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...

Can Obama stop the nuclear bomb in the Senate stimulus plan? (Part 1)

A radioactive dirty bomb has been dropped on the Senate stimulus package. As WonkRoom reported:

On Wednesday, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to increase nuclear loan guarantees by $50 billion in the economic recovery package (S. 336). This staggering sum "would more than double the current loan guarantee cap of $38 billion" for "clean energy" technology.

Yet this provision would not create a single job for many, many years, but would saddle the public with tens of millions of dollars more in toxic loans. As I noted in my 2008 report, "The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power":

In August 2007, Tulsa World reported that American Electric Power Co. CEO Michael Morris was not planning to build any new nuclear power plants. He was quoted as saying, "I'm not convinced we'll see a new nuclear station before probably the 2020 timeline,"

Morris further noted, "Builders would also have to queue for certain parts."

Indeed, the nuclear industry is riddled with bottlenecks. For instance, Japan Steel Works is "the only plant in the world ... capable of producing the central part of a nuclear reactor's containment vessel in a single piece, reducing the risk of a radiation leak." And they have a backlog of a few years already.

The additional loans would probably not even result in a single new signed contract for a plant over the next two years, let alone produce a single job in Obama's first term -- other than maybe a few high-priced lawyers and lobbyists to twist the arms of state Public Utility Commissioners to shove the inevitable rate increase down the throats of consumers (see "Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power"). Turkey seems smarter than that (see "Turkey's only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour"). Are we?

Why are we still propping up an industry that can't survive without the taxpayer swallowing both the economic risk of an actual meltdown and the risk of the new nukes melting down financially -- all for a mature technology that has already received more than $100 billion in direct and indirect subsidies (see "Nuclear Pork -- Enough is Enough")?

Here is the proposed language for this nuclear bomb:

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?

What happens when a few large buyers dominate a market? Anyone who keeps up with my posts — still there,...

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.

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":

The ‘invisible hand’ is blind to climate externalities and the value of natural resources

When Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, released his ground-breaking study in late 2006 on the future...