Because I know Salon readers are still having sleepless nights wondering whether owning a Labrador Retriever does as much damage to the earth as owning an SUV, I thought I would pass on this entertaining debunking of the numbers involved, put together by Clark Williams-Derry at Sightline Daily.
Derry concludes that the authors of "Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living" underestimate the carbon footprint of SUVs and way overestimate the carbon footprint of dog food. His bottom line, "the anti-doggites are off by a factor of at least 18, and probably more."
Derry's make a convincing case all along the numbers-chain, especially when it comes to breaking down the dog food issue.
The anti-doggists estimate it takes .84 hectares -- or about 2.1 acres of cropland -- to meet a a pooch's food needs for a year. There are a little over 70 million dogs in the U.S. (the Humane Society says 74.8 million, the veterinarians say 72.1 million, and the pet food industry says 66.3 million, for an average of 71.1 dogs). So by the authors' estimates it must take about 150 million acres of U.S. farmland to feed our dogs. In all, there are 440 million acres of cropland in the US -- suggesting that the equivalent of one-third of all U.S. cropland is devoted to producing dog food.
Williams-Derry argues that the notion that 1/3 of all U.S. cropland goes to dog food is ridiculous, particularly when you look at how big a part dog food plays in the overall food economy.
Total retail food sales in the U.S. topped $1.1 trillion in the US in 2008 (see table 36 from the USDA's Agricultural Outlook statistics.) But according to the pet food industry, retail dog food sales totaled just $11 billion in 2008. By that measure, dog food represents about one percent of the total food economy.
There's more at the source, if you still need convincing.
If 2009 goes down in history as the year when ideology finally pinned fact-based politics to the floor and dribbled a loogie over its face, then the people of Minnesota's 6th Congressional District will have proven themselves ahead of the curve. After all, they first elected Michele Bachmann to Congress back in 2006. And get this: They reelected her in 2008. Take that, evolution.
Evidence that Michele Bachmann stepped in a bucket of crazy? Take your pick. Calling Barack Obama un-American? Check. Death panels? Check. Encouraging armed revolt? Check. Calls for mass self-mutilation and/or suicide to protest the Obama regime? Check.
Forget truth. Hell, forget truthiness. The era of the Birthers is Bachmann's epoch, because the bar is so low. Indeed, there is no bar. Just as Glenn Beck can portray President Obama as a follower of Mao Zedong simply by connecting the two on a blackboard with chalk, Bachmann can go onto the House floor, spout out any odd claptrap that comes to mind, and still get reelected.
Bachmann thinks more carbon dioxide is a good thing, since it is a "natural byproduct of nature," just like syphilis, I suppose. She has warned that AmeriCorps could lead to "re-education camps" for young people; she suggested armed revolt to stop climate change legislation (urging her supporters to be sure they're "armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back"). She keeps hinting that there is some creepy, sinister plot behind the 2010 Census.
Bachmann isn't just crazy, she's crazy's frothy-mouthed cheerleader. Take her speech on healthcare reform last August in Colorado, at a time when some Americans had lost perspective, composure and in some cases all grip on the facts during town hall-style meetings across the country. Bachmann happily stirred the big pot of lunacy. "This cannot pass!" she shouted at her Colorado audience. "What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn't pass."
Bachmann, of course, came to national attention just before the 2008 presidential election, when she declared on MSNBC's "Hardball" that she was "very concerned that [Obama] may have anti-American views." She went on to encourage a media and congressional investigation into the anti-American views of all of her enemies. Although her opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, began to surge in the polls, that November she clung to her seat. The people of Minnesota's 6th District will get to have a third referendum on crazy in 2010, when Bachmann will face one of two Democrats: physician Maureen Reed or state Sen. Tarryl Clark. Unbelievably to the rest of the world, Bachmann's two-year jag of crazy seems to have strengthened her hold on her seat, but it's still possible she'll step beyond the realm of orthodox, increasingly acceptable right-wing crazy into a new crazy frontier that could cost her politically.
Possible, but not likely.
Monsanto is not the first company I think of when assigning blame for sabotaging climate talks, but according to 37 percent of the voters in the Friends of the Earth Angry Mermaid contest, the biotech seed company is the most egregious offender on the planet, edging out Shell and the American Petroleum Institute.
The award, says FoE, is meant to "highlight those business groups and companies that have made the greatest effort to sabotage the climate talks, and other climate measures, while promoting, often profitable, false solutions."
