How the Olympics are becoming a sustainable business

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An internal audit exposes the USDA’s lax oversight of GM crop tests.

In a press release last June, the anti-GMO watchdog group Center for Food Safety questioned the USDA's oversight of tests involving genetically altered crops. The agency had just greenlighted a biotech company's proposal to grow test plots of rice containing human genes on 270 acres in North Carolina and Missouri, right in the middle of large-scale conventional rice production.

The press release quotes a CFS scientist thusly:

With this approval, USDA has signaled that it thinks it's okay to grow drug-producing crops near food crops of the same type, despite the threat of contamination ... There have already been numerous examples of contamination of food crops by biotech crops, including pharmaceutical crops. Over time, such contamination of our food is virtually inevitable under the conditions allowed by USDA.

The USDA brushed aside this complaint and plunged forward, asserting that it monitors such tests with all due care.

According to a recently released internal USDA audit, though, the CFS had a point.

The Mustache of Understanding speaks truth

Woah. Tom Friedman is on fire. Of course you can't read it unless you pay for Times $elect, so here are the relevant bits:

Sorry, but being green, focusing the nation on greater energy efficiency and conservation, is not some girlie-man issue. It is actually the most tough-minded, geostrategic, pro-growth and patriotic thing we can do. ...

...

The biggest threat to America and its values today is not communism, authoritarianism or Islamism. It's petrolism. Petrolism is my term for the corrupting, antidemocratic governing practices - in oil states from Russia to Nigeria and Iran - that result from a long run of $60-a-barrel oil. Petrolism is the politics of using oil income to buy off one's citizens with subsidies and government jobs, using oil and gas exports to intimidate or buy off one's enemies, and using oil profits to build up one's internal security forces and army to keep oneself ensconced in power, without any transparency or checks and balances.

...

No matter what happens in Iraq, we cannot dry up the swamps of authoritarianism and violent Islamism in the Middle East without also drying up our consumption of oil - thereby bringing down the price of crude. A democratization policy in the Middle East without a different energy policy at home is a waste of time, money and, most important, the lives of our young people.

...

We need a president and a Congress with the guts not just to invade Iraq, but to also impose a gasoline tax and inspire conservation at home. That takes a real energy policy with long-term incentives for renewable energy - wind, solar, biofuels - rather than the welfare-for-oil-companies-and-special-interests that masqueraded last year as an energy bill.

...

Green is the new red, white and blue.

Amen, brother!

Update [2006-1-6 11:11:0 by David Roberts]: Just as a tangential side-note: I know how (conservative populism) and why (9/11) it happened, but nonetheless I find it utterly galling how completely our national dialogue has come to be dominated by arguments about who is more macho and who is a "sissy." (Note to Friedman: "sissy" is not a word that genuinely macho people use.) What about intelligence? Pragmatism? Anyone?

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Mining provision update

Remember that horrendous new mining provision that was slipped into the House budget reconciliation bill? The one that could lead to millions of acres of public land being sold off? Yeah you do.

Well, a little birdie tells us that Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-Nev.), one of the fathers of the provision, will announce a "compromise" version any minute now. It will strip out Section 6104, which allows mining claimants to buy land contiguous to mining claims for non-mining "sustainable economic development."

That's good, but the resulting provision will still suck, and will still allow the sale of millions of acres of public land.

This is standard issue Republican strategy. Start with a provision so odious no one with a conscience could possibly support it. If you get called out, make a show of "compromising." Then you get a provision that's still odious, but everybody gets to call it a win for their side.

Fie on them, I say. A pox on their houses. A fie and a pox, both.