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Defeat from the jaws of victory

Call it environmentalism, Bush style. A new federal tax credit will help allay the extra cost of purchasing hybrid vehicles, but the Byzantine formula for calculating the savings provides greater financial incentives for buying heavy SUVs than more fuel-efficient cars.

Read the rest at Wired.

(Via TP.)

Pharmaceuticals may be saving species

You may have heard that measurable levels of pharmaceuticals have been turning up in water supplies, causing concern about the potential effects on wildlife. But did you hear that they may also help preserve endangered species?

As noted today on Green Media, a recent study shows that, in China at least, widespread availability of Viagra-type drugs has decreased the demand for endangered animal body parts used to treat erectile dysfunction in traditional Chinese medicine. In all, the study names eight animals that stand to benefit from this trend, including seals and green sea turtles.

Sadly, tigers and rhinos are not on the list, because their body parts are used in the treatment of many, many other ailments.

Clearly Pfizer needs to come out with pills to address these other disorders, so that other endangered species can be saved as well. Maybe they could combine effects into one pill, depending on which animals' parts are usually used:

Got arthritis? Suffer from insomnia? Ulcers, rheumatism, epilepsy, hemorrhoids, skin disease? Tooth ache, fever, acne? Alcoholic? Try our little orange-and-black striped pill! It's grrrreat!

Bye, Local

Organic farmers in U.S. losing business to foreign growers Organic is seen as a niche that helps smaller American farmers endure, but a sizeable chunk of the organic foods sold in the U.S. are being sourced from overseas suppliers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that as much as $1.5 billion of organic food was […]

Beswitched

Jeb Bush’s switcheroo on drilling causes rift in Florida delegation Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) is backing a bill in the House of Representatives that would open some new federal waters, including the eastern Gulf of Mexico, to oil rigs — and in so doing, he’s fractured the state’s long-standing bipartisan political consensus against offshore […]

Dirty Seeds Done Dirt Cheap

World’s 10 largest seed sellers control half the global market Seeds are at the core of almost everything humans eat — that’s why the tightening grip of seed-selling corporations is so worrisome. The world’s 10 largest seed-hawkers now control about half the global market, and its top three are among the world’s largest pesticide purveyors […]

Tar Nation

Canada’s oil sands boom for business, bust for environment We have seen our energy future, and it’s very, very dirty. By some estimates, the oil sands of northern Alberta, Canada, contain 175 billion barrels of crude, reserves second only to Saudi Arabia’s. Problem is, getting usable oil out of the tarry, sticky sand requires clearing […]

Why the Bush Administration looks set to jettison the farm-subsidy program, beloved of industry and

Long the bane of environmentalists and sustainable-agriculture proponents, the U.S. agriculture-subsidy system has drawn some unlikely new critics: top Bush administration officials.

Speaking before a food-industry trade group last week, USDA chief Mike Johanns, the reliably pro-Big Ag former governer of subsidy-rich Nebraska, complained that in fiscal year 2005:

92 percent of commodity program spending was paid on five crops -- corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton and rice. The farmers who raise other crops -- two thirds of all farmers -- received little support from current farm programs.

Later, he deplored what he called "trade-distorting subsidies. "

And Monday, U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman published an op-ed in the Financial Times offering to slash farm support, so long as Europe and Japan follow suit.

The U.S. subsidy system, rooted in the Great Depression and most recently ratified by the 2002 Farm Bill, rewards gross output. The farms that churn out the most product -- so long as the product in question is one of the Big Five commodities mentioned above by Johanns -- grab the most cash. And from 1995 to 2003, reports the stalwart Environmental Working Group, that cash averaged a cool $14.5 billion per year.

Now, the subsidy system is beloved of politically powerful grain-processing giants like Archer-Daniels Midland, because it pushes down the price of the stuff they buy and then resell at a profit (or "add value" to, as in the case of high-fructose corn syrup). Environmentalists tend to hate the system because (among other evils) it encourages farmers to maximize production through the use of fossil fuel-derived fertilizers, which in turn foul up groundwater. (In his 2004 Harper's essay "The Oil We Eat," Richard Manning elegantly teases out the environmental impact of government-funded industrial agriculture.)