Agriculture giant Monsanto was nominated for promoting its genetically modified (GM) crops as a solution to climate change and pushing for its crops to be used as biofuels. The expansion of GM soy in Latin America is contributing to major deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions.... Monsanto also wants GM soy to be funded under the Clean Development Mechanism.
Seems to me that there is a bit of a contradiction at work here. If Monsanto believes that GM soy should qualify as a carbon offset under the Clean Development Mechanism, wouldn't that mean that the company would support a strong agreement on emissions at Copenhagen? If a world carbon tax regime or cap-and-trade scheme became reality, wouldn't that make Monsanto's products more valuable? (Providing, of course, that anyone could prove that GM soy plantations or GM corn-derived biofuels really did result in a net decline in greenhouse gas emissions, which seems highly dubious.) But I'm betting the voters in FoE's poll did not stop to think this through. Monsanto has become one of those brands that inspires overwhelming kneejerk antipathy -- the American Petroleum Institute never had a chance, even though API has done far more to fight action on climate change than any biotech company.
And of course, good reasons to distrust Monsanto are legion. I wrote earlier this summer about hints that the U.S. Department of Justice was considering antitrust action against Monsanto, based on the company's near complete monopoly power in huge sectors of the U.S. seed market. On Monday, the Associated Press published a blockbuster expose of Monsanto's anti-competitive practices in the seed business, written by Christopher Leonard (no relation), that makes a darn good case for trust-busting.
Among the goodies dug up by Leonard: When Monsanto licenses its gene traits to independent companies, the terms of its contracts include a clause that requires the licensee to destroy its inventory of seeds in the event of a change of ownership. What this means is that Monsanto's competitors have no chance to bid against Monsanto in any potential buyouts.
Monsanto's provision requiring companies to destroy seeds containing Monsanto's traits if a competitor buys them prohibited DuPont or other big firms from bidding against Monsanto when it snapped up two dozen smaller seed companies over the last five years, said David Boies, a lawyer representing DuPont who previously was a prosecutor on the federal antitrust case against Microsoft Corp.
Competitive bids from companies like DuPont could have made it far more expensive for Monsanto to bring the smaller companies into its fold. But that contract provision prevented bidding wars, according to DuPont.
"If the independent seed company is losing their license and has to destroy their seeds, they're not going to have anything, in effect, to sell," Boies said. "It requires them to destroy things -- destroy things they paid for -- if they go competitive. That's exactly the kind of restriction on competitive choice that the antitrust laws outlaw."
Maybe the Angry Mermaid can help?
Over the weekend, my Twitter feed overflowed with references to an Associated Press investigation of the climate change hacked e-mails, citing it is as definitive proof that "the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked."
In reaching that conclusion, the story provides useful context to the e-mails, polls outside scientists for their reactions to the contretemps, and pulls no punches in describing bad behavior by the climate researchers at East Anglia University. It finishes with this coda:
The AP is mentioned several times in the e-mails, usually in reference to a published story.... The archive also includes a request from an AP reporter, one of the writers of this story, for reaction to a study, a standard step for journalists seeking quotes for their stories.
Aha, shouted the climate skeptic blogosphere, which wasted no time in parading the e-mail in question, written by AP reporter Seth Borenstein, earlier this summer:
Kevin, Gavin, Mike,
It's Seth again. Attached is a paper in JGR today that Marc Morano is hyping wildly. It's in a legit journal. Whatchya think?
Seth
For the skeptics, this e-mail is enough to prove that Borenstein "is just too damn cozy with the people he covers." I don't know about that. It seems like typical due diligence from a reporter, in a conversational style appropriate to interaction with sources that you trust. Formerly a top aide to Senator James Inhofe, Marc Morano is, without doubt, a master at the art of wildly hyping. He is a primal font of climate skepticism, with the amp always turned up to 11. I like David Roberts' summary:
Morano's entire job is to aggregate every misleading factoid, every attack on climate science or scientists, every crank skeptical statement from anyone in the world and send it all out periodically in email blasts that get echoed throughout the right-wing blog world and eventually find their way into places like Fox News and the Weekly Standard. From there they go, via columnists like George Will and Charles Krauthammer, into mainstream outlets like Newsweek and the Washington Post.
For a good example of how Morano conducts his business, here's an attack on none other than Seth Borenstein, which he published in August at his blog, ClimateDepot.
