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Government investment in the Midwest will grease the skids for cap-and-trade

The New York Times, in an article entitled, "Geography is dividing Democrats over energy," makes much of an alleged split between policymakers on the coasts, vs. those in the Midwest and Plains states. Somehow coal and manufacturing are grouped together, challenging a concern for global warming:

"There's a bias in our Congress and government against manufacturing, or at least indifference to us, especially on the coasts," said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. "It's up to those of us in the Midwest to show how important manufacturing is. If we pass a climate bill the wrong way, it will hurt American jobs and the American economy, as more and more production jobs go to places like China, where it's cheaper."

Since many, if not most, of my posts attempt to explain why manufacturing and green issues are mutually reinforcing instead of at loggerheads, I find this all very troubling. The problem seems to be that a cap-and-trade policy would make coal more expensive, thus making electricity for manufacturing more expensive. In addition, cap-and-trade might make energy-intensive industries, such as steel and chemicals, more expensive as well.

I think the way to square this circle is to pair cap-and-trade with direct governmental investment to assist coal dependent areas turn to green energy. In other words, if cap-and-trade legislation was passed along with funding to build the wind and solar systems needed to replace the coal plants (and the attendant electrical grid upgrades), then nobody would be worse off. In fact, the Midwest and other manufacturing states would prosper by manufacturing the very wind turbines and solar panels that would be used to replace the coal plants as well as generating any potential on-site solar and wind power. But that would require big bucks from the federal government.

Unless cap-and-trade is accompanied by direct funding for clean energy construction, I'm afraid cap-and-trade will be in big trouble in Congress.

Seventy percent of world's uranium lies under native lands

"Nuclear Caribou" by Mark Dowie, in the new issue of Orion magazine, explains the drama playing out on a crucial caribou calving ground in Nunavut, in northern Canada. It is emblematic of a worldwide challenge to the sovereignty of indigenous communities in Africa, Asia, Australia, and North and South America.

As uranium mining companies rush to fill an expected spike in demand, they often are staking claims on native-owned lands. That's because, and I knew the number was high, but not this high: roughly 70 percent of the world's uranium resources are located under these communities, and about two-thirds of prospective uranium deposits in the U.S. are under or adjacent to Native American land.

It's not at all clear if the Nunavut claims will ever be mined, though it's looking more likely all the time. But then Winona LaDuke weighs in with an alternative vision for energy projects on native lands, a green one, that promises a better future for everyone concerned.

Salmonella-linked Ga. peanut-butter plant had dismal sanitary record

Is it just me, or has our food-safety system lapsed into a state of decadence that might have made Caligula blush?

In the past few days, I've learned that the FDA ignored clear evidence that mercury was entering the food supply through high-fructose corn syrup; and that the FDA and USDA continue to ignore the increasingly obvious threat of antibiotic-resistant pathogens in industrial pork.

Now I hear mind-numbing news about the Peanut Corporation of America, whose Georgia plant is evidently the source of the salmonella outbreak that has sickened five hundred people, killing seven, nationwide.

Given the breadth of the outbreak and the sheer number of products infected, the company must have owned a mammoth  share of the industrial peanut-butter market; its tainted paste has shown up in everything from health-food store staples like Clif Bars to supermarket fodder like Famous Amos cookies.

According to a recent New York Times report, sanitary conditions at the Georgia plant have for years approached the tragi-comic. And despite a steady stream of reproaches from Georgia health officials, the company was allowed to continue churning out peanut butter for the nation's food factories until the salmonella disaster struck. Here's a summary of the company's rap sheet:

NYT fails to acknowledge the job-creation opportunities from climate legislation

On the front page of Wednesday's NYT, we learned that Midwestern Democrats hate the climate. Or something. The ostensible point of the article was to highlight the geographical split between the climate change policymakers from the Obama administration and the House -- predominantly from the East and West coasts -- and the moderate Midwestern and Plains-state Democrats in the Senate who, according to the NYT, actually care about jobs.

