This post originally appeared on Ed Bruske’s Slow Cook blog.

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Kids from Bancroft School in the White House garden with Michelle Obama. As one of the teachers involved with Michelle Obama and the White House vegetable garden, I’ve been impressed with the sudden surge of public interest in the simple act of children planting seeds. At Bancroft Elementary School, where I work first and foremost as an art teacher, we know only too well the benefits children get from growing their own food. 

But I don’t think the public has any inkling how hard it is for teachers to maintain school gardens like the one we have at Bancroft. Despite all the hoopla over school gardening, the truth is teachers engage in these activities at risk of their jobs. You see, gardening is not part of the mandated school curriculum. We are supposed to be teaching reading and math. As much as we believe school gardens offer a multitude of teaching opportunities, schools do very little to support us. Principals and teachers have been bluntly told that they will lose their jobs if math and reading scores don’t improve. We desperately need help. We need someone to take charge of our school gardens. 

The kids you see in all the photos working with the First Lady in the White House garden, or making breakfast on the Today Show with the Obamas’ chef, Sam Kass, are fifth graders from my school. One of the reasons I chose to work at Bancroft two years ago was its garden. I had just moved back to the Washington area from South Carolina where I grew things pretty much all year round in my own yard. With visions of sunflowers and big tomato plants dancing in my head, I signed up for a community garden plot in D.C. But the waiting list was long. The idea of living without a patch of dirt to play in was hard to swallow. 

Then I arrived at Bancroft. The assistant principal toured me around the school. As we walked through the playground, she casually remarked, “Oh, and that’s the garden.”  We passed four herb boxes and nine raised beds overflowing with giant sunflowers, with tomato plants heavy with fruit, with squash spilling out over the sides. There was even corn! Truthfully, up until that point I had no idea schools had gardens. Planter boxes with a few basil plants, maybe, but nothing like this. 

As I soon discovered, these remarkable gardens were entirely the result of volunteer efforts. Ten years earlier, neighborhood resident Iris Rothman and her partner-in-crime, Nancy Huvendick, along with fifth grade teacher Toni Conklin, had begun acting on a shared vision of the school as a gardener’s Eden. Iris and Toni fought tooth and nail—cut through government red tape, jumped through every bureaucratic hoop—to make way for outside agencies such as the U.S. Botanical Garden to come in and construct the bones of our garden. Casey Trees, a non-profit groups, planted some 40 trees on school grounds. Last year, Iris had the brilliant idea to start a community garden on school property. We now have at least 30 people on the waiting list for plots. 

All of this was accomplished by concerned neighbors and teachers during their free hours. I don’t think the school system ever spent a dime. 

I met Iris when she approached me about collaborating on some art projects in the garden. Up to that point, I had assumed the garden was part of the daily school curriculum. It soon became clear that the work Iris was doing with the kids happened after school or in the summer. Iris worked hard to create opportunities for learning in the garden. But she did not have support from the school administration. They saw gardening as an extra-curricular activity. Disrupting the daily schedule was not an option. 

The garden at Bancroft Elementary evolved on its own over the years. It was never officially introduced to the school’s staff. No system was ever put in place to utilize it within the curriculum. When I arrived, I brought something new: A passion for gardens and a creative mind. Not only was my schedule more flexible than other teachers’, I did not have test scores to worry about. I was able to weave the garden into my own arts curriculum. And since I teach every student in the school, I was able to expose all of them to the joys of horticulture. 

Then came the day when some of my students helped Michelle Obama and Sam Kass break ground for the new kitchen garden at the White House. I returned to Bancroft and told the administration we needed to get our own school garden ready because the First Lady planned to visit. They laughed and told me that while she may have said that, what she actually did was something else. I called Iris. 

As in the past, there was no plan for spring planting at Bancroft. No money had been set aside for seeds. No teachers had garden projects in mind. I approached some local businesses and asked for donations of plants. Whole Foods gave us enough cabbage, broccoli and lettuce seedlings to fill five beds. But how would I get students to plant our garden beds during the school day? Each day Iris and I took art classes to the garden to plant seedlings. We weeded and mulched. By the time Michelle Obama strolled through our garden with a beaming Toni Conklin on her arm, things looked pretty lush. 

After that I began taking my art classes frequently to work in the garden—planting, harvesting, drawing. The White House dropped off tomato plants and we had fifth-graders show 3-year-olds how to plant them. We don’t have a kitchen at school so anytime we wanted to use the produce from the garden in a cooking lesson we had to convert the art room into a kitchen. When the lettuce was ready to eat we got an after-school group to harvest, wash and prepare it for salads. We set out salad toppings—dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, croutons—so kids could create three-dimensional, edible art projects. We picked herbs from the garden to make vinaigrette from scratch. The students were shocked to learn that salad dressing could be “made,” it did not have to be bought at a store. 

Last Spring I signed up for a workshop at the Washington Youth Garden—part of the National Arboretum—to learn how gardens can be used as teaching tools. My classmates were teachers who already had gardens, along with many others who wanted to start gardens at their own schools. Our common bond: a shared desire to get kids busy in the soil. For the first time, I saw just how many people are working hard to create a consistent, citywide school garden program. 

Then in the fall, a new D.C. Farm to School Network sponsored a “Local Flavor Week” to encourage school activities around the idea of fresh, local produce. My principal allowed me to put the rest of my schedule on hold to plan numerous events—cooking demonstrations, a trip to a farm, building cold frames. Most were linked to teaching standards. Every one of our 450 kids participated. 

Many things became clear after that week. The most important and surprising was that every teacher in my school was excited about students having garden experiences like the ones I organized. Most were even willing to sacrifice precious hours to help. I also learned that there are so many dynamic people eager to work with kids on gardening, cooking and nutrition education. Finally, it became plainly evident that while it is possible to tap into this wealth of resources to build a school garden program, it is a FULL- TIME JOB. 

During Local Flavor Week, I still had to teach my full load of art classes even though there were 16 trips and in-school workshops scheduled. Everywhere I went I was actually jogging, not walking. I had to be in at least three places at once on more that one occasion. I had not asked any other staff members to help me coordinate this because none of them had the time. They had their kids all day long. So I was a one-woman show. And I remember thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great if every week could be like this week?” If we had a full-time garden coordinator, that is. 

I had so many teachers after that week thank me and tell me that anytime I want to set up something like that again they would love to participate. I wanted to say, “If I can do it, you can do it.” But the truth is they can’t.

It’s not that classroom teachers aren’t interested. They just have too much  on their plate. And without gardening experience, they just won’t use the school garden. 

For all her great work and effort, Iris Rothman lacks an inside connection to the school, involvement in the schedule, familiarity with the curriculum. She has no power to create or change the curriculum, to implement standards-based activities, train teachers. She even has a hard time convincing the administration to allow her to bring in others who could do all of these things. Fitting it into the schedule would mean more work for administrators who are already overloaded. 

“Healthy Schools’ legislation pending before the D.C. Council would require the city’s schools to create a garden program for the first time, to provide training, planning and technical assistance for existing gardens as well as new ones. The one thing clear to everyone involved in this legislation is that, more than anything, what school gardens need is someone to be in charge, someone to take on this job full-time. 

School gardens illuminate the connections between food, nutrition and our physical and mental well-being. They can change the lives of impressionable children. A resource this valuable should not have to depend on unpaid volunteers or teachers who fear for their jobs.

Related Links:

Echoing Michelle Obama, a D.C. pol pushes ‘healthy schools’

Battle for the soul of organic dairy farmers goes on behind the scenes

Washington Times puts screws to city’s food provider, Chartwells

Is it me or were the   Super Bowl commercials this year unusually ugly, misogynistic, and, worst of all, unfunny?  Some of America’s biggest corporations seemed to be trying to play to Teabag America, and the results were as bitter as the teabaggers themselves. Amidst the dreck was a commercial from Audi featuring the “green police.” Here it is:

At first blush this seems like more teabagging—appealing to angry white men with the same old stereotype of environmentalists as meddling do-gooders obsessed with picayune behavioral sins. If you check in the comments under the video, that perspective is well represented. Says Metallicafan6611, “You guys all laugh. But this is really going to happen. Wake up people! Stop being sheep!” Enviros are predictably steamed (see, e.g., Adam Siegel).

The more I’ve thought about it, though, the more the teabaggy interpretation just doesn’t quite fit. The thrill at the end, when the guy gets to accelerate away from the crowd, turns on satisfying the green police—not rejecting or circumventing them, but satisfying their strict standards. The authority of the green police is taken for granted, never questioned. If you’re looking to appeal to mooks who think the green police are full of it and have no authority, moral or otherwise, why would you make a commercial like that? Why offer escape from a moral dilemma your audience doesn’t acknowledge exists?

The ad only makes sense if it’s aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police—people who may find those obligations tiresome and constraining on occasion, who only fitfully meet them, who may be annoyed by sticklers and naggers, but who recognize that living more sustainably is in fact the moral thing to do. This basically describes every guy I know.

Now go back through the ad. Notice that everyone who gets busted is a man. There are lots more urban and suburban professional males in Audi’s target market than there are teabaggers.

To scratch one layer deeper: what is Audi’s message to these guys who want to be good but find the effort anxious-making? Here’s a way to meet your green obligations and still have a bad-ass car!  The Audi A3 is both green and desirable—indeed more desirable because it’s green. Buried deep in this ad, in other words, is a bright green message: prosperity, pleasure, and sustainability can be achieved together.

Anyway, not to overthink it (ahem), but the ad is not just another pot shot at greens. It’s an appeal to a new and growing demographic that isn’t hard-core environmentalist—and doesn’t particularly like hard-core environmentalists—but that basically wants to do the right thing. Audi’s effort to reach them, however clumsy, is actually a bit ahead of the curve.

Related Links:

U.S. feeds one quarter of its grain to cars while hunger is on the rise

America’s Century-Long Love Affair with the Car May Be Coming to an End - Data Highlights

U.S. car fleet shrank by four million in 2009

Editor’s note: The following is the 10th Annual John H. Chafee Memorial Lecture, delivered at the National Council for Science and the Environment in Washington, DC, on January 21, 2010.

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I’m both pleased and honored to have been asked by NCSE to give this 10th Annual John H. Chafee Memorial Lecture. I knew John personally and had the opportunity to work with him during his long and distinguished service on the Senate Environment Committee. He was a wonderful person and a great Senator. I wish we had a dozen John Chafees in the Senate today. And I want also to acknowledge the ever-more important role NCSE has played in our national life. Many of you are familiar with its contributions, including this blockbuster conference, but you may not know of its leadership in creating and supporting a council of deans and directors of America’s environmental schools. I know that that initiative meant a lot to us at Yale. And let me especially join in celebrating the achievements of the remarkable Herman Daly, a profound thinker, a generous soul,  and a great wit. Herman launched us into considering the steady state economy and led in the creation of the now highly-productive field of ecological economics. We owe him a great debt for all he has done.

To begin, I would like to invite you to join me in a journey of the imagination. I want you to join me in visiting a world very different from the one we have today.

As the new decade begins in this world, the President, early in his first term, stands before Congress to deliver his State of the Union address. He says the following:

In the next ten years we shall increase our wealth by fifty percent. The profound question is – does this mean that we will be fifty percent richer in a real sense, fifty percent better off, fifty percent happier?...

The great question… is, shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, our land and our water?

Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. ... It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans – because they more than we will reap the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later….

The program I shall propose to Congress will be the most comprehensive and costly program in this field ever in the nation’s history.

The argument is increasingly heard that a fundamental contradiction has arisen between economic growth and the quality of life, so that to have one we must forsake the other. The answer is not to abandon growth, but to redirect it…

I propose, that before these problems become insoluble, the nation develop a national growth policy. Our purpose will be to find those means by which Federal, state and local government can influence the course of ... growth so as positively to affect the quality of American life.”

And Congress acts. To address these challenges, it responds with the toughest environmental legislation in history. And it does so not with partisan rancor and threats of filibusters but by large bipartisan majorities.

In this world that we are imagining, the public is aroused; the media are attentive; the courts are supportive. Citizens are alarmed by the crisis they face. They organize a movement and issue this powerful declaration: “We, therefore, resolve to act. We propose a revolution in conduct toward an environment that is rising in revolt against us. Granted that ideas and institutions long established are not easily changed; yet today is the first day of the rest of our life on this planet. We will begin anew.”

Meanwhile,  the nation’s leading environmental scholars and practitioners, and even some economists, are asking whether measures such as those in the Congress will be enough, and whether deeper changes are not needed. GDP and the national income accounts are challenged for their failure to tell us things that really matter, including whether our society is equitable and fair and whether we are gaining or losing environmental quality. A sense of planetary limits is palpable. The country’s growth fetish comes under attack as analysts see the fundamental incompatibility between limitless growth and an increasingly small and limited planet. Advocacy emerges for moving to an economy that would be “nongrowing in terms of the size of the human population, the quantity of physical resources in use, and [the] impact on the biological environment.” Joined with this is a call from many sources for us to break from our consumerist and materialistic ways – to seek simpler lives in harmony with nature and each other. These advocates recognize that, with growth no longer available as a palliative, “one problem that must be faced squarely is the redistribution of wealth within and between nations.” They also recognize the need to create needed employment opportunities by stimulating employment in areas long underserved by the economy and even by moving to shorter workweeks. And none of this seems likely,  these writers realize, without a dramatic revitalization of democratic life.

Digging deeper, some opinion leaders, including both ecologists and economists, ask, “whether the operational requirements of the private enterprise economic system are compatible with ecological imperatives.” They conclude that the answer is “no.”  Environmental limits will eventually require limits on economic growth, they reason.

“In a private enterprise system,” they conclude, “[this] no-growth condition means no further accumulation of capital. If, as seems to be the case, accumulation of capital, through profit, is the basic driving force of this system, it is difficult to see how it can continue to operate under conditions of no growth.” And thus begins the thought: how does society move beyond the capitalism of the day?

You can see that the world we are imagining is one of high hopes and optimism that the job can and will be done. It is also a world of deep searching for the next steps that will be required once the immediate goals are met.

Now,  at this point, I suspect there may be a generational divide in the audience. Those of you of my vintage have probably realized that this is not an imaginary world at all. You do not have to imagine this world – you remember it. It is the actual world of the early 1970s.  That is really what President Nixon said to the Congress in 1970.  Congress really did declare that air pollution standards must protect public health and welfare with an adequate margin of safety and without regard to the economic costs. The revolutionary Clean Water Act really did seek no discharge of pollutants, with the goals of restoring the physical, chemical and biological integrity of the nation’s waters and making our waters fishable and swimmable for all by the mid-1980s. Many scientists, economists and activists supported the longer term thinking about growth and consumerism that I just mentioned, and they recognized the ties to social equity issues. They saw the challenge all this posed to our system of political economy. I have quoted John Holden, Paul and Anne Ehrlich and Barry Commoner, opinion leaders in this era,i but there were many others, including Kenneth Boulding who famously noted, “Anyone who thinks exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

It was in many respects a great beginning. Not perfect, not to be romanticized, but still a remarkably strong start. And now four decades have passed. So let us fast forward to the present and take stock. What do we find today? The powerful environmental laws passed in the 1970s are still in place. They have been attacked often,  chipped away here and there but have also been strengthened in important respects. Overall, the ones that were really tough have brought about many major improvements in environmental quality,  particularly in light of the fact that today’s U.S. economy is three times larger than it was in 1970. And the introduction of market-based mechanisms has saved us a bundle. In the 1980s a new agenda of global-scale concerns came to the fore, and there are now treaties addressing almost all of these global concerns.

Major,  well-funded forces of resistance and opposition have arisen, and virtually every step forward, especially since 1981, has been hard fought. The environmental groups, both those launched after 1970 and earlier ones have grown in strength, funding, and membership, and most groups can point to a string of victories they have won along the way. One shudders to think of where we would be today without these hard-won accomplishments.

That said, it is also true that we mostly pursued those goals where the path to success was clearer and left by the wayside the more difficult and deeper challenges. Much good thinking and many good ideas of the 1960s and 1970s were not pursued. And our early successes locked us into patterns of environmental action that have since proved no match for the system we’re up against. We opted to work within the system and neglected to seek transformation of the system itself.

And it is here that we arrive at the central issue – the paradox which every U.S. environmentalist must now face. The environmental movement – we still seem to call it that – has grown in strength and sophistication, and yet the environment continues to go downhill,  fast. If we look at real world conditions and trends, we see that we are winning victories but losing the planet, to the point that a ruined world looms as a real prospect for our children and grandchildren. And the United States is at the epicenter of the problem. So, a specter is haunting U.S. environmentalists – the specter of failure. The only valid test for us is not membership,  staff size, or even our victories but success on the ground – and by that test we are failing in our core purpose. We are not saving the planet. We have instead allowed our only world to come to the brink of disaster. Some who look at the latest science on climate change and biodiversity loss would say we are not on the brink of disaster, but well over it.

I looked hard at environmental conditions and trends, both global and national, a couple of years ago when I was writing my book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World.  In a nutshell, here is what I found.ii

Here at home, despite four decades of environmental effort, we are losing 6000 acres of open space every day and 100,000 acres of wetlands every year. Since 1982 we have paved or otherwise developed an area the size of New York State. Forty percent of U.S. fish species are threatened with extinction, a third of plants and amphibians, twenty percent of birds and mammals.  Since the first Earth Day in 1970 we have increased the miles of paved roads by 50 percent and tripled the total miles driven. Solid waste generated per person is up 33 percent since 1970.  Manicured mountains of trash are proliferating around our cities. Half our lakes and a third of our rivers still fail to meet the fishable and swimmable standard that the Clean Water Act said should be met by 1983.  EPA reports that a third of our estuaries are in poor condition, and beach closings have reached a two-decade high. A third of Americans live in counties that fail to meet EPA air quality standards, which are themselves too weak.  We have done little to curb our wasteful energy habits, our huge CO2 emissions, or our steady population growth.  And we are still releasing truly vast quantities of toxic chemicals into the environment – over five billion pounds a year, to be more precise.  The New York Times reported recently that a fifth of the nation’s drinking water systems have violated safety standards in recent years.

