Thursday, 29 Sep 2005

A federal court ruling earlier this year determined that the addition of synthetic ingredients (artificial thickeners, ripening agents, etc.) to products with the "USDA Organic" label violates the spirit of the 1990 law that established it. This scared the bejesus out of the Organic Trade Association, which represents mainstream organic purveyors like Dole and Kraft, as well as small-scale organic farmers and producers. OTA claims that removing synthetic ingredients would crush many product lines, and it's lobbying Congress to approve the chemical additives. The Organic Consumers Association is battling back. Muckraker covers the infighting.

Next Up: Jerry Bruckheimer on Defense Policy

Novelist Michael Crichton testifies before Senate on climate change

As part of his ongoing attempts to defy parody, Senate Environment Committee chair James Inhofe (R-Okla.) convened a hearing yesterday on climate science, featuring as an "expert" witness ... a novelist. Yup, it was Michael Crichton, whose latest thriller State of Fear casts global warming as a sinister environmentalist conspiracy. Inhofe, who has called warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," gushed that he was "excited about this hearing," that he had "read most of [Crichton's] books," and that "Dr. Crichton's science background has served him well." (Crichton has a medical degree but has never practiced medicine -- and, oh yeah, has no background in climate science.) Crichton was treated like a celeb by the committee's star-struck Republicans, but non-Republican members were bewildered. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) said the hearing had been "organized in a way to muddy sound science rather than clarify it." You think?


Among a series of stories on environmentalism's fortunes in the latest issue of The American Prospect is "Death Warmed Over" by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, a follow-up to their notorious "Death of Environmentalism" essay of last year. In their latest treatise, argues Grist's David Roberts, they condescend to their critics, accuse everyone of missing their point, and display a rather unwarranted degree of satisfaction with their own accomplishments. It ain't pretty.

Arctic You Glad We Didn't Say Banana

Arctic ice cap is melting fast, say scientists

The Arctic ice cap has shriveled to its smallest size in a century; at this rate of shrinkage, the summer cap may vanish by 2060. Researchers who compiled the data say the process appears to have become self-sustaining: As ice melts, there's more water, which absorbs more solar radiation (white ice reflects better), thus creating more heat, thus making it harder for ice to re-form. The Arctic is "becoming a profoundly different place than we grew up thinking about," said Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, with overall temperatures rising about twice as fast as in other parts of the world. Anthropogenic global warming is widely seen as the culprit. In case we weren't yet fully freaked out, other scientists speculate that melting glaciers and ice sheets may unleash ancient illnesses to which modern humans have no resistance, via viruses, bacteria, and fungi previously unknown. As the French say, l'eek!

What Pricey Glory

Carbon sequestration a pricey but feasible way to curb global warming

Carbon sequestration -- capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions -- isn't a cheap or easy solution to global warming, but it's doable. A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds that with major investments, up to 40 percent of CO2 emissions from large industrial facilities around the world could be isolated, perhaps by injecting them into disused mines or oil fields or dissolving them in the oceans. Sequestration could achieve up to 55 percent of the reductions needed to rein in global warming by 2100, but a global market for carbon credits that trades at a minimum of $25 to $30 a ton would be needed to create incentive to invest in the technology. Everyone seems to agree that putting the necessary conditions in place would take strong political will -- a resource in questionable supply -- but some find good news in the promise carbon sequestration holds for actually curbing global temperature increases.

Toujours Gas

France contending with bovine-source greenhouse gases

France's 20 million cows account for 6.5 percent of the country's greenhouse-gas emissions. Researcher Benoit Leguet of the Climate Mission of Caisse des Depots, a state-owned French bank, contends that bovine belches produce about 28.6 million tons of globe-warming gases annually, primarily methane and nitrous oxide. Cow poop (or as the French say, dejection bovine) accounts for another roughly 13 million tons -- but, sadly for humor writers, cow flatulence is a negligible contribution. By comparison, French oil refineries emit about 13 million tons of greenhouse gases a year -- although cows must burp and defecate to live, while fossil-fuel use can often be made optional. Leguet suggests changing cow chow to high-protein feeds like soy to reduce burping, and capturing the methane generated by cow patties for use as biofuel.