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Taking a dive into the murky future of extracting food from the troubled sea

In my work on food and agriculture, I've focused nearly 100 percent on land-based issues. But the earth's vast and gaping oceans have always been a major source for human nutrition -- and will be only more so as population grows over the next decades. No one who writes on intersections between food and ecology can ignore the seas. I need to educate myself.

With that in mind, I'm currently attending the Seafood Summit, a confab sponsored by a combination of NGOs (e.g., Marine Stewardship Council), foundations (e.g., Packard), and corporate interests (e.g., Darden, which owns Red Lobster and other restaurant chains).

The hottest topic here is aquaculture -- a truly new practice with a history of around 50 years, compared with agriculture's 10,000-year track record. The question isn't whether aquaculture will continue to grow explosively over the next decades; the question is whether it will mimic the blunders of land-based industrial agriculture, or move in more sustainable directions.

Look for my seafood-ish posts over the next couple of days.

A small example of dynamic ice

Looking up from my keyboard, I saw a perfect illustration of what's happening underneath ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Two recent snowstorms dumped eight inches of heavy snow, followed by an afternoon of very warm air and a sharp rain. The rainwater lubricated the snow packs on my neighbor's roof and they began to slide. The temperature fell quickly with nightfall, leaving us with a perfect example of dynamic ice.

See the photo below the fold:

EPA Administrator Jackson's first public appearance

Those of you who did not make it to New York on Jan. 29-30 for the 20th anniversary celebration of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a national conference on Advancing Climate Justice: Transforming the Economy, Public Health and Our Environment, missed an inspirational high. You also missed a political milestone.

The event marked the first public speech by new EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, who laid out the nation's new environmental-justice and climate-change priorities. President Obama echoed Jackson's sentiments and made a statement to the Muslim world by giving his first TV interview to Al Arabiya television.

Civilized, reasoned discussion and debate on environmental health and inequality, on the complexities of climate change economics, on cap-and-trade, cap-and-dividend, carbon charges, and on greening the economy as we invest in new infrastructure framed the formal content. But those substantive sessions were just the subtext.

Umbra on heat and pipes

Dear Umbra, In your video advice, you warn people not to set their heat below 55 degrees for fear of frozen pipes. My question is, “On what do you base the 55 degree number?” … I “core heat” with a stove in the fireplace. It heats the core of my house (kitchen and family room) […]

Barney Frank on why tax cuts can’t do it all

“I never saw a tax cut fix a bridge. I never saw a tax cut give us more public transportation. The fact is, we need a mix.” — Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chair of the House Financial Services Committee, refuting arguments from Republicans that the economic stimulus bill should be scrapped in favor of their […]

Seattle museum opens coffee exhibit, downs third cup of the day

Coffee culture is king in Seattle. Whether it's because of the eternally gray weather, the cool, rainy climate, or our inability to socialize outside a dimly lit café, there's no denying the importance of the caffeine bean in a Seattleite's daily life.

And certainly we've earned our rep as a highly caffeinated metropolis, with more coffee shops per capita than anywhere else in the country -- many of them artisanal roasters selling specialty coffees. But the story of your steamy mug of joe doesn't begin and end with a moody barista.

In fact, it probably started in the hands of someone like Edwin Martinez, a third generation coffee grower who has been picking coffee beans in Guatemala with his family since he was a young boy. From there, they may have passed through a co-op set up to help small farmers process and market their beans. Then they'll move on to someone like David Griswold, the founder of Sustainable Harvest, a specialty coffee importer who bridges connections between the farmers in tropical coffee-growing nations and the roasters in, say, Seattle.

The roasting process will awaken the coffee beans' complex aromas and flavors -- and they'll soon be passed from barista to half-awake patron. And though you might be sipping on a half-caf soy latte with sugar-free vanilla syrup, you've really got the whole world in your cup.

It's this story that a new exhibit at Seattle's Burke Museum aims to tell. Opening weekend of Coffee: The World in Your Cup featured exhibit tours, coffee tastings, and informative talks by Martinez, Griswold, and University of Washington professor Max Savishinsky. "We're really putting a huge topic in a small space," said Education Director Diane Quinn.

