Obama's pick to head regulatory oversight agency draws criticism, sends Dave on tangent

Last week Obama announced that he'd be appointing Harvard Law professor (and prolific public intellectual) Cass Sunstein as head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

You could be forgiven for reacting to that news with a large yawn. But it's important!

First of all, OIRA is a big deal -- the conduit through which the entire suite of federal regulations passes. It can be used, as it was under Reagan and Bush, to stifle such regulations, or -- as will hopefully be the case under Obama -- to make them smarter and more effective. Ezra Klein has a great rundown on OIRA here, explaining its history and significance.

Some progressives are worried by the appointment because Sunstein is an outspoken proponent of cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which has been the death of many a progressive reg. Over on The New Republic, NYU Law professor Michael Livermore makes the case that Sunstein is a good choice because CBA needs to be reformed rather than scrapped. (It's a case he and his colleague Richard Revesz have made on Grist more than once.)

The food price blame game

Tactic No. 1: Create a straw man. Nobody in their right mind can claim that corn ethanol has no impact...

Bush pledges $17.4 billion for auto bailout, with no efficiency requirements

President Bush today approved $13.4 billion in emergency loans for General Motors and Chrysler, and will make another $4 billion...

Hadley Center and WMO say 2000s comprise hottest decade in recorded history

Last week, I pointed out that the climate story of the decade is that the 2000s are on track to...

Time to slice up the tomato industry?

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Interesting food articles from around the web

My browser's blowing up again with interesting tidbits from around the web. Time to serve up another platter of choice nuggets.

• I've been obsessing over a New York Times blog post on "The 11 Best Foods You Aren't Eating," which originally ran way back in June but was recently revived because of its popularity. The choices have been declared by nutritionist Jonny Bowden as packed with nutrients. They're also all extremely flavorful, and (with one exception) economical.

Most of them carry a kind of unearned stigma. Beets, for example, are one of our most glorious vegetables, but their reputation has been ruined by deplorable canned versions that prevailed in the '70s. Why don't Americans revere cabbage? I can't imagine a better way to consume something fresh and crunchy in the winter than a red-cabbage salad, dressed simply with lemon juice and olive oil. Canned sardines? People tend to recoil from this nutrient-dense, abundant, and, yes, delicious fish. I used to despise them, too; now I can't remember why. (Check out this recipe I conjured up for pasta with sardines a few years back.) And prunes (delicately called in the article "dried plums")? Fantastic -- and unjustly scorned. In an ideal world, this sort of list would be getting hung up in school-cafeteria kitchens across the land, where skilled cooks would debate about how best to teach children to love them. In our own fallen world, school-cafeteria kitchens barely exist (they been replaced by reheating centers for churning out Tyson chicken nuggets), and skilled cooks have long since been sent packing.

What do you expect from a party that wants to be more like Sarah Palin?

You can indeed fool some of the people all the time -- if those people are conservatives.

Rasmussen Reports made headlines last month reporting that 41 percent of Americans blame global warming on human activity, down from 46 percent, two years ago. The conservative pollster gleefully noted:

Al Gore's side may be coming to power in Washington, but they appear to be losing the battle on the idea that humans are to blame for global warming.

It is, however, the details of the poll that are the most telling. In January 2009:

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democrats blame global warming on human activity, compared to 21% percent of Republicans. Two-thirds of GOP voters (67%) see long-term planetary trends as the cause versus 23% of Democrats.

This compares to December 2006 result:

Fifty-six percent (56%) of Democrats say human activity is the cause while 51% of Republicans identify long-term planetary trends as the culprit.

That's right. Slightly more Democrats now understand that humans are the primary cause of global warming, whereas substantially more GOP voters -- a full one-sixth -- have been duped into thinking long-term planetary trends are the cause.

Why the growing divergence?

Tufts study: Corn subsidies are a sop to HFCS industry, but don't alone make bad food cheap

I have a complex and much criticized view of farm subsidies. 

On the one hand, I acknowledge that the "commodity program" embedded in the Farm Bill is a back-door sop to agribusiness giants like meat titan Tyson and grain-processor Archer Daniels Midland. By encouraging farmers to produce as much corn and soy as possible even when prices are low, subsidies push down the price of commodity crops -- and fatten the profits of the firms that buy them.

On the other hand, I disagree with sustainable-food activists who claim that subsidies are the root of our food-system problems. Take them away, I've argued more than once, and you'd still have a food system that mainly produces junk churned out by a few big companies. Plus, rather than campaigning to end subsidies, I think we should be pushing to redirect them to more useful purposes: like rebuilding local and regional food infrastructure.

A study just released by the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts illustrates my point. The authors -- veteran Tufts researcher Tim Wise, plus Alicia Harvie -- look at the effect corn subsidies have had on consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, the U.S. food industry's favorite sweetener.

They essentially pose two questions: 1) Do HFCS producers benefit from the subsidy program?; and 2) Can the rise in obesity/overweight and diabetes rates be tied to corn subsidies through HFCS?  Their conclusions might surprise you.

How the U.S. can stay the global wind leader

The Global Wind Energy Council reported Monday:

The United States passed Germany to become world #1 in wind power installations, and China's total capacity doubled for the fourth year in a row. Total worldwide installations in 2008 were more than 27,000 MW ... 36% more than in 2007 ...

Global wind energy capacity grew by 28.8% last year, even higher than the average over the past decade, to reach total global installations of more than 120.8 GW at the end of 2008.

It just goes to show what this country can do with intelligent and (somewhat) consistent government policies -- state-based renewable electricity standards and a federal tax credit (see "U.S. wind energy grows by record 8,300 MW").

But the race is on for global leadership, and China is poised to be our major contender, as it "once again doubled its installed capacity by adding about 6.3 GW, reaching a total of 12.2 GW":