Meanwhile,  the United States is deeply complicit in the even more serious trends in the global environment. Half the world’s tropical and temperate forests are now gone. The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second, and has been for decades.  Half the planet’s wetlands are gone. An estimated ninety percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity. Almost half of the world’s corals are either lost or severely threatened. Species are disappearing at rates about 1,000 times faster than normal. The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction in 65 million years,  since the dinosaurs disappeared. Over half the agricultural land in drier regions suffers from some degree of deterioration and desertification. Persistent toxic chemicals can now be found by the dozens in essentially each and every one of us.

Human impacts are now large relative to natural systems. The earth’s stratospheric ozone layer was severely depleted before the change was discovered. Human activities have pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide up by more than a third, along with other greenhouse gases, and have started in earnest the calamitous process of warming the planet and disrupting climate. Despite stern warnings now thirty years old, we have neglected to act to halt the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and are now well beyond safe concentrations. Industrial processes are fixing nitrogen, making it biologically active, at a rate equal to nature’s; one result is the development of hundreds of documented dead zones in the oceans due to overfertilization.  Human actions already consume or destroy each year about 40 percent of nature’s photosynthetic output, leaving too little for other species. Freshwater withdrawals are now over half of accessible runoff, and soon to be 70 percent.  Water shortages are increasing in the United States and abroad.  Aquatic habitats are being devastated.  The following rivers no longer reach the oceans in the dry season:  the Colorado, Yellow, Ganges, and Nile, among others. We have treaties on most of these issues, yes, but they are in the main toothless treaties. Global deterioration continues; our one notable success is protecting the ozone shield.

And so here we are, forty years after the burst of energy and hope at the first Earth Day, on the brink of ruining the planet. Indeed all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and biota and leave a ruined world to our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy. Just continue to release greenhouse gases at current rates, just continue to impoverish ecosystems and release toxic chemicals at current rates, and the world in the latter part of this century won’t be fit to live in. But human activities are not holding at current levels – they are accelerating,  dramatically.

The size of the world economy doubled since 1960, and then doubled again.  World economic activity is projected to quadruple again by mid-century. At recent rates of growth, the world economy will double in size in two decades. It took all of human history to grow the $7 trillion world economy of 1950. We now grow by that amount in a decade! We thus face the prospect of enormous environmental deterioration just when we need to be moving strongly in the opposite direction.

It seems to me one conclusion is inescapable. We need a new environmentalism in America. The world needs a new environmentalism in America. Today’s environmentalism is not succeeding. America has run a 40-year experiment on whether mainstream environmentalism can succeed, and the results are now in. The full burden of managing accumulating environmental threats has fallen to the environmental community, both those in government and outside. But that burden is too great. Environmentalists get stronger, but so do the forces arrayed against us, only more so. It was Einstein, I believe, who first said that insanity is doing the same thing over an over again and expecting a different result.

Well,  we are not insane. It’s time for something different – a new environmentalism. We must build a new environmentalism in America.  And here is the core of the new environmentalism: it seeks a new economy. And to deliver on the promise of the new economy, we must build a new politics.

I applaud NCSE for taking the important step of focusing us on the economy and economic transformation. And surely NCSE is correct that it must be a green economy – an economy that protects and restores the environment, one that lives off nature’s income while preserving and enhancing natural capital. Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins have wonderfully described key features of such an economy in their book Natural Capitalism, which I will not repeat now.iii

The first step in building a green economy is to ask why the current system is so destructive. As I describe in The Bridge at the Edge of the World,  the answer lies in the defining features of our current political economy. An unquestioning society-wide commitment to economic growth at almost any cost; powerful corporate interests whose overriding objective is to grow by generating profit, including profit from avoiding the environmental costs they create and from replicating technologies designed with little regard for the environment; markets that systematically fail to recognize environmental costs unless corrected by government; government that is subservient to corporate interests and the growth imperative; rampant consumerism spurred endlessly by sophisticated advertising; economic activity now so large in scale that its impacts alter the fundamental biophysical operations of the planet – all these combine to deliver an ever-growing world economy that is undermining the ability of the planet to sustain life. These are key issues – these issues that are more systemic – that must be addressed by our new environmentalism.

But the new environmentalism will not get far if it is focused only on greening the economy, as important as that is. As David Korten,  John Cavanagh and I and others in the New Economy Working Group are saying, the old economy has actually given rise to a triple crisis,  and they are tightly linked. The failure of the old economy is evident in a threefold economic, social, and environmental crisis.  The economic crisis of the Great Recession brought on by Wall Street financial excesses has stripped tens of millions of middle class Americans of their jobs, homes, and retirement assets and plunged many into poverty and despair.

A social crisis of extreme and growing inequality has been unraveling America’s social fabric for several decades. A tiny minority have experienced soaring incomes and accumulated grand fortunes while wages for working people have stagnated despite rising productivity gains and poverty has risen to a near thirty-year high. Social mobility has declined, record numbers of people lack health insurance, schools are failing, prison populations are swelling,  employment security is a thing of the past, and American workers put in more hours than workers in other high income countries.

An environmental crisis, driven by excessive human consumption and waste and a spate of terrible technologies, is disrupting Earth’s climate, reducing Earth’s capacity to support life, and creating large scale human displacement that further fuels social breakdown.

And I would add that we are also in the midst of a political crisis. The changes we now badly need require far-reaching and effective government action. How else can the market be made to work for the environment rather than against it? How else can corporate behavior be altered or programs built that meet real human and social needs? Inevitably, then, the drive for real change leads to the political arena, where a vital, muscular democracy steered by an informed and engaged citizenry is needed.

Yet,  for Americans, merely to state the matter this way suggests the enormity of the challenge. Democracy in America today is in trouble.  Weak, shallow and corrupted, it is the best democracy that money can buy. The ascendancy of market fundamentalism and anti-regulation,  anti-government ideology has been particularly frightening, but even the passing of these extreme ideas would leave deeper, more long-term deficiencies. It is unimaginable that American politics as we know it today will deliver the transformative changes needed.

There are many reasons why government in Washington today is too often more problem than solution. It is hooked on GDP growth – for its revenues, for its constituencies, and for its influence abroad. It has been captured by the very corporations and concentration of wealth it should be seeking to regulate and revamp. And it is hobbled by an array of dysfunctional institutional arrangements, beginning with the way presidents are elected.

Peter Barnes describes the problem starkly: “According to the Center for Public Integrity, the ‘influence industry’ in Washington now spends $6 billion a year and employs more than thirty-five thousand lobbyists….[I]n a capitalist democracy, the state is a dispenser of many valuable prizes. Whoever amasses the most political power wins the most valuable prizes. The rewards include property rights,  friendly regulators, subsidies, tax breaks, and free or cheap use of the commons….We face a disheartening quandary here.  Profit-maximizing corporations dominate our economy….The only obvious counter-weight is government, yet government is dominated by these same corporations.”iv As Bob Kaiser says, “So Damn Much Money.”v

These four crises underscore that our current system is not working for people or planet. Far too many people get a raw deal, as does the environment. No wonder there is so much populist anger today.

Now,  these four crises are linked, powerfully linked. They cannot be dealt with separately. That seems daunting, for sure, but the only promising path forward is to address them together. And that’s why it is not enough only to green the economy – and that is also why the new environmentalism must embrace social and political causes that once seemed non-environmental but are now central to its success. Let’s explore some of these linkages.

America’s gaping social and economic inequality poses a grave threat to democratic prospects, the democracy on which our success depends. In his book On Political Equality, our country’s senior political scientist, Robert Dahl, concludes it is “highly plausible” that “powerful international and domestic forces [could] push us toward an irreversible level of political inequality that so greatly impairs our present democratic institutions as to render the ideals of democracy and political equality virtually irrelevant.”vi The authors brought together by political analysts Lawrence Jacobs and Theda Skocpol in Inequality and American Democracy document the emergence of a vicious cycle: growing income disparities shift political influence to wealthy constituencies and businesses,  and that shift further imperils the potential of the democratic process to correct the growing disparities.vii

Social inequities are not only undermining democracy, they are undermining environment as well. If the market is going to work for the betterment of society, environmental and social costs should be incorporated into prices, and wrongheaded government subsidies, a vast empire today, should be eliminated. Honest prices would be a lot higher, in some cases prohibitively high. But how can we expect to move to honest prices when half the country is just getting by?  Honestly high prices are not a problem because they are high; they’re a problem because people don’t have enough money to pay them, or they can’t find preferable alternatives. In a similar vein, we cannot get far challenging our growth fetish and consumerism in a society where so many are nickeled and dimed to death and where the economy seems incapable of generating needed jobs and income security. Clearly, addressing social and environmental needs must go hand in hand.

Consider also the link between the recent financial collapse and the ongoing environmental deterioration. Both are the result of a system in which those with economic power are propelled, and not restrained by government, to take dangerous risks for the sake of great profit.

So,  we see that the new economy – the prime objective of the new environmentalism – must be about more than green. We need a broader, more inclusive framing of our goal. We need to answer the probing question posed by John de Graaf in his new film: What’s the economy for anyhow? The answer, I believe, is that we should be building what I would call a “sustaining economy” – one that gives top, over-riding priority to sustaining both human and natural communities. It must be an economy where the purpose is to sustain people and the planet, where social justice and cohesion are prized,  and where human communities, nature, and democracy all flourish. Its watchword is caring – caring for each other, for the natural world,  and for the future.viii Promoting the transition to such an economy is in fact the mission of the New Economy Network, which I’m now working with many others to build. It will be a broad, welcoming space for all those pursuing diverse paths to these goals.

To build the new economy we need innovative economic thinking and new models. There is today wide-spread dissatisfaction with much of current economic orthodoxy. Enter the New Economics Institute, which is now being launched in the United States. The new economy needs a new economics.ix The new economy also needs a journal to focus our attention beyond problems to solutions, and I applaud Bob Costanza for launching the new journal Solutions.x

Beyond the generalities, it is fair to ask for more on how this new economy might look. As an early step in building a new economy, I believe we must begin to question the current centrality of economic growth in our economic and political life, what Clive Hamilton has called our “growth fetish.” With recent books like Peter Victor’s Managing Without Growth, Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth, and the New Economics Foundation’s The Great Transition, this is no longer as quixotic a cause as it was when I wrote my Bridge book just a few years ago. Peter Brown’s wonderful book, Right Relationship, also deserves mention in this context.xi

Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for much of the world it is a god that is failing – underperforming for most of the world’s people and, for those of us in affluent societies, now creating more problems than it is solving.  The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy undermines communities and the environment, it fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources, and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting the deepest human needs. We’re substituting growth and consumption for dealing with the real issues – for doing things that would truly make us better off.

Before it is too late, I think America should begin to move to post-growth society where working life, the natural environment, our communities,  and the public sector are no longer sacrificed for the sake of mere GDP growth; where the illusory promises of ever-more growth no longer provide an excuse for neglecting to deal generously with compelling social needs; and where citizen democracy is no longer held hostage to the growth imperative.

Yet,  even in a post-growth society there are many things that do need to grow. It is abundantly clear that American society and many others do need growth along many dimensions that increase human welfare: growth in good jobs, meaningful work, and in the incomes of the poor; growth in availability of affordable health care and in compassionate care for the elderly and the incapacitated; growth in education, research and training; growth in security against the risks of illness, job displacement, old age and disability; growth in investment in public infrastructure and amenity; growth in the deployment of climate-friendly and other green technologies; growth in the restoration of both ecosystems and local communities; growth in non-military government spending at the expense of military; and growth in international assistance for sustainable, people-centered development for the half of humanity that live in poverty, to mention some prominent needs. A post-growth economy would shift resources away from consumption and into investments in long-term social and environmental needs.

I put jobs and meaningful work first on this list because they are so important and unemployment is so devastating. Likely future rates of economic growth, even with further federal stimulus, are only mildly associated with declining unemployment. The availability of jobs, the wellbeing of people, and the health of communities should not be forced to await the day when overall economic growth might deliver them. It is time to shed the view that government mainly provides safety nets and occasional Keynesian stimuli. Government instead should have an affirmative responsibility to ensure that those seeking decent jobs find them. And the surest, and also the most cost-effective, way to that end is direct government spending,  investments and incentives targeted at creating jobs in areas where there is high social benefit. Creating new jobs in areas of democratically determined priority is certainly better than trying to create jobs by pump priming aggregate economic growth, especially in an era where the macho thing to do in much of business is to shed jobs, not create them.

Of particular importance to the new economy are government policies that will simultaneously temper growth while improving social and environmental well-being. Such policies are not hard to identify:  shorter workweeks and longer vacations, with more time with our children and friends; greater labor protections, job security and benefits; job protection guarantees to part-time workers, flextime and generous parental leave; restrictions on advertising and a ban on ads aimed at children; a new design for the twenty-first-century corporation, one that embraces rechartering, new ownership patterns,  and stakeholder primacy rather than shareholder primacy; incentives for local production and consumption and for community revitalization; new indicators of national social and environmental well-being that dethrone GDP;xii strong social and environmental provisions in trade agreements;  rigorous environmental, health and consumer protection, including full incorporation of environmental and social costs in prices;  greater economic and social equality, with genuinely progressive taxation of the rich and greater income support for the poor; heavy spending on public services and amenities; and initiatives to address population growth at home and abroad. Cumulatively, such measures would indeed slow growth, but we’d be better off with a higher quality of life.

Environmentalism’s new agenda should embrace measures like those just listed. The new environmentalism must be about more than green. Mainstream American environmentalism to date has been too limited. In the current frame of action, too little attention is paid to the corporate dominance of economic and political life, to transcending our growth fetish, to promoting major lifestyle changes and challenging the materialistic and anthropocentric values that dominate our society, to addressing the constraints on environmental action stemming from America’s vast social insecurity and hobbled democracy, to framing a new American story, or to building a new environmental politics. The new environmentalism must correct these deficiencies.

The new environmental agenda should expand to embrace a profound challenge to consumerism and commercialism and the lifestyles they offer, a healthy skepticism of growthmania and a redefinition of what society should be striving to grow, a challenge to corporate dominance and a redefinition of the corporation and its goals, a deep commitment to social equity and justice, and a powerful assault on the materialistic, anthropocentric and contempocentric values that currently dominate in our culture.

I have concentrated mostly on needed policies, I suppose because that is my background. But there is another hopeful path into a sustainable and just future. This is the path of “build it and they will come” and “just do it.” One of the most remarkable and yet under-noticed things going on in our country today is the proliferation of innovative models of “local living” economies,  sustainable communities and transition towns and for-benefit businesses which prioritize community and environment over profit and growth. The work that Gar Alperovitz and his colleagues are doing in Cleveland with the Evergreen Cooperative is a wonderful case in point. An impressive array of new economy businesses has been brought together in the American Sustainable Business Council, and a new Fourth Sector is emerging, bringing together the best of the private sector, the not-for-profit NGOs, and government. The seeds of the new economy are already being planted across our land.xiii

As I mentioned earlier, the transition to a new economy will require a new politics, and a new environmental politics in particular. The leading environmental journalist, Philip Shabecoff, recognized this a decade ago in his far-sighted book, Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century.xiv How should we approach the job of building a new politics? Consider the triple crisis I mentioned earlier. All three result from a system of political economy that is profoundly committed to profits and growth and profoundly indifferent to the fate of people, communities and the natural world. Left uncorrected, this system is inherently rapacious and ruthless, to use the description used by Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus in their famous macro-economics text. So it is up to us citizens, acting mainly through government, to inject values of fairness and sustainability into the system. But this effort commonly fails because our politics are too enfeebled and Washington is increasingly in the hands of the powerful and not the people. It follows, I submit, that the best hope for real change in America is a fusion of those concerned about environment, social justice, and strong democracy into one powerful progressive force. All progressive causes face the same reality. We rise or fall together, so we’d better join together.

Environmentalists should therefore support social progressives in addressing the crisis of inequality now unraveling America’s social fabric and join with those seeking to reform politics and strengthen democracy. And they should join with us. Corporations have been the principal economic actors for a long time; now they are America’s principal political actors as well. So here are some key issues for the new environmental agenda: public financing of elections, regulation of lobbying,  nonpartisan Congressional redistricting, a minimum free TV and radio time to qualifying candidates, bringing back the Fairness Doctrine,  and other political reform measures.

The new environmentalism must work with this progressive coalition to build a mighty force in electoral politics. This will require major efforts at grassroots organizing; strengthening groups working at the state and community levels; and developing motivational messages and appeals — indeed, writing a new American story, as Bill Moyers has urged. Our environmental discourse has thus far been dominated by lawyers, scientists, and economists. People like me. It has been too wonkish, out of touch with Main Street. The Death of Environmentalism was right about that. Now, we need to hear a lot more from the poets,  preachers, philosophers, and psychologists.

And indeed we are. The world’s religions are coming alive to their environmental roles – entering their ecological phase, in the words of religious leader Mary Evelyn Tucker. And just last year, the American Psychological Association devoted its annual gathering to environmental issues. The Earth Charter text and movement are providing a powerful base for a revitalization of the ethical and spiritual grounds of environmental efforts. The Charter’s first paragraph says it all: “We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms, we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights,  economic justice, and a culture of peace. Toward this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations.”

The new environmental politics must be broadly inclusive, reaching out to embrace union members and working families, minorities and people of color, religious organizations, the women’s movement, towns and cities seeking to revitalize and stabilize themselves, and other groups of complementary interest and shared fate. The “silo effect”  still separates the environmental community from those working on domestic political reforms, a progressive social agenda, human rights, international peace, consumer issues, world health and population concerns, and world poverty and underdevelopment, but we are all in the same boat.

And the new environmental politics must build a powerful social movement.  We have had movements against slavery and many have participated in movements for civil rights and the environment and against apartheid and the Vietnam War. We now need a new broad-based social movement –  demanding action and accountability from governments and corporations, protesting, and taking steps as citizens, consumers and communities to realize sustainability and social justice in everyday life.