John Podesta talks tough on Obama’s energy plan

“If people want to continue in practices that were more appropriate in the 1950s than today, then I think that they’re going to have to understand that Obama campaigned on a promise of energy transformation. And he intends to fulfill it.” — John Podesta, Obama’s transition chief and president of the Center for American Progress

Yes, carbon taxes are more transparent than trade system

Proponents of carbon trading over carbon taxes deny that carbon taxes are more transparent -- because you can play any game with a tax you can with a trading system. But the point of transparency is not that games become impossible, but that they become more obvious, and thus easier to stop.

When it comes to handing out permits (grandfathering) rather than auctioning them, carbon tax advocates clearly have the better of this argument.

The equivalent with a carbon tax would be to write big polluters a check -- not more difficult in the abstract, but a lot more visible than creating a property right.

"For every one that doeth evil hateth the light..." John 3:20.

A hint of the future appears at a Miami-area produce market

No, this isn't another cap-and-trade post. I'm talking about the yummy kind of markets.

As we grapple with ways to reform food production in this country, one problem that crops up is the loss over time of the old farm-to-market networks that fed cities before air freight and transcontinental trucking took over. So even if we wanted to (or, more ominously, were forced to) re-regionalize our food distribution system, the infrastructure no longer exists.

This desire, by the way, is not motivated simply by a need to reduce food miles -- a misleading measure for sure. I and others have talked at length about the misplaced focus on food miles as a way to guide food distribution. Rail, for example, is an especially good way to move food long distances -- especially compared to the option of driving huge fleets of diesel trucks even relatively short distances (which is why rail freight stimulus is such a great idea. Right, Ryan?).

But as we explore ways to reform industrial agriculture and its reliance on fossil fuels in food production, more, smaller farms inevitably come up as an alternative -- and for that sort of system to work, they would need to be proximate to population centers. Speaking of the food miles argument, it's likely that, using our existing infrastructure, exclusively procuring produce from farms within, say, 75 miles of urban centers would cause the transportation component of agricultural carbon emissions to go way up. So, there's a lot to do before anything like this could happen.

And thus we come to the point -- a means to counteract my recent gloom-and-doom posts. Ready?

Obama may be able to implement cap-and-trade under the Clean Air Act — but should he?

The following is the fourth in a series of guest posts from the Constitutional Accountability Center, a progressive legal think tank that works on constitutional and environmental issues. It is written by online communications director Hannah McCrea and president Doug Kendall, who also help maintain CAC's blog, Warming Law. (Part I, Part II, Part III)

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In previous posts, we've spelled out specific steps President Barack Obama can take to encourage Congress to pass legislation establishing a strong cap-and-trade program. Yet there has been speculation as to whether the President already has the authority, under the Clean Air Act, to establish a cap-and-trade program without waiting for Congress to act.

In actuality, there is no straightforward answer to whether the administration can introduce cap-and-trade for CO2 under the CAA. For one thing, the EPA has never successfully implemented a cap-and-trade program for any pollutant without congressional approval. The Bush administration tried twice, once with the Clean Air Mercury Rule (regulating mercury emissions) and again with the Clean Air Interstate Rule (regulating sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions), though both programs were ultimately struck down by the D.C. Circuit on unrelated grounds. (Note: The D.C. Circuit temporarily reinstated the Clean Air Interstate Rule in December in order to preserve its environmental benefits while the EPA promulgates new rules. However, the court made clear that it still viewed the program as unlawful.)

The only time cap-and-trade has been permitted to go forward is when it was explicitly approved in CAA provisions, as was the case with the EPA's famous Acid Rain Program regulating SO2 and NOx. Georgetown Law professor (and newly-appointed EPA adviser) Lisa Heinzerling noted in testimony [PDF] before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that this by itself might be grounds for prohibiting cap-and-trade for CO2 under other sections of the Act, "because [the acid rain] provisions explicitly permit emissions trading, it might be argued that the provisions that do not mention trading do not allow it." (Emphasis added.)

Precedent thus provides little insight as to whether a full-fledged cap-and-trade program for CO2 emissions under the existing CAA would withstand a court challenge. Moreover, Heinzerling's congressional testimony reveals that while certain provisions of the CAA lend themselves to establishing targets for CO2 emissions, the language of the Act only somewhat supports then using cap-and-trade as the mechanism for reducing total emissions. She concedes: