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The costs of unsustainable agriculture

Here's a guest post from Rodale Institute CEO Tim LaSalle.

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Tom Philpott is right to highlight the tremendous ecological debt we've built up by depending on nitrogen fertilizer to run our crop production system. Depending on mined and fossil-fuel produced nitrogen for our food is no more sustainable than depending on peaking oil and mountain-top removed coal for our energy.

There's no more "cheap" food and fuel, because, really, there never was. The huge irony -- currently obscured by the psychological jolt of widespread shortages of food and fuel -- is that we were just learning of how not cheap industrial food has been:

White House refuses to open email about regulating greenhouse gases

The White House has refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, and has told EPA officials that the email they sent containing the document of their findings would not be opened, reports The New York Times. Apparently the email in question has been hanging in […]

California license plates will go without Wyland whale tail

Some 126,000 California license plates sport a whale tail designed by artist Robert Wyland, but the famed marine muralist is now withdrawing his permission for the state to use the art. A few months ago, Wyland asked the California Coastal Commission to donate 20 percent of profits from the plate to his ocean-conservation group. The […]

Day three of the UN Dispatch-Grist collaboration

The UN Dispatch-Grist collaboration continues today with a discussion of the top user-rated idea on On Day One: 'Eat the View,' by Roger Doiron. This idea was so popular, it even found its way into The New York Times.

Here's what he suggests:

Announce plans for a food garden on the White House lawn, making one of the White House's eight gardeners responsible for it, with part of produce going to the White House kitchen and the rest to a local food pantry. The White House is "America's House" and should set an example. The new President would not be breaking with tradition, but returning to it (the White House has had vegetable gardens before) and showing how we can meet global challenges such as climate change and food security.

Kate Sheppard, David Roberts, and Timothy B. Hurst respond below the fold.

As gas prices rise, Americans move back to the urbs

For decades, Americans have trickled steadily out of cities into suburbia — and then into exurbia. But with gas prices high and likely to stay there, the wallet-conscious are now poised to trickle back in. In 2003, the average suburban household spent $1,422 on gasoline annually; in April 2008, that had leaped to $3,196 per […]

Hansen’s message to the planet

Maybe it was the thought of two decades of climate-crisis exhortation, little more heeded than words shouted at a hurricane.

Maybe it was the temporizing of the Democrats and the obstructionism of the GOP. Or it might have been the images of cities, houses and farmland of his native Iowa drowned by the latest "500-year" floods.

Perhaps it was all three. Whatever the reasons, the climate crisis' Paul Revere turned it up a few more notches in a speech yesterday (PDF) at a Congressional staff briefing in Washington D.C.

Yet James Hansen's headline-grabbing broadside against Big Oil and Big Coal CEOs may prove less significant than his full-throated advocacy of carbon tax-and-dividend as the highest priority for reducing carbon emissions and abating global warming:

A price on emissions that cause harm is essential. Yes, a carbon tax.

Obama lays out an energy vision that’s economics and security first

I just read the energy speech Obama gave on Tuesday in Nevada. I’d call it a TKO if I didn’t sound so unconvincing using boxing metaphors. Watch what he leads with: "A green, renewable energy economy isn’t some pie-in-the-sky, far-off future, it is now." This is what the campaign, correctly in my judgment, has decided […]

Supreme Court slashes Exxon’s punitive damages for Valdez oil spill

ExxonMobil is off the hook for billions in punitive damages related to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. In 1994, the oil giant was ordered to pay $5 billion in punitive damages. In 2006, that amount was cut to $2.5 billion. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court slashed the amount once again, to $507.5 million. By […]

BP, Shell, Airbus, and other multinationals call for 50 percent emission cuts by 2050

The CEOs of 100 large multinational corporations -- including companies from carbon-intense industries -- have signed a World Economic Forum statement [PDF] that calls on the G8 to create a strategy to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 50 percent by 2050. The G8 will be meeting in Japan next month, and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda will be pushing hard for an agreement on climate change.

Notable signatories to the statement: Airbus, British Airways, BP, Duke Energy, DuPont, Electricite de France, Entergy, E.ON, Michelin, Petrobras, Renault, Rolls-Royce, and Shell.

Are pigs flying? Not quite.

Umbra on short-haul flights

Dear Umbra, I work in the touring music business, based in the U.K. but touring worldwide. I have noticed recently that the record companies are booking cheap flights for short distances, e.g., London-Manchester, about 200 miles. Over such short distances, there is no saving in time, due to travel to and from airport, checking in, […]