Geoffrey R. Stone

Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago

We’ve read a lot lately about the AP “scandal.” In short, on May 7, 2012, the Associated Press released a story that disclosed classified details of a CIA operation in Yemen that prevented an airliner bombing around the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

In an effort to determine the identity of the government employee who leaked the classified information to the AP, the Justice Department, after conducting an extensive investigation without success, subpoenaed from the AP’s phone company the records for more than twenty telephone lines used by the AP and its journalists. The hope was that, by examining the incoming and outgoing phone numbers, it could identify the leaker and prevent him or her from releasing additional classified information in the future.

According to the media (to say nothing of Republicans and Fox News), in pursuing this investigation the Obama administration brutalized the Constitution and flagrantly violated the law. The hysteria of the media’s response is predictably self-involved and self-interested and the reaction of Republicans is predictably hypocritical.

Let me say at the outset that I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU, a strong proponent of press freedom and a staunch believer in both a robust First Amendment and a vibrant Fourth Amendment. But I also care about rational public discourse, and the furious condemnation of the Department of Justice in this situation is way over the top.

The Fourth Amendment prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Almost forty years ago, in a regrettable decision, the conservative justices on the Burger Court held that individuals have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in information we voluntarily reveal to third parties. The Court therefore held that for the government to obtain our financial records from our bank, or our phone records from our phone company, is not an “unreasonable search or seizure” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

This understanding of the Fourth Amendment is regrettable because it ignores the reality that in the modern world we often, as a matter of practical necessity, expose what we quite reasonably regard as private information to third parties, such as banks, Internet providers and phone companies. That we reveal such information to those entities does not in any way suggest that we are indifferent to the privacy of the information.

Nonetheless, that is the prevailing interpretation of the Fourth Amendment and there is no possibility that the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court will change it. Thus, the subpoena of AP phone records from the phone company does not violate the Fourth Amendment.

The First Amendment prohibits government to abridge the “freedom of the press.” Does it violate the First Amendment for the government to gather information about the AP’s phone records? The media argue that because this action will reveal the identity of confidential sources, it abridged “the freedom of the press.”

Forty years ago, in another regrettable decision, the conservative justices on the Burger Court held that the government can constitutionally require reporters to disclose the names of confidential sources. The Court held, in effect, that the “freedom of the press” does not give members of the press any special rights not enjoyed by other individuals.

Although the government cannot constitutionally discriminate against the press (for example, by charging higher sales taxes for newspapers than for other products), the Court held that if other individuals can be compelled to disclose information relevant to law enforcement, then journalists can be compelled to do so as well.

This understanding of the First Amendment is regrettable because there are clearly circumstances in which the government should be constitutionally required to recognize and respect the distinctive harm its investigations might have on our ability to preserve a vibrant, robust public discourse. But, because of the settled state of First Amendment law on this question, it is clear that the Department of Justice’s action did not violate the First Amendment (despite the outraged complaints of the media).

In short, then, nothing the Department of Justice did in this investigation violated the Constitution as currently understood. Nor did anything it did violate federal law. Although proposals to enact legislation restricting the ability of the government to compel the disclosure of information about the identity of confidential sources — a so-called “Shield Law” — have been presented repeatedly in Congress over the past decade, Republican lawmakers have consistently — and shamefully — blocked such legislation on the theory that it might weaken the national security. Thus, it is also clear that the Department of Justice’s use of a subpoena to require the phone company to turn over the call records of the AP did not violate any federal law.

Legally, then, the Department of Justice could constitutionally and legally have sought the phone records of the AP at any time and in any manner it pleased. As a measure of good government, though, since Watergate, the Department of Justice has acted with self-restraint. For the past forty years, the Department has imposed upon itself specific, voluntary limitations on when it will exercise its lawful authority to ascertain the identities of confidential sources.

Thus, as set forth explicitly in Department of Justice regulations, the Department, “in recognition of the importance of freedom of the press to a free and democratic society,” has promulgated regulations providing that “the prosecutorial power of the Government should not be used in such a way that it impairs a reporter’s responsibility to cover as broadly as possible controversial public issues.” These regulations provide that the Department will not subpoena the phone records of a member of the news media unless certain conditions are satisfied, including

(a) balancing in each instance “the public’s interest in the free dissemination of ideas and information with the public’s interest in effective law enforcement,”

(b) “taking all reasonable steps to attempt to obtain the information through alternate sources or means,”

(c) fashioning the subpoena “as narrowly as possible to obtain the necessary information in a manner as minimally intrusive and burdensome as possible,” and

(d) negotiating “with the affected media” before resorting to a subpoena “unless such negotiations” might “pose a substantial threat to the investigation.”

Although these regulations are, in my view, insufficiently protective of the interests of a free press, they are as protective as the Department of Justice has ever been, and they are more protective than either the Constitution (as interpreted by conservative justices) or federal law requires.

It is, of course, possible that the Department of Justice did not comply with its own regulations in the AP investigations. Perhaps the subpoena could have been more narrowly drawn. Perhaps the Department should have negotiated with the AP before issuing the subpoena. I do not have sufficient information to speculate about these issues, but nor do the media. What is clear, though, is that the overblown claims that this investigation is some huge “scandal” that threatens the very foundations of our free society are nothing short of absurd.

Think Progress

By Zack Beauchamp on May 17, 2013 at 10:30 am

You may start seeing more people carrying James Bond’s gun around — by law. A new proposed federal law would require that all new guns, and eventually all guns for sale, would be required to have “smart” identification technology that only allows specially authorized users to fire it, something the silver screen saw recently in Skyfall. The law is intended to crack down on gun accidents, thefts, and suicides, but its critics — including a major gun violence prevention group — worry that it might make the problem worse.

Introduced by Rep. John Tierney (D-MA), the Personalized Handgun Safety Act of 2013 would require that all guns manufactured for sale or put up for sale, would have to have some kind of “personalized” technology that limited the ability to fire the gun to its owner and any individuals authorized. Since this technology is not widespread now, these requirements would kick in within two years for manufacturers and three years for sellers. Affected sellers include both federally licensed retailers and private sellers.

The bill is technologically feasible. Several possible ways of building “smart” guns include firearms that only activate when you press a special ring into it, guns that won’t work until you enter a key code, guns that only fire if they detect a specific radio signal, and guns that recognize biometric info like fingerprints. Some smart guns are already available abroad, including one Irish design that automatically disables guns when they’re brought into properly equipped schools.

There’s some reason to believe these measures could be effective in reducing gun violence. Roughly ten to fifteen percent of crime guns are acquired by theft; an average of 232,400 guns are stolen per year. Presumably, a smart gun couldn’t be used by a thief.

So long as parents don’t give their kids biometric “permission” or leave their gun key lying around, then kids also wouldn’t be able to fire the gun. Adam Lanza couldn’t have brought his mother’s guns to Newtown absent her say-so were they smart guns. Some of the 900 kids who died in gun accidents or suicides last year may not have lost their lives.

“Even if smart guns disarmed only our dumbest, laziest criminals and other unauthorized borrowers like kids,” wrote Dave Guston and Ed Finn, two professors at Arizona State University, “the savings in lives could be tremendous.”

But the Violence Policy Center (VPC), a major group supporting stronger gun regulations, is skeptical. A 2013 report on smart guns opposed “the use of any federal tax dollars in support of smart gun research,” though it didn’t take a position on a smart gun mandate of the sort Tierney is proposing. The report noted that most guns criminals use are acquired via personal sales from “straw purchasers” who initially acquired the gun legally, a distribution mechanism that wouldn’t be affected by smart guns. Moreover, the report finds, many children are allowed to use family guns by their parents, and the vast majority of guns in the United States are collected, not for sale, which means that most already-existing guns wouldn’t be covered by legislation like Tierney’s.

The VPC report even worries that smart gun laws might fuel gun sales. “Packaged with a strong sales pitch,” the VPC writes, “the technology could penetrate new markets for a gun industry that is facing long-term declines in household and personal gun ownership.”

The question may be moot. Some conservative commentators have already harshly criticized Tierney’s proposal, and the law can’t pass without GOP support.

Salon

Friday, May 17, 2013 11:32 AM PDT

Nirvana’s former bassist is working to end political dysfunction. Here’s his plan to make Congress more accountable

By Krist Novoselic

Krist Novoselic(Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson)

That Congress is totally dysfunctional is evident to most Americans, with just 16 percent telling pollsters they approve of the job the body is doing. The good news is there’s a constitutional solution that would dramatically improve its efficacy, boost participation, and curb partisan obstruction: switching to a form of proportional representation by electing multiple members in each district based on how it votes.

Legend and myth was important to ancient Roman society. They practiced augury, such as reading the way birds fly, then attributing bad situations to unhappy gods. In reality, their government (a republic, no less) was run by a few elites who made bad decisions. Americans tend to be similar in buying into myths, while a real culprit of our stagnant democracy is right before our eyes. Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but too many of us are focused on distractions — like blaming Citizens United v. FEC for everything wrong with politics — while political insiders rig the game.

I don’t have to tell Salon readers about gerrymandering. It is as plain as day that political insiders draw lines to protect their interests. However, there’s another effect of this process. Democrats tend to get packed into urban districts or disbursed in rural areas, and this causes distortions. For example, last November in liberal Seattle, Rep. Jim McDermott won over 79 percent of the vote. Where I live in the third Congressional district of Washington state, the Democrat who lost got almost 40 percent. Nevertheless, in Seattle, no matter how great the Democrat did (whether 80 percent or 50.1), the party won a single seat; meanwhile, in my district, a not too shabby 40 percent got no representation. It’s been noted that nationally the Democratic Party won more votes than Republicans but still lost the House by 233-201. That’s not democracy.

The solution is two-fold. First, Congress needs to pass a law mandating citizen-led independent redistricting commissions in each state for U.S. House elections. This will take the power away from the insiders who skew maps and let commissions of citizens independent of the legislature draw maps. California has such a system. But this alone is not enough to provide more fairness to our elections; these commissions still tend to determine which parties are winners or losers before any ballot is cast.

 Monsanto and Congress Move to Stomp on States’ Rights

• By Ronnie Cummins
  Organic Consumers Association, May 16th, 2013

Reliable sources in Washington D.C. have informed the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) that Monsanto has begun secretly lobbying its Congressional allies to attach one or more “Monsanto Riders” or amendments to the 2013 Farm Bill that would preempt or prohibit states from requiring labels on genetically engineered (GE) foods.

