Some good thoughts on ethanol

This outfit called the Network for New Energy Choices really has it in for corn-based ethanol. The group’s staff and advisory board seem heavily weighted toward more engineering-based renewable sources of energy, such as wind power, which might explain a few things, but their report “The Rush to Ethanol” (PDF) makes some excellent points. Chief among them is the obvious one: corn ethanol, produced and burned carelessly, can be worse for the environment than gasoline.

The report, unfortunately, also trots out some leftie-green objections to ethanol: biofuels plants are run by great big corporations and not community-based ones; industrial uses of crops tend to encourage farmers to plant specially engineered strains, and so on. A lot of this stuff is neither here nor there — asking energy policy to do work that actually shouldn’t be a matter of government concern at all, or at least no more than it already is. The family farm, for instance, with which the Network for New Energy Choices is unduly concerned. matters in U.S. politics because of the overrepresentation of sparsely populated agricultural states in Congress and the presidential primaries. Really, it ought to matter no more than the family cobbler shop or the family real-estate firm, and approving or dismissing a policy on ethanol should take no notice of it.

Nevertheless, the network is right to propose hard-edged standards for deciding what “good” ethanol is, and being a lot more discriminating when the subsidies are being ladled out. The group practically dismisses corn ethanol entirely, and puts all its hope into cellulosic ethanol (which gets its energy from the woody structures of plant cells rather than from starchy sugars, and which isn’t even really close to being commercially viable):

In particular, criteria for sustainable cellulosic feedstock production should include:

• Establishment of maximum harvesting levels for agriculture residues;
• Use of designated cropland rather than protected land conversion, with a ban on converting highly erodible land in the Conservation Reserve Program to crop production;
• Promotion of native species planted in diverse composition;
• Promotion of best-feedstock-production scenarios that would involve mixed perennial grasses and trees that can be harvested on a rotating basis;
• Financial support for small farmers growing energy crops in establishment years before crops can be harvested; and
• Development of woody crops and grasses in buffer areas between forest remnants and croplands that
• enhance biodiversity and habitat protection for threatened interior forest wildlife.

Also, and this is key, the group proposes enforcing the same standards on imported ethanol. If you couldn’t do it in the United States, you can’t do it somewhere else and sell the product in the United States, either. I’m not sure this can be applied perfectly rigidly — some agricultural practices might be fine in different climates that are destructive in the United States, for instance — but as a rule, it’s wrong to encourage others to do things that you’d actually ban in your own country.

A funny way to market a movement

Excerpts from two posts at ordinarily superb sources of green news. First, Grist Mill (continuing the ongoing discussion of what makes a good carbon offset):

For example, I own several acres of forestland. I can turn that land over to a conservation trust and they will manage it, in theory, forever. The idea behind conservation trusts is to permanently prevent development. The contract you sign can allow some things to happen on that land. For example, you can allow it to be logged. You can also have some structures on it, or even live on it. You just can’t do anything else to the land not stipulated in the original contract. The conservation trust idea is really taking off and has preserved millions of acres of land. I purchased my land from an old logging baron family. The other parcels were sold to Joe Sixpacks who plan to park their retirement double-wides on them when electric power becomes available, assuming their obesity and drinking does not get them first. Had carbon offsets and conservation trusts existed at the time, that timber family might have put all that recently logged forestland into trusts instead of selling it to the local rednecks.

The post is by Seattle resident Russ Finley, writing as “biodiversivist.”

Second, Celsias’s Craig Mackintosh on organic farming:

The factories and chemical companies that made huge profits from dealing death to the earth’s human inhabitants during wartime – especially World War II – quickly found a new direction for their efforts when killing people quickly was no longer acceptable. They began to use their chemicals to kill us slowly instead.

But, we’re starting to fight back, and the truth is getting out. The agribusiness justifications for their war on the earth is beginning to be seen for what it really is – pure propaganda.

Here’s the news release on a University of Michigan study that Mackintosh is working from. It sounds pretty interesting, though not interesting enough to pay $20 to a journal just to see whether it’s all it’s cracked up to be.

