Climate Food and Agriculture

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  • A climate policy for agriculture that works

    A proven climate solution. Not since Earl Butz’s famous “hedgerow to hedgerow” comment of the 1970s have America’s farmers been at such a turning point. Food and farming policy in the United States is largely determined by the Farm Bill, behemoth legislation that comes around once every five years.  Yet, the current climate legislation–The American […]

    Meredith Niles Climate & Energy

  • Why are milk prices plummeting?

    Dairy farmers are in deep trouble. Milk prices have fallen by half since last year, dropping to a 30-year low. Consumption has fallen in light of the slowing world economy and now there is a huge milk surplus, or so the “experts” tell us. It’s a nice theory: surplus equals low prices. Easy to explain […]

    Jim Goodman Food

  • Do dirty coal plants make us more vulnerable to swine flu?

    Scientists have discovered that exposure to a common pollutant may make people more likely to experience severe symptoms from swine flu — and it’s a pollutant emitted in large quantities by coal-burning power plants and other industrial facilities. The culprit is arsenic, a highly poisonous semi-metal which, according to a new study by researchers at […]

    Sue Sturgis Climate & Energy

  • On World Oceans Day, consider the jellyfishburger and fries

    Photo: Christopher ChanAround the world, fishermen and swimmers are running into a problem: jellyfish. The slick, stinging blobs are showing up in increasing numbers, earlier in the year, and in more places than ever before. Is there a reason for the jellyfish invasion? Unfortunately, yes—and like most reasons for ocean decline, it relates to how […]

    Carl Safina & Marah J. Hardt Climate & Energy

  • While the West will have to eat less meat, Africa might have to eat more

    Jim Motavalli of E/Environmental Magazine has a piece in Foreign Policy (!) on the difficulties we face in lowering meat consumption on any significant scale: …Giving up meat is tough, and arguing people into it is probably a losing proposition. Even with all the statistics out there about the dangers of meat, there are fewer […]

    Tom Laskawy Climate & Energy

  • As ‘Food Inc.’ nears open, Eric Schlosser appears on Colbert

    The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Eric Schlosser colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Keyboard Cat   Steven Cobert is a brilliant comedian. Eric Schlosser may be our best investigative journalist after Seymour Hersh. Together, Colbert and Schlosser create … a typically random and zany Colbert interview. But they do give […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Food industry and longer commutes are making us fat

    Recently I wrote about a study that looked across a few decades of data about housing and health. And we have written more than once about the relationship between the environment, location, health and price as it relates to food. Certainly there are systems issues that conspire against us when we try to make the […]

    Roger Valdez Food

  • Europeans demand investigation of the CAFO/swine flu link

    Swine flu continues Maroon lagoon: Take a dip in a hog-waste cesspool? spreading across the globe, killing people–even (gasp) Americans. (Eleven have died in New York City alone.) Ho-hum. As I predicted a few weeks ago, the flu scare has skulked off the front pages and into the realms of historical amnesia, that vast American […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • NPR: Organic ag rises in India

    Wouldn’t a bit of atrazine liven up this scene?India is a major player on the global stage–hub of the information-technology market, the world’s second most populous nation, and a nuclear power to boot. It would be a global-scale calamity if India’s food security became compromised–and that is exactly what’s happening, as NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling showed […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Would you like some GMOs in your coffee?

    One cube or two? Jill Richardson made a good catch on the GMO crop front the other day. She dug up an article from a Boulder, CO newspaper that detailed the debate over local sugarbeet farmers’ request to plant GM seeds within the city limits. The farmers claim that without GM sugar beets, they’ll be […]

    Tom Laskawy Food