Seed: So you’re turning corn into plastic in much the same way that the ethanol industry turns it into biofuels. As I’m sure you know, the big criticism of corn ethanol has been that if you account for all of the embedded fossil fuels, it doesn’t wind up being very good for the environment. How does this play out with Mirel?
OP: Grain ethanol has been around for more than 100 years, so the industry’s ability to shift the process to a more favorable energy balance is limited. A good illustration is polypropylene: The energy cost of making it when they first started was probably 10 to 20 times what it is today. This is typically what happens with any manufacturing technology—you get continuous improvements as you learn how to do it better and better. Ethanol has largely been through that cycle. Mirel plastics are still in their early days, but even with our initial start-up we’ve been able to manage the manufacturing of Mirel to make sure that it has an attractive greenhouse gas profile. We are pretty confident that it’s going to get better and better.

I found People’s to be genuinely interested in ensuring the environmental sustainability of his bioplastics (trademarked as Mirel). There ‘s certainly a growing market for biodegradable plastic, so it’ll be interesting to follow this story, and see if there is indeed a paradigm shift here in the making….You can read the full interview here. 

Land is where the food is

For example, Cambodia has entered land-for-oil talks with Kuwait and Qatar, and Laos has signed away 15 percent of its arable land. Yet both Cambodia and Laos have large food-insecure populations — and both receive aid from the World Food Program. What will become of the subsistance farmers who will be displaced?Should food-insecure nations really be bargaining away farmland at a time of increasingly volatile food markets and climate change that could affect agricultural productivity?

I’ve been thinking through these issues for two recent pieces in Seed magazine. The first piece explores the trend in broad brushstrokes, and the second is a case study of the Kenya’s Tana River Delta, where Qatar is vying for land. Look for this story to break into the mainstream media after Joachim Von Braun, director of the International Food Policy Research Institute delivers a press conference today in Washington DC.

Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control …

“The mind is a limited machine,” says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. “And we’re beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.”

So is it the sensory overload of being in an urban environment or the lack of nature that does the damage? It seems to be a bit of both: Numerous studies have shown, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows and that apartment-dwellers function better when their units overlook a grassy courtyard. Green spaces provide a mental break, according to the article, from the “urban roil.”

But what if the urban space isn’t roiling? I mean, it stands to reason that walking through Times Square during a power outage at 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning would tax the brain less than doing so on New Year’s Eve, but would it be less taxing than hiking through a riotous rainforest?

Interestingly enough, the answer is probably “no.” The article goes on to explain that when it comes to nature, the more sensory stimulation, the better.

Although [Frederick] Olmsted took pains to design parks with a variety of habitats and botanical settings, most urban greenspaces are much less diverse. This is due in part to the “savannah hypothesis,” which argues that people prefer wide-open landscapes that resemble the African landscape in which we evolved. Over time, this hypothesis has led to a proliferation of expansive civic lawns, punctuated by a few trees and playing fields.

However, these savannah-like parks are actually the least beneficial for the brain. In a recent paper, Richard Fuller, an ecologist at the University of Queensland, demonstrated that the psychological benefits of green space are closely linked to the diversity of its plant life. When a city park has a larger variety of trees, subjects that spend time in the park score higher on various measures of psychological well-being, at least when compared with less biodiverse parks.

OK, you say, so now surprise me. I don’t need a psych study to tell me that a walk in the park is good for the mood. Or that traffic jams are less fun than lakes and butterflies. Point taken. But to the extent that scientific studies can help make the case for innovative urban design, including greener, airier homes and apartments, wilder public parks, and less concrete in between, then I’m all for them. And hey, it’s a good argument for a corner office.

They’re all part of an new project called Climate Central. It was mentioned briefly in this recent post about Lubchenco, but it’s so interesting and innovative that it merits further digital ink — which I was going to provide myself, but Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Journalism Review beat me to it.

