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Farmworker Awareness Week is a chance to recognize the people whose labor means we can eat

This is Farmworker Awareness Week, a time to support the millions of farmworkers whose labor puts food on every American table, and who work and live in some of the worst environmental conditions in our nation.

It's estimated that 2 to 3 million farmworkers plant, tend, and harvest American crops every year. Many farmworkers in the U.S. are migrants who move from place to place following the harvest. Where I live, in North Carolina, migrant farmworkers are the majority. The average annual income for a farmworker in the United States is about $11,000, or about $16,000 for a farmworking family (though pay on the East Coast is lower than the national average). Farmworkers live in overcrowded housing and very few receive health care or unemployment benefits. Here in North Carolina, about half of our farmworkers cannot afford enough food for themselves and their families.

NYT op-ed: pesticides wiping out songbirds

When the little bluebird Who has never said a word Starts to sing Spring … It is nature, that is all, Simply telling us to fall in love. — Cole Porter, “Let’s Do It” The immortal refrain of an old Cole Porter chestnut — “birds do it; bees do it” — has taken on an […]

A roundup of news snippets

• A U.S. EPA program that evaluates the effect of chemicals on children is basically defunct. • Strip-mined Appalachian mountains are being planted with chestnut trees. • A Montana dam is breached to clean up toxic sediment. • Snorting cocaine is bad for the environment. • Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, and Costa Rica race to […]

Measuring additionality has clear benefits — and also some obvious costs

The second in a series of posts on additionality.

In his post criticizing the design of carbon markets, Sean correctly notes that additionality is a pain to measure -- an ever more expensive pain, as the industry matures and quality controls become more stringent.

To take an example I know well, at TerraPass, we spend tens of thousands of dollars per project helping dairy farmers validate their methane digesters under the Voluntary Carbon Standard. It's a complex process, requiring a fair amount of domain expertise, outside consultants, site visits, and ongoing monitoring. The process is meant to ensure additionality, but the cost carries some clear downsides. For example, we can't consider any projects that are below a certain size. Even if they're great projects, they won't generate enough carbon reductions to justify the effort.

So Sean and I agree that additionality in the carbon world is expensive and tricky to measure, and that the cost of doing so drives some worthwhile projects out of the system.

Spots vs. strips

This is the fourth post in five-part series on the details required to get carbon policy right. See also parts one, two, and three.

We now get into an issue that will seem a bit arcane, because no one's talking about it, at least not explicitly. But it's a real choice, and in many conversations about carbon policy we are implicitly getting it wrong.

Should we price carbon in spots, or strips? Or, to take it out of financial jargon, should we:

1. set up markets such that people who are selling or buying emissions credits have to go to the market with each incremental ton to determine what the price will be (a "spot" market), or
2. set up markets such that buyers and sellers can enter into long-term contracts for the emissions they will produce/reduce (a "strip" market)?

Land swap would allow drilling in Alaska wildlife refuge, two huge solar projects slated for Califor

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Like a Bat Out of Help An Offer We Can’t Refuge Go Toward the Light We Detect a Seal Change Law & Order: Species Victims Unit Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Garbage, Man Different Beasts All the World’s a Shag

EPA announces new lead standards for renovation of older buildings

Contractors will have to train workers to follow “lead-safe work practice standards” when renovating or repairing older dwellings that house children or pregnant women, according to new standards introduced Monday by the U.S. EPA. The new requirements are an attempt to keep lead out of the bloodstreams of babes, as structures built before 1978 are […]

File under Epitaphs for Humanity

Wow: Here’s the back:

Blogger Nathanael Greene takes on Philpott re: biofuels

The Natural Resources Defense Council evidently remains pretty sanguine about biofuels as a "solution to energy dependence and global warming." Over on the group’s Switchboard blog, senior policy analyst Nathanael Greene recently took exception to some unkind words of mine on cellulosic ethanol. I responded in the comments section. I hope a robust debate follows.

Small wind in urban settings

I never really thought much about small wind's potential as a significant source of a city's electricity supply. Windmills in a urban setting? I just don't see it.

Didn't see it, that is, until I saw it. The other day I biked by 1303 Alabama St., in the Mission District of San Francisco. Softly -- very softly -- whirring overhead is a 1.9 kW Southwest Windpower Skystream windmill. The Choose Renewables resource estimator says that it's a class 3 wind site, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually higher. As any San Franciscan knows, the Mission can be very sunny and pleasant during a summer day, but on summer evenings, as the marine layer moves in, the wind just nukes over Twin Peaks and the South Mission/Noë area can be a wind tunnel.

The result, I expect, makes for propitious economics. The house also has a 5 kW SunPower solar system. California's system peak is shifting later and later, which is being reflected in PG&E's tariffs. The old E-7 Residential Time of Use (which is being phased out) had a summer peak of 12 to 6 p.m. The new E-6 has a summer peak of 1 to 7 p.m., and a partial peak of 7 to 9 p.m. In practice, that means that as the solar system's production winds down in the early evening, the windmill steps in and produces electricity that would have cost up to 53 cents/kWh if bought from the utility.

That's just a wonky way of saying that wind and solar are like peanut butter and chocolate: great on their own, but even better together.