Now look. These are the people that have to be won over if this thing is going to work. The factories and the chemical companies can maybe be written off, but only if the obese rednecks can be convinced to stop buying the stuff they sell. Otherwise, it’s going to have to be an alliance.

Mackintosh, in particular, ought to be ashamed of that tripe. Can anyone seriously believe that chemical companies so enjoyed killing people during the Second World War that they got into the fertilizer business so they could keep doing it? That fighting “a war against our world” is really what anybody outside of a James Bond movie gets up to do in the morning? What blithering nonsense is that?

Errors, yes. Concealing of unpleasant and unexpected side-effects and byproducts, sure. Corporate malfeasance, as much as anywhere else, no doubt. But a deliberate effort to kill for its own sake?

Honest to God. People who are serious about environmentalism cannot crap on other human beings this way and expect to be taken seriously.

Follow-up on burning down Brazil

A couple of days ago, I wrote in criticism of a trend among some developing countries to demand international payments for not chopping down their own forests (it’s come up before, too, and I’m sure it will again). I think it’s a bad, bad, bad, idea.

In response, Rhett A. Butler of mongabay.com wrote to let me know about a positive development in efforts to protect the Amazon rainforest in Brazil: a Texas-born rancher named John Carter (yes, seriously, Rhett Butler and John Carter — it’s a strange world sometimes) who’s running a sales co-operative/certification scheme called Aliança da Terra that aims to sell loads of Brazilian beef while promising big-time buyers like McDonald’s and Burger King that the cattle involved were pastured sustainably and in accordance with Brazil’s environmental-protection standards. The idea is that they can boast about it to their customers.

Butler interviewed Carter at great length and has the full exchange on his site, but here are a couple of clips I found particularly interesting:

[S]ince I arrived here there’s been a forest reserve law in place. Actually in 1998 they raised it from 50 percent of your land kept as forest to 80 percent. That provision really backfired for the environmental movement. The law was already contested at 50 percent. Raising it to 80 percent just created a mass hysteria and a state of civil disobedience where landowners said “to heck with this” and just tore down everything.

…

For the most part, the consumer always wants to buy the cheapest product on the shelf. If someone is willing to pay a premium because of conservation, it’s called a niche market. Niche markets will never stop the deforestation of the Amazon. We have to hit the commodity markets and spread the benefits across the whole region, not just a niche sector. To do this, we can’t raise the price of the commodities–people simply haven’t shown a willingness to pay more for these products on a consistent basis.

Under our system, the only benefit a producer will get is market access, but by gaining access to the European, American, and other foreign markets, local producers will benefit significantly. Instead of having prices based on the Brazilian Bolsa, they will be getting Chicago mercantile rates which are inherently higher, less freight and trade tariffs. The only way producers have this access is by following the rules.

This sure sounds a lot more productive than asking for permanent payments for nothing more than not burning down your own house.

Carnival of the Green No. 80.

Heidi, who blogs intermittently at Groxie, is hosting the Carnival of the Green digest of environmentalism-related blog postings this week. She’s picked up my two postings from last week on challenges to the “organic” designation in Britain and talking about whether we can reasonably expect “organic” to stand in for “socially just” generally.

A Farm Bill of Rights that’s full of wrongs

Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer seems like a good fellow — U.S. congressman from Oregon, former commissioner of public works in Portland, winner of the 2001 National Bicycling Award from the League of American Bicyclists, according to his bio. I’ve met more than a few of his kind writing about politics, earnest environmentalist lefties who always do their homework, and we’re lucky to have them.

Writing at the Democrat-friendly über-blog Talking Points Memo, (well, its offshoot, TPM Café), Blumenauer takes up the cause of agriculture-policy reform. With the next Farm Bill menu of subsidies on the table, he does an excellent job mapping the garden path down which the U.S. Congress has strolled with a succession of previous Farm Bill subsidy programs, distorting markets and transferring an awful lot of wealth to an awfully small number of people for awfully little public benefit:

Sixty percent of America’s farmers and ranchers get no support while a great bulk of subsidies and federal support go directly to big special-interest corporations. It’s even worse for people who grow most of our food: fruits, vegetables, and row crops are largely bypassed in favor of lavish subsidies for a few commodities… The United States sugar subsidy program is an archaic remnant of a Depression-era policy to artificially raise prices of sugar. Today, it harms American companies and consumers, while preventing developing nations from competing in the global market place.