Climate Central is a hybrid team of nearly two dozen journalists and scientists — spread between a main office in Princeton, New Jersey and a smaller one in Palo Alto, California — who work side by side on stories for television, print, and the Web. Relying upon a non-profit business model that is similar to The Center for Investigative Reporting, ProPublica, and others, Climate Central pitches its work to local and national news outlets, looking for collaborative editorial partnerships. It also makes its various experts, many of who are still affiliated with major research institutions, available as primary sources. The goal is to “localize” the story around regions, states, or even cities, in order to highlight the various and particular ways that changes in climate are affecting people’s daily lives.

As Brainard points out, this new effort comes at a time when traditional news outlets are struggling to produce original environment-related content (many, like CNN, have axed their science and environment teams).

Whether Climate Central will be, as communications scholar Matthew Nisbet puts it, "the future of science journalism — non-profit partnerships providing independent and syndicated science coverage,” or whether it will falter under conflicts of interest (real or perceived), remains to be seen.

But it’s great to see scientists stepping up to the plate — or if you’ll indulge a double-edged pun — to the green screen.

In the piece, my co-author Terry Glavin and I mention some important legislation being put forth at the annual meeting of the IUCN in Barcelona, Spain. Now that I look at my calendar, I realize the meeting’s just now wrapping up … and it looks like there is some amazing web coverage of the 10-day event.

I haven’t yet figured out whether the resolution was adopted or not … bonus to anyone who can beat me to the answer.

(McCain is still working on his answers.)

Call them the lazy locavores — city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.

She devotes so much time and script to the eco-chic aspect that I, like Tom Philpott, was initially put off by the idea of armchair gardening. But just like Tom, who later posted that he was “too hard” on it, I softened after reading Allison Arieff’s opinion piece. She writes:

Though some may see this as a “lazy locavore” trend — wherein couch potato clients, glass of biodynamic Syrah in hand, observe the hard labor of city farmers while lounging with their laptops — the urban agriculture movement seems to me to be slowly transcending its elitist associations. It is truly growing into something that is wholly about collaboration, community and connection to food, to neighbors, to land.

That’s certainly been my experience both in my yard, as neighbors and friends come by to help harvest (and to eat), and in my city. Earlier this month, my family spent a Saturday at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, helping to plant a 10,000-square-foot Victory Garden sponsored by Slow Food Nation, a nonprofit organization that will be celebrating American food through art, music, lectures, tastings, school programs and the like over Labor Day Weekend.

To me, the most interesting thing about organizations like My Farm — a point that came across more clearly in Arieff’s article than in Severson’s — is that they aren’t just bringing food from nearby farms into the city; they are actually building new farms — miniature urban agro-scapes (okay, gardens) where once there was concrete or grass. Not only does this virtually eliminate the transportation costs (in dollars and in emissions), but it also brings the living plants that produce our food back into close proximity. Who knows? Perhaps after a few months of watching Paque carry in boxes of mustard greens and sweet tomatoes, some curious couch potatoes will be tempted to get a little dirty.

Engber’s critique is flawed in so many ways that it’s hard to know where to begin … For instance, he doesn’t seem to believe that obesity really has much to do with being too sedentary or eating too much. To support this, he cites research saying that 80 percent of the variation in body weight can be explained by DNA. But what the research actually shows (and what his own colleague, William Saletan, has recently gotten right) is that 80 percent of the variation can be explained by DNA among individuals living in the same environment. If fatness is determined so strongly by genes, as Engber would have us believe, how in the world, then, is it possible to explain skyrocketing obesity rates in the past several decades?

In sum, Engber thinks the Nalgene-toting eco-liberals are ridiculous (and disingenuous) in their linking of the expanding waistlines and climate change. It’s a too-easy analogy, he says.

Granted, I (most likely, we) are among those people Engber loves to loathe and could scarcely be dissuaded from doing so, but just in case — in case there’s been a fundamental oversight, a gap in education — I feel like sending him a copy of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food or Paul Robert’s The End of Food. It’s impossibly hard to argue, after reading either one, that agriculture, ecological degradation, and obesity aren’t closely intertwined.