In response to this blatant violation of states’ rights to legislate, and consumers’ right to know, the OCA and a nationwide alliance have launched a petition to put every member of Congress on notice: If you support any Farm Bill amendment that would nullify states’ rights to label genetically modified organisms (GMOs), we’ll vote – or throw – you out of office.

On Wednesday, May 15, an amendment to the House version of the Farm Bill, inserted under the guise of protecting interstate commerce, passed out of the House Agricultural Committee. If the King Amendment makes it into the final Farm Bill, it would take away states’ rights to pass laws governing the production or manufacture of any agricultural product, including food and animals raised for food, that is involved in interstate commerce. The amendment was proposed by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), largely in response to a California law stating that by 2015, California will allow only eggs to be sold from hens housed in cages specified by California.  But policy analysts emphasize that the amendment, broadly and ambiguously written, could be used to prohibit or preempt any state GMO labeling or food safety law.

Will the King Amendment survive the Senate? No one can be sure, say analysts. However few doubt that Monsanto will give up. We can expect that more amendments and riders will be introduced into the Farm Bill–even if the King Amendment fails—over the next month in an attempt to stop the wave of state GMO labeling laws and initiatives moving forward in states like Washington, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut and others.

Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) have admitted privately that they’ve “lost the battle” to stop GE food labeling at the state level, now that states are aggressively moving forward on labeling laws. On May 14, Maine’s House Ag Committee passed a GMO labeling law. On May 10, the Vermont House passed a labeling bill, 99-42, despite massive lobbying by Monsanto and threats to sue the state. And though Monsanto won a razor-thin victory (51 percent to 49 percent) in a costly, hard fought California GMO labeling ballot initiative last November, biotech and Big Food now realize that Washington State voters will likely pass I-522, an upcoming ballot initiative to label GE foods, on November 5.

If Monsanto can’t stop states from passing laws, then the next step is a national preemptive measure.  And all signs point to just such a power grab.  Earlier this year, Monsanto slipped its extremely unpopular “Monsanto Protection Act,” an act that gives biotech immunity from federal prosecution for planting illegally approved GE crops, into the 2013 Federal Appropriations Bill.  During the June 2012 Farm Bill debate, 73 U.S. Senators voted against the right of states to pass mandatory GE food labeling laws. Emboldened by these votes, and now the House Ag Committee’s vote on the King Amendment, Monsanto has every reason to believe Congress would support a potential nullification of states’ rights to label.

The million-strong OCA and its allies in the organic and natural health movement are warning incumbent Senators and House members, Democrats and Republicans alike, that thousands of health and environmental-minded constituents in their Congressional districts or states will work to recall them or drive them out of office if they fail to heed the will of the people and to respect the time-honored traditions of shared state sovereignty over food labels, food safety laws, and consumers’ right to know.

Trouble in Monsanto Nation.
Over the past 20 years Monsanto and the biotech industry, aided and abetted by indentured politicians and corporate agribusiness, have begun seizing control over the global food and farming system, including the legislative, patent, trade, judicial and regulatory bodies that are supposed to safeguard the public interest.

In the U.S., despite mounting evidence of the damage GE crops inflict on human health and the environment, approximately 170 million acres of GE crops, including corn, soybeans, cotton, canola, sugar beets, alfalfa, papaya, and squash, are currently under cultivation. These crops, untested and unlabeled, comprise 41 percent of all cultivated cropland, or 17 percent of all cropland and pastureland combined. According to the GMA, at least 70 percent of non-organic grocery store processed foods contain GMOs. And GE grains and mill byproducts now supply the overwhelming majority of animal feed on the factory farms that supply 90 percent to 95 percent of the meat, eggs and dairy products that Americans consume.

Yet despite their marketplace dominance, record profits and enormous political clout in Washington D.C., Monsanto and the biotech industry are in deep trouble. Evidence is mounting that Monsanto’s top-selling herbicide, Roundup, is a deadly poison, destroying important human gut bacteria and likely contributing to the rapid increase of food allergies and serious human diseases including cancer, autism, neurological disorders , Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD), dementia, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Those most susceptible to poisoning by Monsanto’s Roundup are children and the elderly.

Scientists aren’t the only ones raising new questions about Roundup. Farmers are complaining that they’re being forced to spray more and more chemicals on crops increasingly under siege from a growing army of herbicide-resistant weeds.  The situation is so bad that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just raised the limits of Roundup residue allowed on grains and vegetables to even more dangerous levels. But just in case the EPA someday stops raising the limits, Monsanto, Dow and the biotech industry are working on a new “solution” to the onslaught of herbicide-resistant Superweeds: They’ve applied  for approval of a new and highly controversial generation of super toxic herbicide-resistant GE crops, including “Agent Orange”  (2,4-D and dicamba-resistant) corn, soybeans and cotton.

As a recent widely-circulated article points out,

• “The use of 2,4-D is not new; it’s actually one of the most widely used herbicides in the world. What is new is that farmers will now ‘carpet bomb’ staple food crops like soy and corn with this chemical at a previously unprecedented scale—just the way glyphosate has been indiscriminately applied as a result of Roundup Ready crops. In fact, if 2,4-D resistant crops receive approval and eventually come to replace Monsanto’s failing Roundup-resistant crops as Dow intends, it is likely that billions of pounds will be needed, on top of the already insane levels of Roundup being used (1.6 billion lbs were used in 2007 in the US alone).”

In addition to these Agent Orange crops, an expanded menu of genetically engineered organisms are awaiting approval. Next on the menu?  GE apples, trees, and salmon.

State Labeling Laws: The ‘skull and crossbones’ that terrify Monsanto
Monsanto’s greatest fear isn’t a federal government charged with protecting the health and safety of its citizens.  Congress and the White House seem only too happy to oblige the biotech industry’s unquenchable thirst for growth, power and dominance. No, it’s the massive, unstoppable (so far) grassroots movement of Millions Against Monsanto that strikes fear in the heart of the Biotech Bully. U.S. citizens are waking up. They’re demanding labels on genetically engineered foods, similar to those already required in the European Union. They’re calling for serious independent safety-testing of GE crops and animals, both those already approved (especially Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant crops) and those awaiting approval.

The anti-GMO movement has finally figured out, after 20 years of fruitlessly lobbying Congress, the FDA and the White House, that the federal government is not going to require labels on GE foods. Instead the movement has shifted the battleground on GMO labeling from Monsanto and Big Food’s turf in Washington D.C. to the more favorable terrain of state ballot initiatives and state legislative action—publicizing the fact that a state GMO labeling law will have the same marketplace impact as a national labeling law.

State laws spell doom for Monsanto. Companies like Kellogg’s, General Mills, Coca-Cola, Pepsi/Frito-Lay, Dean Foods, Unilever, Con-Agra, Safeway, Wal-Mart and Smuckers are not going to label in just one or two states.  Monsanto knows that U.S. food companies will go GMO-free in the entire U.S., rather than admit to consumers that their products contain GMOs.

As Monsanto itself has pointed out, labels on genetically engineered foods are like putting a “skull and crossbones” on food packages. This is why Monsanto and their allies poured $46 million into defeating a California ballot initiative last year that would have required labels on GMO foods. This is why Monsanto has lobbied strenuously in 30 states this year to prevent, or at least delay, state mandatory labeling laws from being passed. This is why Monsanto has threatened to file federal lawsuits against Vermont, Connecticut, Maine and Washington if they dare grant citizens the right to know whether or not their food has been genetically engineered or not.

And this is why Monsanto’s minions are trying to insert amendments or riders into the Farm Bill that will make it nearly impossible, even illegal, for states to pass GMO labeling laws. And there’s nothing to stop them when Congress is filled with pro-biotech cheerleaders who could care less that 90 percent of U.S. consumers want mandatory labels and proper safety testing of genetically engineered crops and foods.

Countering Monsanto’s Final Offensive: Throw the Bums Out!
Only a massive grassroots resistance will deter the U.S. Senate and House from stomping on our rights. Only an unprecedented campaign of public education, petition-gathering and grassroots pressure will be able to convince the ever-more corrupt and indentured politicians in Washington D.C. to back off.

Eighteen state constitutions have century-old provisions for state registered voters to collect petitions and recall state and local officials, forcing them to either resign or stand for reelection. But what very few Americans, and even members of Congress, realize is that 11 states have constitutional provisions to recall U.S. Senators and House of Representative members, as well as state elected officials.

It’s time we exercise the full power of direct democracy, not just state and municipal ballot initiatives. We must continue to support efforts like the current state ballot initiative to label GMOs in Washington state, and county ballot initiatives to ban GMOs, factory farms and other corporate crimes, in the 24 states and hundreds of counties and municipalities where these are allowed.  But we also need to use the power we have to recall and throw out of office our out-of-control Congressional Senators and Representatives as well.

If our elected officials in Congress continue to represent Monsanto and big corporations, rather than their constituents, then let’s throw the bums out! If the Washington political Establishment, both Democrats and Republicans, continue to trample on our inalienable constitutional rights and contemptuously disregard the 225-year principle of a shared balance of power between the federal government, the states and local government, then we have no choice but to recall them or throw them out of office.

Please join the nation’s organic consumers and natural health advocates in this strategic battle, the Food Fight of Our Lives. Please join this campaign to save, not only our right to choose what’s in our food, but our basic right to democratic representation and self-determination as well.  Sign the petition.  Tell your Congressmen and women, especially the 73 incumbents who voted last year to eliminate states rights’ to legislate on GMO labels, and those in the House this week who voted to support the King Amendment that “enough is enough,” “ basta ya.” Power to the People!

Ronnie Cummins is National Director of the Organic Consumers Association.

Mother Jones

When you hear about foam in the context of food, you might think of molecular gastronomy, the culinary innovations of the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, who’s famous for dishes like apple caviar with banana foam.

But this post is about a much less appetizing kind of foam. You see, starting in about 2009, in the pits that capture manure under factory-scale hog farms, a gray, bubbly substance began appearing at the surface of the fecal soup. The problem is menacing: As manure breaks down, it emits toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide and flammable ones like methane, and trapping these noxious fumes under a layer of foam can lead to sudden, disastrous releases and even explosions. According to a 2012 report from the University of Minnesota, by September 2011, the foam had “caused about a half-dozen explosions in the upper Midwest…one explosion destroyed a barn on a farm in northern Iowa, killing 1,500 pigs and severely burning the worker involved.”