Recent trends reflect a broadening in approaches. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have certainly worked outside the system, the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club have had a sustained political presence, groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund have developed effective networks of grassroots activists around the country, the World Resources Institute has augmented its policy work with on-the-ground sustainable development projects, and environmental justice concerns and the climate crisis have spurred the proliferation of grassroots efforts, student organizing, and community and state initiatives.  Groups like 1Sky, the Energy Action Coalition, the 350 Campaign,  Green for All, the Blue-Green Alliance, and others are transforming the environmental landscape. All this is headed in the right directions, but it is not nearly enough.

If all this seems idealistic and daunting, and it must to many, we should try not to let today’s political realities and the art-of-the-possible get in the way of clear thinking. The planet is literally at stake and with it our children’s future. In our super-rich country millions of fellow citizens are facing unnecessary economic and social deprivation. All the crises I have referred to are real – economic, social, environmental and political. They are very real. We see that every day. And right now we are fumbling around unable to find answers to any of them. The current system is broken. We need something better. Let’s find it. The important thing is to know the general direction we should take and to start marching. As Thoreau said, “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.” We know a lot already about needed policy initiatives, and an impressive array of new economy initiatives is already underway.  And here is an especially compelling part: if we succeed in building the new environmentalism, we can not only contribute greatly to saving our planetary home but also help build the ideas and momentum needed to address many other big challenges our country faces.

In conclusion, I hope you will remember three things:

Remember what my friend Paul Raskin said: Contrary to the conventional wisdom, it is business as usual that is the utopian fantasy; forging a new vision is the pragmatic necessity.xv

Second,  in order to shore up my diminished ecumenical credentials, remember what Milton Friedman said: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”xvi Unfortunately the crisis is here, if we would but recognize it as such.

And,  finally, remember that most of the ideas I have sketched this evening are not new. As we saw, they actually take us back to where we began, in the 1960s and 1970s. They gained prominence then and they can again. Perhaps they are now, belatedly, ideas whose time has come. We can’t recreate the 1960s and the 1970s; we shouldn’t even try. But we can learn from that era and find again its rambunctious spirit and fearless advocacy, its fight for deep change, and its searching inquiry.

Thank you.

——-

NOTES:

i President Nixon’s January 22, 1970, State of the Union Address is reproduced in Council on Environmental Quality, Environmental Quality: The First Annual Report of the CEQ, transmitted to Congress August, 1970 (Appendix B), which also contains the President’s Letter of Transmittal of the CEQ report (pp. v-xv).  The citizens’ declaration quoted in the text is the Santa Barbara Declaration of Environmental Rights, which followed quickly after the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. The material in the text regarding growth, materialism, redistribution and job creation is drawn from Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich and John Holdren, Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1973), pp. 259-274. See also William R. Burch, Jr. and F. Herbert Bormann eds., Beyond Growth: Essays on Alternative Futures, Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Bulletin No. 88, Yale University, New Haven, 1975. The discussion on whether private enterprise can be compatible with ecological imperatives is from Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), pp. 255-275. See also Robert L.  Heilbroner, Business Civilization in Decline (New York: W. W.  Norton, 1976), pp. 97-110.

ii James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World:  Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). The environmental conditions and trends information in the text is drawn from this book, where it is more fully elaborated and referenced.  See Introduction and Chapters 1 and 3. Many of the themes in the text are developed at greater length in this book.

iii Paul Hawken et al., Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999).

iv Peter Barnes, Capitalism 3.0 (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler,  2006), pp. 34, 36, 45.

v Robert G. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money (New York: Alfred A.  Knopf, 2009).

vi Robert A. Dahl, On Political Equality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), x. Dahl believes an alternative, hopeful outcome is also “highly plausible.” “Which of these futures will prevail depends on the coming generations of American citizens,” he writes.

vii Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, eds., Inequality and American Democracy (Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 2005).

viii See Raine Eisler, “Roadmap to a New Economics: Beyond Capitalism and Socialism,” Tikkun, November/December 2009, p. 17.  Julian Agyeman has stressed the need to link social and environmental justice. See Julian Agyeman, Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice (New York: New York University Press, 2005). Important recent contributions to new economy thinking include Bill McKibben, Deep Economy (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2007); Peter Brown and Geoffrey Garver, Right Relationship: Building the Whole Earth Economy (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2009); and David Korten, Agenda for a New Economy (San Francisco:  Berrett-Koehler, 2009).

ix See David Boyle and Andrew Simms, The New Economics (London:  Earthscan, 2009). The New Economics Institute is being launched by the New Economics Foundation (based in London) and the E. F.  Schumacher Society.

x See www.thesolutionsjournal.com.

xi See Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth (London:  Earthscan, 2009); Peter Victor, Managing Without Growth (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2008); Stephen Spratt and New Economics Foundation, The Great Transition (London: New Economics Foundation, 2009); and Peter Brown and Geoffrey Garver, Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2009). See also Herman E. Daly, Beyond Growth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), to whom we are all indebted. And see Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish (London:  Pluto Press, 2004).

xii See Robert Costanza et al., Beyond GDP: The Need for New Measures of Progress (Boston: Pardee Center, Boston University, 2009).

xiii See, e.g. www.asbcouncil.org; www.fourthsector.net; www.evergreencoop.com; www.smallisbeautiful.org; www.bouldercountygoinglocal.com; http://transitionsc.org;  and generally http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/TransitionCommunities.

xiv Philip Shabecoff, Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000).

xv Paul Raskin et al., Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead (Boston: Stockholm Environment Institute and Tellus,  2002), p. 29.

xvi Milton Freidman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), Introduction.

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Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

My boyfriend
and I are talking seriously about marriage, and he knows I don’t want a diamond
ring (at least not a new one) because of the social and environmental
impacts. You addressed this topic in 2003, saying the only good options were no ring
or a used ring. I’m wondering if, in the past seven years of “green”
innovation, there might be other options to consider.

Thanks,
Sarah
Washington,
D.C.

A. Dearest Sarah,

You know, I just can’t get that song out of my head. If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring
on it/If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it ... OK, that’s
actually the only part I know, so it’s just running on a mental loop as I write
this.

Obviously, your boyfriend cares a great deal about your finger because
he does, in fact, want to adorn it with a ring. And while, sure, the most eco-friendly
options may be to have no ring at all or opt for a second-hand band, they
aren’t the only ways to celebrate your engagement in a socially and
environmentally responsible fashion. Maybe it’s just because I smell Valentine’s
Day in the air, but I think there’s something lovely about what the ring
represents, despite its roots as a sort of down payment.

A couple of things to look for if you’re going the new ring route:
recycled metals and responsible diamond sourcing. I won’t take you through the
whole depressing diatribe—check out No Dirty Gold’s site or DiamondFacts.org for more info. But I will say mining metals is a dirty business; it takes 20
tons of mining waste to produce just one gold band. And the cyanide used to
extract gold from ore is highly toxic. Plus, the unethical treatment of diamond
mine workers, as well as the horror of conflict
or blood diamonds, is a major issue. You need to get the real down-low on where
your diamond is sourced—take a look at Brilliant
Earth’s Conflict Free Diamond Buying Guide, which includes a handy list of questions
to ask a jeweler. Other companies known for adhering to ethical social and
environmental standards include GreenKarat and Ingle & Rhode.

You could always go a completely
untraditional route with a wooden
ring made from salvaged wood, a tattooed band, or perhaps a Chia
Pet-esque ring, though a moss-growing ring probably won’t last as long as
your love.

Matrimonially,
Umbra

P.S. When it comes time to plan your wedding, check out our how-to guide for no-
(or low-) impact nuptials.

Q. Dear Umbra,

I enjoy
drinking out of straws. Is this putting me at risk for BPA contamination? How
awful of a habit is this for the environment? Are straws recyclable?

Thank you,
WM
Portland,
Ore.

A. Dearest WM,

Don’t be ashamed—I also enjoy drinking straws. But plain and simple:
Plastic straws suck.

While they’re not likely to leach toxic chemicals like BPA and may be
recyclable (check with your local recycling program to find out), most
disposable straws are made from polypropylene—a product of the nasty
petrochemical industry. And the plastic from the thousands of straws littering
landfills will never fully break down, so ask yourself: Is it worth it to enjoy
drinking one beverage from a plastic straw, knowing that the plastic will in
fact outlive us all? Kind of dramatic, no?

The best solution is, of course, no straw at all—just suck it up,
tilt that glass, and pour the beverage directly into your mouth. Did that bring
a little tear to your eye? There, there. Don’t cry. The good news is that you
don’t have to forgo the simple
pleasure of consuming a cold beverage through a straw in order to honor your
commitment to the planet. Try opting for a reusable straw made from stainless
steel or glass instead.
Just imagine how impressed your dinner date will be when you turn down the
waiter’s disposable straw and whip out your own shiny reusable one. The answer
is very.

Slurpily,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

I have two
small children, who tend to go through a lot of napkins at meal time. Is it
better to use recycled paper napkins, or to switch to cloth napkins that I can
wash with the rest of their never-ending laundry? They typically go through 1–2
napkins at each meal and snack time—so about 5–10 each per day. Thanks!

Lucy M.
Round Rock,
Texas

A. Dearest Lucy,

Questions like this really do warm my heart. Granted, this falls under
the small choices category, one I often tell people not to sweat. But you’re
essentially asking: Should I opt for the green choice or the green one?

The fact is either way you go—recycled or reusable—you’re being a more
conscious consumer by taking a big step up from choosing disposable napkins.
Disposables are made from virgin fiber and bleached with chlorine (which
releases carcinogenic dioxins during manufacture—ick). Why buy bright white
napkins when your kids are going to soil them soon anyway? If every household
in the United States replaced just one package of virgin fiber napkins with
100% recycled ones, we could keep 1 million trees standing.

That said, let’s take a look at reusable cloth napkins—the optimal
choice, in my opinion, if you pick the right ones and care for them in the most
eco-friendly fashion. Opting for secondhand napkins or ones made from reclaimed
material—or getting crafty and making
your own—conserves new resources. If you’d rather buy new ones, choose organic
cotton or hemp.

Odds are that your kids will get multiple uses out of one cloth napkin
before it’s washed, so you won’t be adding mountains of dirty laundry. When it
is time for a cleaning, launder the napkins in cold water and NPE-free detergent, and skip
the dryer sheets. Skip
the dryer, for that matter, and hang your napkins on a clothesline or indoor
drying rack. And cut your spaghetti sauce servings down to once a week.

Wipily,
Umbra

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Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated speech Saturday night at the first National Tea Party Convention in Nashville included a one-minute-and-20-second disquisition on energy policy.  She hit on her familiar talking points—drill here, drill now, “cap-and-tax” sucks. But she also commended Obama for highlighting nuclear power during his State of the Union address, a brief departure from her otherwise sneering tone toward the president. (“How’s that hopey-changey thing
workin’ out for you?” was more typical.)

Considering that Palin was paid $100,000 for the 40-minute speech, this excerpt represents $3,333 worth of her wisdom: 

And to create jobs, Washington should jump-start energy projects.  I said it during the campaign and I’ll say it now: We need an all-of-the-above approach to energy policy.  That means proven, conventional resource development and support for nuclear power.  And I was thankful that the president at least mentioned nuclear power in the State of the Union. But again, we need more than words, we need a plan to turn that goal into a reality, and that way we can pave the way for projects that will create jobs, those are real

job-creators, and deliver carbon-free energy.

And while we’re at it, let’s expedite the regulatory and permitting and legal processes for on- and offshore drilling.  Instead of paying billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars that now are being sent to foreign regimes, we should be drilling here and drilling now instead of relying on them to develop their resources for us.

So what we’ve got to do is axe that plan for cap-and-tax, that policy that’s going to kill jobs and that’s going to pass the burden of paying for it onto our working families. 

At another point in the speech, Palin extols the virtues of
“everyday Americans” who, among other things, “grow our
food”—reinforcing Tom
Philpott’s argument that conservatives and progressives should be able to
find common ground on food issues.

Here’s video of the whole speech; the food mention is at 7:25 and the energy section is at
30:00-31:20:

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How much will nuclear cost U.S. citizens?

I spotted a rare critter on the streets of San Francisco
this week—a smiling, optimistic businessperson.

Then again, Ron Kenedi is in the solar panel business. 

“The big news as I see it is the demand—demand keeps
growing everywhere,” says Kenedi, vice president of Sharp Solar, the renewable
energy arm of the Japanese conglomerate. “What really amazes me every day is
how much demand has grown throughout the world.”

Kenedi is not one for Pollyannaish optimism—he started in
the business around the time Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter’s solar
panels from the White House roof.

“I used to have to go out there with a sandwich board on to
get people interested in solar,” he says. “Now I can’t even walk down the
street without people talking to me about solar and wanting it on their home
and businesses.”

That’s because there’s a boom in so-called distributed
generation under way—placing solar panels and pint-sized photovoltaic farms at
or near where electricity is consumed.

Until very recently, distributed generation just couldn’t
compete on cost with Big Solar—massive megawatt solar thermal power plants
usually located in the desert.

Big Solar has had the edge by the dint of the gigawatt-size
deals utilities have struck with developers like BrightSource Energy, eSolar,
and Solar Millennium. Large solar thermal power plants—which use mirrors to
heat liquids to create steam that drives a generator—could make electricity
cheaper than photovoltaic panels, which produce electrons when the sun strikes
semiconducting materials.

Now that’s all changing. Over the past year, a number of Big
Solar thermal projects have become mired in disputes over their impact on
fragile desert ecosystems and the lack of transmission lines to connect them to
cities. In December, California’s powerful Democratic senator, Dianne
Feinstein, introduced
legislation to ban renewable energy development on more than a million
acres of the Mojave Desert she wants to protect as national monument.

Photovoltaic module prices, meanwhile, have plummeted by about
30 percent over the past year thanks to an oversupply of modules and the rise
of low-cost Chinese manufacturers. Thin-film solar companies, which make solar
cells that use little or no expensive polysilicon and which layer or print them
on glass or metal, began to produce solar modules for less than a one dollar a
watt—long considered a key milestone for making solar competitive with fossil
fuels. Though less efficient than conventional crystalline solar modules,
thin-film solar cells can be manufactured more cheaply, making it particularly
suited for use by photovoltaic power plants.

Distributed solar’s new competitiveness can be seen in a
spate of deals and initiatives over the past few weeks as utilities turn to
small-scale solar to help meet mandates to obtain a growing percentage of their
electricity from renewable sources. As of today, 1,300 megawatts’ worth of distributed solar
will be installed over the next five years—at peak output those arrays will
generate as much electricity as a big nuclear power plant.

California regulators two weeks ago approved Southern
California Edison’s five-year program to install 500 megawatts of solar arrays
on commercial rooftops. They also recommended that PG&E, the big Northern
California utility, be given the go-ahead for its own 500-megawatt distributed
solar program to place small solar farms near substations and cities that can
plug directly into the grid.

And both utilities revealed additional distributed solar
deals this week. Southern California Edison agreed to buy 50 megawatts from
three small-scale solar farms to be built by San Francisco’s Recurrent Energy
in Kern and San Bernardino Counties in the eastern part of the state.

On Monday, PG&E filed a request that regulators approve
a contract with Eurus Energy America, a
joint venture between Tokyo Electric Power and Toyota Tsusho, for 50 megawatts
of solar electricity from three power plants to be constructed near Fresno.

“We’re seeing the rest of the industry cotton on to what
we’ve been saying, distributed solar done at the right size can scale,” says
Arno Harris, Recurrent’s chief executive. “Distributed solar is faster on
permitting, on environmental issues, and interconnection to the grid.”

For Sharp Solar, the biggest demand for its thin-film panels
comes from utilities. “That’s what’s opening up the utility sector for Sharp—it’s a very robust market,” says Kenedi.

(And lest you think this is just a California phenomenon,
the New York Power Authority last week announced a program to
install 100 megawatts of photovoltaic panels on rooftops and at ground stations
over the next four years.)

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District showed, just last
month, how fast the distributed generation market is growing when it put up 100
megawatts of photovoltaic projects up for bid and sold out the allotment in one
week.

But the shocker of the SMUD deal is that the utility is not
paying a premium for solar electricity, according to Adam Browning, executive director
of Vote Solar, a San Francisco
nonprofit that promotes renewable energy (and an occasional Grist contributor).

I’ll spare you the utility industry calculus of “time
differential avoided costs,” but Browning has run the numbers and believes that
SMUD will pay essentially the same price for solar electricity as it would for
fossil fuel-generated power when demand peaks. (Solar farms typically supply
peak power as their output coincides with the time of day when demand spikes.)

“The point here is that this is an entirely revenue neutral
investment for SMUD,” Browning says. “They got solar electricity for what they
would have paid for fossil, which is a significant milestone.”

SMUD officials did not return requests for comment so I
could not verify those numbers with the utility, but given that solar
developers must put down a deposit of $20 a kilowatt for winning bids—that’s
$100,000 for a five-megawatt project—it seems unlikely there were many
speculators in the bunch willing to walk away from a six-figure commitment.

Truth be told, we’re going to need every kilowatt of green
electricity we can wring from Big Solar, distributed solar, wind, waves and
geothermal. But the rise of distributed solar generation will help ease the
load as well as the environmental pressures from developing other forms of
green energy.

Related Links:

Large-scale distributed energy is here: Recurrent Energy signs 50MW power purchase agreement

How innovative financing is changing energy in America

Let the era of solar wholesale distributed generation begin

From its failure to rein in abuse of farm subsidies to its misguided efforts on international trade, the Obama USDA has disappointed many progressives. But let’s take a moment to offer kudos to USDA Chief Tom Vilsack for two positive developments in one week.

On Thursday, the USDA responded to revelations first published in USAToday regarding safety lapses in the school lunch program. The report indicated that meat which wouldn’t meet safety standards at most national fast food chains was nonetheless sold into the school lunch system and fed to school children. In addition, USAToday also documented a broken system at the USDA for recalling tainted food from schools. Piling on, the NYT revealed a few weeks ago that a form of meat filler commonly used in school lunch meat, aka “pink slime,” was potentially unsafe and yet escaped USDA testing on a routine basis.

Well, the USDA has had enough:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced sweeping steps Thursday to “assure the safety and quality of food” purchased for the National School Lunch Program.
The measures include tightening requirements on
companies that supply ground beef to schools, testing the beef more
often and more thoroughly, and improving communications within the USDA
to “identify potential food safety issues” before children get sick.