Why, then, is the Bush Administration, generally friend of industry and foe of environmentalists, breaking ranks?

The dirty truth about Canada’s famed oil sands.

[W]hen Canada announced in 2004 that it has more recoverable oil from tar sands than there is oil in Saudi Arabia, the world yawned. There is estimated to be about as much oil recoverable from the shale rocks in Colorado and other western states as in all the oil fields of OPEC nations. Yes, the cost of getting that oil is still prohibitively expensive, but the combination of today's high fuel prices and improved extraction techniques means that the break-even point for exploiting it is getting ever closer.
--From "The Oil Bubble," Wall Street Journal editorial, Oct. 8, 2005

Actually, with oil prices nestled comfortably above $60 per barrel, the oil giants are tapping Canada's famed tar sands, as this interesting NYT piece by Clifford Krauss shows.

"Deep craters wider than football fields are being dug out of the pine and spruce forests and muskeg swamps by many of the largest multinational oil companies," Krauss reports. "Huge refineries that burn natural gas to refine the excavated gooey sands into synthetic oil are spreading where wolves and coyotes once roamed."

Note well: They're burning natural gas to get at this stuff.

Krauss adds:

About 82,000 acres of forest and wetlands have been cleared or otherwise disturbed since development of oil sands began in earnest here in the late 1960's, and that is just the start. It is estimated that the current daily production of just over one million barrels of oil--the equivalent of Texas' daily production, and 5 percent of the United States' daily consumption - will triple by 2015 and sextuple by 2030. The pockets of oil sands in northern Alberta--which all together equal the size of Florida - are only beginning to be developed.

Be sure and click on the article's multi-media link comparing the environmental depredations of producing a barrel of artificial oil from sands with those of conventional crude production.

The only way this process can make economic sense for the oil giants is if they succeed in externalizing these costs -- i.e., shuffling them off of their balance sheets.  

Post-Katrina floodwaters are dirty, but so are other U.S. waterways

Last month, “toxic gumbo” entered the American lexicon with the speed and force of the floodwaters it describes. A LexisNexis search of major U.S. publications doesn’t return a single hit for the phrase in the year before Hurricane Katrina. But in the 30 days after the storm’s landfall, 66 articles contained the phrase. Measure twice, […]

Confessions of a sustainable mind

Former Grist intern Jocelyn Tutak has written a short but interesting piece for the Sustainable Style Foundation's SASS Magazine in which she describes her love/hate relationship with Dansko clogs:

My paying job keeps me on my feet - literally - for eight hours a day. At about a mile an hour (oh yes, I clocked it with a pedometer), I put in forty miles a week just at work. My feet were no longer happy with me and quite vocal about it. I needed arch support, and I needed it bad.

Enter Dansko's Professional clog, the shoe of choice for doctors, nurses, chefs, and nearly anyone else whose job requires more than a bit of standing. This shoe carries the "Seal of Acceptance from the American Podiatric Medical Association." So I do a little research. My coworkers swear by them, and I even get a deal on buying them for work. The website promotes peace and earth-friendliness, and began as a mom-and-pop business. By looking at the site, the shoes, and those I know who wear them, you'd think they were helping save the world with each pair sold, with each step taken with their anti-skid tread. All is well until I check the specs on this Danish wonder-clog: The inner frame of this happy little shoe is made with PVC.

For those of you who don't know (and really, who can keep all these plastics straight), #3 PVC, or polyvinyl chloride, has been deemed the worst of the bunch. Bill Walsh, founder of the Healthy Building Network wrote in Grist that "the weight of available evidence tells us that ... it may well be the single most important source of many of the worst toxic chemicals plaguing the global environment today."

I can just picture it: Umbra on one shoulder and a tired, sore Jocelyn on the other. Who won out in the end? Find out.

BTW, to all you in the Seattle area on Tuesday ... the Sustainable Style Foundation will be hosting Green Drinks. There's a rumor some Gristers will be attending.