A sample of the manure foam that caused an explosion that lifted a hog barn two feet off the ground and blew a man 20 feet away from where he had been standing (see video below). Screenshot from the video embedded below.

And the foam grows to a thickness of up to four feet—check out these images, from a University of Minnesota document published by the Iowa Pork Producers, showing a vile-looking substance seeping up from between the slats that form the floor of a hog barn. Those slats are designed to allow hog waste to drop down into the below-ground pits; it is alarming to see it bubbling back up in the form of a substance the consistency of beaten egg whites.

And here’s the catch: Scientists can’t explain the phenomenon.

Check out this amazing 2011 video presentation on the matter by University of Minnesota researcher David Schmidt. He opens by describing a 2009 explosion that lifted a hog barn a “couple of feet off the ground” and blew the farm operator himself 20 feet from the building. (Thankfully, he wasn’t injured, and there were no animals in it.) And check out the footage, starting about 3:19 in, of the foam itself, which must be seen to be believed. At one point , a shovel dips into the mire and scoops up as sample—which jiggles and pulsates, alive, apparently, with microbial activity. Schmidt also does a great job of explaining just how manure foam can cause explosions.

David Schmidt: Foaming Manure Pits from Iowa State University Extension on Vimeo

I wrote about the phenomenon about a year ago. But these days, there’s not much in the agriculture trade press about it. Which led me to wonder: Has the mysterious foam subsided—or congealed into yet another fact of factory farming that isn’t even notable anymore, like, you know, raising hundreds of pigs over pits that concentrate their waste, or dosing them them daily with low levels of antibiotics, leading to rampant antibiotic-resistant bacteria?

I decided to do a bit of digging for an update. Via email, Angela Kent, an associate professor in the department of natural resources and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois, informed me that “manure foaming” is “still a very serious problem among pork producers in the Midwest.” Scientists have still not been able to finger the cause of it, but “we are in the midst of a large multi-institution investigation focused on finding the cause of this very serious problem.”

So: still happening, and still no explanation.

Surveys show that around 25 percent of operations in the hog-intensive regions of Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa are experiencing foam—and “the number may be higher, because some operators might not know that they have it.”

I then got Larry Jacobson, a professor and extension engineer at the University of Minnesota who has been working on the issue, on the phone. He confirmed that the problem persists—just about a month ago, he said, workers were welding metal fixtures in an empty hog facility and a fire broke out, likely because a spark managed to penetrate foam enough to free trapped methane and ignite it. (No one was injured.)

Jacobson said that surveys show that around 25 percent of operations in the hog-intensive regions of Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa are experiencing foam—and “the number may be higher, because some operators might not know that they have it.”

He added that the practice of feeding hogs distillers grains, the mush leftover from the corn ethanol process, might be one of the triggers. Distillers grains entered hog rations in a major way around the same time that the foam started emerging, and manure from hogs fed distillers grains contains heightened levels of undigested fiber and volatile fatty acids—both of which are emerging as preconditions of foam formation, he said. But he added that distillers grains aren’t likely the sole cause, because on some operations, the foam will emerge in some buildings but not others, even when all the hogs are getting the same feed mix.

But if the causes of manure foam remain a mystery, a solution seems to be emerging, Jacobson told me: Dump a bit of monensin, an antibiotic widely used to make cows grow faster, directly into the foam-ridden pit. At rather low levels—Jacobson told me that about 25 pounds of the stuff will treat a typical 500,000 gallon pit—the stuff effectively breaks up the foam, likely by altering the mix of microbes present. No other treatment has been shown to work consistently, he said.

Thankfully, monensin isn’t used in human medicine. Still, it’s striking to consider that the meat industry’s ravenous appetite for antibiotics has now extended to having to treat hog shit with them.

Tom Philpott

Food and Ag Blogger

Tom Philpott is the food and ag blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. To follow him on Twitter, click here. RSS | Twitter

YaleE360

16 May 2013: Report

In the wake of the 2011 tsunami, the Japanese government is forgoing an opportunity to sustainably protect its coastline and is instead building towering concrete seawalls and other defenses that environmentalists say will inflict serious damage on coastal ecosystems.

by winifred bird

In the years leading up to the massive tsunami of March 11, 2011, it seemed that Japan’s coastal ecosystems could hardly decline in health any further. Decades of coastal engineering had divided land from ocean, turned quaint seaside towns grey with concrete, and pushed once-familiar species like loggerhead sea turtles and common orient clams towards extinction. Nearly half of the island nation’s perimeter was modified in some way; cliffs comprised most of what remained untouched. Even within the government, a sense had begun to spread that in a country where the sea has shaped culture and cuisine for millennia, coastal land management had taken a wrong turn.

Then came the once-in-a-thousand-year tsunami. Walls of water swept over the coast of northeastern Japan, claiming more than 15,000 lives and destroying hundreds of thousands of buildings, together with 60 percent of seawalls. In the rubble-covered wasteland that remained, scholars, activists, and fishermen alike saw a chance to rethink how people live on the coast.

Instead, national and regional government bodies are moving to recreate the concrete coastline that existed before. Reconstruction plans in heavily damaged Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima prefectures call for a string of

The government has let slip a rare chance to heal past harm by implementing more sustainable strategies.

stunningly tall and wide seawalls. Some have already been built; many others are in the final stages of planning. A second layer of raised earthen banks topped with pine trees is also planned in many places. And with Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic administration promising a major infusion of funding for disaster prevention projects nationwide, new seawalls are in the works well beyond northeastern Japan.

The goal is to protect human communities along the coast. But ecologists, environmentalists, and some coastal residents say the plans are an environmental calamity.

“We’re facing the possibility that it’s not the tsunami but rather the reconstruction work that will wipe out the extremely important natural ecosystems along the coast,” said Yoshihiko Hirabuki, a plant ecologist at Tohoku Gakuin University in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture. In part, the problem is that many of the new seawalls will be taller, wider, and possibly longer than they were before the tsunami, endangering seaside ecosystems that managed to survive earlier decades of coastal engineering. But Hirabuki and others are also frustrated that the government has let slip a rare chance to start healing past harm by implementing new, more sustainable coastal management strategies.

Hirabuki is one of many scientists who surveyed tidal flats, wetlands, beaches, and bays in northeastern Japan following the tsunami and concluded that, despite severe damage at some sites, wild plants and animals are making a strong recovery. He says plant communities on Sendai’s coast have bounced back “beyond all expectations,” and describes some sections of the beach as a flower garden of native plants humming with local bee species. The tsunami created new habitats, as well: In a 2011-2012 survey of the disaster zone, the Nature Conservation Society of Japan identified twenty new marshes.

The reconstruction is threatening that natural recovery in a number of ways. Depending on their design and location, seawalls — some of which are 45 feet tall and more than 150 feet wide — can block the movement of water, sand, and living organisms between land and sea. They can physically obliterate tidal flats, dunes, and other important habitats — as can coastal roads and earthen embankments. The construction work required to build these structures can also severely disturb natural habitats.

The central government’s environmental impact assessment laws do not apply to seawalls, disaster prevention forests, and two-lane roads like those being built and planned on the coast. However, Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures have set up committees to discuss the potential environmental impact of the work.

”As we carry out the construction work we are taking each ecosystem into consideration and receiving advice from experts,” Masayuki Kadowaki, who oversees seawall planning as director of the rivers division of Miyagi’s Public Works Department, said in an email.

Critics counter that these measures will bring little real change.

“What we are at great risk of losing is the seashore itself,” says Ryuichi Yokoyama, director of the Nature Conservation Society of Japan, which is

‘What we are at great risk of is losing the seashore itself,’ says one scientist.

campaigning against the current reconstruction plans. Northeastern Japan’s coastal ecosystems are difficult to protect, he says, because they are both narrow and congruent with the planned sites of coastal engineering projects: “You have a zone that’s maybe a fifth of a mile wide,” said Yokoyama. “You build a seawall and a road and your fifth of a mile is gone.”

Satoquo Seino, a professor of environmental engineering at Kyushu University, says it’s the first time coastal land use has become an issue of national debate.

“[When policy is set] disaster prevention comes first — ecosystems are secondary,” says Seino, who sits on the central government’s specialist advisory group for coastal policy. Government planners are making an effort to listen to recommendations from ecologists. But, said Seino, “Those groups don’t have political power or money. Opinions from the construction industry take priority, so we are not seeing any big changes.”

The roots of the coastal land-use debate go deep. People first began moving from higher elevations down toward Japan’s seashore, which offered rare expanses of flat land, at the beginning of the Edo period (1603-1868), Seino says. “Over a period of 400 years Japanese moved further and further into these dangerous areas, as modernization allowed for more public works projects,” she explains. “[Today], by law, the land management concept is to claim everything down to the high-tide line as human territory.”

Yale Environment 360

In the three most heavily damaged prefectures, plans call for extensive rebuilding and expansion of seawalls.

The percentage of fully or partly artificial coastline has now surpassed 56 percent on Honshu, Japan’s main island, according to the Ministry of Environment. In 1945 the country had about 84,000 hectares of tidal flats; by 2001, reclamation for agriculture, industry, and housing had reduced the figure to less than 50,000 hectares, the government reported. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries says some 55,000 hectares of seagrass beds were lost between 1988 and 2001. Beach erosion has become a serious problem, as well. And with waves now breaking directly on seawalls in many places, less and less beach remains for sea turtles to nest or endangered plants to thrive.

The reconstruction strategy in northeastern Japan calls for expanding the structures that caused these environmental problems. Badly damaged prefectures such as Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate all have announced plans to increase the height, width, and, in some cases, the length of seawalls. Prefectural bureaucrats determine the height of these walls according to formulas provided by the central government. The walls promise protection from tsunamis that occur once every few dozen to 100-plus years — not the much rarer mega-tsunamis like that of 2011.

Before the tsunami, Miyagi Prefecture — which has a mile or more of flat land between the mountains and sea in many places — generally had fewer and shorter seawalls than neighboring regions. Some beaches lacked them altogether. In the northeastern district of Kesennuma, activist and oyster farmer Makoto Hatakeyama says tiny inlets like the one where he lives remained in a relatively natural state. “People had a close relationship with the sea,” he says.

Now, Miyagi’s government is planning to greatly increase the height and width of many seawalls. In Hatakeyama’s hamlet, the prefecture proposed a wall 32 feet high — to the utter disbelief of Hatakeyama and his fellow fishermen and women.