For the record, the article, while admitting that President Barack Obama is, you know, Midwestern, ignored the fact that Ray LaHood and Tom Vilsack, Secretaries of Transportation and Agriculture, respectively, 1) are also from the Midwest, and 2) will have a significant role in devising an economy-wide solution to climate change.

And this is not to underplay the legitimate concerns that representatives from coal-dependent manufacturing states have. But this mostly just points to the greater weakness of the article -- the way it plays into the idea that addressing climate change will be some kind of job-killing catastrophe. This from the same newspaper that could write a feature on the tremendous job creation underway in Iowa related to wind-turbine manufacturing, a serious growth industry given that the nearby Plains states are considered the "so-called Saudi Arabia of wind." Keep in mind that enormous wind turbines will likely never be imported from abroad since one of these monstrous steel blades can barely fit on an oversize tractor-trailer much less be flown around the world on a 747. Indeed, the industry's potential for the Midwest led President Obama to visit a turbine factory in Ohio just the other week.

Sue me harder

So, remember how we're going to dump billions and billions of dollars into the laps of the Big Three automakers, to rescue them from their own myopic decisions? And remember how automakers are suing the crap out of every state that tries to implement California's tailpipe emission standards? Remember how Obama green-lit the waiver for those standards yesterday, and how those standards are overwhelmingly supported by the public?

Putting all that together, it occurred to New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert to wonder whether automakers will use that taxpayer money to fund their lawsuits against, um, taxpayers.

So she contacted them, and the following day put up a second post: Yes. Yes, they are going to use taxpayer money to sue taxpayers.

Summers doesn't advocate for climate solutions, but Obama's climate team makes up for it

Yes and no.

Larry Summers is widely regarded as a very brilliant economist. I can't dispute that. He was also the lead horse among the economists in the Clinton administration who were using every trick they knew to undermine any serious effort toward negotiating an international agreement on restricting greenhouse gases in Kyoto, Japan (see here and below).

He appears to remain firmly in the camp of most MEOWs (Mainstream Economists who Opine on Weather) in that he

• Doesn't understand climate science enough to realize how dire the situation is
• Doesn't propose remedies that would avert the irreversible catastrophe we face.

That seems clear from his two-part series on climate in the Financial Times in 2007 (Part 1 and Part 2). By his own admission, he proposes polices that are "less dramatic in their immediate claims for emissions reductions" than what the world has been considering. These include more R&D, of course, and an end to energy subsidies, plus:

The US must engage in an energy efficiency programme that takes effect without delay and has meaningful bite. As long as developing countries can point to the US as a free rider there will not be serious dialogue about what they are willing to do. I prefer carbon and/or gasoline tax measures to permit systems or heavy regulatory approaches because the latter are more likely to be economically inefficient and to be regressive

First off, the "and/or" is odd, since the "or" undermines the whole message. A gasoline tax is obviously not going to touch coal, and it is obviously not "economically efficient" if your goal is carbon reductions.

Second, it is odd economics to described an "energy efficiency" program as being driven by price, when high carbon prices primarily drive fuel switching. You would need incredibly high CO2 prices to drive efficiency in transportation (see "Why a carbon cap won't solve our oil addiction"), something Summers has never endorsed as far as I've seen. Also, even his new boss knows a gas tax is a politically dubious strategy for pushing efficiency (see Obama is right: Higher gasoline taxes to boost efficiency would be "a mistake"). Fortunately, his boss also understands that smart regulations make more sense in the transportation sector (see "Obama to push for California waiver that mandates cut in auto CO2 emissions").

In any case, if Summers won't specify a domestic emissions target, let alone a global one -- and won't specify how high a carbon or gasoline tax he has in mind, then it is impossible to view his policies as a serious addition to the debate or know if he is really serious at all. He is just another mainstream economist opining on a subject that he has not bothered to become knowledgeable enough on to make a useful contribution.

But does it matter that a MEOW, in this case a very clever kitty, is the head of the president's powerful National Economic Council? The New York Times says it does matter a lot in "In Obama's Team, Two Camps on Climate," which pits Summers against Carol Browner, who will oversee Obama's energy and climate policy, and which ignores the rest of his amazing Cabinet.