... The measures outlined Thursday are intended to ... [bring] the standards and testing protocols in line with those used by the most selective restaurants and
retailers. “It’s a big deal,” food safety consultant David Theno said
of the USDA measures. He said the moves will push companies to “play to
a higher standard” if they want to continue to supply food to schools.

The USDA also pledged to review the safety
records of its school lunch suppliers more carefully and bar companies
that have had repeated problems with their commercial products.

In an interesting wrinkle, the USDA, in response to a request from Rep. George Miller, has asked the National Academy of Sciences to review the department’s ground beef purchasing program and make recommendations for improvement. The non-partisan NAS is charged with advising the federal government on scientific and technical matters—and will allow the USDA to depoliticize attempts to reform the commodity purchasing program. So good news all around.

The second positive development came today with the USDA’s announcement that it is totally revamping the controversial “National Animal Identification Program.” What started as a voluntary program inspired by a mad-cow disease scare during the Bush administration threatened to morph into a mandatory, full life-cycle tracking program for every farm animal (pets included) in the nation. Facing the controversy, Vilsack embarked on a series of “listening tours” last summer to get feedback from farmers and got an earful.

In response, he has all but scrapped the national system in favor of a to-be-determined new state-level program focused on interstate commerce. Now, this has complications of its own (especially for farmers who send their cattle across state lines for slaughter), but, significantly, whatever the new system is, it will all but exempt small and medium-sized producers who sell locally. Given that many small farmers thought a mandatory animal tracking system could put them out of business, this news comes as a great relief.

These fixes may not be wholesale reform, but they do represent progress. Let’s hope these are the seeds, and not the crumbs, of change.

Related Links:

Battle for the soul of organic dairy farmers goes on behind the scenes

USDA’s Deputy Secretary discusses local, organic farming

And the winner of the USDA food safety sweepstakes is ...

Jewels of winter: Kumquats from L’Hoste Organic Citrus Farm in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. Photo: April McGreger

For a long time, I never really saw citrus fruits. Lemon, limes, oranges, and even grapefruits were just fruits I often had in my fridge—nice, but unremarkable.

All of that changed in 2005. That’s when I realized that, like so much else, the citrus varieties we have available to us are the dull tip of a spectacular iceberg of biodiversity and deliciousness. Like the red delicious apple, I learned, most supermarket citrus, both conventional and organic, offers but a shadow of the fruit’s true glory.

That fall, I was given the chance to offer communal support—something so elemental, yet, sadly so rare in these days of frenetic consumption. In the weeks following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans native Poppy Tooker, champion of the self-styled “Eat-it-to-Save-it” Movement, found out that the L’Hoste Organic Citrus Farm in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, had escaped Katrina with only minor damage. But the infrastructure and outlets for selling the farm’s produce had been devastated. Through her contacts with Slow Food USA, Tooker got the word out and took orders for the L’Hoste’s prized citrus. I signed on to receive my first 5 boxes.

When my Satsumas arrived, their skin was tinged with green, but what lay beneath it was the sweetest, juiciest, most ethereal oranges I had ever eaten. The following year when I contacted the L’Hostes to order more, it was Lester L’Hoste himself who answered the phone while manning his booth at the Crescent City Farmers Market. I found that they were also the growers of Meyer lemons, both sweet and sour kumquats, two varieties of grapefruit, and more. I ordered some of all of them, and have come to anticipate the first Satsumas and Meyer lemons of late fall just like I do the first sun-ripened tomato of summer.

My citrus epiphany led quite naturally to a marmalade conversion. Turns out you don’t have to be British to be endlessly enchanted by the stuff! I’m inclined to believe there is no better defense against the winter doldrums than marmalade, toast, and tea. The concentrated burst of sweet, bitter, and tart feels like warm sunshine on my face and sand between my toes.

And now, here I am in the middle of winter with snow on the ground. Just as I am beginning to believe the preserving season is over, I find myself with my most challenging and rewarding subject yet. Yes, marmalade has a reputation for being fussy. From my experience, however, most of the difficulty of making marmalade can be remedied with a very sharp knife for slicing through the fruit. Other helpful tips include, using a candy thermometer for a more reliable set, and using citrus in its prime. Overripe citrus or citrus that has been sitting around in your refrigerator for weeks will be lower in pectin, therefore, will not set properly.

Marmalade that has a somewhat softer set is still delicious so don’t be deterred. It makes a wonderful glaze for fish, chicken, or pork, as well as a topping for yogurt, pound cake, oatmeal or pudding. I even love it stirred into mashed sweet potatoes and use it as a flavor booster in sweet potato and pumpkin pie filling.

Still too timid to attempt marmalade on your own? The best way to get your feet wet is to take a class or observe a pro. Luckily, you don’t have to go to cross the Atlantic to find skilled marmalade makers. On the west coast, check out classes offered by Brit expat June Taylor of June Taylor Jams or Rachel Saunders of Blue Chair Fruit Company. Easterners, check out Marisa McClellan’s, of foodinjars.com, class in Philadelphia next week.

Know of any other classes offered by skilled marmaladers? How about direct sale, minor purveyors of delicious, organic citrus? Please share this information with the rest of us in comments below! If you aren’t ready to make your own marmalade but you still want to know what all the fuss is about, you can support gifted artisans like June Taylor, Casey Havre of Lou Lou’s Garden, and Rachel Saunders through their online stores. I’d rather receive a jar of their marmalades than a box of truffles on Valentine’s Day. Honey, are you reading this?

Your marmalade epiphany awaits you. Photo: April McGregerThree-Citrus Marmalade
So far this year I’ve made three-citrus marmalade—a mix of Meyer lemons, Ruby Red grapefruit, and kumquats; a Satsuma-rosemary marmalade; and sour kumquat marmalade. A quick search on the internet will yield all sorts of other esoteric combinations, such as Rangpur lime & ginger; Lemon & Cara Cara orange; or even Bergamot. Start with the best citrus you have access to. I find that you can use sweet oranges in marmalade but it is helps to balance that flavor with a supporting role of a bitter or tart variety.

Ingredients

1 ½ pounds organic citrus—I used grapefruit, sour kumquats, and Meyer lemons, but oranges, limes, and other citrus would also work
3 1/2 cups water
1/4 cup lemon juice
4 cups sugar

Canning equipment: three pint-sized or six 8-ounce or canning jars with rings and lids, a funnel, tongs, a ladle, a wide 12-quart pot, a candy or deep fry thermometer, a sheet pan, and a small 3 to 4 quart pot.

Instructions

Scrub your citrus. For oranges, grapefruit, lemons, or limes, slice off the top and the bottom of the fruit, deep enough so you can see the flesh. Half the fruit, squeeze out the excess juice and reserve. Slice each half into halves or thirds, or even quarters, depending on the size of the fruit, then slice thinly, peel, pith, and all. Discard the seeds as you go. For kumquats, slice the fruit thinly, and discard the seeds.

Place the sliced citrus in a wide preserving pan. Add the reserved juice and the water. Set aside for 4 hours.

After 4 hours, bring the fruit mixture to a boil, turned down to a simmer, and cook uncovered until the fruit is tender, about 40 to 45 minutes.

While the marmalade is cooking, preheat your oven to 250 degrees F. Place your washed jars on a sheet pan and place in the oven. Bring a 3 to 4 quart pot of water to a boil and boil your lids, as well as your tongs, ladle, and funnel for 10 minutes to sterilize before canning the marmalade.

When the fruit is tender, stir in the sugar and lemon juice and bring back to boil. Attach a candy or deep fry thermometer to the side of your pot. Boil rapidly, stirring occasionally until the thermometer registers between 222 and 225 degrees F.

Test the set of the marmalade with the plate test. Drop a teaspoon of marmalade on a plate and place in the freezer for 1 minute. If it thickens up on the plate, it is done.

Remove the jars from the oven. Pour the marmalade into the sterilized jars, leaving a 1/4-inch of headspace, and top with sterilized lids. Do not disturb for 24 hours so that a proper set can be achieved. After 24 hours, check to see that the jars have sealed. Refrigerate any unsealed marmalades and use immediately. The sealed jars can be stored in a cool, dark place for up to one year.

Related Links:

Hello, Dal-ly: curried red lentils

Thick as a foggy, drizzly night: smoky-spicy split peas

Winter cold no match for spicy kimchi stew

 In Tom’s Kitchen, Grist’s food editor discusses some of the
quick-and-easy things he gets up to in, well, his kitchen. He thinks
the column name sucks—please help him rename it. Email ideas to
tphilpott[at]grist[dot]org. Forgive him for the lame iPhone
photography.

—————

Mise en place: getting it together in Tom’s kitchen. Photo: Tom PhilpottOn page 304 of Deborah Madison’s masterpiece Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, there’s a recipe called, with undue modesty, “Red Lentil Dal with Aromatics.”

The dish is gorgeous—and simple. You saute onion, garlic, and chile in ghee; add lentils, turmeric, and water, and cook until soft. You finish with shallots fried in ghee with mustard seeds and bay leaves, and finally some coconut milk. That’s it. The result gets depth and richness from the coconut milk and fried shallots; and this incredible, full curry flavor from the turmeric, mustards seeds, and bay. It’s a pure, elemental dish—perfect for warming up after a cold day outside.

The curry flavor in the dish surprised me. It really only has two spices associated with curry—mustard seeds and turmeric. I had always assumed to get a good, full curry flavor, you have to either grind a bunch of whole spices—cinnamon, cardamon seeds, cloves, etc.—or buy some pre-gound mix at the grocery store and hope for the best (because pre-ground spice mixes turn to sawdust with shocking speed). Deborah’s dish taught me that just a couple of well-chosen spices can deliver the goods.

Indeed, It wasn’t until I this recipe dish seven or eight years ago that I really got red lentils at all. They’re quick—they cook in little more than 30 minutes. And, goosed with curry spices and aromatics, they taste really, really good.

These days, I use Madison’s recipe only occasionally—when I have all the ingredients on hand (the absent ones typically being coconut milk and shallots, both of which I adore). When I don’t have them around, I do a kind of slapdash version, which I will describe now.

My hacked version relies on onions caramelized in butter (when I run out of onions, cooking becomes difficult) and whetever curry spices I have on hand. The onions, sweet and buttery, give the dish a savory depth that approaches, but doesn’t quite reach, the splendor of Madison’s. And the random nature of the curry spices I have on hand give the dish an unpredictability I treasure.

Mise en place.
• A good chunk of butter, about three tablespoons. (I’ve been using Organic Valley “pasture butter.”) Especially without the coconut milk, butter gives this dish richness. I don’t much like store-bought ghee, and am usually too pressed for time or lazy to make my own from butter. You could use good-quality vegetable oil in a pinch—or a combination of butter and oil. Homemade ghee is the gold standard.
• 2 small onions, halved lengthwise and sliced thinly.
• Curry spices. I really recommend keeping a store of black mustard seeds around. Other ones are turmeric, cinnamon, cardamon, and even store-bought “curry” mix. something hot is neccessary—crushed chile flakes, hot paprika, etc. Note: whole spices, like cinnamon stick and cardamon seed, add real vibrancy to the dish, and need not be ground. (See below.)
• 2-4 cloves garlic (I use four), chopped fine.
• A knuckle-sized knob of ginger, peeled and chopped fine, optional but recommended (note to self—why am I always out of ginger? I love the stuff.)
• I cup red lentils, rinsed and picked over for rocks, then drained.
• 3 cups water
• Good sea salt
• A loaded pepper grinder
• Something green—preferably cilantro, but parsley works, too—chopped.

Process:
In a medium-sized heavy-bottomed pot, heat butter over medium-low heat. When the butter has melted and its foam has subsided, add the sliced onion. Turn heat to a gentle medium. (Note: to aid the caramelizing process, i sometimes add a pinch of sugar.) Now add the spices—a little of this and a little of that. Definitely a full teaspoon of mustard seeds. If you have a small chunk of cinnamon stick, add it; two or three cardamon seeds would be good. You’ll fish them out later, or someone will accidently bite into one. I guarantee your the risk-reward ratio is favorable here. Sprinkle on a heavy pinch of turmeric, by all means, and “curry powder,” too; and whetever else you have in the way of curry spices. And good pinch of spicy paprika or crushed chile. Stir in spices. Cook, stirring often, until onions soften. Make sure they don’t scorch; turn down heat if they threaten to. When the onions are soft, turn heat to low and stir occasionally. Be patient. Soon enough, you will have lovely brown onions. When the onions have browned, stir in the garlic and, if you have it, the ginger. Let it cook another minute and add the lentils. Stir to coat with the curried brown onions. Add the water, bring to a boil over high heat, turn heat to lowest setting and cover. They’ll cook in 30-40 minutes. Check occasionally to make sure they’re not drying out; if so, add some hot water. Like split peas, they should be very soft—a kind of rough paste. When they’re done, taste, and add a half teaspoon of salt and a generous grinding of pepper. Then taste again. Note how the salt sparked everything to life. Correct for salt, and serve.

I serve them with brown rice, topped with chopped parsley. To take the dish to the next level, add some sauteed, curried collard greens to the side. All of that, plus a raw cabbage salad brightened with fresh lemon juice and chopped parsley, make a simple, delicious winter dinner.

This sort of food seems best-suited to beer—one with enough sweetness and roastiness to stand up to the spice. I enjoyed it recently with Duck-Rabbit Porter. I bet a zippy, dry Riesling would work, too.

Related Links:

How Hurricane Katrina turned me into a citrus fanatic and marmalade maker

Thick as a foggy, drizzly night: smoky-spicy split peas

Winter cold no match for spicy kimchi stew

Sometimes when I’m interviewed on the radio, it’s really awkward. The interviewer doesn’t know or understand the topic and asks a senseless question; or I have five seconds to construct the perfect soundbite and flub it; sometimes both.

Other times, I get an interlocutor who’s immersed in the topic, puts me at ease, gives me time to, well, ramble, and asks great follow-up questions. Kate Manchester of Edible Radio is my ideal interviewer. Here find the podcast of our talk last week. (Don’t be put off by the massive mugshot that looms over the play tab.) We talk about Maverick Farms, the genius of multi-farm CSAs in mountain areas, and the importance of food in rebuilding robust community-level economies.

Related Links:

Watch Yes Men stick it to Archer Daniels Midland

Oscar smiles upon ‘Food, Inc.,’ stiffs ‘Mr. Fox’

USDA’s Deputy Secretary discusses local, organic farming

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)On On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced a bill aimed at getting 10 million new solar rooftop systems and 200,000 new solar hot water heating systems installed in the U.S. in the next 10 years.

Cleverly titled the “10 Million Solar Roofs & 10 Million Gallons of Solar Hot Water Act” (PDF), it would provide rebates that cover up to half the cost of new systems, along the lines of incentive programs in California and New Jersey (not coincidentally, Nos. 1 and 2 in installed solar in the U.S.). It also includes measures to insure that those who receive assistance get information on how to make their buildings more energy efficient.

Sanders currently has nine co-sponsors: Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.),  Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Arlen Specter (D-Pa.).

The bill would accelerate what is already a fairly rapid pace of growth for distributed solar power. Distributed energy has a number of advantages over its central-plant competitors (both clean and dirty): it’s faster to build, avoids the need for expensive transmission lines, can use already developed land, and enhances community resilience and self-reliance. It’s also labor-intensive, creating more jobs per dollar of investment than its competitors—a feature that may make it more attractive during a recession, when Democrats are turning their attention to unemployment.

I chatted with Sen. Sanders about the bill, the growth of solar, and his colleagues’ peculiar fixation on nuclear power:

Q. How much would your program cost?

A. We think this will cost between 2 and 3 billion dollars a year, and at the end of a 10-year period we are going to be producing 30,000 new megawatts of energy—the equivalent of what 30 nuclear power plants produce. This is a very cost effective way of producing that energy.

Q. Even if you take half the price off a solar system, it still has relatively high upfront capital costs. Are you looking into ways for people to find financing?

A. Remember that there are already a lot of tax credits, federal and in many states.  The federal tax credit would be up to 30 percent off the cost of a project. That’s a lot.  Let’s say hypothetically you wanted to spend $40,000 on solar. If you take 30 percent off that, you’re down to $28,000. If you get state help you’re down to $25,000. Then the federal government would pay half of that.

That’s a pretty good deal! It could be a major incentive for people to use photovoltaics. And the more photovoltaics we use, the more will be built; the more that are built, the cheaper it becomes.

Q. What about the objection that it’s a subsidy that advantages some states (the sunny ones) over others?

A. The fact is that every state in this country can produce at least 10 percent of its electricity from solar. [Sanders’ press release cites ISLR’s report on Energy Self-Reliant States.] In Vermont, we’re moving on solar. New Jersey is one of the leading producers of solar energy in America.  It’ll obviously work better in Florida and California—that’s true, and that’s great—but this is for all 50 states.

For people who are complaining about subsidies to energy, well, they’ve got to take a deep breath: huge amounts of money into nuclear, huge amounts of money into coal, huge amounts of money into oil.  It is time that we begin to subsidize those technologies that are cutting greenhouse gas emissions and in the long run will be more cost-effective.

Q. Do you get the sense that your Senate colleagues appreciate the power of renewable energy, particularly distributed renewables?

A. No, they don’t. I’m a member of both the Environment Committee and the Energy Committee, and it just astounds me how little discussion there has been about the potential of sustainable energy in general and solar in particular.  If you go to an Energy Committee meeting, it’s about nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. The general assumption is that nuclear is time-tested, it’s cheap, it’s reliable; solar is experimental, it’s fringe, maybe someday.

Roughly speaking, a new nuclear power plant will cost you about $10 billion. Then at some point you’ve got to decommission it and get rid of the waste—a great expense. The average nuclear power plant will produce about 1,000 megawatts for that $10 billion dollars. We can produce 30,000 megawatts for $30 billion and they’re going to produce it for $300 billion.

Now, theirs is baseload ours is intermittent, that is true. But having said that, our form of production is far more cost effective than nuclear. Have you ever heard anybody talk about that outside of the environmental community? You have not heard that discussion on the floor of the House or the Senate. And the reason you’re not hearing about this is the solar industry doesn’t quite have the clout that the coal industry, the oil industry, or the nuclear industry has.