… and so on. Blumenauer is promoting his Food and Farm Bill of Rights, essentially a statement of principles for the 2007 Farm Bill and those to follow. It starts well before going off the rails. These are the bullet points:

• Americans have a right to a policy free of special interest giveaways: Current farm policy favors corporate special interests. Fully 70 percent of the payments go to the top 10 percent of farmers, and even more of that benefit is concentrated for the large processors. What’s more, aid is so concentrated in a few powerful states that the support received by most states is almost negligible. We deserve a food and farm policy that serves all Americans, not just the politically-connected.

Yeah!

• American taxpayers have a right to a fiscally responsible policy: Today’s Farm Bill contains some of the federal government’s largest programs. We deserve a food and farm policy that ensures our tax dollars are invested in fiscally sound policies and programs that fit in with the priorities of the American farmer and taxpayer.

Yeah!

• Americans have a right to a policy that serves all farmers: Our current farm policy ensures high profits for a few select commodities while neglecting the needs of many other valuable commodities and smaller producers. In fact, 60 percent of America ’s farmers and ranchers get no support whatsoever. We deserve a food and farm policy that supports producers and helps them access new local markets, thereby generating jobs by adding value to their products.

• Americans have a right to a safe and healthful food supply: Recent crises in food supplies (Hurricanes Katrina and Rita) and food safety (fresh spinach and tainted pet foods) are painful reminders of the vulnerability of our food supplies and distribution systems. We deserve a food and farm policy that guarantees a safe and healthful food supply in this country, in good times and in bad.

If you’re going to have an official farm policy, I guess these are good ends to pursue.

• American children have a right to good nutrition: Children who are hungry perform poorly in school and are at greater risk for long-term health problems. We deserve a food and farm policy that makes sure our children are well nourished by allowing more healthful choices and opening up access to fruits and vegetables.
• Americans have a right to local supplies of fresh food: Too many Americans do not have the option of buying affordable, locally-grown fresh food. We deserve a food and farm policy that includes programs that deliver healthy food to all communities, regardless of location, class, or economic standing.

Oh, dear.

The first point is defensible as a goal, if you take it that the state has a role to play in protecting helpless kids from negligent parents who don’t feed them properly. School lunch programs, etc. I don’t see that the supply side of the food sector is the place to carry out this role, by generally subsidizing the production of fruits and veggies in the hope that some of that artificially cheaper produce will find its way onto the tables and into the lunchboxes of otherwise deprived children.

The second point is pure nonsense, and a complete reversal of the notion of rights as Americans are supposed to understand them — as freedoms, guarantees against government encroachment on individual liberties. Once governments start to pledge positive rights to material goods, they go mental.

First of all, define “healthy” for the purposes of this “right.” Then let’s talk about how isolated a community and small a “community” has to be before we decide it’s not worth airdropping sacks of fresh apples on it. A commune on a mesa in Arizona? A couple of old guys manning traplines in Alaska?

If a whole community is poor, there’s usually a reason, particularly if it’s also isolated from sources of good food — chances are, it’s a town that’s hanging on long after the local industry left, surviving on government money of one kind or another. The right thing for people to do is leave, for young people to seek their fortunes elsewhere and for parents to give their kids better opportunities than waiting for the shuttered mill to reopen. Guaranteeing them healthy food supplied by government is prolonging the inevitable at the expense of the poor suckers who have to pay the bills for it. It’s not right.

• Americans have a right to a policy that promotes energy independence: The pursuit of heavily subsidized corn-based ethanol is a fool’s game fueled only by massive government subsidies and regulations not justified by the science or economics. We deserve a food and farm policy that enables our farmers and ranchers to produce vast quantities of renewable energy: wind, solar, in some cases small-scale hydro, geothermal and biomass.

