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California yanks kids’ jewelry from stores

Bangles and baubles may make fun stocking stuffers, but beware: the California Department of Toxic Substances Control has yanked a dozen types of kids’ jewelry from 11 retailers — including Macy’s, Marshalls, and the Gap — after finding lead levels measuring approximately in the skazillions. “The problem is much more pervasive than we would like […]

Why we shouldn’t target farmers for our farm bill frustrations

We're very pleased to run this guest essay by Elanor Starmer, an independent activist scholar who lives in California. Elanor recently published an important paper (PDF) on the livestock industry with Tim Wise of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. As the farm bill lurches to its conclusion amid shrill rhetoric about the "farm bloc," Elanor redirects our attention to the real beneficiaries of both federal farm policy and conventional attempts to reform it: the agribusiness giants that control the food system. This essay, first in a series, originally appeared on Ethicurean.

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In a recent Grist column, Tom Philpott ran down the list of problems that this year's Farm Bill debaters have blamed, loudly and repeatedly, on subsidies: "everything from the obesity epidemic to the explosion in CAFOs in the late 1990s to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico ... [to] steamrolling farmers in Mexico, Africa, and elsewhere."

Most mainstream media outlets and, points out Philpott, many progressive causes (Oxfam is one prominent example) are only too willing to point to subsidies as the delinquent dad when our food system spawns yet another bad seed.

Philpott is frustrated by what he sees as a lack of complexity and nuance in the debate over subsidies. I'd like to voice my own frustration about a different but related issue here. I've noticed that in the debate over subsidies, both in the media and among progressive reform groups, there is often no distinction made between the subsidy policy itself and the farmers who receive payments.

Commodity farmers, once considered the salt of the earth (almost literally), are now characterized quite differently: as a wealthy, powerful, politically savvy lobbying force capable of shaping the global food system to meet its needs, leaving the rest of us to pick up its mess. Call it Big Farma.

Notable quotable

“The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming. Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.” — NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally

Aaawkwaaard [sing-song voice]

Which is more painful, Giuliani’s line that we can deal with global warming through energy independence or Romney’s line that it’s not “American warming” but “global warming”? (A question for the Mittster: if, as you say, tackling this problem is going to enrich our economy, our environment, and our national security, why on earth would […]

NASA says 2007 second-warmest year ever, with record warmth likely by 2010

According to NASA scientists (PDF):

Through the first 11 months, 2007 is the second warmest year in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean has entered the cool phase of its natural El Niño -- La Niña cycle.

... barring the unlikely event of a large volcanic eruption, a record global temperature exceeding that of 2005 can be expected within the next 2-3 years.

Up to a million gallons of oil spill in North Sea

Perhaps jealous of the recent oil spills in San Francisco, Russia, and South Korea, Norway has had a spill of its very own. Oil company StatoilHydro says a mistake transferring crude from an offshore oil platform to a tanker resulted in up to a million gallons of black liquid flowing into the North Sea. The […]

Second-to-last issue of the Bali ECO newsletter

Issue #10 if the Bali ECO is here (PDF). You may need to read between the lines a bit if you haven't been following the negotiations. But it's not hard.

Transportation planning with people in mind

Say what you will about streetcars, they have an unmatched appeal. I mean, there must be a reason why it's hard to imagine a smoldering love affair between Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh with a bus theme.

Or, as the inimitable Dan Savage says:

Why is this so hard to understand? ... People like trains. People hate buses.

To wit, the Seattle P-I recently interviewed folks about the new Seattle streetcar and elicited what I imagine are fairly typical sentiments:

Bryan Lenning ... could take the bus downtown ... But for some reason, he'd rather take the streetcar. "But I'd never take the bus." He'd rather walk or drive downtown.

Mari Stobbe ... "I'd never take a bus. I've never been on a bus. I've never had any desire to be on a bus," she said. "(But) the streetcar seems like it would have a different feel."

Umbra on a safe return

Dearest Readers, I am back. My captors released me early this morning, and I have never been happier to walk somewhere in my life. All that driving gets one down, doesn’t it? Big thanks to the more than 2,000 of you who donated to Grist to help secure my release. I am in your debt, […]

Big ideas come out of Hollywood Goes Green summit

“Hollywood has gone from the capital of conspicuous consumption to the cutting edge of conspicuous conservation,” Arianna Huffington declared recently. Case in point: A two-day Hollywood Goes Green summit that wraps up today. At the summit, tech giant IBM announced a plan to design new technologies that will increase computing capacity by a factor of […]