhetorical questions. Despite the burning certainty that someone on the internet is wrong, you don't need to try and explain how the advertising industry works to me. Really and truly. I'm just taking my sense of indignation for a Sunday walk.)
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.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.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.
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. ]]>
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.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.]]>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.
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.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.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.
Politics is stupid.]]>
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.]]>
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.]]>
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. . .No win, no draw, no escape. . . unless, you know, the engineers have a go.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”.
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.]]>
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.]]>
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. . .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.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.
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.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.]]>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,"
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."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.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.
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.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.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."
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.]]>
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.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. ]]>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 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.. . . 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."Supporting Amelia [Rawls, the author of the OpEd], here is a pict I took at Harvard Thursday: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.
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.
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.Another way to see this is as grim green romanticism.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. . .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".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.
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.
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. . .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.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.
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.]]>
"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.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.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.
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.]]>
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.Ox, meet gore.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.
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.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.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."
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.]]>
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.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.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."
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. . .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.]]>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.