Takao Suzuki, a marine ecologist at Sendai’s Tohoku University, says a number of the new walls will fragment or smother tidal flats. That has already happened in one part of famously beautiful Matsushima Bay, north of Sendai.

But plant ecologist Hirabuki is even more concerned about the so-called “disaster prevention forests” that are being planned as a second line of defense behind the concrete. Coastal dwellers traditionally planted these strips of pines to block wind and sand; a total of 140 kilometers of them were wiped out by the tsunami. The Forestry Agency plans to replant them.

In Sendai, the trees will stand on top of 10-foot-high earthen banks. The dirt for the banks is being trucked in from nearby mountains and mounded on top of native plants that survived the tsunami or grew back afterwards, Hirabuki says. The Forestry Agency says the banks are necessary for ensuring tree health where the water table is high. But Hirabuki worries that a vital source of seeds for regenerating more heavily damaged parts of the shoreline is being destroyed.

Solutions do exist. Hirabuki is pushing government planners to forgo raised banks in some places and intersperse pine seedlings with existing plants. Seino recommends building seawalls further inland, where they won’t fragment marshes, dunes, tidal flats, or beaches. (Setback also allows for shorter, narrower walls). The most fundamental solution, of course, is resettlement on higher land. Preserving an undeveloped buffer zone along the coast leaves people safer and nature intact, Seino and the Nature Conservation Society’s Yokoyama point out.

The pace of the reconstruction has left little time to consider alternative options, however: The bulk of subsidies from the national government have a five-year expiration date. Displaced disaster survivors are also divided over how to rebuild. “What’s hard is that people want to get their old life back, but that comes as a set with building these huge seawalls,” Yokoyama says.

Even when communities decide to move en masse to higher land, problems remain. In oyster farmer Hatakeyama’s fishing hamlet, for instance, the fact that all 30 households decided to relocate did not affect plans for a three-story-tall seawall. It was only after Hatakeyama — whose father is one of Miyagi’s most famous environmental activists — spearheaded a petition campaign that the plans were cancelled.

Seino does see signs of policy change ahead.

“I think [the tsunami brought Japan’s] 400-year pattern of ever-expanding coastal development to an end on an intellectual level,” she said. “But the change isn’t immediate. The extreme irony of the situation is that it probably won’t influence what happens with seawall construction in northeastern Japan in the next three years.”

For the region’s natural environment, the cost of that delay could be high.

Think Progress

Politics

By Igor Volsky on May 17, 2013 at 9:34 am

This week, the national media has focused on the three different scandals surrounding the White House, devoting hours of coverage to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) improperly targeting conservative groups applying for tax exempt status, the talking points Susan Rice used in the aftermath of the attacks in Benghazi, and the Justice Department’s subpoena of phone records from the Associated Press as part of an investigation into a national security leak. The around-the-clock coverage comes even as a new Gallup poll finds that interest in the ongoing controversies is “lower comparable to major news stores in the past.”

And while these stories raise serious concerns about money in politics, embassy security, and freedom of the press, they aren’t the only problems impacting the American people. Here are five big stories the media isn’t obsessing about:

1. Carbon pollution reaches historic highs, threatening human existence. The concentration of climate warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “has passed the milestone level of 400 parts per million (ppm),” scientists estimate. “At the beginning of industrialisation the concentration of CO2 was just 280ppm,” said Prof Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “We must hope that the world crossing this milestone will bring about awareness of the scientific reality of climate change and how human society should deal with the challenge.” The last time the Earth saw carbon dioxide levels that high, humans did not exist. The West Antarctic ice sheet also did not exist, and sea levels were as much as 82 feet higher than they are today. During an earlier period when CO2 levels were this high, temperatures were 5° to 10°F warmer globally.

2. The devastating impact of sequestration on kids, cancer patients and first responders. On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the budget deficit will shrink to its smallest level since before the Great Recession in 2013, and it will continue to decrease through 2015. But despite the smaller deficits, Republicans remain focused on spending reductions — even as the most recent round of cuts has kicked children out of preschool, left cancer patients without needed screenings, undermined public health and fire safety, and gutted programs that help low-income Americans in a variety of ways. Those cuts have also threatened to derail the economic recovery, which has sputtered along despite the headwinds created by a consistent focus on deficit reduction.

3. Massive cuts to food stamps for the most vulnerable Americans. The House Agriculture Committee approved a farm bill late Wednesday night that would cut federal food stamps by $20.5 billion — more steeply than any legislation since the welfare reforms of the 1990s. Earlier this week, the Senate Agriculture Committee also agreed to a $4.1 billion reduction. The program keeps hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Americans out of the deepest pits of poverty, and even as the Great Recession swelled SNAP rolls, the program continued to push its erroneous payments rates to record lows.

4. 1100 workers die in garment factory collapse in Bangladesh and most American retailers plan business as usual. Since a factory collapsed in Bangladesh, killing 1,100 clothing industry workers, American retailers have been hesitant to adopt safety plans that could prevent similar tragedies. Abercrombie & Fitch announced it would sign a safety upgrade plan that has been approved by six major European retailers and one other American company, but many other manufacturers — including Walmart and Gap — are holding out. Although some retailers fear the costs of upgrades, they could pass them on entirely to consumers and only raise prices by 10 cents per garment.

5. 4,000 gun deaths due to gun violence since Newtown. A crowdsourced effort to count every person killed by a gun in the United States since the Newtown tragedy is currently being hosted by Slate. As of this writing, the count is 4,150. The Senate rejected gun safety legislation in April and has not yet set a date for reconsidering the measure.

NukeFree.org

May 16, 2013

By Harvey Wasserman

San Onofre 2001 by Wikipedia

NukeFree.org was founded in 2007 by Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and friends to stop a proposed $50 billion loan guarantee package meant to finance new nuclear reactor construction. Joining a successful national grassroots campaign, they established this website and recorded the YouTube video on the home page.

Editor Harvey Wasserman has worked with Bonnie, Jackson, and Graham since the late 1970s and the legendary Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) concerts in Madison Square Garden. This website is meant to inform and inspire those who continue to work for a green-powered Earth, free from the plague of atomic energy. Please feel free to write Harvey with your comments and with URLs for articles you’d like to see appear on these pages.

HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE US is available at http://www.harveywasserman.com/, as is A GLIMPSE OF THE BIG LIGHT and clues to the whereabouts of the Holy Grail.

Opposing Views

By Sarah Rae Fruchtnicht, Tue, May 14, 2013

 Burns Narcissist CEO (Video)

By David Sirota

If I told you that government officials possessed ironclad proof that an imminent threat to this nation had the capacity to create a 9/11′s worth of injuries and deaths every year at an annual economic cost of a quarter trillion dollars, ask yourself: Would you say we should do something about it? 

The Huffington Post

Rodger Kamenetz

Author: Burnt Books,The Jew in the Lotus, History of Last Night’s Dream

From a talk given at Temple Sinai in New Orleans on May 9, 2013. This is part one in a series.

The Dalai Lama has come to New Orleans. If I were to speak with him, this is what I might say.

Your Holiness, you are coming to New Orleans at a time of some optimism, some hope. Eight years ago, after Katrina, there was some concern we might not survive as a city. Many of us had lost everything, our homes, our community our relatives and friends, and most of all our trust in the large institutions and government we thought should have protected us. The levees broke and so did our hearts, and out in the country there were many dark voices who said we had no right to exist, to continue as a city. We might have lost all faith in each other, but somehow we did not. In the first place, from all over, there was a tremendous outpouring of love and help, of compassion. There was a new influx of young people with energy and hope. We have not exactly triumphed, but we have rebuilt much of our city, our schools.

Yet we still face terrible problems many of which we had before the storm: We have tremendous poverty and hopelessness in our streets; we have violence and a terrible murder rate; our young people are killing each other; we still have corruption; we mistrust our institutions, our police and our jail; the rich and the poor still live very separate lives; and while we often come together to celebrate and party, black and white also live very separate lives. And we are still living on the front line of a world wide ecological disaster. So while we look ahead, with some confidence, that perhaps our city will be safer in future storms, in the not very long term, the destruction of our protective wetlands continues, our land is sinking and the sea is rising and our margin of safety grows thinner every year. So yes we have survived, but the question of long-term survival for our city as a community and as a culture still is very much in question.

Your Holiness, survival was the question you brought to the Jews in our dialogue in Dharamsala in 1990. It was an historic dialogue between two exile peoples, Jews and Tibetans who had never met before at such a high level. And it was a religious dialogue, a dialogue of philosophy, faith and soul — you would call it Mind, your Holiness. When we met with you in 1990, a group of eight rabbis and Jewish teachers, and me as a modern day scribe, your question to us was, can you tell me the secret of Jewish spiritual survival in exile?

What a beautiful question it still is, and one we might ask ourselves also here in New Orleans. Not only for Jews but for all of us here: Do we have a secret for survival?

Some of us smiled at your question as we journeyed through the Punjab. Have we been doing so well as Jews that we can offer advice to others? One of the rabbis on the trip said, I don’t know that you can tell the Dalai Lama, eat chicken soups, send your kids to Sunday school and it will be OK? Some said if there is a secret of survival maybe it’s because it was God’s will and how can you tell that to a non-theist like you? But mostly Your Holiness we were deeply honored by your question, For 2,000 years we survived, and up to now, no one ever thought to ask, how did you do it?

That question was really how you started dialogue with us, so sweetly. When I was sitting in your temple in your exile home in India, that first day, I saw a Buddhist thangka, a sort of wedding cake of Buddhas piled up, and before them was a reflecting pool. And I said to the man next to me, “Is that a pool of water?” And he said, “No, it’s a pool of nectar.” So that is how you reflected us in your eyes, right from the start, sweetly, maybe more sweetly than we knew how to see ourselves, for Jews are a very self-critical people, as you now know, Your Holiness, very contentious and very much opinionated and given to arguments.

So right from the start, the dialogue with you was never going to be just one way with the Jewish side teaching and you receiving. As my beloved teacher Reb Zalman — Rabbi Zalman Schachter — said, “We didn’t come just to sell, but also to buy.” And oh what you had to sell us Your Holiness, was so precious — we are still feasting on the light.

You know, Your Holiness, as we told you then, we Jews have a prophecy that tells us that our suffering and our exile, our collective trauma as a people, has some redemptive meaning. Because of exile we were able to share our teachings our wisdom, our story of redemption from slavery, our Torah. And it’s true also that our Torah, thanks to our sister religions Islam and Christianity, is now known through every corner of the earth, as our greatest philosopher, Maimonides, pointed out. We even found a mission in exile, to be “a light unto the nations,” and yet at times how bitter those words can sound to us and how far from their meaning do we live, caught up in practical concerns.