Now, you asked me [about distributed energy].  We need to push solar, in all of its forms, as aggressively as we can.  I’m not very sympathetic to people who tell us, “If we don’t move aggressively to cut greenhouse gas emissions the world will collapse, but I don’t like wind because a bird got killed.” According to the secretary of the interior, we can produce almost 30 percent of the electricity for homes in this country through solar thermal in the Southwest.  That is extraordinary. We should begin building those things tomorrow.

It’s not a question of either/or. It’s both. It’s those, wind, geothermal, biomass versus coal and oil and nuclear. Our main job is to cut back greenhouse gas emissions in a fundamental way, and to transform our energy system. So people should be putting their shoulders to the wheel.

Q. Is anyone in Congress talking about the barriers to distributed energy posed by America’s complex regime of utility regulations?

A. Yeah, they are. Many of us like what Germany has done—feed-in tariffs. In Vermont, without state regulations, one of our major utilities has unilaterally instituted those with good results. A lot of the utilities are tied into coal and to gas, and they will be resistant. There’s always resistance to change. But I think we have the wind at our backs, or the sun in our faces, or whatever. We are making progress.

Q. What’s the road forward for the bill? Any chance it will be part of the upcoming jobs bill?

A. It’s certainly something I would like to see. In any vehicle, any venue we can get, we’re going to push it.

Related Links:

Palin bashes ‘cap and tax’ and commends Obama on nuclear

The Climate Post: In which it feels like everything has come to a full stop

Anti-jobs ‘California Jobs Initiative’ crew threatens suit over name change

Dearest readers,

Sometimes when I’m down in the stacks researching answers to
your latest dilemmas, I enjoy taking a stroll down Ask Umbra archives lane. Here
are some sparkly tidbits I culled from my past advice on lessening your impact on
that sweet little romantic holiday, Valentine’s Day. Have any of your own
sustainable loving tips or stories? Let me know in the comments section below
or shoot me an email.

Lovingly,
Umbra

Related Links:

Ask Umbra on engagement rings, straws, and napkins

Ask Umbra’s video advice on making your own club soda

Ask Umbra on sustainable manufacturing jobs, sexless fish, and matches

Series redirect.

Related Links:

Coal: clean it up or move on?

Climate Citizens

A rollicking tour of America’s energy landscape

Cross-posted from Wonk Room.

In a series of hard-hitting television ads, a liberal veterans
advocacy organization challenges Republican lawmakers for blocking
clean energy legislation that would cut oil funds to terrorists. As
part of a $2 million television ad campaign,
VoteVets has released a national spot as well as ones targeting Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), and Sen.
John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) for their opposition to climate and clean energy
legislation. Other ads challenge representatives in Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and South Dakota.
As the spots point out, each member has taken thousands of dollars from
oil companies that have operations in nations like Iran, Libya, Saudi
Arabia, Iraq, Nigeria, and Algeria. The national ad explains the connection between our dependence on oil and terrorists like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab:

Terrorists. They’re trying to kill Americans at home and
our troops abroad. And who’s footing the bill for the attacks against
us? Oil money. Filtered through secret organizations in the Middle East
and countries like Iran. When oil money hands up in the hands of our enemies, Americans pay the ultimate price.
We’ve got to protect ourselves and end our dependence on foreign oil.
Tell Congress: Pass the Clean Energy and American Power Act now.

Watch it:

The local spots are unflinching, featuring local veterans of the
Iraq War. Veteran Benjamin Cossel, of Pine Bluffs, Wy. tells Sen.
Barrasso to “decide whose side he’s on”—the terrorist-enabling oil
companies that have given him $50,500, or the American people:

For thirty years, we’ve been warned about the danger of
spending billions of dollars oil. The United States military calls it a
major threat to our security. And on Christmas Day over Detroit, we
were reminded again how oil money can support terrorism against us. But
even today, Sen. John Barrasso won’t break our addiction. And he won’t
break his own. Call Sen. Barrasso. It’s time for him to decide whose side he’s on.

Veteran James Sander of Columbia, Mo. challenges Rep. Blunt for taking
$151,000 in oil money and voting against the Waxman-Markey American
Clean Energy and Security Act:

When a terrorist tried to attack us on Christmas Day, I
was reminded why I’m willing to risk my life for America’s security and
why we need to stop sending billions in oil money to countries with
ties to terrorism. But Congressman Blunt voted against the bipartisan
clean energy bill that could cut our dependence in half. And he’s taken
thousands from oil companies that do business in countries with ties to
terrorism. Congressman: it’s time to put America’s security ahead of
your own politics.

George Zubaty, of Louisville, KY takes on the minority leader for taking $150,800 in dirty oil cash:

When a terrorist tried to attack us on Christmas Day, I
was reminded why I’m willing to risk my life for America’s security and
why we need to stop sending billions in oil money to countries with
ties to terrorism. But Sen. Mitch McConnell is against against the
bipartisan clean energy bill that could cut our dependence in half. And
he’s taken thousands from oil companies that do business in countries
with ties to terrorism. Sen. McConnell: it’s time to put America’s
security ahead of your own politics.

As the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review noted, “climate change,
energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked.” And
the number one link is our deadly dependence on petroleum.

Related Links:

Pentagon: ‘Climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked’

Water, conflict, and security on the banks of the Hudson

Veteran wins groundbreaking claim for Agent Orange exposure at Georgia military base

First things first: President Barack Obama
defended a market-based system to limit the pollution of heat-trapping
gases, a core part of his legislative agenda, even as he acknowledged
the Senate may pursue an energy bill without one. He spoke to a “town
hall” meeting in Nashua, N.H., about the potential of Senators removing
technology-and-jobs legislation from the context of a larger climate
bill: “We may be able to separate these things out. And it’s conceivable that that’s where the Senate ends up.”

Unlike last year, the White House’s proposed 2011 budget,
which came out Monday, assumes no revenue from a “cap-and-trade”
program. In a footnote, the administration says that in the event
revenues materialize, they should be used in “climate-related purposes”
for industry and consumers. The budget eliminates fossil-fuel
subsidies, boosts EPA funding to implement its greenhouse gas
regulations, and triples loan guarantees to the nuclear industry, to
$54 billion, an olive branch to the GOP that is likely to rankle the
left.

The key Republican in the Senate climate debate, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, pushed back at his colleagues who favored an energy-only bill, saying, “If the
approach is to try to pass some half-assed energy bill and say that’s
moving the ball down the road, forget it with me.”

Washington beyond politics: The Defense
Department includes a dense, serious four pages on climate change and
energy security in its 128-page Quadrennial Defense Review [pp 84-88]. Planners write that global warming will challenge the kinds
of missions the military will carry out. The authors rely on official
U.S. scientific reports, including the U.S. Global Change Research
Program’s 2009 overview,
and intelligence sources. The QDR observes that “climate-related
changes are already being observed in every region of the world,
including the United States and its coastal waters.” Climate change, to
Defense planners is “an accelerant of instability or conflict.” The
military will also have to adapt to changes along with everyone else: “In 2008, the National Intelligence Council judged that more than 30
U.S. military installations were already facing elevated levels of risk
from rising sea levels.”

Politics beyond Washington: The Quadrennial Defense Review provides a sobering dose of reality to
the political arena, where the driving motivation for strong policy is
employment. And that message faces strong headwinds.

In California, fiscal woe is undermining public support for
leadership in climate and environmental policy. A bill to repeal the
state’s climate solutions law, known as A.B. 32, has failed in the
legislature. It would have suspended the law’s implementation, due in
2012, until California’s state employment rate falls to 5.5 percent,
from the current 12.4 percent. Opponents are pressing for a November public referendum to repeal. Separately, the oil, chemical, and trucking industries are suing California over its low-carbon fuels regulations, which took effect
last month. The suit charges that the state rules violate the
constitution by interfering with interstate trade. The rules, they
argue, discriminate against out-of-state fuel companies.

Internationally, the Guardian concludes from chats with international climate specialists that “a global deal
to tackle climate change is all but impossible in 2010,” leaving an
uneasy trajectory.  Jan. 31 was the “soft” deadline for nations to
submit to the UNFCC their emissions reduction commitments or national
mitigation actions. Fifty-countries complied with the deadline set out
in the Copenhagen Accord, including the European Union members. Top
U.N. officials who assessed the pledges have expressed concern that the numbers are very unlikely
to meet the political aspiration of keeping global warming limited to
two degrees. The U.S. submitted language similar to what Obama promised
at Copenhagen, a 17 percent emissions cut below 2005 levels in 2020.
Europe would reduce 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. China and
India have pledged reductions in the carbon-intensity of their fuels.

Intergovernmental Panel for Corrections and Clarifications: Twenty-six percent of the Netherlands is below sea level. This unremarkable fact surfaced this week after a Dutch magazine discovered the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put 55 percent of
the land below the threshold in its 2007 report (55 percent of the land
is vulnerable to flooding). Finger-pointing ensued. Perhaps the IPCC
was thinking not of the modern Netherlands, but the Batavian Republic
of the late 18th century, which was smaller and more concentrated by
the sea?

How can such mistakes be avoided in the future? If you ask
cryptographers how to reduce the potential for mistakes, they’ll tell
you to publish everything about a cryptographic system publicly. If
there are security flaws, some enterprising hacker will find them. The
same idea applies to Wikipedia, whose quality control is only as good
as its volunteer community gardeners. It’s not a new idea. Attending a
livestock exhibition a century ago, the scientist Francis Galton was
surprised to discover that in a contest, no individual accurately
guessed the weight of an ox, yet the average of more than 800 guesses
hit the mark.

If so many of us are interested in helping scrutinize the second
review draft of the fifth IPCC report, perhaps there is a way to make
it easier for good Samaritan fact-checkers to root out what turn out to
be dumb mistakes. The IPCC is already an openly collaborative
work—scientific peer review is the original “crowdsourced” enterprise. And the organization is up front about the process by which it produces its comprehensive reports [pdf]. How can public readers of Web-published drafts strengthen the next final report?

Concerns about a lack of crowdsourcing go to the heart of
accusations over what, if anything, was wrong or distasteful about the
tranche of more than 1,000 e-mail messages hacked out of University of
East Anglia servers late last year. Yesterday, an ad hoc committee of
Pennsylvania State University administrators cleared paleoclimatologist
Michael Mann on three of four concerns arising from the UEA e-mails [pdf]:
that he made up or falsified data; disregarded protections on other
researchers; and failed to disclose financial conflicts of interests. A
fourth inquiry—“failure to comply with other applicable legal
requirements governing research or other scholarly activities”—will be
looked at by a group of faculty members, because the administrative
committee wasn’t in a proper position to evaluate.

Question of the week: If you’ve read this far down, and do every week, you officially are a friend of the Climate Post. Thank you. Lunch with a couple friends of Climate Post turned on a—perhaps the—central
question in talking about this stuff: How (on Earth) can we tell
experiential, photo-friendly stories about a phenomena experienced most confidently
only by satellites, digitized ocean buoys, and air-sipping,
laser-blasting, carbon-dioxide-molecule counting machines? In the post-Copenhagen world of Waxman-Markey purgatory, what do we talk about when we talk about climate change?

Have you personally experienced global warming? And how do you know
that, exactly? Let’s hear about it. We can crowdsource the big story embedded in
them.

IPCC, brown-paper cover edition: In a move no one could have foreseen, embattled IPCC chief Rejendra Pachauri last month published a lascivious romance novel, Return to Almora, which he wrote during recent years traveling the world as a celebrity scientist. Full stop.

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I miss Van Jones.  A lot of us miss President Obama’s former green jobs visionary.

That includes coal miners and residents on Coal River Mountain.

If President Obama’s brilliant green jobs administrator hadn’t been hounded out of office in a bizarre witch hunt last fall, we would be engaged in an exciting discussion about pursuing a just transition to a clean energy economy at ground zero in our nation’s energy policy and climate debate—the coalfields.

While clean energy jobs are a hot topic in the president’s vision—and State of the Union—Van Jones was one of a few administrators in Washington, D.C., who also envisioned a fair share of green jobs for the Big Coal-strangled coalfields in Appalachia, the Midwest and the West, not just the rest of the country.

Last week, the president spoke about the need for a transition in West Virginia’s coalfields—by calling for more coal and the new bridge to nowhere in the guise of carbon capture and storage.  He declared:

For example, nobody’s been a bigger promoter of clean coal technology than I am. In testament to that, I ended up being in a whole bunch of advertisements that you guys saw all the time about investing in ways for us to burn coal more cleanly.

And then the president offered:

What I want to do is with West Virginia to figure out how we can seize that future. But to do that, that means there’s going to have to be some transition. We can’t operate the coal industry in the United States as if we’re still in the 1920s or the 1930s or the 1950s. We’ve got to be thinking, what does that industry look like in the next hundred years?

Next hundred years?  Even West Virginia Congressman and Big Coal peddler Nick Rahall has openly discussed the issue of Appalachia facing a “peak coal” crisis within 20 years.

In the president’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the entire state of Kentucky, for example, only received $4.7 million in green job funds and initiatives—while billions of dollars continue to be poured into the Big Coal black hole to cover external health care and environmental costs, including defaulted black lung payments.

A study released by the National Academy of Scientists in October found that the “hidden costs” of coal amount to more than $62 billion in “external damages” to our health and lives.  According to a West Virginia University report this year, the coal industry “costs the Appalachian region five times more in early deaths than it provides in economic benefits.” A recent Mountain Association of Community Economic Development study concluded that coal is responsible for $528 million in state revenues and $643 million in state expenditures in Kentucky alone.

While Kentucky ranks 46-47th in per capita income, coal mining hubs like Clay, Harlan, and Martin County rank as some of the poorest counties in the nation.

Thanks to mountaintop removal mining and greater mechanization, employment in these coalfield areas has dropped by nearly 50 percent in the last generation.

A year ago at the Powershift clean energy conference in Washington, DC, Jones declared: “This movement also has to include the coal miners.” He added. “We could have clean coal, and we could have unicorns pull our cars for us.”

While our president continues to carry Jones’ clean energy banner, he still glibly clings to “clean coal” slogans, a motto introduced by Chicago coal pusher Francis Peabody in the 1890s, and used over the past century whenever the coal industry faces an image problem and seeks to derail any diversification in our coalfield economies.

In 2008, Jones noted:

I think it’s important that we be respectful of all the contributions that have been made by all workers. Even our coal workers are heros in a way ... in that they’ve been asked to sacrifice their lungs, their health, their communities. We’re now asking our coal miners to blow up their grandmother’s mountains! Awful ... Mountaintop removal and strip-mining ... Those coal miners don’t set the energy policy in this country but they have to make the sacrifices to carry it out. I think that sometimes we aren’t respectful enough, that we’re not as encouraging and honoring of the people who have gotten America to this point.

Van Jones understood, like the majority of coalfield residents not on the payroll of a coal company, that mountaintop removal mining—and strip mining, in general—have blindsided any progress for sustainable economic development and clean energy jobs in Appalachia, and other coal mining regions.

Just ask residents fending off mountaintop removal in the Coal River Valley today.

As blasting continues daily at the Bee Tree Branch area of the massive 6,600-acre mountaintop removal mine on historic Coal River Mountain today, our nation’s most exciting clean energy initiative and green jobs breakthrough for the coalfields is being destroyed.  Coal River Mountain is being blown to bits, and with it, any sustainable economic future for the area.  Unlike the limited 14-year supply of coal on the site, the Coal River Wind project would have provided long-term energy for 70,000-150,000 households, an estimated 200 jobs and $1.7 million in annual county taxes.

Says Eric Mathis of the JOBS project in Mingo County, W. Va.:

Sustainable economic development not only needs to start in the coalfields but has to start in the coalfields if only for the fact that America has a long standing commitment to operating within the boundaries of democracy. Boundaries which seek to limit the monopolization of markets and more importantly peoples choice. For this reason America owes coalfield residents a choice to decide their own fate. Sustainable economic development provides a viable choice that shatters the 150 year legacy of a monopolized workforce. As our great county transitions to a carbon neutral economy we owe coalfield residents our greatest and sincere respect for building our country and bringing us through two world wars. For this reason, the JOBS project intends to show respect to these communities by providing a choice for what type of development they want to see.

Van Jones would be standing at Coal River Mountain today, as part of Clean Energy Week.  He would have made sure that the coalfields—in Appalachia, the heartland, and the west—were included in the clean energy future.

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This is funny.

A group in California is working on a ballot initiative to suspend implementation of AB 32, the state’s global warming law, until California’s unemployment drops below 5.5% for four consecutive quarters. No big fans of green jobs, one presumes. Their proposed title? The “California Jobs Initiative.”

The Luntzian nomenclature reminds me of Bush’s “Healthy Forests Initiative,” which did have its own perverse logic, in that a clearcut forest and denuded hillsides are significantly less at risk for major fires.

In any event, California Attorney General Jerry Brown gets final say on ballot initiative naming, and he prefers: “Suspends air pollution control laws requiring major polluters to
report and reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.”

Now the sponsoring group is reportedly threatening to sue.

Which reminds me of Fox News’ lawsuit against Al Franken for using “Fair and Balanced” in his book title—an effort entirely welcomed by Franken, as the controversy put his book onto bestseller lists and kept it there for a long time.

Fox had the last laugh, though. After the judge threw out their case, they dropped their lawsuit, saying:

“It’s time to return Al Franken to the obscurity that he’s normally accustomed to,” Fox News spokeswoman Irena Steffen said.

Anyway, I wonder what Senator Franken has to say about the ballot initiative?

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The Climate Post: In which it feels like everything has come to a full stop

The jobs are in the trees

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Few people spare a thought for nitrogen. 
But with every bite we take—of an apple, a chicken leg, a leaf of spinach—we are consuming nitrogen. Plants, including food crops, can’t thrive without a ready supply of available nitrogen in the soil.

The amount of
food a farmer could grow was once limited by his or her ability to supplement soil
nitrogen, either by planting cover crops, applying manure, or moving on to a
new, more fertile field. Then, about 100 years ago, a technical innovation enabled us to
produce a cheap synthetic form of nitrogen, and voila! Agriculture’s nitrogen
limitation problem was solved.  The age
of industrial nitrogen fertilizers had begun. 

