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Cruelty to hogs, and wretched meatpacking conditions

As the Senate debates the farm bill, which contains an entire title that would limit the power of the industrial-meat giants, you might think the industry would be on its best behavior, trying to act mellow while its lobbyists sort things out on the Hill. And yet the industry is currently churning out outrages as […]

Forest Service objects to Va. ‘clean coal’ plant that would be one of state’s biggest polluters

I should have added this to my account of state-level coal backlash: The U.S. Forest Service is warning Virginia environmental officials that pollution from a $1.6 billion coal-fired power plant proposed for Wise County would violate federal clean-air laws. In a letter to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, the supervisor of the Pisgah National […]

Senate Republican minority blocks energy bill

The Senate held a cloture vote this morning to overcome a threatened filibuster from Senate Republicans. It failed 59-40 — one vote short of the 60 votes needed. Reid now says he’ll introduce the bill again later today without the clean-energy tax provisions. More later. Right now I’m so disgusted and pissed off I don’t […]

White House pressured EPA to ease toxics reporting requirements, GAO says

Congress’ investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, has concluded that the Bush White House pressured the U.S. EPA to ease toxics reporting requirements for businesses. The Toxics Release Inventory was born in 1986 and serves as a community right-to-know tool, requiring that companies report annually on their toxic pollution. However, the EPA, apparently under pressure […]

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 […]