That you saw something of that light in us as Jews was not just wishful thinking; it was a kind of visualization of us, a meditation in itself. And the Tibetan people have their own theory of their brokenness and exile — that they had stored up so much wisdom behind the barrier of the high Himalayas, and that this wisdom was intended for the whole world. So exile and destruction came to your people too in the 20th century so that at long last this light might also be shared with other nations. And you have been one of the chief carriers of that light, and have gone all over the world with it, and now you are coming to us here in New Orleans. And we are grateful.

In that historic dialogue in 1990 there were two important teachings that still seem relevant to us, both to Jews and really also to New Orleans in general.

Two important secrets of Jewish spiritual survival in exile that you received, and then with a bit of a twist, turned back to us. For your contribution, your response proved to be incredibly powerful.

The first was an historical answer, and the second I might say was a spiritual answer. Or I might say the first was how we speak as Jews to Tibetans, exile people to exile people, and the second, the deeper dialogue of soul to soul.

We sent rabbis to speak with you, mainly. And one of them was Rabbi Irving Greenberg, the founder of CLAL, who later became chair of the Holocaust Museum — an unusual figure at the time, an orthodox rabbi given to dialogue between Jews and other religions. And we joked he was preparing for the more difficult dialogue between Orthodox and Reform Jews. Rabbi Greenberg, Yitz we called him, looked through the long history of Jewish trauma — and we can think of so many: the destruction of the first Temple, the Babylonian exile, the exile from Spain, and looming over all of them and still today, the Holocaust. But of all these historical traumas and destructions, he chose to speak of one: of the year 70, in which the Jewish people were dispersed, Jerusalem itself was renamed for a Roman god, and the destruction of the Second Temple, which still lies in ruins today. And in speaking to you, your holiness, Yitz told of a secret of Jewish survival, which is a kind of spiritual democracy, in which instead of entrusting all the authority in a single figure, it was spread so that everyone had some responsibility. It began with a small group of teachers who we know as the rabbis or rabbinic sages, who founded a small school in northern Israel in Yavneh, and of how they essentially invented a new form of Judaism to replace the old Temple worship that had been conducted by priests.

They faced a choice then, that we have also faced here in New Orleans, as we’ve tried to make our choices. The choice comes down to renewal vs. restoration. When everything is destroyed, there are two impulses, and the Tibetans know this as well. One group wants to rebuild the old monasteries and the old system and keep everything the same, and this is a very human response. Get things back the way they were. The other group recognizes: No, we are in an entirely new situation now, and we cannot go back to the way things were before. We have to renew our institutions and make up new ones. And that’s essentially what the rabbis did. There was no longer a priesthood, no longer a Temple, no longer a central place of pilgrimage called Jerusalem, and the whole meaning of the Torah, the redemptive history of a people who’d lived in exiled and returned home in triumph, was shattered, seemingly forever. So Yitz explained — to you– that the rabbis moved many of the Temple ceremonies into the home, and instead of the priest and the altar, there was the father and mother at the family table, and the blessings for the bread and the wine were now said there. And new observances were created like Tisha B’Av to remember the destruction, to never forget it, and new prayers recited to speak always of the longing for the hoped for return — such as when we say at each Passover, “Next Year in Jerusalem…”

And your Holiness, you heard all that and you grasped it in your hand, and you said, “Now I understand the Jewish secret, in everything you do always to remind, always to remind.”

But that is when the selling turned to buying. For you twisted your hand and you said quietly in your special way: So now that you have returned to the land of Israel, do you still need all these prayers and customs?

And of course you’d nailed it because after all, when my grandfather was a boy in Zhegare and said “Next Year in Jerusalem” at the end of the Seder, it was a hope or a dream, but today it is a call to my travel agent.

Rabbi Greenberg acknowledged how you had turned things around. That we thought we’d come to advise you about exile and trauma but we ourselves are living through a very new kind of situation that has not existed for 2,000 years, a situation that is in fact causing the Jewish people every where tremendous stress and anguish — a mixture of hope and fear — and that is the continuing drama of the state of Israel and its existential conflicts within its borders and without. So Yitz joked, “Your Holiness, we should make you a chief rabbi because that’s exactly what we are wrestling with today,” and Your holiness, you joked, “Then would you get me a little hat?”

So right there you’d turned the exposition into a dialogue, and showed us what we already sense, that though we have survived so much over 2,000 years, we are still struggling with questions of spiritual survival — that is, in what form will Judaism take when exile is a choice rather than a condition?

Even though as Jews we have survived, our struggle is not at all over. It reminds me of what one of our great contemporary Jewish poets, and part time New Orleanian, Bob Dylan said,

The rabbis built a good strong boat after the fall of the Temple. It carried us along for about 1,800 years. Then it started to fall apart. We’ve been drifting on planks of wood and life savers for the last 250 years. But that’s an amazing boat. It lasted for 1,800 years and even the wreckage is pretty amazing.

But as beautiful as that exchange about suffering and history and destruction was, there was a second exchange that had an even more profound effect on many Jews. And this one was soul to soul, and angel to angel — the Jewish soul and the Tibetan soul, the Jewish angel and the Tibetan angel. For the spiritual dimension of reality is so often neglected, despised, even hated in today’s world, but it is a major part of what makes Jewish survival worthwhile in the first place. And right now it is in the midst of our wreckage I speak to you, both as a Jew and as a New Orleanian, because survival is not just a matter of urban planning, or of financial aid, or willfulness. It is something deeper. It is of the soul, the soul of individuals and the soul of the city, and the soul of nation. To rebuild is important, but to recognize a new historical moment and to renew is a matter of soul I do believe, and without soul nothing we do can ever really be new.

Rodger Kamenetz is the author of ‘The Jew in the Lotus.’

The Huffington Post

Organic Food Industry Gains Clout On Capitol Hill, Causing Tensions Within Congress

By MARY CLARE JALONICK 05/17/13 12:12 PM ET EDT

 

WASHINGTON — The organic food industry is gaining influence on Capitol Hill, prompted by its entry into traditional farm states and by increasing consumer demand.

That’s not going over well with everyone in Congress.

Tensions between conventional and organic agriculture boiled over this week during a late-night House Agriculture Committee debate on farm legislation that for decades has propped up traditional crops and largely ignored organics.

When Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., a former organic farmer, offered an amendment to make it easier for organic companies to organize industry-wide promotional campaigns, there was swift backlash from some farm-state Republicans. One lawmaker said he didn’t want to see the industry get a free ride and a second complained about organics’ “continued assault on agriculture.”

“That’s one of the things that has caught me and raises my concerns, is that industry’s lack of respect for traditional agriculture,” said Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga. He was referring to some organic companies’ efforts to reduce the number of genetically modified crops in the marketplace.

At the same time, Scott acknowledged that he and his wife buy organic foods.

Growing consumer interest in organics has proved tough for some Republicans on the committee to ignore. Eight Republicans, most of them newer members of the committee, joined with all of the committee’s Democrats in supporting the amendment, which was adopted 29-17.

Rep. Vicky Hartzler, a Missouri Republican who owns a farm equipment business and a nonorganic corn and soybean farm, said she supported the amendment not only because helping organics is good for agriculture but because many of her constituents eat organic foods.

“Organics are a niche market in agriculture with a growing market share, so it makes sense for me to allow farmers to invest some of their own funds to promote their products,” she said.

The amendment would allow the organic industry to organize and pay for a unified industry promotional campaign called a “check-off” that is facilitated by the Agriculture Department but is no cost to the government. These promotional programs have traditionally been limited to individual commodities or crops, producing familiar campaigns like “Got Milk?” and “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner.”

The amendment would not set up such a program for organics, but it would allow USDA to approve an organic promotional campaign if the industry decided it wanted one.

Laura Batcha of the Organic Trade Association says one reason the industry would approve a campaign is that many organic producers are concerned that consumers don’t understand that products labeled “natural” aren’t necessarily organic, which requires certification.

The organic industry has exploded in the past decade, with $35 billion in sales and 10 percent growth just last year. There are more than 17,000 certified organic businesses in the country.

Producers of organic crops and conventional crops long have been at odds as organic products have grabbed market share and the industry has advertised organic foods as healthier than other foods.

That share was more than 4 percent of food and beverage sales in 2011.

Organic products are required to be certified by the USDA and are grown without pesticides and genetically modified ingredients, mainstays of traditional agriculture.

Government-managed promotional check-off programs such as the one that would be allowed under the amendment are required to be positive and not disparage other products. Some lawmakers seemed wary that such a campaign would be possible.

“How do I present organic pork without disparaging non-organic pork?” asked the House committee chairman, Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., who opposed the amendment.

Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, took issue with part of the amendment that would allow the organic producers to opt out of other commodity campaigns, an option that isn’t given to conventional producers.

“Looks to me like they have a free ride on this thing,” Conaway said, in an at times angry exchange with Schrader.

Despite the rancor, the chances that the amendment will become law are good, as the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee added the same amendment to its version of the farm bill.

Schrader told his colleagues that embracing organics is essential to appealing to consumers in a time when big farms are often demonized by popular culture. He said that many young people are coming back to farms because of nontraditional agriculture.

“American agriculture is under siege,” he said. “Urban folks do not understand where their food and fiber comes from. … The point here is to hopefully position American agriculture where we’re not always trying to catch up to what the American consumer wants.”

The Huffington Post

By MATTHEW DALY 05/16/13 06:31 PM ET EDT

WASHINGTON — Companies that drill for oil and natural gas on federal lands will be required to disclose publicly the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing operations, the Obama administration said Thursday. The new “fracking” rule replaces a draft proposed last year that was withdrawn amid industry complaints that federal regulation could hinder an ongoing boom in natural gas production.

The new draft rule relies on an online database used by Colorado and 10 other states to track the chemicals used in fracking operations. FracFocus.org is a website formed by industry and intergovernmental groups in 2011 that allows users to gather well-specific data on thousands of drilling sites.

The proposed rule also sets standards for proper construction of wells and disposal of wastewater.

Fracking involves pumping huge volumes of water, sand and chemicals underground to split open rocks to allow oil and gas to flow. Improved technology has allowed energy companies to gain access to huge stores of natural gas underneath states from Wyoming to New York but has raised widespread concerns about alleged groundwater contamination and even earthquakes.