Again, an OK goal, but I’m not sure how a massive government subsidy bill is going to help in any way except the obvious. Does a complex set of energy-production subsidies belong in the Farm Bill?

• Americans have a right to a policy that protects the environment: Virtually every urban area is surrounded by productive farmland that also provides important environmental services – wildlife habitat, carbon sinks, clean water – as well as landscapes and vistas that define our sense of place. We deserve a food and farm policy that promotes good stewardship of the environment and our natural resources.

Fine, I guess. Certainly better than the alternative, which is government policy encouraging farmers to denude the land.

• Americans have a right to preserve farmland from sprawl: In many areas of the country the pressures of sprawl are forcing farmers off of their land. We deserve a food and farm policy that gives farmers the tools they need to protect their land – and our heritage – from development pressures.

This is hard, and Blumenauer makes it sound easy by glossing over the actual problem he’s describing: a farmer doesn’t sell land to a developer unless he or she has been made an offer that’s too good to refuse. Shopping-mall companies don’t creep up behind them and rip the land away from owners who are unable to “protect” it. To make farmland worth more as farmland than it is as subdivision (particularly when some dimwitted sprawl-friendly municipality has already granted the zoning) would take massive subsidies pretty much forever.

• Americans have a right to a policy that fosters sustainable farming practices: The current farm policy offers conflicting messages about good farming practices, sometimes promoting sustainable practices while other times offering incentives that undermine the long-term health of our soil and water resources. We deserve a food and farm policy that enables farmers to be responsible with their land so that they can pass it on to the next generation.

Fair enough.

The basic problem seems to be that Blumenauer hasn’t come up with principles for future Farm Bills that acknowledge that the problems with the old Farm Bills arose with the best of intentions. The sugar subsidy Blumenauer criticizes off the top made a kind of sense during the Depression — it’s just loopy that America is stuck with it 70 years later. It happens that subsidizing wind power is in vogue just now, but Blumenauer’s bill of rights is a recipe for continuing to subsidize it in 2077.

(Photo credit: “Silhouetted,” Flickr/Nicholas_T)

Yuppie chow defended

The Globe‘s Michael Valpy gets 900 words in today’s Globe to summarize a forthcoming research paper from Irena Knezevic, an academic who doesn’t like that big corporations are selling organic food.Valpy:

She says [big companies like Coca-Cola and Kraft] products – along with those sold by retail giants such as Loblaws and Wal-Mart – are turning organic agriculture into product brands that are becoming “a marketing tool more so than an assurance of quality, let alone an assurance of a fair and sustainable production process.”

Officials from Loblaws and Wal-Mart were unavailable for comment last night.

This trend, says Ms. Knezevic, is driven by consumer demand, with the food industry’s eager willingness to jump on the bandwagon and make organic consumption efficient and slightly less expensive by mass-producing – creating only a slightly “greener” version of the dominant industrial food system but separating organic agriculture from its central concepts.

It takes a normative judgment to decide what organic agriculture’s “central concepts” are. And indeed, Knezevic makes one: “Organic agriculture is by definition intertwined with environmentalism, resistance to corporate globalization and the ‘back to the land’ movement.”

Knezevic, if her paper is being summarized fairly, seems to want to include not only factual declarations about the use of pesticides and fertilizers and other planet-friendly techniques, but also small-scale farming and an anti-corporate attitude on the part of the farmer.

Significantly, Knezevic is a PhD candidate in a communications and culture program, not anything to do with food science or economics. She’s presented a previous paper on “How corporations and the PR industry make big pharma look good.”

It seems to me that again we’re asking an “Organic” label to do something it can’t possibly — indicate not just the chemical conditions under which a particular food item was produced, but the political and economic conditions, too.

All this having been said, while I don’t share Knezevic’s apparent judgment that “organic” should be interchangeable with “good” in every way meaningful to the environmental left, she’s right that there’s a danger in labels that are effectively meaningless. There’s a danger that as organic foods become increasingly attractive positional goods — things people like to show off to demonstrate how cool they are — some shady labelling standards will spring up to approve any old thing. If indeed a particular mango was grown organically, but as a result comes from so much farther away from the market than an industrial mango that the environmental benefit is obviated, buying organic doesn’t do anybody any favours.