When you cover a beat as a journalist, it doesn't take long to learn who is trustworthy and who is a tool. Indeed, one of the big problems with mainstream journalism is that too many reporters don't let their readers know what they really think about the sources they quote or cite. I haven't been able yet to find a copy of Borenstein's report on the above-mentioned study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research -- which argued, by the way, that natural causes, not humans, were responsible for rising sea surface temperatures -- but I'll bet that Borenstein did not tell his readers that Mark Morano was "wildly hyping" it. And that's a shame, because the more we know about Mark Morano's tactics, the more we can understand why climate researchers who have to deal with his misrepresentations on a daily basis were driven to injudicious decisions.
As for me, I think Morano is a tool. And for the record, his old boss thinks the same of me.
One of the frustrations of being a progressive is that the bar to clear for public support seems to be asymmetrically higher for progressive agenda items than conservative agenda items. More than anything else--the bias of the media, think tanks or other institutions, which is a related and relevant element--the political reality that less support is needed, say, to pass a tax cut for rich people or start a war than is needed to expand health care coverage or raise the minimum wage, testifies to the fact that the political system is generally skewed against progressive reforms.
And so it is with climate change. The USA Today reports today that Americans by a 17-point margin, 55 percent to 38 percent, support a global treaty to deal with climate change. In a democracy, no less one where Democrats control the entire federal government, that ought to be enough to political capital to get such a treaty done--and benefit politically, to boot. But I harbor no illusions that that 17-point margin translates directly into political victory the way that, say, a 17-point margin in favor of sending everyone in America a $300 tax rebate check or a 17-point margin in favor of the gun show loophole might.
Why? Because, obviously, entrenched and largely conservative powers in Washington rely on the fact that majorities can be thwarted. And they will no doubt continue to frame climate change actions as inimical to economic progress. Indeed, the same USA Today poll gives them ample fodder: by a 7:1 ratio Americans think the Obama administration should be focusing on the economy, not climate change. Economic progress and climate protection are not mutually-exclusive choices. And though I realize that the resources like time, attention and political capital that the president and his staff can actually invest in the economy and the environment are mutually-exclusive, you can be sure that calls to "focus on economy" will be used as a convenient distraction for climate change-deniers and others who oppose serious enviro reform.
In any case, this continues to be a teachable moment in which the Obama Administration, the Democratic Congress, Republicans who understand that climate change is real, and all others of good faith must continue to stress that the improving the economy and protecting the environment are not mutually-exclusive public agenda options. What saddens me is that Al Gore and others were having a much easier go of this process of public education before the economy went in the crapper. Teachable moments are tough enough in good times, but they are even harder when people are struggling to make their monthly payments. In that sense, the sad reality is that Obama's first summit in Copenhagen came at a bad time for the environment because it's a bad time for the domestic and global economies.
Still, it's encouraging to see that 55 percent figure. It's something to work with--and to point out repeatedly to critics of reform and climate change-deniers.
Even if the fate of the world did not hang on the outcome of climate change negotiations between 192 nations in Copenhagen, Denmark, the spectacle would be fascinating solely from the vantage point of history. The Industrial Revolution isn't just responsible for pumping vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; the countries in which technological progress, fueled by cheap energy, originally took off ending up using their new powers to dominate the entire globe over the last 200 years.
The processes that caused climate change are therefore inextricable from a history of imperialism and colonialism and uneven economic development. When developing nations ask for cash and technology to help them adapt to a clean energy future, they aren't just trying to guilt-trip the rich countries for all the tons of greenhouse gases they have alread emitted -- the so-called "carbon debt." In a very real way they're also asking for reparations to compensate for the creation of the rift that has divided the world into "developed" and "developing" nations.
Because that's what it has come down to -- how much cash will the rich nations pony up to get the poor nations to sign up for a deal? The big news on Monday was that the group of 77 developing nations (which includes big greenhouse gas emitters like China, India, and Brazil) briefly walked out of the negotiations. The reason was summed up by a Nigerian delegation official who said the European offer of about $10 billion dollars over the next three or four years was "pathetic."
"There will be no commitments from the G77 until we get better assurances about financial and technology transfers," the official said.
The developed nations want $100 billion a year. It strains credulity to think that they will get anything close to it. Energy analyst Geoffrey Styles is on the mark when he observes that it would be "political suicide" for any American president "to explain to the electorate -- particularly with so many of them already exercised over growing deficits and the current tax burden -- why they must pay higher taxes to send carbon-debt payments to some of the same countries that are competing for our jobs and industries, on the basis that previous generations of Americans put more CO2 into the atmosphere than past generations of Chinese, Indians and Brazilians."