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell called the proposed rule a “common-sense update” that increases safety while also providing flexibility and improving coordination with states and Indian tribes.

Current regulations date back to 1982, when the Sony Walkman was considered cutting-edge, Jewell said.

“As we continue to offer millions of acres of America’s public lands for oil and gas development, it is important that the public has full confidence that the right safety and environmental protections are in place,” she said.

But environmental groups said the proposal was weaker than last year’s plan and represents a nearly complete capitulation to industry, which had lobbied heavily against the earlier rule. Interior’s Bureau of Land Management has held at least 11 meetings this year with industry groups as well as fracking opponents.

“Comparing today’s rule governing fracking on public lands with the one proposed a year earlier, it is clear what happened: the Bureau of Land Management caved to the wealthy and powerful oil and gas industry and left the public to fend for itself,” said Jessica Ennis, a spokeswoman for the environmental group Earthjustice.

The BLM appears to have settled for “shoddy protections peddled by the oil and gas industry,” Ennis said.

Erik Milito, director of upstream and industry operations for the American Petroleum Institute, said the federal rule was unnecessary, since state rules and state-based tools, such as FracFocus, are already in place to ensure responsible drilling.

Changes made since last year “attempt to better acknowledge the state role,” Milito said, but the Obama administration “has yet to answer the question why BLM is moving forward with these requirements in the first place.”

The API and other industry groups urged the administration and Congress to take a close look at the proposed rule, which is subject to a 30-day comment period before being made final this summer.

Environmental groups said the new rule relies too heavily on FracFocus, a voluntary site that critics say has loose reporting standards and allows companies to avoid disclosure by declaring certain chemicals trade secrets. A report by Harvard Law School last month said the site is plagued by loopholes, adding that government reliance on FracFocus as a regulatory tool is “misplaced or premature.”

Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes defended the use of FracFocus, calling it a potentially valuable tool to make information on fracking operations available to the public.

“Let there be no doubt, what we are interested in is good public disclosures” of information on fracking and chemicals in drilling operations, Hayes said.

If the site does not work as well as officials hope, “we will look for another mechanism to make sure there is information available” to the public about chemicals used in fracking operations, Hayes said.

Besides Colorado, FracFocus is used by Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas and Utah. The site and its operators don’t regulate fracking in any way, but rather provide a repository for relevant information.

Jewell, who took office last month, said she expects to be criticized by both industry and environmental groups. An industry claim that federal regulation is unnecessary “ignores that fracking is taking place on an estimated 90 percent” of wells drilled on federal and Indian lands, Jewell said. Domestic production from more than 92,000 oil and gas wells on public lands accounts for about 13 percent of the nation’s natural gas production and 5 percent of U.S. oil production, the Interior Department said.

Similarly, environmental groups who say “fracking is dangerous and should be curtailed full-stop” ignore that “fracking has been done safely for decades,” said Jewell, a former petroleum engineer who has worked on fracked wells.

The new rule will “help ensure that human health and security are protected,” she said.

The proposal includes a provision allowing the BLM to defer to states and tribes that already have standards in place that meet or exceed those proposed by the federal rule.

___

Follow Matthew Daly on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewDalyWDC

The Huffington Post

After Delayed Committee Vote

Posted: 05/16/2013 1:44 pm EDT

Gina McCarthy stands on stage in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Monday, March 4, 2013, as President Barack Obama announced he would nominate McCarthy to head the EPA. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

WASHINGTON — The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Thursday approved the nomination of Gina McCarthy to head the Environmental Protection Agency, sending the Obama administration’s pick for consideration before the full Senate. The vote was 10 to 8, with members voting along party lines.

The committee approval comes one week after Senate Republicans boycotted a vote for McCarthy, who is currently the environmental agency’s top air quality official.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the committee’s chair, said it’s much too soon to celebrate, however, adding that Republicans’ unwillingness to move McCarthy forward raises concerns.

“All I know is this couldn’t be a better nominee,” Boxer told reporters after the vote. “If they bypass this woman and don’t give her the nomination she deserves, that’s an incredible signal they’re sending out.”

Thursday’s vote had been delayed a week, after committee Republicans skipped an earlier vote. Under Senate rules, a majority of committee members must be present for a vote, meaning Boxer needed 10 members of the committee to show up. The absence of committee Republicans last Thursday, as well as Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), left Democrats with only eight members. Lautenberg’s poor health has kept him from the Hill recently and Baucus was attending another hearing.

Lautenberg, who has been suffering from leg pain and chronic fatigue, came to Washington on Thursday specifically to help advance McCarthy’s nomination. His attendance at the committee vote marked his second visit to the Capitol since the end of February.

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), the committee’s ranking member, has been critical of McCarthy and has claimed the EPA has been less than forthcoming about the nominee. He signaled Thursday that he would continue his quest for transparency, saying that the EPA’s acting administrator had already promised “significant” action on requests he sent earlier this week ranging from improving the agency’s response to Freedom of Information Act requests to reviewing McCarthy’s private email accounts.

Environmental groups were quick to offer up their endorsement of McCarthy as her nomination advanced to the full Senate.

“Now it’s time for the full Senate to confirm Gina McCarthy to lead the EPA,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement after the vote. “She’s answered more than 1,000 questions from committee Democrats and Republicans. She’s demonstrated a strong commitment to protecting our air, water, land and health. And no one is better qualified to lead this vital agency at a time of mounting climate crisis.”

League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski chimed in with his support, saying McCarthy “is one of the most qualified EPA nominees to come before the Senate, and she deserves a swift bipartisan confirmation vote on the Senate floor.”

 

The Huffington Post

Posted: 05/17/2013 6:47 am EDT  |  Updated: 05/17/2013 11:12 am EDT

Fishermen harvest codfish off the shores of New England. Government catch limits for the highly prized fish were slashed for 2013.

With a limberness that defies his 69 years, Frank Mirarchi heaves himself over the edge of a concrete wharf and steps out onto a slack, downward sloping dock line bouncing 20 feet above the lapping waters near Scituate, Mass. He shimmies laterally along the pylons, steadying himself with a grip on some steel rigging, until he reaches the roof of the pilot house on his boat, a groundfish trawler called the Barbara L. Peters, after his mother-in-law.

He descends to the motor room and rubs a hand along a clean stretch of engine piping. “I’ll be done painting in here soon,” says Mirarchi, who has been harvesting cod, flounder and other quarry from the Gulf of Maine and, further out, from the lucrative shallows of Georges Bank for the better part of five decades. “Then I’ll move outside.”

Painting is about all the action Mirarchi’s boat has seen lately. Facing massive cuts in government-proscribed limits to the groundfish species at the very heart of New England’s commercial fishing economy, the Barbara L. Peters — like the 30 or so other nominally active boats remaining in this New England sector, and dozens more boats up and down the Northeast coast — has been locked hard against its pier, rising and falling with the tides but going nowhere.

“We’re gonna lose a bunch of boats,” Mirarchi says, referring to the high odds that some fishermen, perhaps even himself, will be forced to abandon the livelihood that has sustained them for decades. Mirarchi barely broke even last year, and with official catch allocations for some crucial species down by nearly 80 percent for the season that opened May 1, he expects that he will be forced to put the Barbara L. Peters — only eight years old — up for sale. “What else am I going to do? My entire life’s résumé is running boats, and they aren’t hiring these days.

“It’s a beautiful boat,” Mirarchi adds. “It just doesn’t have any fish to catch.”

Why that should be so is a matter of heated and sometimes rancorous debate. Nature being what it is, after all, good years and bad years on the high seas are par for the course. And while federal regulators have been on a long and difficult quest for balance, managing the nation’s historically over-harvested commercial fishing grounds remains an exceedingly difficult task, not least because determining just how many fish are out there at any given time still requires a bit of groping in the darkness. As one marine expert famously quipped, counting fish is like counting trees, except “the trees are invisible and keep moving around.”

But a growing number of scientists, as well as fishermen like Mirarchi, recognize that another factor — global warming — is sending the already delicate and opaque mechanics of marine ecosystems into a period of rapid flux. Some research suggests, for example, that as ocean temperatures rise, many fish species are being driven into deeper waters or toward the planet’s poles. Those same shifting conditions, meanwhile, are inviting historically anomalous breeds into new ranges — with unpredictable results.

The precise degree to which these phenomena are contributing to Mirarchi’s current plight is difficult to say, but ample evidence suggests that such changes are already affecting fisheries across the globe. Just this week, researchers at the University of British Columbia published an analysis revealing that a large roster of fish species have been on the move in response to rising temperatures for at least the last four decades, and that in some marine ecosystems, particularly in the tropics, fish abundance was quickly dwindling.

These and other impacts are expected to continue cascading throughout the aquatic food web, from tiny zooplankton to the higher-order and commercially valuable species on which fishermen like Mirarchi depend for their livelihoods. Indeed, despite decades of efforts aimed at restoring the health of the nation’s commercial fisheries — which generate more than $116 billion in annual sales and employ more than 1 million people — rising temperatures, increasing acidity and other ocean changes are undermining years of acquired knowledge about how our oceans work and how their harvests can be sustainably managed.

This now has armies of scientists, conservation groups and regulators scrambling to get a handle on what’s happening. In a new report released last week ahead of a national conference on fisheries management in Washington, D.C., researchers described climate change as “the single greatest challenge facing fishery managers.”

And yet, critics say, efforts to monitor and account for the impacts of new climate variables on the marine food web remain too new, too few and woefully underfunded. This is particularly true given that it takes years to translate sound marine science into effective public policy, which in turn can determine the success or failure of local economies along the nation’s coasts.

As it is, from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia and in a variety of places across the globe, chaos rules.

“I’m going nuts,” Mirarchi says. “I’m going all around to different meetings and talking to everybody, from regulators to congressmen to other fishermen to fishery associations, and everybody says, ‘We don’t know how to fix this.’ None of us, individually — nobody knows how to fix this.”

At the end of last month, despite weeks of protests by fisherman and local politicians, federal regulators announced that they would try to fix it, at least in part, by maintaining steep cuts in catch limits for the 2013-2015 fishing seasons. Limits on cod, among the most historic and lucrative species associated with these waters, were set 78 percent below 2012 levels for the Gulf of Maine and 61 percent below last year’s mark for Georges Bank. Varieties of yellowtail and witch flounder, haddock and American plaice have also seen dramatically lower catch limits.