But neither does saying big companies can do nothing right just because they’re big companies, or saying that efficient production aimed at making organics more affordable for more people is necessarily bad.

The paper comes out for real on Friday, and I’m looking forward to Knezevic’s wrestling with these problems.

An organics challenge in Britain

A major British organics-certifying organization is considering stripping its labels from food that’s been flown in from abroad, according to the Guardian:

The problem stems from the public’s desire to consume more and more organic crops and meat. Demand for organic food now greatly outstrips UK farmers’ ability to supply it. Supermarkets imported 34 per cent of all the organic food they sold in 2005, most of it by air.But increases in the numbers of flights in and out of Britain are also linked to environmental worries because air transport is considered to be a major cause of greenhouse warming. For the Soil Association, which claims it has impeccable green credentials, this link is embarrassing.

Technically, an “Organic” designation is meant to convey information about how food is produced and grown — with an utter minimum of chemicals and so on. How it gets to market is a separate question, notwithstanding some people’s argument that an apple that travels 1,500 miles before being sold gets coated in dirty dust and fuel fumes.

Expecting an “Organic” label to stand in as a general stamp of approval for environmental friendliness is a mistake, though of course a lot of people do. It’s like assuming that a hybrid car engine is necessarily low-emissions, even though some hybrid vehicles use the extra battery power to provide more torque, rather than higher efficiency.

Buying local is good, but many fruits and vegetables can only be coaxed out of the ground in unfriendly climates with the addition of fertilizers and the protection of pesticides. Maybe what’s needed is different labels: green for organic/local, blue or something for organic/flown-in, yellow for non-organic/local, and no label at all for God-knows-where-this-is-from-and-what-they-did-to-grow-it.

The state of food journalism

The Columbia Journalism Review takes stock of the state of food journalism in a long essay by Christopher Shea. He’s not talking about recipes and restaurants, but the examination of the economics and science of food production, in which ever-more people seem to be taking an interest.

Shea’s piece centres on the recent work of Michael Pollan, whose The Omnivore’s Dilemma I mention frequently. Shea takes him down a few pegs, suggesting that underlying Pollan’s work is a certain dreaminess about an impossible world without cities or large-scale food production.

The idealistic alternative Pollan offers is that of a farm in Virginia run by Joel Salatin, who refers to himself as a “grass farmer” because grass is the foundation of his enterprise. He lets his cows graze on clover, orchard grass, sweet grass, bluegrass, and timothy one day, then “mobs and moves” the herd to a different pasture so the grazed pasture can rebound. His chickens live authentically chickeny lives. All told, Salatin displays a kind of agrarian self-sufficiency, Pollan writes, that Thomas Jefferson assumed would become the American norm but that now “constitutes a politics and economics and way of life both deliberate and hard-won–an achievement.”

But what kind of politics, exactly, and what kind of economics? In Pollan’s book, and even in more prosaic newspaper pieces, some of the political and economic dimensions of the local-foods movement are suppressed or underexplored. In one telling passage in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Salatin brushes off a question from Pollan about how, say, New Yorkers might take advantage of the local-farm network, retorting: “Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?” Pollan, a former New Yorker, demurs, but quickly drops the subject, telling readers that the lesson of the exchange is that a shared concern about food offers a “sturdy bridge” across a “deep gulf of culture.”

Other points of the Shea piece:

• The merging of agriculture reporting with food reporting is basically a good thing;
• Done properly, it informs us about elements in food production that will make us change our consumer habits, enhancing our rational choices;
• We’re stuck with industrial-scale food production if everyone’s going to eat, although we could probably do some things better;
• Nobody really knows for sure whether a bunch of small farms or a small number of ginormous ones is a more planet-friendly way of feeding the population we’ve got;
• A carbon tax would help sort things out;
• So would an end to farm subsidies.

Hear, hear.