The breakthrough, by German
chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch (rhymes with posh), made it possible to
grow many, many, many more crops per acre. For the last 50 years, farmers
around the world have used synthetic nitrogen fertilizers to boost their crop
yields and drive the 20th century’s rapid agricultural
intensification.

But in their fervor to increase
yields, farmers often dose their crops with more nitrogen than the plants can absorb.
The excess is now causing serious air and water pollution and threatening human
health. Ironically, all that fertilizer may even be ruining the very soil it was
meant to enrich.

Nitrogen, it seems, has a
dark side, and it has created serious problems that we are only now beginning
to reckon with.

Nitrogen kills a bay

To see nitrogen’s ill effects up close head to the mid-Atlantic coast and visit
the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary. Once the site of a highly
productive fishery and renowned for its oysters, crabs, and clams, today the
bay is most famous for its ecological ruin.

On Dec. 9, 2008, the
Environmental Protection Agency’s restoration program for the Chesapeake Bay
marked its 25th anniversary. Other than the passing of the years, there wasn’t
much to celebrate. The Chesapeake Bay Program’s goal is rehabilitation of the
vastly polluted estuary, yet its 2008 “Bay Barometer” assessment found that “despite
small successes in certain parts of the ecosystem and specific
geographic
areas, the overall health of the Chesapeake Bay did not improve in
2008.” (The fight to save the Chesapeake continues; in 2009, President
Obama ordered the federal EPA to lead the ongoing cleanup efforts, but
groups involved are still arguing over the details.)

A significant portion of
the Chesapeake Bay pollution comes from agricultural operations whose
nutrient-rich runoff—in the form of excess nitrogen and phosphorus—fills the
Bay’s waters, leading to algal blooms, fish kills, habitat degradation, and bacteria proliferations that endanger human health.

The nitrogen runoff comes
from the synthetic fertilizer applied to farm fields, as well as the manure generated
from the intensive chicken farming on the east bay. Of course, the nitrogen in
that chicken manure—some 650 million pounds per year, according to The New York Times— can largely be traced to
synthetic nitrogen; the chickens are merely recycling the synthetic fertilizer
that was originally applied to feed crops.

This type of reactive
nutrient pollution is now so common that the dead zones, acidified lakes, and
major habitat degradation it can cause are occurring with greater frequency,
not just in the Chesapeake Bay, but in other parts of the United States and around the world.

Bombs away:
Synthetic nitrogen comes of age

Nitrogen is ubiquitous. It makes up 78 percent of the earth’s atmosphere. But
atmospheric nitrogen is inert. It exists in a stable, gaseous form (N2), which
plants cannot use. Unless nitrogen is made available to plants, either by
nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil or by the application of fertilizer, crops
won’t grow as productively.

The German chemists Haber and Bosch found a
way around this availability problem. Originally conceived as a way to make explosives for war, their technique turned inert nitrogen gas into highly
reactive ammonia (NH3), a form of nitrogen that can be applied to soil and
absorbed by plants. With their discovery, nitrogen ceased to be a limiting
factor in agriculture.

The widespread use of
synthetic fertilizer took off after World War II when innovations allowed nitrogen fertilizer
to be produced inexpensively and on a grand scale. When Norman Borlaug, a leader of the Green Revolution,
and other plant breeders began developing and exporting dwarf, high-yielding,
fertilizer-loving varieties of corn and wheat, the new chemical fertilizer
addiction went global. In 1960, farmers in developed and developing countries
applied about 10 million metric tons of nitrogen fertilizer to their fields. In
2005, they applied 100 million metric tons.

This order of magnitude
increase coincided with the Green Revolution. Indeed, nitrogen fertilizer is
largely responsible for the phenomenal crop yield increases of the past 45
years. Without the additional food production fueled by nitrogen fertilizer,
researchers estimate that two billion fewer people would be alive today.

Shifting shapes, getting around

Modern agriculture—and, consequently, present-day human society—depends on
the widespread availability of cheap nitrogen fertilizer, the ingredient that
makes our high-yielding food system possible. But the industrialization of this
synthetic nitrogen fertilizer has come with costs.

The high temperatures and
very high pressures needed to transform N2 to NH3 are energy intensive. About
one percent of the world’s annual energy consumption is used to produce ammonia,
most of which becomes nitrogen fertilizer. That’s about 80 million metric tons
(or roughly one percent) of annual global CO2 emissions—a significant carbon
footprint.

Nearly half that
fertilizer is used to grow feed for livestock. Herds then return the nitrogen
to the landscape, where it contributes to several different kinds of pollution—the
second cost of synthetic nitrogen.

Synthetic fertilizer is
made with reactive nitrogen—that’s what makes the fertilizer easy for plants to
use. As it turns out, though, reactive nitrogen doesn’t always stay where you
put it. Farmers may apply this synthetic fertilizer to their cornfields, but the
nitrogen in it will happily engage with the soil carbon, oxygen, and water in
its environment. This is the essential problem with reactive nitrogen—its
ability to morph and move around, often to unhealthy ends (see illustration).

Estimates vary on just
how much nitrogen escapes from fields and remains reactive and potentially
harmful, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that plants absorb 30 to 50
percent of the nitrogen in the soil. So if a farmer applies 125 pounds of
nitrogen fertilizer to an acre of corn, 30-50 percent of it will end up in the
corn; as much as 70 percent—or 87 pounds per acre—could end up somewhere else.

‘N’ stands for ‘Needs to improve’

There is an obvious way around this nitrogen problem: use less fertilizer more efficiently. But
there’s not much incentive to cut back.

Farmers
get paid by the ton, which makes yields the driving force of modern
agriculture. Most agronomists agree that farmers can get the same yields
without applying as much fertilizer and manure as they now do. But few farmers
are willing to take that chance. Many farmers use fertilizer as a form of insurance; better to apply a little too much and get high yields than apply too little and risk yield (and profit) declines.

 The challenge then is to
find a way to provide plants with enough nutrients to maintain high yields
while also minimizing nitrogen leakages. This may sound straightforward, but
it’s tough to find mainstream farmers who are using nitrogen efficiently and
safely. There simply aren’t incentives to do so. Fertilizer is cheap, and
polluters don’t pay.

The situation might
change if nitrous oxide becomes regulated under climate legislation. But in the
climate bills currently making their way through Congress, agricultural
emissions are explicitly exempted from any cap. Even if ag-related nitrous
oxide emissions did get capped, policies would have to address efficiency
directly. Otherwise, a climate-focused policy risks encouraging farmers to adopt practices that simply force the
reactive nitrogen in another direction—into ground and surface water, for
example.

Farmers
don’t over-apply nitrogen on purpose. Nor do they want to contribute to estuary
pollution and dead zones. But for 40 years, we’ve invested in a type of
agriculture that rewards high yields over all other considerations.

U.S. grain farmers
operate under pressure to generate volume, and have little or no incentive to
conserve synthetic nitrogen along the way. Under the Farm Bill, commodity
farmers get subsidies based on how many bushels they churn out, not how
efficiently they use nitrogen. Even when fertilizer prices spiked in 2008,
synthetic nitrogen remained a remarkably cheap resource—and corn farmers had
every economic reason to lay it on liberally.

In their
2009 paper in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, researchers G.
Philip Robertson from the University of Michigan and Peter M. Vitousek from Stanford noted that the cost of applying a little
additional nitrogen to a cornfield is more than paid for by the marginal gains
in yield. In other words, corn is really cheap—but nitrogen is even cheaper.

Scientists now know that
this arrangement can’t last forever—agricultural intensification has come with
enormous costs. They also know there are other ways to manage crops and reward
farmers. The Rodale Institute’s research on high yield production using
cover crops to build soil organic matter and biologically fix nitrogen provides
one example of a potential alternative to current practices. But the incentive
structure around farming must change.

No longer can
farm-support policy blindly push maximum yield. Farmers should be rewarded at
least as much for conserving nitrogen and building the organic matter in soil.
Rodale’s research suggests that those goals can be achieved without sacrificing
much in the way of long-term yield.

Twenty-five years ago,
the Commonwealths of Pennsylvania and Virginia, the state of Maryland, and the
District of Columbia formally agreed to cooperate with the United States
Environmental Protection Agency, in order “to fully address the extent,
complexity, and sources of pollutants entering the [Chesapeake] Bay.” As it
turns out, the Bay and other nitrogen-threatened ecosystems need more than cooperation to get healthy. They need the kind of political will that will take nitrogen
efficiency and impacts seriously—and force actual changes to agricultural
practices. And endangered ecosystems need for those changes to happen soon. We don’t have
another quarter century to spare.

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Percent by which President Obama’s latest budget proposal would
increase taxpayer-backed loan guarantees to build new nuclear reactors:
300

Amount the Department of Energy under President Bush originally proposed spending on loan guarantees for nuclear reactors: $18.5 billion

Amount the Obama administration is now proposing to spend: $54 billion

Number of new reactors that Energy Secretary Steven Chu says that amount could support: 7 to 10

The
nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the risk of
default on these loans, leaving taxpayers to pick up the tab: 50 percent

Potential
risk exposure to taxpayers based on various proposed scenarios for new
nuclear plant construction, as calculated by the Union of Concerned
Scientists: $360 billion to $1.6 trillion

Current price estimate for a new reactor: $10 billion

Of the 4 nuclear reactor construction projects considered front-runners for loan guarantees,* number in the south: 3

Early
cost estimate for the two reactors proposed for the V.C. Summer plant
in South Carolina, a joint project of SCE&G and Santee Cooper: $9.8 billion

Current cost estimate for that project: nearly $11 billion

Current
estimated cost of the project to build two new reactors at the Southern
Co./Georgia Power Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro, Ga.: $14 billion

Year
in which the Georgia legislature passed a law allowing Georgia Power to
begin charging customers for the Vogtle reactors even before they were
licensed: 2009

Date
on which the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that
Westinghouse failed to demonstrate that the building designed to shield
its AP1000 reactor—the design slated for Vogtle and Summer—was
safe: 10/15/2009

Original cost estimate for the two reactors at the South Texas Project, which involves NRG Energy, CPS Energy, and Toshiba: $5.4 billion

Adjusted cost estimate announced last fall: $13 billion

Current cost estimate for the project: $17 billion

Amount
in damages CPS is seeking via a lawsuit that alleges NRG and Toshiba
conspired to mislead its officials on the reactors’ cost: $32 billion

Current estimated cost of the EPR reactor proposed for Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, not including financing: $10 billion

The estimated cost of an identical reactor being considered in Pennsylvania: $13 billion to $15 billion

During the previous nuclear push of the 1970s and 1980s, number of new plants utilities abandoned due to cost overruns: about 100

Estimated amount taxpayers and ratepayers paid for those abandoned plants: $40 billion

Amount ratepayers paid in today’s dollars in cost overruns for the plants that were built: over $200 billion

Year
in which Forbes called the previous round of nuclear plant
construction “the largest managerial disaster in business history, a
disaster on a monumental scale:” 1985

Estimated
additional amount it would cost to generate electricity today from 100
new nuclear reactors instead of generating the same amount of power
from a combination of energy efficiency and renewables: $1.9 trillion to $4.1 trillion

*
In the South, two new reactors are slated for V.C. Summer in South
Carolina, two for Plant Vogtle in Georgia, and two at the South Texas
Project near San Antonio. One reactor is also planned at Maryland’s
Calvert Cliffs, a joint undertaking of Constellation Energy and the
French government-owned Electricité de France.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South. Click on figures to go to the original source.)

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The
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has issued a long-awaited legal
analysis of how states could implement feed-in tariffs and still comply with
federal law.

The January 2010 report, “Renewable Energy Prices in State-Level Feed-in Tariffs: Federal
Law Constraints and Possible Solutions,” was written principally by
Scott Hempling with the National Regulatory Research Institute (NRRI) under
contract to NREL.

Hempling treads ground that others have tread before him, including
California’s Attorney General, Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown. The Attorney General
filed comments on who has jurisdiction to set feed-in tariffs
with California’s Public Utility Commission in August of 2009. Brown concluded
that the state could set feed-in tariffs sufficient to pay for renewable energy
development while complying with federal law.

NRRI’s Hempling, like Brown, concludes that states can offer feed-in tariffs,
but the programs creating the feed-in tariffs must be structured in a way that
meets federal requirements.

There’s ample ammunition in the Hempling report to stoke either side in the
feed-in tariff debate.

Opponents have long argued that feed-in tariffs are illegal in the U.S. They
will find ample solace in the report that the European or Canadian approach of
setting specific tariffs directly won’t comply with current federal law or its
interpretation. Hempling says, in essence, that states can’t set specific
tariffs above “avoided cost” under the Public Utility Regulatory
Policies Act (PURPA) of 1978.

However, Hempling goes on to chart a path to implementing feed-in tariffs that
avoids the regulatory minefield under PURPA and the Federal Power Act. Hempling
describes how states can set total payments, or equivalent feed-in tariffs,
above avoided cost in compliance with federal law. The path may appear more
circuitous, in comparison to that in other countries, but it is, nevertheless,
clear.

Feed-in tariff programs work best, that is, they quickly develop a significant
amount of renewable energy, when the tariffs are based on the cost of
generation plus a reasonable profit. In these programs, there are a suite of
tariffs for solar PV, another set for wind energy, and so on. The tariffs for
solar PV in these programs are much higher than the “avoided cost” of
a conventional natural gas-fired power plant in the U.S.

California’s largely ineffective feed-in tariff introduced at the end of 2008
pays $0.096 USD/kWh for projects installed in 2010. The tariff—there is only
one tariff—is based on the Market Price Referent, California’s term of art for
the avoided cost of a natural gas-fired plant. By mid 2009 the tariff had
resulted in only 17 MW of generation. Even with generous federal subsidies,
this tariff is insufficient for most technologies, but especially for solar PV,
the most expensive of the new renewable energy technologies.

There are two paths to lawful feed-in tariffs argues Hempling: the PURPA path
and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) path.

The PURPA path

Feed-in
tariffs can be lawful under PURPA if the feed-in tariffs are
“voluntarily” offered by the utility, or if the tariffs are based on
“avoided cost” and any additional payments necessary to make workable
tariffs are derived from:

These “supplemental” forms of payment fall outside FERC’s
jurisdiction.

Voluntary tariffs

Feed-in
tariffs, whether above avoided cost or not, are permissible if a utility
proposes them “voluntarily” as in Indiana where Indianapolis Power
& Light (IP&L) has a suite of proposed tariffs before the state’s
Utility Regulatory Commission. IP&L has proposed a solar PV tariff for
systems from 20 kW to 100 kW of $0.24 USD/kWh—a tariff clearly above the current
avoided cost of gas-fired plants.

This provision is less useful than it first appears. In states where earnings
are not decoupled from investments in generation, it is not in the
self-interest of utilities to offer functional feed-in tariffs that supplant
their own generation with non-utility generation.

Additional payments

Both
Hempling’s report and Brown’s PUC filing argue PURPA stipulates the payment of
“avoided cost.” This restriction doesn’t preclude other forms of
payment that “tops up” or adds to the avoided cost. Thus, the total
payment, or total tariff, can be based on the cost of generation. These top up
payments can come from many sources: Renewable Energy Credits, subsidies or
other payments, and state tax credits.

Renewable Energy Credits

In states with Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS), or renewable energy
mandates, utilities are required to produce a certain portion of their
generation with renewable energy. Regulators track the amount of renewable
energy generated by issuing “credits” for units of renewable energy.
These credits can be traded, and the trades establish a value that can be added
to the avoided cost. However, it is not necessary to trade the credits to
establish their value.

The value of the credits can be established administratively for any of a host
of reasons: environmental values, climate change avoidance, distributed
benefits, and so on. Thus, the total tariff can include a Renewable Energy
Credit designed to reach the total cost of generation plus a reasonable profit
when added to the “avoided cost”.

Other payments

Similarly, other forms of payments can be added to the avoided cost. Hempling
suggests subsidies or cash grants as the top up payment, but it need not be
limited to taxpayer subsidies.

Swiss feed-in tariffs, for example, pay a tariff that is comprised of two
parts: the wholesale cost, and a top up payment. In the Swiss system, the top
up payment is paid out of a Systems Benefit Charge, a pool of money collected
from ratepayers for a public good, in this case the development of renewable
energy.

Creating a pool of funds to pay for the portion of tariffs that exceed the
avoided cost through a Systems Benefit Charge can work, but the policy must be
designed with care. Such charges create a defined and, therefore potentially
limited, pool of funds. These pools can, depending upon design, effectively
place a monetary cap on renewable energy programs separate from the physical
targets in RPS programs. While this defined pool of funds might be appealing to
timid politicians wanting to limit the perceived cost of renewable energy, it
often leads to a boom and bust cycle so characteristic of U.S. renewable energy
policy.

However, successful feed-in tariff programs, such as in Germany, use what is in
essence a Systems Benefit Charge. The charge, and hence the size of the pool,
is “flexible” and is applied to ratepayers after-the-fact, that is,
the pool is sized to pay for the renewables on the system. Unlike pools where
the charge is fixed and the pool of funds to pay for renewable generation is
limited, Germany’s pool adjusts annually to pay for the actual amount of
renewable generation. The pool expands as more renewables are added and the
charge to ratepayers adjusts accordingly.

The German strategy of flexible or annually adjusted charges make sense because
it is not inconceivable that as more renewables are added to the system, and as
fossil fuels becomes more expensive, the charges, or “overcost” as the
French call them, will actually decrease.

French bank Caisse des Dépôts examined the overcost of French feed-in tariffs in late 2008. Their
findings flew in the face of conventional wisdom: as more renewables were added
to the system, especially wind, the overcost declined.

State utility tax credits

Washington state’s net-metering policy was built around a top up payment that
utilities could offset with state tax credits. The total payments, while
attractive, have only been modestly successful because of numerous restrictions
on the program to limit the program’s cost to the state treasury.

FERC path

Feed-in
tariffs can also be lawful under the Federal Power Act if the tariffs are

If the tariffs are cost-based, each contract must be reviewed by FERC, says
Hempling. Thus, if a homeowner installs a 5 kW solar system and signs a
contract with a utility, it must have the contract reviewed by FERC. This is a
nightmare scenario for small power producers.

