Articles by Grist staff

Canada's economic recovery plan includes green items

Stephen Harper, the recently reelected prime minister of Canada, is including plenty of environmental items in his government's $40 billion (about $33 billion U.S.) economic stimulus bill, including tax credits and grants to support homeowners fund energy efficiency improvements.

Here's the government's own rundown of the plan's green items:

Action to Build a Greener Canada -- Budget 2009 targets investments that improve Canada's environment. These include:

* $1 billion for green infrastructure projects.
* $1 billion over two years for renovation and energy retrofits to social housing.
* $300 million over two years to the ecoENERGY Retrofit program.
* $1 billion for clean energy research, development and demonstration projects.
* $87 million over two years for key Arctic research facilities.
* $245 million over two years for the cleanup of federal contaminated sites.
* $10 million to improve government environmental reporting. (Unless otherwise noted, all amounts are in Canadian dollars)

Harper's conservative government is also saying the right thing about climate change. According to the CBC, the "government said it's committed to reducing greenhouse gases by 20 per cent by 2020, pledging over the next five years to give $1 billion in support to projects that encourage sustainable energy."

But cutting those emissions seems to hinge on the successful development of carbon capture and storage technology. Harper's budget would "provide $15-million over five years towards research, and another $850-million over the same period for clean-energy demonstration projects, including large-scale carbon capture," according to the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Is U.N. secretary-general planning pre-Copenhagen gathering?

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is set on jump-starting international climate negotiations, according to a Financial Times article (registration required).

The report appears to be based on comments made today by Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the UN climate convention. De Boer's remarks, made at the Globe International meeting in London, were picked up by other news organizations, but the FT's reporters put much greater emphasis on Ban's apparent plans to call a summit in the near term.

The BBC piece makes no mention of a summit, while Reuters buried the summit mention further down, suggesting that the U.N. chief isn't as far along in planning as the FT piece would make it seem. From the Reuters piece: "De Boer said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hoped to convene a 'small but representative' group of governments and heads of state in the spring to identify key political issues. 'What I would like to see come out of a process like that is first of all a shared vision that politically has to be delivered and agreed in Copenhagen,' he said."

Ban certainly did talk climate change with two high-level U.S. officials today, as made clear in this bit of the transcript from the daily U.N. press briefing:

Question: What did Secretary-General Ban say to Susan Rice when he met with her this morning?

Deputy Spokesperson: As you probably heard, Susan Rice came out at the stakeout this morning, and I certainly can confirm that the subjects that she mentioned and the way forward that she laid out is in line with the readout that I received. Just to recap, for those of you who may have missed the readout of the Secretary-General's conversation with President Obama on Friday afternoon:

The Secretary-General received a call early on Friday afternoon from President Barack Obama. The two leaders discussed a range of issues of common concern and interest. The Secretary-General underlined the importance of the US-UN partnership and stressed the need for the two to work closely together on major issues like the global economic crisis, climate change, food security and in the resolution of regional crises, particularly those in the Middle East and Africa.

The Secretary-General and the US President discussed ongoing efforts at UN reforms and the Organization's need for adequate political support and funding. The Secretary-General was encouraged by the US President's assurance of strong support as the Organization makes further progress in this direction. They also looked forward to mutual visits.

The Secretary-General also had a very cordial conversation with United States Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, at which they discussed issues of multilateral interest and importance such as food security, the Darfur peace process, climate change and management reform in the UN. The Secretary of State emphasized the importance of working together with the UN in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Iraq. And the two leaders discussed greater cooperation in UN reform and budgetary issues as well as mutual visits.

Based on this readout and Susan Rice's readout at the stakeout, I think you have some idea of where we are going on this.

The FDA sat on evidence of mercury-tainted high-fructose corn syrup

High-fructose corn syrup rose from obscurity to ubiquity starting in the late 1970s, borne up by an informal public-private partnership between grain-processing giant Archer Daniels Midland and the federal government. For me, HFCS is at best a highly processed, lavishly subsidized, calorie-heavy, nutritional vacuum.

I recently visited a public high school in Boone, N.C. The main hall literally hummed with machines peddling variations on Coca-Cola's formula for success: fizzy water with artificial flavor, artificial color, added caffeine, and a jolt of HFCS. Other machines displayed snack "foods" tarted up with HFCS. Why are we feeding our kids this crap, again?

Now comes news that makes even an HFCS cynic like me do a spit-take over my home-brewed morning coffee. Turns out that HFCS is commonly tainted with mercury -- a highly toxic substance -- according to a peer-reviewed report published by Environmental Health (abstract here; PDF of the must-read full text here.)

The Environmental Health study draws on samples of high-fructose corn syrup taken straight from the factory. But no one drinks the stuff straight. What about, say, cookies sweetened with HFCS? The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy plucked HFCS-containing products from supermarket shelves and tested them for mercury. The result?

Overall, we found detectable mercury in 17 of 55 samples, or around 31 percent

Traces of mercury turned up in name-brand products from makers including Quaker, Hunt's, Manwich, Hershey's, Smucker's, Kraft, Nutri-Grain, and Yoplait.

That a ubiquitous industrial-food ingredient such as HFCS should be tainted by mercury is bad enough. But it gets worse. The FDA has apparently known about this since 2005 -- and done nothing to publicize it or change it.

Tainted peanut butter and our troubled food system

An email from a PR person recently hit my inbox claiming that by high-school graduation, the average American has consumed 1,500 peanut butter sandwiches. I certainly did my bit to hold up the average; to this day I revere the unctuous paste of crushed, roasted peanuts.

Now, of course, comes news that a large producer of this protein-packed national treat (widely reviled, for reasons I can't fathom, by people in other nations) has been sending out product that's tainted by a particularly nasty strain of salmonella.

The New York Times' Kim Severson has a good piece on how the suspect peanut butter moved through the industrial food system, working its way into products as diverse as Clif Bars and Famous Amos Cookies.

News accounts don't typically mention that good old peanut butter has been tainted for a while now -- by sweeteners and dodgy industrial products. Look at Jif (not implicated in the salmonella outbreak), which is owned by Smuckers, which also owns Crisco, Pillsbury, and Hungry Jack. Merely roasting peanuts and pureeing them with a little salt isn't enough for the makers of Jif peanut butter. Its ingredients include: roasted peanuts and sugar, plus "2 PERCENT OR LESS OF: MOLASSES, PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OIL (SOYBEAN), FULLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OILS (RAPESEED AND SOYBEAN), MONO- AND DIGLYCERIDES AND SALT." Yuck.

Come to think of it, the PR person whose email got me thinking about this issue was actually peddling a smart solution: a high-powerd kitchen contraption that allows you to make your own peanut butter (among many other things). As our famously fragmented food-oversight system continues to fail and our industrial-food purveyors continue to pump unnecessary crap into our food, do-it-yourself solutions make more and more sense.