Many fishermen argue that the fish are more plentiful than these cuts suggest, and that environmental groups and government scientists, who conspired to implement a new system for divvying up catch quotas among local fishermen in 2010, are simply inept and unable to provide an accurate measurement of fish abundance. But others suggest that the very real effects of climate change are now being made plain in New England’s waters, as cod and other species seek out more comfortable conditions.

Mirarchi, who has acquired the sort of wry, world-weary temperament that often comes with a profession at the nexus of so many opposing interests, says there’s lots of blame to go around. But until scientists and regulators get a grip on how the ocean is changing, he adds, one of the planet’s most vital food sources — and the multibillion-dollar industry built around it — hangs in the balance.

As the new fishing season opened on May 1, researchers were reporting that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide had topped 400 parts per million — higher than at any point in human history. Mirarchi, meanwhile, once again made the trek down to the Scituate town pier and boarded his boat — not to fish, but to paint.

“Something is different out there. You can call it climate change or whatever you want, but the whole thing is a mess,” he says. “They project some fish as being abundant but we can’t catch them. They project the others as being scarce and we can’t get away from them. There’s a real disconnect and we’re not able to put the two halves together to make it work very well at all.

“And,” he says, “it’s getting worse.”

A BRUTAL EFFICIENCY

It may not be revelatory to note that fish are a crucial source of nutrition to the human animal, though it’s an easy fact to forget in economies of seeming abundance like ours. As it is, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated in 2012 that, worldwide, the full complement of commercial angling, trawling and farming currently yields an annual haul of 150 million metric tons of fish, worth about $200 billion — of which roughly 130 million metric tons ends up feeding someone.

For a little fewer than half the planet’s nearly 7 billion inhabitants, fish comprise as much as 20 percent of the animal protein in their diets — and a significantly higher percentage in poor and island regions where subsistence hinges on just a few basic and readily accessible staples like fish.

Inland fishing, to be sure, accounts for a chunk of the angling activity. But the lion’s share of the global seafood bounty — about 80 percent — comes from comparatively small and patchy subsections of ocean habitat where fish thrive.

Meanwhile, mankind’s proficiency at exploiting those spots has taken a heavy toll. Opinions on the precise numbers vary widely, but by most accounts a staggering number of fish stocks have been hunted to the point of wholesale population collapse. Of the 600 varieties currently monitored globally by the United Nations, for example, the organization estimates that roughly 90 percent are being either “fully exploited,” meaning that any uptick in fishing would be unsustainable, or “overexploited,” which is just what it sounds like: Humans are extracting fish at a pace that exceeds the stock’s natural ability to replenish its numbers.

It’s little wonder: Decades of technological improvements, including the rise of GPS and fish-finding sonar and the deployment of massive trawl nets and more muscular boats to pull them, have permitted commercial fishers to hunt with an ever more brutal efficiency — faster, deeper and over wider areas. And these developments have come in tandem with other ocean stressors like the increased demand for seafood, wanton coastal development and proliferating ocean pollution, all of which can spell trouble for anglers and their quarry.

Object lessons abound, including the collapse of Canada’s Atlantic cod fishery 20 years ago. A combination of lax government oversight and the rise of rapacious trawling technologies had, by the mid-1990s, reduced cod stocks — the cornerstone of coastal economies in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia for the better part of four centuries — by more than 90 percent. Tens of thousands of fishing and related industry jobs evaporated amid an emergency government moratorium on cod fishing in the area. While two decades of restrictions have begun to yield small signs of recovery, the amount of codfish in and around Newfoundland’s Grand Banks remains just 10 percent of what it was in the 1960s, according to the intergovernmental Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Council.

Great Britain is now grappling with a cod collapse of its own, and the aggregate size of commercial hauls the world over — from Peruvian anchovies and bluefin tuna to Irish Sea sole — are shrinking as populations of fish go bust. A famous study published in the journal Science in 2006 predicted that, absent efforts to reverse the trend, all known commercial seafood species faced collapse by mid-century.

Whether these most dire assessments are overstated is a matter of debate, and some newer studies have suggested that a combination of government regulation and diligent conservation is helping to stabilize the falloff, at least in some areas. But there is little question that, collectively, humankind has been making wanton and unsustainable use of a precious resource for a long time.

Signs of trouble for U.S. fisheries were plain as far back as the 1970s, when the waters around the Gulf of Maine and elsewhere had become an international free-for-all, with industrial-strength trawlers — including huge fleets from the Soviet Union — plumbing the depths just 12 miles off the American coasts with relish. One estimate has suggested that by the mid-1970s, annual harvests were removing as much as 60 percent of the adult cod from populations along the U.S. and Canadian coasts — three times the level considered sustainable for the long term.

In an effort to establish some order, the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act officially extended the territorial rights of the United States — and the economic benefits therein — out to 200 miles, and it laid down some basic tenets for sustainable fishing. The legislation was updated in 1996 and 2006, and Congress is now considering whether to reauthorize the act again this year — all in an ongoing quest to establish the optimal suite of controls, which can range from limiting the number of days commercial anglers are permitted at sea, capping the amount of fish that can be caught, or closing certain areas to fishing altogether, depending on what experts believe any particular fish stock can handle.

In 2010, the New England Fisheries Management Council — one of eight such bodies that oversee commercial fishing in the U.S. under the auspices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — refined the controls by implementing a “catch share” system for the region’s highly prized groundfish. Modeled after similar systems used by various other U.S. and international fisheries, the idea is simple: Government scientists, using a combination of historical catch data and trawl surveys, determine the size of a fish population and how much of it can be sustainably caught. That total catch limit is then divvied up as “shares” among the region’s commercial fishermen, who can then pursue their allocations on the high seas, or sell them to other anglers on an open market.

Catch-share systems are by no means universally popular, and the jury is still out on their overall impacts. Some recent studies suggest, for example, that while they may help to stabilize fish populations, they are less effective in restoring health to the marine ecosystem, which would ideally include boosting the overall biomass of the target fish that remain in our oceans.

This year’s drastic cuts in cod allocations, which met with angry protests ahead of the season that opened earlier this month, suggested to many critics that the catch-share system in New England was an utter failure. But some environmental groups and fishery regulators insist that the system is both sound and necessary, explaining that an earlier sampling anomaly led them to overestimate certain stocks in the preceding years and forced them to make big cuts in the current season.

“We know that for some fishing communities that have relied heavily on cod, haddock and flounder, the next several years are going to be a struggle,” said John Bullard, the northeast regional administrator for NOAA’s fisheries division, at the end of April, in a public defense of the cutbacks. “We’ve done everything we can to include measures that may help soften the blow of quota cuts, but it’s going to take a collective effort to find more ways to keep both the fishery and the businesses that support it viable while these stocks recover.”

The more pressing question now, however, is whether any management strategy can bring the cod, or other traditional species, back. Optimists surely can point to year-over-year improvements in the percentage of stocks that federal regulators consider to be overfished in the U.S. But scientists are also mindful that 150 years of carbon pollution have begun to break down and reassemble the undersea environment in ways we do not fully understand. Indeed, for all the concern over the impacts of global warming on land-based agriculture, forests and glaciers, the oceans are at the front lines of the climate assault, becoming increasingly acidic and absorbing as much as 80 percent of the additional heat being generated by the greenhouse effect.

Given that cod development and ecology is so dependent on water temperature, one analysis has predicted that if bottom temperatures in the Gulf of Maine rise just one degree Celsius in coming decades, yields of the fish could drop by 21 percent. A one-degree uptick from that would reduce cod catch by as much as 43 percent, and higher temperatures would likely drive the fish out of the area completely.

At the end of April, NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center reported that sea surface temperatures on the Northeast continental shelf — which runs roughly from Cape Hatteras, N.C., on up through the Gulf of Maine — had reached their highest level in 150 years of recording. The change, the agency noted, appeared to be impacting distributions over the whole stretch — from black sea bass, summer flounder and longfin squid to butterfish, American lobster and, of course, haddock and cod.

But scientists and regulators still don’t have a good handle on how the full array of new climate-driven variables — rising temperatures, changing currents, shifting thermal layers, increasing acidity — are combining to alter the ecosystems in which our favorite seafood items live and breed. “It isn’t always easy to understand the big picture when you are looking at one specific part of it at one specific point in time,” said Michael Fogarty, who heads the Ecosystem Assessment Program at NFSC, in a statement accompanying the historic temperature data.

“What these latest findings mean for the Northeast Shelf ecosystem and its marine life is unknown,” Fogarty said. “What is known is that the ecosystem is changing, and we need to continue monitoring and adapting to these changes.”

GROPING FOR ANSWERS

The chilly waters of the Damariscotta River Estuary mingle with Atlantic Ocean currents about midway up Maine’s coast, roughly 60 miles north of Portland. About four miles from the estuary’s mouth, aboard the research vessel Ira C., Jeffrey Runge, a marine scientist with the University of Maine and the independent Gulf of Maine Research Institute, grabs hold of a pair of shallow plastic drums, yoked side-by-side like giant bongos, as they are heaved out of the water by an overhead winch. Each drum is about two feet in circumference and open at one end. On the other, they are skirted with fine mesh nets that taper over several feet into a pair of narrow steel collection cylinders, each about the size of a loaf of bread.

Dragging the apparatus behind the boat for several minutes has drawn an aquarium of minuscule creatures into the cylinders, including a species of rice-sized zooplankton that can be seen darting and swimming, like so many sea monkeys, in the collection jars where they eventually end up. This breed of zooplankton is technically known as calanus finmarchicus, Runge says as he raises a jar to his eyeball, and it carries a staggering payload of rich, fatty acids known as lipids. This makes it a crucial source of nutrition for, among myriad other creatures, foraging species like herring and mackerel — which, as it happens, are among the many food sources for predatory species further up the food chain, including Gulf of Maine groundfish like cod.

The lifecycle of calanus finmarchicus in the Gulf of Maine has been in flux in recent years, and Runge is among several marine scientists who believe that changes in the climate, including rising ocean temperatures, increased precipitation and drainage cycles along coastal estuaries like this one, are playing a role. If that’s the case, the entire food web in this historically abundant fishery may be reorganizing itself in response to new environmental inputs, with implications across dozens of interdependent species, including humans.

“If this calanus finmarchicus disappeared — no one has really done the quantitative analysis, though it’s something I would like to try to work out,” Runge says. “But what impact might that have on the system? How would that cascade? Just intuitively it seems like it would be a big effect. The warmer temperatures throughout the water coming from the Gulf of Maine — that really affects how quickly calanus can metabolize their lipid supplies, and it’s really dramatic.”