If the tariffs are market-based, such as through an “auction,” the
“seller” must issue a “market-power” report to FERC every
three years. Again, compliance through this route is too cumbersome for
widespread adoption.

Less
than 20 MW exemption

However,
Hempling notes that these onerous conditions could be superseded if FERC took
one of several actions. Most importantly, FERC has granted
“exemptions” from PURPA for generators less than 20 MW. These
generators can sell at any price without seeking FERC approval. Hempling
suggests that state regulatory commissions could ask FERC for a
“clarification” that above avoided-cost tariffs would qualify
automatically for the less than 20 MW exemptions if they met certain conditions.
This is a promising near-term fix that would allow compliance with PURPA and
the Federal Power Act without relying on a two-tiered tariff made up of avoided
cost and some form of additional payment.

The California Energy Commission in its 2009 Integrated Energy Policy Report recommends that
the state seek “clarification of federal law to ensure that states can
implement cost-based feed-in tariffs.”

Other exemptions

Hempling
notes that Hawaii, Alaska, and most of Texas are exempt from the Federal Power
Act.

Long-term solutions

While
the use of RECs or SBC funds to pay for the portion of feed-in tariffs above
avoided cost is administratively more complex and consequently more costly than
simply setting a tariff and putting the cost in the rate base, it can be done.
Regulatory commissions and the utilities themselves are fully capable of, and in
fact do, administer such funds in several states.

While such a system can work, and in the U.S. legal system since the Civil War,
it may be necessary, such an approach treats renewable energy differently than
utility-owned conventional generation that is put into the rate base. It treats
renewables as a cost to the system and to ratepayers not as an integral part of
the utility system as in Ontario and Germany.

That the principle federal law governing renewable energy, PURPA, treats
renewable energy in this second-class way shouldn’t be surprising, considering
that the law passed more than three decades ago. Even then the first major wind
farms were not erected in California until several years later when the PUC
created the world’s first feed-in tariff, California’s famous Interim Standard
Offer Contract No. 4.

The bigger question of whether U.S. law will continue to treat renewable energy
as a burdensome addition to the existing utility system remains. Unless these
legal precedents in the U.S. are clarified or revised, the competitive
position of the U.S. will continue to erode in comparison to such states as China, India,
Germany, and Japan that look at renewable energy differently.

Germany confronted just such a question of how to treat renewable energy in the
late 1990s and the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, acted. The result is the
now famous Renewable Energy Sources Act, also known as the law on granting
renewable energy priority access to the grid. In the Act, renewable energy is
treated not only as a necessary and integral part of the electricity system, it
was given preference and the payments needed to profitably develop renewable
energy, even costly solar PV, were deemed desirable and the costs put in the
rate base.

While every German consumer pays out of pocket for renewable energy development
on their utility bill, study after study has consistently shown that the
benefits to both German consumers and German citizens as a whole outweigh the
monetary costs. In fact, the monetary benefits of offsetting conventional
generation from plants on the margin, the so-called merit-order effect, alone
outweighs the full cost of the tariffs, including the payments to Germany’s
massive development of solar PV.

Congressmen Jay Inslee and his co-sponsors have proposed fixes to PURPA in the
Waxman-Markey climate change bill. This may be the best that can be hoped for
from the currently dysfunctional U.S. Congress. But even this well-meaning effort
falls short of the re-orientation of U.S. renewable policy that is called for.

For now, the Hempling report clarifies for states that want to act how to do
so. For those that want to act, it points them in the direction they need to go
to meet FERC’s constraints. For those states that don’t want to act or are
afraid of doing so, the report gives them sufficient legal cover to avoid
taking the steps necessary.

To paraphrase a 68-page legal opinion: “Yes, we can implement feed-in
tariffs in the U.S. under existing law, we just have to do it differently than
everywhere else in the world.”

The path forward is clear for those states that want to aggressively develop
renewable energy in an equitable manner. The choice is theirs to make.

Related Links:

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British engineers slam home wind turbines as ‘eco-bling’

In the
months leading up to President Obama’s inauguration, the Bush administration
rushed through a raft of controversial regulations. These “midnight
regulations,” like the one that would allow mining waste to be dumped into
rivers and streams in West Virginia, caused a major stir at
the time—but whatever happened to them? After a year in office, has
the new president been able to clean up his predecessor’s last minute
mess? The answer is a mixed bag of
attempts, delays, successes, and road blocks.

Among the
avalanche of over
150 midnight regulations issued in the waning days of Bush’s tenure, there
are several major environmental deregulations that make it easier for factory
farms to pollute, endangered species to be threatened, and hazardous waste to
be burned. Despite attempts by the
current administration, almost all of these remain in effect.

Part of
the reason for the holdup is that the outgoing Bush administration made a
special effort to limit the incoming president’s ability to reverse these rules
by finalizing them before handing the reins to Obama. This makes the rules very difficult to
reverse even for a well intentioned successor. Changes or cancellations must go through the same extensive and
politicized process as proposed rules themselves, so removing a bad rule can
take years and success is not guaranteed.

The Obama
administration froze pending regulations where possible—Rahm Emmanuel issued a
memo within hours of the inauguration which stopped all rulemaking. He also
asked agencies to consider delaying the effective date of the rules if they
were already published. But once the
regulations are on the books—as many of Bush’s last minute regulations
were—they cannot be withdrawn unilaterally.

Here is
how the White House and its allies are making progress on overturning nine high
profile environmental midnight regulations:

Congress

In one
case, the president successfully encouraged Congress to use appropriations measures
to overturn a midnight regulation which weakened endangered species
protections. Congressional actions are
effective and binding, but trying to use this method to withdraw each of Bush’s
last minute rules may not be politically feasible: other than riders in appropriations bills,
only stand-alone legislation or the rarely used Congressional Review Act can
strike down a bad midnight regulation. In this political climate, it is not likely that Obama will go back to
the Hill for more help.

Courts

Three of
these nine environmental regulations are being challenged in court by advocacy
groups: the
mountain top mining rule, a permissive oil shale drilling rule, and a
deregulation for air pollution from factory farms. The challenges are all making slow and
halting progress through the legal system.

While
suits are pending, EPA has the authority to ask the courts to suspend the effective
date of the rule, preventing it from being implemented in the meantime. It’s not clear why the agency has not done
this yet for these rules.  For example,
the Obama administration pushed back the effective date to May 2010 for a
midnight regulation that would no longer ask facilities to collect and report
certain kinds of pollution emissions.

Slow or stalled

In two
cases, administrative action to reverse midnight environmental rules has been
slow. Only recently has the
administration proposed rescinding a rule allowing the burning of hazardous
waste. In addition, another bad
rule—this one to weaken a standard governing recycling hazardous solid wastes—just
begun the long path towards reversal. EPA 
opened a public comment period on proposed revisions, but no further
action has been taken.

In another
two cases, midnight regulations are on the books and seem likely to
stand.: one, allowing concentrated
animal feeding operations to self-regulate their own pollution, and another
rule that makes it harder to limit the development of public lands.

Clearly
there are many issues on the president’s plate that have prevented faster
action to push back against these rules. That is why passing midnight regulations is an effective strategy: it forces a new president to make the choice
between challenging the actions of a past administration and moving forward
with a new agenda. Because they are
drafting aggressive new regulation on greenhouse gases and other issues, the
agencies have not been able to act decisively to overturn midnight
regulations: there is only so much time
in the day, and agency budgets are not exactly flush. But the tradeoff has been that the ghost of
the last administration is still haunting us, carrying out an
anti-environmental agenda well after it drew its last breath.

Related Links:

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Digging into Obama’s 2011 budget on energy and the environment

Murkowski’s floor speech on EPA regulations was full of deceptions

Seattle light rail. Photo courtesy LeeLeFever via Flickr One train, two views:

Getting to the airport from Seattle’s north side—its wealthier, whiter
half—on public transit first involves a bus ride downtown. From there, as of two
months ago, you can take a new
light-rail line, instead of another bus, to Sea-Tac Airport.
This north-side resident found the light rail underwhelming—the train chugs
along at street level at a modest speed, stopping 10 times, even stopping at
times for traffic lights. It’s still faster to take the express bus from
downtown.

So it was interesting to hear a south-side
community organizer speak Wednesday about working during the light-rail planning
process to get precisely the things that annoyed me. “We [told transit
planners] we wanted more stops and we don’t want intersections cut off,” said Yolanda Sinde,
who was speaking at the New
Partners for Smart Growth conference in Seattle.

I wasn’t blind to the fact that people live along
the route, or that a new transit service could be disruptive. But Sinde’s
comments were a reminder that low-carbon development in cities—or
anywhere—isn’t always equally beneficial to all communities.

It was a message driven home by others at the
urban-planning event: the principles of Smart Growth may be climate-friendly, but they haven’t always benefitted
low-income and minority neighborhoods.

“What is the difference between Smart Growth and
gentrification? This is a big question,” said Deeohn Ferris, an
environmental-health lawyer, consultant, and former official at the EPA and
National Wildlife Federation.

She questioned the myth that revitalizing poor
neighborhoods requires outside residents, outside role models, and outside
businesses. This attitude fails to appreciate the social networks and
entrepreneurship potential already in those places, she said.

Urban planners often look to build new
developments on abandoned lots and industrial sites—but that strategy isn’t
necessarily popular with locals.  “For
many, ‘Smart Growth’ means fancy infill from outside people,” Ferris said.
“‘Infill’ is a scary word to many communities.”

The environmental and social benefits of building
better cities coincide with each other much more than they conflict (I look
forward to learning more about this at this week’s conference). But enthusiasts
of Smart Growth/New Urbanism/happy-walkable-what-have-you design would do well
to work with environmental-justice leaders like Sinde and Ferris, who have
decades’ worth of knowledge about what poorly crafted development can do to
neighborhoods.

Related Links:

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Bring back Van Jones

EPA capitulates on ethanol, hearts clean coal

Davos Annual Meeting 2010 - ADM CEO Patricia Woertz from World Economic Forum on Vimeo

The Yes Men, in their infinite genius, managed to get this on to the World Economic Forum site. Sigh. I heart the Yes Men.

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Expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing. The press release could have come straight out of the utterly disgraced Bush EPA—and if it had, I can well imagine the howls of outrage it would have provoked, because I would have joined the chorus. Its headline read as follows: “Obama Announces Steps to Boost Biofuels, Clean Coal.”

In short, after a flirtation with reason last spring, the Obama EPA has signed off on the absurd, abysmal Renewable Fuel Standard established under Bush a couple of years ago—ensuring that farmers will continue to devote vast swaths of land to GHG-intensive corn, of which huge portion of will ultimately be set aflame to power cars—but not before being transformed into liquid fuel in an energy-intensive process.

As as ethanol factories continue sucking in more and more corn, plantation owners in places like Brazil and Argentina will put more grassland and even rainforest under the plow to make up for the shortfall, resulting in huge carbon emissions. That dire effect of our ethanol program, known as indirect land-use change, likely nullifies any scant climate benefits from ethanol. In downplaying indirect land use in its assessment of the Renewable Fuel Standard, the agency is essentially caving to the demands of House ag committee chair Collin Peterson—who is returning the favor with an all-out assault of the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases at all.

As for “clean” coal, the EPA announced a major push for “Carbon Capture and Storage” for coal plants. But no amount of public cash for such projects can clean up the atrocity of mountain-top removal—or stop coal plants from transforming the oceans into mercury-laden toxic pits. What would carbon capture do to solve the coal ash problem? Nothing.

I can only think of one more ersatz, flimsy way to confront the specter of global ecological crisis than promoting “clean” coal and biofuels, and it would be nuclear power. Unhappily, Obama has been hyping—and putting taxpayer cash behind—that, too.

I realize that Obama’s EPA director, Lisa Jackson, has worked hard to lift the agency from the ignominy into which it had plunged under Bush’s notorious director, Stephen Johnson. In a provocative essay in The New Republic, the veteran liberal journalist John B. Judis makes a case for Jackson. Judis writes:

In her first year at the EPA, Jackson granted California a waiver to impose tougher greenhouse-gas standards for new automobiles, which the Bush administration had denied. She declared that the EPA would set standards for greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. (This means that, if Congress fails to pass cap-and-trade legislation, the EPA could act on its own to regulate carbon emissions.) And she accepted the EPA staff’s recommendations for tougher smog standards—recommendations that had been rebuffed by the previous EPA head. Science, it seems clear, is back in command at the EPA.

That track record makes the EPA’s capitulation over ethanol all the more painful. I could understand such concessions if the President were using them as pawns in a fight to push through effective climate legislation. But climate legislation got hopelessly compromised—before collapsing unceremoniously on the Senate floor. Why is Obama giving this stuff away now?

When the Democrats gained power in 2007, progressives may have assumed that the tide had turned on environmental protection. But the fossil fuel and agribusiness industries were never going to just melt away. They have hundreds of billions of dollars in investments on the ground that can only be leveraged if their products emain paramount.  Those investments will be defended.

This is a long-term battle that will require much grassroots pressure from below before it really turns—much more than can be brought to bear in any single election.

Related Links:

The people speak out in favor of stronger smog standards

Bring back Van Jones

My whiz-bang light rail is your pain in the asphalt

One of the leading challenges facing the international community is how to rescue failing states, those countries most at risk of collapse due to a combination of weak governance, internal violence, and social upheaval. Continuing with business as usual in international assistance programs is not working, as evidenced by the continuing deterioration of places like Haiti, Somalia, and Yemen. The stakes could not be higher. (See earlier discussion of failing states.)

If the number of failing states continues to increase, at some point this trend will translate into a failing global civilization. Somehow we must turn the tide of state decline.

Thus far the process of state failure has largely been a one-way street with few countries reversing the process. Among the few who have turned the tide are Liberia and Colombia.

Foreign Policy’s annual ranking of failing states showed Liberia ranking ninth on its 2005 list (based on data for 2004), with number one being the worst case. But after 14 years of cruel civil war that took 200,000 lives, things began to turn around in 2005 with the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an official at the World Bank, as president. A fierce effort to root out corruption and a multinational U.N. Peacekeeping Force of 15,000 troops who maintain the peace, repair roads, schools, and hospitals, and train police, have brought progress to this war-torn country. In 2009, Liberia had dropped to thirty-fourth on the list of failing states.

In Colombia, an improving economy—partly because of strong coffee prices and partly because the government is steadily gaining in legitimacy—has helped turn things around. Ranked fourteenth in 2005, Colombia in 2009 was forty-first on the Foreign Policy list. Neither Liberia nor Colombia are out of the woods yet, but both are moving in the right direction.

Failing states are a relatively new phenomenon, and they require a new response. The traditional project-based assistance program is no longer adequate. State failure is a systemic failure that requires a systemic response.

The United Kingdom and Norway have recognized that failing states need special attention and have each set up interagency funds to provide a response mechanism. Whether they are adequately addressing systemic state failure is not yet clear, but they do at least recognize the need to devise a specific institutional response.

In contrast, U.S. efforts to deal with weak and failing states are fragmented. Several U.S. government departments are involved, including State, Treasury, and Agriculture, to name a few. And within the State Department, several different offices are concerned with this issue. This lack of focus was recognized by the Hart-Rudman U.S. Commission on National Security in the Twenty-first Century: “Responsibility today for crisis prevention and response is dispersed in multiple AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] and State bureaus, and among State’s Under Secretaries and the AID Administrator. In practice, therefore, no one is in charge.”

What is needed now is a new cabinet-level agency—a Department of Global Security (DGS)—that would fashion a coherent policy toward each weak and failing state. This recommendation, initially set forth in a report of the Commission on Weak States and U.S. National Security, recognizes that the threats to security are now coming less from military power and more from the trends that undermine states, such as rapid population growth, poverty, deteriorating environmental support systems, and spreading water shortages. The new agency would incorporate AID (now part of the State Department) and all the various foreign assistance programs that are currently in other government departments, thereby assuming responsibility for U.S. development assistance across the board. The State Department would provide diplomatic support for this new agency, helping in the overall effort to reverse the process of state failure.

The new Department of Global Security would be funded by shifting fiscal resources from the Department of Defense. In effect, the DGS budget would be the new defense budget. It would focus on the central sources of state failure by helping to stabilize population, restore environmental support systems, eradicate poverty, provide universal primary school education, and strengthen the rule of law through bolstering police forces, court systems, and, where needed, the military.

The DGS would deal with the production of and international trafficking in drugs. It would make such issues as debt relief and market access an integral part of U.S. policy. It would also provide a forum to coordinate domestic and foreign policy, ensuring that domestic policies, such as cotton export subsidies or subsidies to convert grain into fuel for cars, do not contribute to the failure of other countries. The department would provide a focus for the United States to help lead a growing international effort to reduce the number of failing states. This agency would also encourage private investment in failing states by providing loan guarantees to spur development.

As part of this effort the United States could rejuvenate the Peace Corps to assist with grassroots programs, including teaching in schools and helping to organize family planning, tree planting, and micro-lending programs. This program would involve young people while developing their sense of civic pride and social responsibility.

At a more senior level, the United States has a fast-growing reservoir of retired people who are highly skilled in such fields as management, accounting, law, education, and medicine and who are eager to be of use. Their talents could be mobilized through a voluntary Senior Service Corps. The enormous reservoir of management skills in this age group could be tapped to augment the skills so lacking in failing-state governments.

There are already, of course, a number of volunteer organizations that rely on the talents, energy, and enthusiasm of both U.S. young people and seniors, including the Peace Corps, Teach for America, and the Senior Corps. But conditions now require a more ambitious, systematic effort to tap this talent pool.

The world has quietly entered a new era, one where there is no national security without global security. We need to recognize this and to restructure and refocus our efforts to respond to this new reality.

For more information on addressing the root causes of state failure, such as stabilizing population and restoring the earth’s natural support systems, see the following excerpts from Plan B 4.0: “Educating Everyone,” “Stabilizing Population,” “Toward a Healthy Future,” and “Protecting and Restoring Forests.”