As evidence mounts of deadly bacteria from CAFO pigs, will the FDA and the USDA act?

Last June, Iowa State researcher Tara Smith delivered preliminary results of a study linking the deadly, antibiotic-resistant pathogen MRSA to pigs in concentrated animal feedlot operations. Despite mounting evidence of the link from Canada and Europe, U.S. public-health officials had never formally studied the issue, even though MRSA kills something close to 20,000 Americans every year -- more than AIDS.

In a must-read blog post at the time, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's ace health reporter Andrew Schneider documents the craven inaction of the FDA and the USDA as this public-health menace gained force. (I weighed in here.) As Schneider wrote:

An effective way to say there isn't a problem is never to look. That seems to be precisely what most U.S. government food-safety agencies are doing when it comes to determining whether the livestock in our food supply is contaminated with MRSA and if so, whether the often-fatal bacterium is being passed on to consumers who buy and consume that meat

Now Smith's research has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Examining CAFOs scattered in Iowa and Illinois, Smith and her team found the MRSA strain in 49 percent of pigs and 45 percent of the workers who tend them. The sample size is small; more study must be done. Will the government undertake it?

A real reckoning with the MRSA-CAFO link could deliver a devastating blow to the meat industry. To keep animals alive while stuffed together by the thousands, standing in their own collected waste, it's evidently necessary to dose them with lots of antibiotics. CAFO conditions destroy animal's immune systems; antibiotics pick up the slack. Take them away, and the CAFO model might crumble.

That, presumably, is why the Bush agencies so studiously ignored the problem. Let's hope the Obama FDA and USDA do better.

Update [2009-1-28 8:40:10 by Tom Philpott]:

The Seattle PI's indispensable Schneider reacts to the publication of Smith's findings:

So I called some disease detectives and food safety specialists in agencies responsible for ensuring that our food supply is safe. You could almost hear them cringe over the phone. And, no, to the best of their knowledge, neither the FDA, USDA nor CDC had launched systematic testing of the U.S. meat supply for MRSA. One physician said that a study was being done on the MRSA strain (ST398) that Smith had found on the pigs but added, "I don't think it has anything to do with meat."

McCain's adviser on the censorship of climate information under Bush

"I don't think there's anything with the Bush administration's censoring of documents that has helped them make their case for their stance on climate change. It's a disgrace. Have the information out, have the debate, and win on the merits. Don't win on the editing process."

-- Douglas Holtz-Eakin, senior policy adviser to John McCain's failed presidential campaign, at a panel on "Repairing the Republican Brand"

NOAA stunner: Climate change 'largely irreversible for 1,000 years'

Important new research led by NOAA scientists, "Irreversible climate change because of carbon dioxide emissions," finds:

... the climate change that is taking place because of increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop ... Among illustrative irreversible impacts that should be expected if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increase from current levels near 385 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to a peak of 450-600 ppmv over the coming century are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the "dust bowl" era and inexorable sea level rise.

I guess this is what President Obama meant when he warned today of "irreversible catastrophe" from climate change. The NOAA press release is here. An excellent video interview of the lead author is here.

The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science paper gives the lie to the notion that it is a moral choice not to do everything humanly possible to prevent this tragedy, a lie to the notion that we can "adapt" to climate change, unless by "adapt" you mean "force the next 50 generations to endure endless misery because we were too damn greedy to give up 0.1 percent of our GDP each year" (see, for instance, McKinsey: Stabilizing at 450 ppm has a net cost near zero or the 2007 IPCC report).

The most important finding concerns the irreversible precipitation changes we will be forcing on the next 50 generations in the U.S. Southwest, Southeast Asia, Eastern South America, Western Australia, Southern Europe, Southern Africa, and northern Africa.

Here is the key figure (click to enlarge):

Toymakers bank on kids' love of trash

Announcement: you can now buy toys made from recycled items like water bottles and Styrofoam cups. Or you could ... give your kids water bottles and Styrofoam cups to play with.