“A town maintains a fleet of vehicles for town employee use. It has two types of vehicles. Type A gets 15 miles per gallon. Type B gets 34 miles per gallon. The town has 100 Type A vehicles and 100 Type B vehicles. Each car in the fleet is driven 10,000 miles per year.” The town wants to replace these vehicles with corresponding hybrid models in order to to reduce gas consumption of the fleet and thereby reduce harmful environmental consequences.

Should they (1) replace the 100 vehicles that get 15 mpg with vehicles that get 19 mpg , or (2) replace the 100 vehicles that get 34 mpg with vehicles that get 44 mpg?

If you are like the people who were actually surveyed by Richard Larrick and Jack Soll of Duke University, you chose option two. After all, an increase of 10 mpg clearly sounds better than a measly 4 mpg. And yet, some simple number crunching reveals that the town fuel efficiency is improved more in option one (by 14,035 gallons) than in option two (by 6,684 gallons).

Fuel efficiency, write Larrick and Soll in the current issue of Science magazine, is systematically misunderstood by car consumers in the United States, where the standard of measure is miles per gallon.

“People falsely believe that the amount of gas consumed by an automobile decreases as a linear function of a car’s mpg. The actual relationship is curvilinear. Consequently, people underestimate the value of removing the most fuel-inefficient vehicles.”

They cite a 2006 New York Times Op-Ed in which an automotive expert likened hybrid cars to “fat-free desserts” — they “can make people feel as if they’re doing something good, even when they’re doing nothing special at all.” The Times writer had questioned the logic of granting tax incentives to buyers of “a hypothetical hybrid Dodge Durango that gets 14 miles per gallon instead of 12 thanks to its second, electric power source” but not to a “buyer of a conventional, gasoline-powered Honda Civic that gets 40 miles per gallon.”

According to Larrick and Soll, the basic argument is correct:

“The environment would benefit most if all consumers purchased highly efficient cars that get 40 mpg, not 14, and incentives should be tied to achieving such efficiency. An implicit premise in the example, however, is that an improvement from 12 to 14 mpg is negligible. However, the two mpg improvement is actually a significant one in terms of reduction in gas consumption. A car that gets 12 mpg consumes 833 gallons to cover 10,000 miles (10,000/12); a car that gets 14 mpg consumes 714 gallons (10,000/14). The roughly 120-gallon reduction in fuel used is larger than the reduction achieved by replacing a car that gets 28 mpg with a car that gets 40 mpg over that distance.

It’s not exactly intuitive (especially to a non-mathematically jiggered brain like mine), but essentially fuel efficiency abides by the law of diminishing returns: The greatest savings in terms of gas consumption occur at the guzzler end of the spectrum, where the miles-per-gallon ratio — and the denominator in the fractions above — is a small number.

If relying on linear reasoning about mpg leads us to undervalue small improvements, Larrick and Soll think there’s a relatively simple fix. Let’s invert the numbers. Instead of miles per gallon, “the United States should express fuel efficiency as a ratio of volume of consumption to a unit of distance.” A gallons per mile rating “allows consumers to understand exactly how much gas they are using on a given car trip or in a given year and, with additional information, how much carbon they are releasing. GPM also makes cost savings from reduced gas consumption easier to calculate.”

Which brings us back to the original vehicle fleet survey. When Larrick and Soll gave participants in the same instructions, but in addition to mpg also included gpm data, far more people chose the better answer: Option one. Overall, they found, the percentage choosing the more fuel-efficient option increased from 25 percent in the mpg frame to 64 percent in the gpm frame.

And PCAP isn’t the only player in the game. As Elizabeth Kolbert reports, a number of think tanks and coalitions have been cranking out climate recommendations for the next president of the United States. Whoever that turns out to be, the next president’s problem won’t be a lack of guidelines or expert advice … if anything, it will be the opposite.