Adapted from Chapter 7, “Eradicating Poverty and Stabilizing Population” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/books/pb4

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Thanks for becoming Grist’s Friend with Benefits. Umbra Fisk would like to issue you a warm welcome.

I may soon end up walking the streets of Boston with a sandwich board and a tinfoil hat. I know you’ll all remember me fondly when that day comes, and stop to say hello and maybe buy me a sandwich. But in the meantime, with my wits still somewhat collected, I’m going to tell you about my present struggles with self-expression and what I think they mean.

I was lucky to find an old friend on Facebook recently, and then to have breakfast with him in Washingon D.C., where we were both attending conferences.  Eric and I spent a summer together in NIcaragua in the 80s, and now he’s a professor of physics at a reputable university, and I am someone who is building a zero-carbon house, with thick padded walls, and making it known to all and sundry that I think we’re likely headed for social collapse.  It was Eric who suggested that I wear the tinfoil hat. I challenged him to a debate on the subject. Here’s my part of our email exchange, which summarizes my answer to his question “Do you really believe that we’re in a state of collapse?”

“The short answer is, yes I do, but I’d like to elaborate a bit, because I can see that you fall into a category of people in my life (friends and family), who are worried that I’ve become ungrounded and perhaps apocalyptic.

With people as educated as you, I generally just say “consider the evidence”, and leave it at that. With those I feel don’t have the interest in doing so, I change the subject. But it’s become clear that I need to be able to back myself up with facts and figures and reliable professional opinions, so I’m practicing doing that. Bear with me.

The economic crisis of last year—in which I lost 1/3 of my money which was invested in the stock market, and that was nothing compared to what I saw happen to friends and neighbors—was a major milestone in this process. The fact that the government has bailed out large banks and corporations with taxpayer money reveals the inherent corruption of the government, as does the Supreme Court decision of last week. Obama, however much we may like him, seems utterly stymied by the power of the corporate interests in government. Better heads than I have declared that we are living in a failed state. This isn’t so unusual—governments and empires collapse all the time.

I know much more about climate change than I do about the economy though, and I find the evidence that our way of life is unsustainable to be incontrovertible there. I keep up with the science pretty well, and follow the work of James Hansen, NASA climatologist, very closely. His conclusion, after years of research on glacial melting, ice-core samples, temperature data, etc., is that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 must be kept to 350 parts per million or less in order to preserve the planet as we know it. Anything more is going to lead to runaway warming due to feedback loops (those are the natural mechanisms that accelerate warming once it’s already underway, such as melting permafrost, which releases methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas). Runaway warming will lead to sea-level rise, ocean acidification, massive extinction (already happening), drought and catastrophic weather events, etc. Right now the CO2 is at 387 ppm, and the promises made at Copenhagen by the major emitters, to cut their emissons, are so weak that they will lead us to 770 ppm within this century. It would be arrogant to assume that we can both survive that, and continue our way of life at the same time.

I think I can safely challenge you, because I remember that you enjoy a good debate! So here’s what I would say to you, or anyone with your smarts: What makes you think we AREN’T in an early stage of collapse?”

I didn’t get a good answer to that question “What makes you think we AREN’T in an early stage of collapse?” and it didn’t surprise me much.  Eric’s response was that he thought it unlikely that things would go bad all at once—he felt that positive change could happen over the course of a century or so, without great upheaval in the process.  But while I had given a good deal of the evidence that I find persuasive, Eric’s reply was only a few sentences. I felt as though I was being patted on the head reassuringly.

Many, many conversations with friends and family have ended with me changing the subject, and I did it because I found I was making people uncomfortable. The people I upset are always educated. They include my father, a decorated and highly respected professor or molecular biology, who doesn’t like to see me get upset. They include my writing class, a group of journalists with multiple publication credits, one of whom said to me, angrily “I don’t know why you think that climate change is any worse than anything else!  I feel like I hear about this all the time in the news. There’s a lot of stuff being done, you know—wasn’t there just a big conference in Copenhagen?”  They include a good friend, reeling from a divorce and a year of unemployment and an ex with breast-cancer, who says “I know about this stuff, but I just can’t deal with it right now.” Who can?

I prowl the internet for writing by psych professionals, or anyone really, on the emotional and spiritual effects of living with the threat of cataclysm.  What can we expect to see as typical reactions as the crisis progresses? What are the historical precedents?  How can people work, love and parent under these circumstances? Until about two years ago, I could find almost nothing written on this subject, and I felt isolated and fearful of my own mental health.

I”m a little embarassed to be talking about my communication problems with family and friends, but I’m doing it because I think it’s important to remember that the personal IS political. We are all involved in creating the story of our culture, and that story can be so powerful that it obscures the evident truth. The story of this culture, that we have all been steeped in for our whole lives, is that we are entitled to thrive, prosper and grow. Growth is in fact necessary for our well-being, for our powerful status in the world, and for our capacity to help the less fortunate. Many in this country believe that American prosperity and leadership is mandated by God. To suggest that all this success we have achieved and will achieve and seem destined to achieve, is actually failure, and will soon implode, is to contradict the story of our culture. But we can only change the story if we tell new ones.

This is an American story, and a conversation with almost any immigrant will turn it on its head. Most of the world’s poor already live in a state that we would call collapse. And even prosperous Europeans remember the Second World War in their homelands, and the countries formerly known as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and know that such disasters are possible.

I recently came across the work of Dmitriy Orlov, a Russian-American who saw the Soviet Union collapse up close, and has lived in the US for many years. His work compares the collapse of the Soviet Empire to the present US economic crisis, factoring in climate change and peak oil, as well as other resource depletion. It is particularly compelling to me because I witnessed the Soviet collapse from a closer vantage point than this—I was living in Czechoslovakia in the 1990s, in a post-communist society rebuilding itself to look more like ours.

Here’s an excerpt from Orlov’s essay “Thriving in an Age of Collapse”

“An economy collapses one person, one family, one community at a time.  First the dreams evaporate: the future starts looking worse than the present, and ever more uncertain. Then people are forced to withstand ever greater indignities and privations, which they tend to accept as their personal failings. The resulting stress causes them to experience a variety of physical and psychological symptoms. Our pride, our habits and expectations, and our unwillingness to adapt can kill us faster than any physical hardship. But eventually something has to give, and even if life does not get any easier, one morning we wake up, and not only has life all around us been transformed all out of recognition, but everyone we encounter recognizes that times have changed.  And we realize that none of this is about us personally, and feel better.”

“An economy collapses one person, one family, one community at a time.” Does this seem right? Can you picture unemployed friends? Whole communities losing homes to foreclosure? Families taken down by health-care costs? Detroit, maybe? Dmitriy Orlov’s writing struck me with the force of plain-spoken truth, based on what I know of the collapse of the Soviet Empire, what I know about the US economy at this time, what I know about the implications of climate change, and what I see around me. His story, which is about surviving, and even thriving, through collapse, is the one that compels me now.

 I am talking about the difficulty of expressing the truth—or what I think is the truth—about how imperilled our country and our world is right now.  The news is unwelcome, it makes for deadened conversations, it furrows brows and it irks people. Responses to the bad news on the environment and the economy range from denial to rage to hopelessness. Many good folks do not think about this stuff, or change their lives in accordance with the new reality, because they have no idea what to do in the face of cataclysm. 

I have found solace in the words of Dmitriy Orlov and many others, and there are two reasons for this. One is that the voices of truth relieve our anxiety that the liars are right and we are crazy.  The truth, however awful, is safe and real. The other reason we can embrace the truth is that it allows us to move past denial into action.  I know that this is almost a cliche now, but I have found it a huge relief in my life to contemplate the reality of a world without cars, of local gardens and revived community and useless television sets. We may have to spend much of our energy finding food and water, maintaining our homes and taking care of our families; we may have to school our own children, tend to the ill without hospitals, and bury our own dead. But it’s our spiritual work to take this on now, to prepare, and that begins with acknowledging the truth.

But, as Orlov says, wryly, “Your participation in this program is optional.”

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Transcript of Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) remarks today at the “Business Advocacy Day for Jobs, Climate & New Energy Leadership” in Washington D.C.

Thanks y’all.  Thank you.

Hey everybody.  It’s always good to be introduced by someone that can vote for you—just sounds better. Joe comes to every event I’ve ever had in South Carolina and he is on message with intellectual property and energy.

But to the South Carolina folks—thanks for coming up.  Appreciate all the taxes you pay. Sorry about how we’re spending it.  That’s applies to everybody by the way. I am here from the federal government and I’m here to help you.  You’re supposed to laugh.

Well anyway, I don’t where we are going as a nation on a lot of issues. I know where we should be going, and that’s why we’re here right? We seem to be going at a snail’s pace on all the things that really matter. And finding common ground on hard big issues is not unknown to business, to families or to politicians. But eventually you have got to do something, because time is not on your side.

When it comes to social security and medicare reform, and the big entitlement programs, the baby boomers are retiring in droves. When I was born in 1955 there were 16 workers for every Social Security retiree. How many are there today? Three right? Two in 20 years. You know guys like me are the problem—I don’t have any kids. We have to come to grips with the fact that the demographic changes in America are real and Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid are $51 trillion underfunded when you add them all up. That’s not going to get solved just by arguing with each other.

We’ve got to find a pathway forward on entitlement reform. I just mention that as one issue on the economic side—long-term indebtedness that has to be addressed—only going to be solved when Democrats and Republicans come together we all say it, all 100 of us, we never seem to be able to accomplish much beyond saying it.

On the jobs side, we’re at 12 percent unemployment in South Carolina hardest hit that I can remember in my lifetime. Manufacturing in our state has really been hit hard. The textile industry that I grew up knowing and being around my whole life has really been hit. I can’t promise South Carolinians or people from Michigan or any other place that we can build a wall around America and that these jobs are not going to leave. But I can promise you there is a way to create jobs back here at home. One of the ways to create jobs back here at home is to become energy independent and clean up the environment. That is the best way.

[Applause]

This is so logical it is scary.

[Laughter]

Maybe that’s the biggest flaw with it, it just makes too much sense. It sounds too good to be true.

We send $1 billion a day overseas to buy oil, sometimes from countries that do not like us very much. We are in the middle of two wars.  The war on terror has many tentacles to it, and what to do and how to do it is a reasoned debate I suppose, but eventually the way to win this war is to try to get to root cause of problem. The root cause of the problem is that there is a small minority of people out there who have a way of doing business, a religious view, that doesn’t accept moderate Muslims, Jews, Christians, anybody else and they are a minority within the world’s population but they have to be confronted on a multi-level approach, sometimes military action, sometimes economic aid. But this country would be in a better position to deal with that problem and other problems if we could go to Middle East and say we’d like to help you with your problems but we don’t need your oil.  That would really be a game changer in terms of our domestic national security concerns.

[Applause]

Now, I’m speaking the day after the president spoke in New Hampshire.  I like the president. I’m having a hard time finding common ground but we’re trying.  One of the issues that I think we have some common ground on is trying to come up with a rational energy independence policy married up with climate change policy that will clean up the air but make money doing it and create jobs in the process and looking at old problems anew. There was this idea floating around yesterday—don’t know how serious it is—that somehow it would be wise for Congress to do an energy bill only. I don’t think that’s wise.

[Applause]

The reason I don’t think that’s wise is that “it is a kick the can down the road approach.” It’s putting off to another Congress what really needs to be done comprehensively.

I don’t think you’ll ever have energy independence the way I want it until you start dealing with carbon pollution and pricing carbon. The two are connected in my view—very much connected. The money to be made in solving the carbon pollution problem can only happen when you price carbon in my view.

So if the approach is to try to pass some half-assed energy bill and say that is moving the ball down the road, forget it with me.

[Applause]

If my Democratic and Republican colleagues—but the Democratic leadership—brings an energy bill to the floor, and that’s the only way we’re going to do things, you better get ready to vote for an amendment that allows offshore drilling with revenue sharing. Because you’ll never become energy independent in my view unless we start exploring for resources that we own in America in an
aggressive and environmentally-sensitive way. So this idea that the energy bill makes us energy independent doesn’t cut it with me because the bill that came out committee doesn’t have any revenue sharing for state of South Carolina or any other state who would agree to offshore exploration. So you’re not going to be to pass this bill and tell me we’ve done anything about energy independence.

On nuclear power side, the nuclear title in this bill is woefully inadequate to create renaissance in nuclear power. 82 percent of power in France comes from where? Nuclear.  Surely we can be as bold as the French. French have found a way to produce nuclear safely, efficiently. It is cleaning up their environment, it’s creating jobs. If you want a job renaissance in America then you need a renaissance in nuclear power, that’s where jobs are going to come from. Trust me, you cannot be serious about cleaning up the environment unless you are serious about nuclear power. You cannot replace coal-fired plants with wind and solar—it’s 15 percent of the grid at most. I’m a serious guy. Honest to God’s truth is that nuclear power has been put in the backseat in this country in an irrational way.

But nuclear is just one part of the solution Wind and solar does matter. We have 250 years of coal—we should use it, but it just should be cleaner

At the end of the day we need a comprehensive approach that would allow this country to jump start its economy and lead the world to a cleaner environment

Every day we wait in this nation China is going to eat our lunch. The Chinese don’t need 60 votes.  I guess they just need 1 guys vote over there—and that guy’s voted.

[Laughter]

He has decided to do two things: First, kind of play footsie with us on emissions control stuff but go like gangbusters when it comes to producing alternative energy. The solar and wind and battery-powered cars is an amazing thing to watch. And we’re stuck in neutral here.

So my message to you—you’re up here to advocate—advocate. Let the Congress know that you want a comprehensive approach to two serious problems. You don’t have to believe that Iowa is going to become beachfront property to want to clean up carbon. It is not about polar bears to me, it’s about jobs. I like the polar bears as much as anyone else but I want to create jobs.

If just a fraction of what is being predicted about global warming is true, that’s enough to motivate us all. But if worse thing you did—as Tony Blair would say—is you provided a cleaner environment, I don’t think you’d go down in history in a bad way.

The key in my view to those who believe we should address carbon pollution is to make sure that the energy initiatives that will get us there are done in a package.

If you break this apart you’ll have a watered down solution on both fronts.

Health care was big, it was controversial—I didn’t like the bill—but that doesn’t mean you can’t do other hard problems.

If the lesson from health care is let’s not do anything hard, then why don’t we all go home, which might be good for the country by the way.

But if we go home, China won’t.

The world is moving, pollution is growing, we’ve got a chance to get ahead and lead. If we wait too long and if we try to take half measures as the preferred route on all these hard problems they just get worse.

My challenge to you and to myself is to not let this moment pass. This is the best opportunity I’ve seen in my political lifetime for a Republican and Democrat to do something bold and meaningful.

Why did I get involved in this? I ask myself that a lot. I saw an opportunity. I’ve become convinced that carbon pollution is a bad thing, not a good thing, and it can be dealt with, and we can create jobs.

This is the time, this is the Congress, and this is the moment. So if we retreat and try to just go to the energy-only approach—which will never yield the legislative results that I want on energy independence—then we just made the problem worse.

What Congress is going to come up here and do all these hard things? Who are these people in the future? Because we constantly count on them. I don’t know who they are.  I’ve yet to find them.

So I guess it falls to me and you.

So let’s do it.

Thanks.

[Applause]

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With
Congress and the White House considering spending scarce dollars to jump-start
employment, they’ll need to get the biggest jobs bang for the buck to give
Americans confidence that they’re spending our money wisely. Probably the biggest
jobs generator of all, and one of the least recognized, is investing in forest
and land restoration and sustainable management, with conservation, watershed
projects, and park investment coming close behind.

Heidi
Garrett-Peltier and Robert Pollin at The Political Economy and Research
Institute of the University of Massachusetts report the following numbers for
jobs created per dollar of investment.

To
summarize, reforestation and restoration outperforms even the second-most
jobs-intense activity analyzed by 74 percent, and conservation exceeds other
major jobs alternatives, including especially new highway construction, Wall
Street, and conventional energy sources like oil and nuclear.

See full jobs table here [pdf].

This
means that if the government is serious about creating jobs, it’s got to pass
clean energy and climate legislation and a new jobs bill that includes powerful
incentives for reforestation, revegetation, sustainable forest management, and
conservation.

This
legislation can perform the equivalent of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the
extremely popular New Deal program that put millions of people to work in
forestry and conservation.

Why
are forest investments such good job generators? Restoring forests (as well as rivers,
wetlands, peat bogs, and prairies), requires people, which means jobs: soil
scientists, tree planters, equipment operators, water engineers, and people to
nurture the trees over time.

Conservation—investing in, for instance, the expansion of National Parks and other local,
state, and federal recreation areas through, for instance, the Land and Water
Conservation Fund—isn’t too far behind. Some of the direct jobs in this
sector include park rangers, park transportation workers, and other park
personnel.

Relative
to other spending options, investments in forests and parks tend to go towards
wages rather than capital investments—providing the greatest benefit to
communities, especially in economically difficult times (since Nature largely
provides the materials that go into making a tree or a prairie grow for free,
you don’t need the same kind of capital as you do for, say, building a
highway).

The
actual jobs impact of forest investment is actually significantly greater than
what’s represented in the above table. A variety of other studies have analyzed
job creation through conservation and found dramatic indirect effects. Expand a
national park, national forest, river or local recreation area, and spending on
and employment in outdoor recreation—everything from birdwatching and hiking
to fishing and hunting - is dramatically increased.

A 2006 report for the Outdoor
Industry Association found that the availability of active outdoor
recreation generated $289 billion in retail sales and services across the
United States, with a total of 6.5 million jobs supported by the recreation
economy overall. Other reports focusing on roadless
areas, national
forests, and privately-owned forests have found similar results: the National
Alliance of Forest Owners [pdf] reports that every hundred acres of
privately owned forests supports eight jobs and the FAO reported last
year that investing in sustainable forestry management could create ten million
new, good-paying jobs worldwide. 

Of
course, jobs aren’t the only reason restoration and conservation are a good
idea: forests and other wildlands suck pollution out of the air, provide
wildlife habitat, and recreational opportunities—allowing America to put
people back to work, and giving them somewhere beautiful to go when they’re
done.  

Olivier Jarda, a
policy associate at the Center for International Policy, assisted with the
research for this post.

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