Pig junk food

Oh good Lord. The Wall Street Journal is reporting (short “preview” only, though a bit more is clipped here) that ethanol mandates and subsidies (government support for the corn-based biofuels industry, in other words) have driven the price of industrial-grade American corn so high that it’s no longer economical for farmers to feed their livestock with the stuff.

Corn has been the foundation of much livestock feed for decades, partly thanks to different government subsidies that glutted the market and drove the price down so low that farmers who raised animals almost couldn’t afford not to use it. It’s high-energy, low-priced feed that fattens animals up to market weights fast, though research suggests that animals getting low-quality nutrition end up as low-quality food for humans. Michael Pollan treats this at some length in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but here’s a quickie version:

We have come to think of ”cornfed” as some kind of old-fashioned virtue; we shouldn’t. Granted, a cornfed cow develops well-marbled flesh, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have learned to like. Yet this meat is demonstrably less healthy to eat, since it contains more saturated fat. A recent study in The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that the meat of grass-fed livestock not only had substantially less fat than grain-fed meat but that the type of fats found in grass-fed meat were much healthier. (Grass-fed meat has more omega 3 fatty acids and fewer omega 6, which is believed to promote heart disease; it also contains betacarotine and CLA, another ”good” fat.) A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with cornfed beef. In the same way ruminants have not evolved to eat grain, humans may not be well adapted to eating grain-fed animals. Yet the U.S.D.A.’s grading system continues to reward marbling — that is, intermuscular fat — and thus the feeding of corn to cows.

Anyway, now that corn is expensive, farmers are finding alternatives. According to the Journal, one of them is human junk food:

“Pigs can be picky eaters,” Mr. Smith says, scooping a handful of banana chips, yogurt-covered raisins, dried papaya and cashews from one of the 12 one-ton boxes in his shed. Generally, he says, “they like the sweet stuff.”

I don’t know — maybe raisins and papaya and cashews make higher-quality pig feed than corn does. But chocolate syrup and expired cookies and candy bars and “uncooked french fries, Tater Tots and hash browns” can’t possibly. Ick.

I wonder what we’d feed animals if governments weren’t busy screwing up the agriculture markets so badly. I bet it wouldn’t be old candy bars.

(Via Marginal Revolution. Photo credit: “Oinc!” Flickr/Gato Azul.)

Organics boom

Good news, on the whole, though the stats include self-reporting of products that farmers merely say are organic, with no certification of any kind.

According to figures released Wednesday in Statistics Canada’s 2006 agriculture census, 15,511 farms reported growing organic products last May. That includes those that have been certified organic by an authorizing agency, those that are in the process of getting certified, and those whose operators simply declare that they’re organic.

The number of certified organic producers increased by nearly 60 per cent from 2001 to 3,555 in 2006. Field crops such as wheat and barley are the predominant certified organic crops, and Saskatchewan has about one-third of all the certified organic farms in the country.

To be called organic, food must be produced naturally, without the pesticides, fertilizers, antibiotics or hormones used in conventional agriculture.

Experts say organics are still a small portion of the overall amount of food purchased by consumers, but the demand is growing quickly.

The big grocery chains have seized on the demand.

President’s Choice, the house brand in stores such as Loblaws, Superstore and Provigo, started an organic line five years ago and now has more than 300 products.

There is probably a permanent tension between organic food and local, unfortunately. We signed up for a local grocer’s organics box a couple of weeks ago (we pay $20 a week and get the owner’s selection of good stuff each Thursday) and although the quality of the produce is excellent and comes in fair-to-generous quantities for the price, it’s all from far away, plums and green beans not being particularly available in Ottawa in mid-May whether they’re organic or not. We’re waiting to see whether they switch to local suppliers as things come into season here.

Nevertheless, while plums and green beans are not precisely in the sweet spot of Canadian agriculture, wheat and barley most definitely are, and it’s nice to see farmers taking advantage.

It’s also a way of busting the marketing monopoly of the Canadian Wheat Board (though some farmers want to use its services for overseas sales), which can’t be anything but good, too.