Courtesy Randy Wick via Flickr [UPDATED 4/24] As expected, California's Air Resources Board passed the LCFS with the indirect land use component intact. That's the good news. The bad news is that the actual model to be used in the calculation (including to what extent gasoline will incur an indirect land use penalty) won't be finalized until 2011, a year before the rule actually goes into effect. The badder news is that Reuters reported that CARB's chair, Mary Nichols, sent a to letter for Fmr. Gen. Wesley Clark, CEO of Growth Energy, the main ethanol lobbying group, declaring "that corn …

GMOs: false promise?km6xoTom Philpott's post on USDA chief Tom Vilsack's comments regarding biotech deserves a bit more attention. Vilsack was speaking at the first ever meeting of the Group of Eight agricultural ministers. I guess we have to consider it progress that the top ag officials from the eight largest industrialized nations finally decided it was worth getting together despite the fact that there's no consensus on what to do about food. It doesn't help that when Tom Vilsack leaves the country -- the meeting was held in Italy -- he goes from being "Farmer Tom" to "Salesman Tom." His …

Phil Brasher at the Des Moines Register is reporting that USDA chief Tom Vilsack has named Kevin Concannon the new Undersecretary of the Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, i.e. the head of the federal food and nutrition programs -- which include food stamps and the national school lunch program. Concannon ran Iowa's Department of Health and Human Services -- responsibile for administering the state's Medicaid and nutrition programs -- from 2003-2008. The USDA post is typically held by a former state health department administrator -- the main question will be what, if any, reformist credentials Concannon has. According to Brasher, …

  North Catolina hog-waste lagoon: Smells like CAFO spiritDefMoIn one of the most deliciously perverse (not to say Orwellian) twists in our deliciously perverse (not to say Orwellian) system that is US agricultural policy, the prime beneficiaries of one of the USDA's main environmental programs are beef, pork, and poultry factory farms. This money, of course, comes on top of the monetary benefit that these vast (literal) cesspools of industry reap from an almost total lack of government oversight (a benefit which the GAO has estimated to be in the billions of dollars). Even subsidies to corn and soy farmers …

Don't FUD it upImage: psdFDR must have been talking about the Internet when he famously said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Everywhere you turn there is another study raising some new hazard and questioning some baseline assumption about how our society lives, eats or fuels itself. And then in short order, another study appears questioning the conclusions of the first -- leaving us all full of nothing but FUD. FUD, of course, stands for the bedrock principles of a depressingly large segment of corporations (and politicians) -- Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. The concept may go back as …

The Congressional Budget Office just released a paper looking critically at the relationship between ethanol, food prices and carbon emissions. But it gets better. The CBO blogged about it!Bedtime for corn ethanol?Photo: Big Grey Mare Most ethanol in the United States is produced from domestically grown corn, and the rapid rise in the fuel's production and usage means that roughly one-quarter of all corn grown in the U.S. (nearly 3 billion bushels) is now used to produce ethanol. The demand for corn for ethanol production has exerted upward pressure on corn prices and on food prices in general. CBO estimates …

Diet dilemmas Photo: George D Thompson In his most recent column the NYT's John Tierney -- a conservative political columnist turned "skeptical" science columnist -- objects to NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's attempt to reduce New Yorkers' salt intake. He compares the proposed new policy to a mandatory experiment in which residents are unwitting (and possibly unwilling) participants. ...Why bother with consent forms when you can automatically enroll everyone in the experiment? And why bother with a control group when you already know the experiment’s outcome? The city’s health commissioner, Thomas R. Frieden, has enumerated the results. If the food industry …

Over the weekend, the NYT detailed the trials and tribulations of the Obama administration's attempts to trim farm subsidy payments of a certain size: Among the audacious proposals in President Obama’s budget was a plan to save more than $9.7 billion over a decade by putting strict limits on farm subsidies that are disbursed regardless of market conditions or even whether the land is actively farmed. But Mr. Obama’s grand ambitions have run into political reality. The budget outlines approved by the House and Senate on Thursday night do not include limits on farm subsidies at all, and even champions …

It's good to know the EPA has a sense of humor. For a while, I was afraid the EPA might actually bow to political pressure and raise the so-called blend wall for ethanol, i.e. the amount of ethanol that can currently be mixed into gasoline and sold at the pump. Right now, it's set at 10%, but USDA chief Tom Vilsack, many farm-state representatives and the entire biofuel industry have been lobbying the EPA hard to raise it to 15%. On the one hand, I couldn't see how the EPA, on the verge of making the momentous "endangerment" finding on …

I haven't had a chance to weigh in on the issues raised by Andrew Martin's recent NYT feature on the food movement. Despite the giddiness that comes with hearing that "a prominent food industry lobbyist... said he was amazed at how many members of Congress were carrying copies of 'The Omnivore's Dilemma,'" some felt that the article, with its focus on Alice Waters -- who becomes more controversial by the day -- and Michael Pollan as food movement "leaders," was a hit piece. Personally, I think of it as a reality check. Obamafoodorama is on to something in seeing that …