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Sprol: still cool

Sprol seems to have redesigned since the last time I visited. Their RSS feed is a little fritzed, for me anyway, but as usual there's tons of fascinating stuff there. Just thought you'd like to know.

Pope on GAS Act

So, Carl Pope, what's up with this refinery business going on in Congress?

The answer is clear: Oil industry members of Congress and their allies in the Administration believe that America needs new petroleum sacrifice zones. It's not enough that the oil industry has devastated the Louisiana and Texas coasts by destroying the wetlands that should have protected New Orleans, by fouling the turtle nesting areas of Padre Island National Seashore, and by killing and maiming thousands of residents of Cancer Alley along the Mississippi River. Now, California, Florida, the Carolinas, Virginia, and New England must also be turned over to the oil industry. First we must throw them billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars to ensure their engorged profits. Then we will allow them to build new refineries without regard for their neighbors or for state and local control. Then we will bribe state governors to turn their coastlines into oil fields to feed these new refineries. And then we will eliminate public health standards to make these refineries even more profitable. This is not even a conspiracy -- it's not secretive enough.

Speak it!

Most U.S. food aid goes up in smoke

Celia Dugger, my favorite New York Times reporter, had another knock-out article in yesterday's paper. Titled "African Food for Africa's Starving Is Roadblocked in Congress," the piece lays out the absurd tangle of laws that govern the United States' food-aid program.

Rather than send money to Africa to buy food from African farmers to relieve hunger there, generating a little economic development in the process, U.S. policy stipulates that "American generosity must be good not just for the world's hungry but also for American agriculture," Dugger reports.

Thus all U.S. food aid must utilize food grown on domestic soil. But like another scheme designed to help farmers -- the commodity-subsidy program -- this one really benefits the middlemen, processors like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill.

Writes Dugger:

Just four companies and their subsidiaries, led by Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, sold more than half the $700 million in food commodities provided through the United States Agency for International Development's food aid program in 2004, government records show.

These companies, along with U.S. shippers and anti-hunger NGOs, form what critics have called the "Iron Triangle" of food aid. Under the system they are fighting to maintain, only 40 cents of every dollar the U.S. spends on food aid actually buys food. Much of the rest literally goes up in smoke -- it's spent hauling U.S. grain to distant places.

The Bush administration is actually trying to reform the program; but Congress, impressed by the Triangle's political might if not its arguments, is holding out.

Supermarkets push to the southern hemisphere, driving farmers out of business

The United States has made two great contributions to world cuisine over the last century: the fast-food franchise and the supermarket.

Temples of the cheap-food revolution, both institutions flourished in the 20th century, offering consumers convenience and the cachet of fast life. At the height of the post-war prosperity boom, before the yuppie-led backlash, fast-food and the supermarket occupied the cutting edge of food fashion in a rapidly suburbanizing nation.

At a Grocery Manufacturers Association convention in 1962, an air of hubris and self-celebration held sway that would not have been out of place at, say, a tech trade show in Silicon Valley, circa 1998. As Harvey Levenstein writes:

One family aiming to be half the population of Arkansas

Speaking of overpopulation ...

Jewel of Denial

Plastics plant on Texas coast blows up, no surprise to local activists Formosa Plastics is the self-proclaimed “Jewel of the Texas Gulf Coast.” But last week its plant in Point Comfort, Texas … how to put this … blew up, sending workers running for their lives. At least 11 ended up in the hospital. This […]

Throw Momma From the Pontchartrain

Some post-Katrina floodwaters cleaner than expected Some of the floodwaters pumped out of New Orleans by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — about 250 billion gallons all told, dumped mostly into Lake Pontchartrain — may not have been as toxic as initially feared. Researchers at Louisiana State University took samples five to nine days […]

Who’s there? A joke contest

So, I claimed a few days ago that environmentalism is never funny. Apparently, there's some dispute about this matter. So we're going to settle it once and for all. And we're going to start with the most basic unit of humor on the planet, the unit of humor that dragged itself up out of the primordial swamp and flopped onto land, causing the other protozoa to giggle and roll their eyes.

Yes: the knock-knock joke.

You think environmental matters can be funny? Prove it. Leave us a green knock-knock joke in the comments. We dare you.

Explosion at Texas plastics plant just the latest in a record of malfeasance

For being the self-proclaimed "Jewel of the Texas Gulf Coast," Formosa Plastics isn't doing so hot. Lucky for us, Hurricane Rita, initially packing 185 mph winds and headed straight for Formosa's ill-prepared and sprawling 1,800-acre PVC plant in Point Comfort, Texas, decided to turn north at the last minute. Formosa dodged a bullet.

No bullet-dodging last week: On October 6, at 3:30pm and after 30 minutes of obnoxious chemical fumes that drove Point Comfort citizens into the streets to wonder what ill wind was blowing their way, Formosa Plastics blew, sending a Nagasaki-style mushroom cloud and three, four, and five explosions thundering over the blistering Texas landscape. Formosa Plastics and neighboring Alcoa plant workers ran for their lives, many throwing themselves into nearby Lavaca Bay, host to one of the nation's largest underwater mercury Superfund sites. But for those workers, the mercury was the lesser of two evils. The worst was Formosa's explosion, which sent 11 workers to the hospital, two with serious burns.

The Senate ag chairman balks at Bush’s subsidy-cut hints

Yesterday, I reported that top Bush administration officials have been openly discussing deep cuts in farm commodity subsidies. But the program, a $14.5 billion per year cash cow, is also a sacred cow.

Farm-state politicians, and the agribusiness giants that love them, speciously portray farm subsidies as a "safety net for the family farm." In reality, the program helps push commodity prices down -- and arguably helps drive farms out of business. In 1935, around the time the program started, there were 7 million farms in the U.S. By 1997, the USDA reports, only 1.9 million remained. Some safety net.

Well yesterday, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R.-Ga.), a man who reveres the free market so long as it doesn't impede his state's beloved cotton trade, lashed back.