As noted by Mark Hertsgaard in The Nation, the U.S. chief negotiator Todd Stern utterly dismissed the notion of reparations for carbon debt.
Stern acknowledged that the emissions of rich nations over the past two hundred years of industrialization had caused global warming, telling a press conference, "We absolutely recognize our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere." But, Stern added, "the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations -- I just categorically reject that."
On the other hand, the U.S. and Europe are just as unlikely to get the kind of commitments by developing nations to reduce emissions that they want either. I'm in the camp that thinks everybody needs to reduce their emissions, and that talk about a supposed "betrayal" of the Kyoto Protocol, which lets developing nations completely off the hook, is over-wrought. But the historical record that encourages poorer nations to feel the rich nations have a responsibility to help them navigate towards a clean energy future explains exactly why they will refuse to sacrifice their own chances for economic growth.
How much of all the the rhetoric is bluster and positioning, while the real haggling gets done behind closed doors? I have no idea. I could just as easily see the entire thing collapse in a chaos of discord as I can a real deal getting hammered out in time for the world leaders to sign at the end of this week.
Herding 192 cats to a compromise that involves issues as weighty as economic growth, a warming planet, and the history of domination of the whole world by a handful of countries in Europe and the United States might be one of the hardest things to accomplish that humans have ever set out to do. The problem certainly won't be solved this week. But the sheer volume of rhetoric emerging from Copenhagen seems to be one indicator of just how high the stakes are, and how bad everyone would look if no deal gets done.
Ever since the so-called Climate-gate scandal broke last month, climate change deniers have been getting a lot of press. But this publicity appears not to have affected how people think about global warming. According to an Ipsos/McClatchy Poll released Thursday, most Americans remain skeptical about man’s role in bringing about climate change -- but a slight majority are still in favor of giving one proposed solution, cap-and-trade, a shot.
The Ipsos survey found that while nearly 70 percent of Americans believe that global temperatures are rising, just 43 percent think this change is mostly due to human activity. The other 24 percent think it’s primarily caused by natural patterns. Unsurprisingly, these views differ markedly across party lines: 58 percent of Democrats hold that global warming is real and caused by humans, but 43 percent of Republicans don’t think that world temperatures have increased at all.
Despite the recent hysteria about an alleged global climate hoax, these statistics are pretty much in line with the results of other recent surveys. Back in October, a Pew Research poll found that just 57 percent of U.S. citizens believe there is "solid evidence" that the earth is warming; 36 percent thought the climate change was due to human activity. (The somewhat lower numbers for the Pew poll are likely due to differences in wording: Pew Research asked people if they thought there was "solid evidence" for global warming while Ipsos asked respondents whether they believed an increase in world temperatures "has probably been happening.")
Regardless of the skepticism about the idea that human actions are causing climate change, 52 percent of Americans still favor a cap-and-trade program aimed at decreasing the pollution levels that result in global warming. Support for this legislation also appears largely unchanged. Although a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey in October found that 60 percent of Americans backed a cap-and-trade program, the October Pew poll and an August Washington Post-ABC News poll put that number at 50 and 52 percent, respectively.
According to the latest Ipsos survey, support for the cap-and-trade proposal goes up dramatically when linked with the prospect of increasing jobs in the United States: 69 percent of respondents would support such a bill if it raised their monthly electrical bill by $10 but also created a significant number of “green” jobs. And 60 percent would still support such a law if it increased their monthly cost by $25, as long as it also would generate a substantial number of jobs.
These survey results may be encouraging for the Democrats as they try to push their climate change bill through the Senate. But popular support is no guarantee that legislation will get passed. After all, 56 percent of Americans still support the public option.
Early signs: Reports from a warming planet
U.C. Berkeley journalists traveled the world to report on the front lines of climate change.
By Sandy Tolan, from Salon
Bjørn Lomborg feels a chill
Global warming doesn't faze the infamous author, who argues that polar bears are doing fine and Al Gore is way too hot under the collar. But can the "skeptical environmentalist" back up his rosy views?
By Kevin Berger, from Salon
Anti-science conservatives must be stopped
Americans must not allow global warming deniers to block the policies needed to avert catastrophic climate change. Our future is at stake.
By Joseph Romm, from Salon
The climate of man – 1
By Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker
RealClimate
Climate science from climate scientists
The Case for Bicycle Commuting
E-Books: Satan or Saviour?
New York Under Water