Research like Runge’s is both vital and woefully behind the climate curve. Speculation about the potential impacts on the oceans and marine life have been percolating in scientific circles for decades. But in terms of understanding and monitoring the changing dynamics of ocean systems as a whole, and what impact that might have on the fisheries that provide jobs, revenue and economic stability for dozens of coastal communities, we are, by most accounts, still groping in the darkness.

“I think fundamentally that this climate forcing is going to be big, and it’s going to make for big changes in ways that we don’t understand,” Runge says. “I think we are fundamentally unprepared for that, in terms of infrastructure, and if we really had unlimited resources, I would like to see some kind of observation program in places like the Gulf of Maine, with much more extensive sampling and many more variables.”

Efforts along these lines are underway, Runge notes, pointing to organizations like the Northeast Regional Association of Coastal and Ocean Observing Systems, or Neracoos as it is known, which is part of the wider U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System. These entities, which grew out of the Integrated Coastal and Ocean Observation System Act of 2009, operate as federal-regional partnerships seeking, among other things, to improve and support marine commerce and science-based resource management.

In 2009, the National Science Foundation also authorized funding for the Oceans Observatories Initiative. The project aims to build a network of ocean sensors that measure the full complement of “physical, chemical, geological and biological variables in the ocean and seafloor” and provide “improved detection and forecasting of environmental changes and their effects on biodiversity, coastal ecosystems and climate.”

Last month, the Obama administration released a roadmap for implementing the president’s own 2010 ocean policy plan, which is nominally aimed at improving the resilience of the nation’s ocean economy. “Science is the foundation upon which sound management of ocean and coastal resources is based,” John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and co-chair of the National Ocean Council, said in a statement announcing the implementation plan. “The president’s National Ocean Policy and the new implementation plan will help advance relevant science and its application to decision-making to strengthen the economies of our coastal regions while increasing their resilience and sustaining their resources.”

But for all this brewing activity, such endeavors remain both embryonic and, given the scope of the problem and the austere economic posture of lawmakers, cash-starved.

Consider, for example, rising ocean acidification, a direct result of oceans absorbing excessive carbon dioxide pollution. As pH levels in marine waters drop, so too does the ability of so-called calcifying creatures — assorted corals, clams, oysters, sea urchins and some varieties of plankton — to develop. And as the Carbon Group at NOAA’s own Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory notes: “When shelled organisms are at risk, the entire food web may also be at risk.” The sentiments echo those of the National Research Council, whose 2010 “national strategy” for addressing ocean acidification concluded that the ocean’s chemistry is changing at a pace that “exceeds any known to have occurred for at least the past hundreds of thousands of years.”

Coral reefs alone support a wide array of fish species and other ocean life, act as a buffer against shoreline storms and waves and floods, and are increasingly providing clues to new medicines for a variety of human ailments, from cancer and arthritis to heart disease. And yet, given the ever upward trajectory of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, scientists in December suggested that virtually every coral reef might be dead or dying by the end of this century.

Given the dire outlook, many stakeholders argue that far too little is being done.

One study, prepared in 2012 by the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, noted that federal funding for research and monitoring of ocean acidification averaged about $29 million annually over the last four years. The foundation compared this to estimates, both public and private, of how much cash will actually be needed to address the problem in coming decades. The Ocean Carbon and Biochemistry program, a joint effort supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA, suggested that as much as $100 million annually — more than three times current funding levels — would be needed over the coming decade.

Taking a wider view of ocean science and management, the bipartisan Joint Ocean Commission Initiative, in its ocean policy report card last year, put the issue bluntly: “Ocean management, science, and education programs remain severely underfunded, hindering them from effectively supporting our national security and economic interests and undermining the health of ocean resources.”

A ‘PHENOMENAL WEIRDNESS’

Perhaps not surprisingly, these shortfalls have left fishermen, regulators and coastal economies flat-footed. Runge points by way of example to shifts in the growth process of one of Maine’s iconic seafood staples: the lobster. Warmer waters caused the prized crustaceans to molt earlier than expected last year. “It contributed to a mini-economic crisis in the lobster industry here in Maine,” Runge says. “You had this early molting, and then there was a supply of lobsters that now were of size much earlier than usual, and processors in Canada just weren’t ready for that. So you had this tremendous oversupply of lobsters early in the year that flooded the market and the price just took a nose dive.”

Early molting appears to be underway again this year — and similar behavior and lifecycle shifts are being documented in fisheries the world over. In September, scientists at the University of British Columbia reported that warming oceans appeared to be causing fish to get smaller. The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, modeled some 600 fish species from oceans all over the globe, projecting that in aggregate, average maximum body weight of fish was likely to decrease between 14 and 20 percent over the first half of this century.

Last spring, Britain’s Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership, which unites a wide array of scientists, government agencies and industries, issued an analysis that found “clear changes in the depth, distribution, migration and spawning behaviors of fish — many of which can be related to warming sea temperatures.” Sole were reported to be moving away from the Netherlands and toward the eastern edges of the English Channel, the group noted, while sea bass and red mullet had drifted northward.

Many of the Gulf of Maine’s subarctic species — including Runge’s calanus finmarchicus — are already at the southern extent of their range, and experts suspect they are slowly being replaced by species migrating up from more temperate waters to the south. As the numbers of precious cod mysteriously dwindle in the gulf — possibly migrating north and westward with the calanus — Mirachi and other fishermen are reporting increasing numbers of shortfin squid, black sea bass, blue crab and other species that had never been here in appreciable numbers before.

One common response to all this is, of course, so what? If changing ocean characteristics drive some fish away, others will likely arrive, suggesting that dry-docked fishermen like Mirarchi, and the fish-dependent economies of which they are a part, need only to adapt to new quarry. The U.K.’s MCCIP noted, for example, that rising populations of sea bass, red mullet, anchovy, octopus and squid, among other species, could represent new opportunities for British fishermen.

But Jake Kritzer, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund who also serves on the New England Fishery Management Council’s science and statistical committee, suggests it’s not that simple. “Just because we’ve seen some black sea bass in the Gulf of Maine doesn’t mean we’re going to have a viable black sea bass stock in the Gulf of Maine anytime soon, and therefore that we can write off cod and just shift our attention over there,” Kritzer says. “And even if it does, in order for it to be sustainable, we still need to understand the stock dynamics of black sea bass in the Gulf of Maine, which is something we’ve never had to look at before.”

Add to that uncertainty the sizable time lag that exists between scientific understanding and its translation into public policy, and it’s likely that the intersection of commercial fishing, environmental conservation and government oversight is going to become increasingly chaotic and contentious in coming years.

Writing in the journal Nature this week, the researchers from the University of British Columbia, whose new analysis suggests that fish and invertebrate movements in response to warming waters have been underway since the 1970′s, suggested the stakes were high for everyone. “This study shows that ocean warming has already affected global fisheries in the past four decades,” they wrote, “highlighting the immediate need to develop adaptation plans to minimize the effect of such warming on the economy and food security of coastal communities, particularly in tropical regions.”

Of course, that’s easier said than done.

“It’s an immensely complicated situation,” Kritzer says. “You have climate change overlaying everything, and it seems to be changing the way everything works, which means we have a lot of problems. It’s getting harder and harder to assess the stocks, to model them and understand their dynamics and predict what’s going to happen. Because those models are based on years and years of experience reading fish stocks and studying them, they have been tested over a long time and they rely on a certain set of assumptions and conditions that now seem to be rapidly changing. Tools that have been fairly well established and worked well in the past just don’t seem to be working as well anymore.”

Until science gets a handle on things, Runge says, that’s going to be a social, economic and regulatory problem. “I think we’re just going to be responding kind of blindly to what happens.”

Down the hall from Runge’s office at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Andrew Pershing, an ocean ecosystem modeler, has been enthusiastically documenting historically high ocean temperatures in the area and what he calls the “phenomenal weirdness” unfolding in the Gulf of Maine. “This event is larger than the Midwest drought, and like the drought, it has impacted ecosystems and people,” he wrote in October. “However, because it took place in the ocean, it will be several years before we know the full extent of its impact.”

In a meeting at his office, Pershing says that this is the task that he and his fellow ocean scientists now face. “I just really feel like there’s a lot to be learned,” Pershing says. “I think that we can view it as doom and gloom, as a lot of challenges, but I think there’s also — I feel like this region has the potential to be a really interesting example for the rest of the country, or the rest of the world, for demonstrating how you manage a fishery through climate change.”

IN THE MEANTIME

Two weeks ago, as 11th-hour debate was brewing around the tough new catch limits for New England, several hundred fishermen and an assortment of local and national politicians from the Northeast gathered in Boston to air their grievances and entreat regulators at NOAA to increase the looming quotas.

“We’re here to fight for a way of life that we believe in,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) declared at the outset of the rally, “and that’s what we’re going to do, and we’re going to do it together.”

In the end, however, NOAA didn’t budge.

Mike Fogarty, the marine biologist and head of the agency’s ecosystem assessment program for the region, defends the government’s fish stock analyses — though he adds that more integrated approaches to understanding and modeling the ocean biosphere, including the ability to identify and fold in crucial new inputs arising from climate change, remain a work in progress.

He points to NOAA’s nascent Integrated Ecosystem Assessment program, which is based on a wider regulatory philosophy called ecosystem-based management. The doctrine aims, for example, to move away from blunt, species-by-species counting and quota-setting in favor of continually taking the pulse of an ecosystem and all its various interdependencies as a whole. This includes not just a more thorough understanding of how a given natural resource lives and breathes, but also how society derives economic benefits from it, and how humans function as fundamental parts of the machinery — both delivering impacts to, and absorbing consequences from, the environment.

Accurately accounting for all the new variables being introduced by ever-rising carbon dioxide emissions will, of course, be fundamental to this holistic management approach — though again, it’s all just getting started. “The basic situation is that consideration of climate change issues is beginning to be taken into account [and] into management,” Fogarty says. “But we have a long, long way to go.”

That’s cold comfort for Mirarchi. Inside the pilot house of his trawler, he grips a Styrofoam cup of coffee and ticks off the grim arithmetic that lies before him. This, he says, will likely be his last season as a fisherman. “Understand, I was already at zero last year with quotas for twice as much fish,” he says. “So you do the math: If Frank is at zero with 2x fish, where is Frank with 1x fish? Somewhere below zero.

“I don’t really see, at age 70, going out and getting a job to pay the mortgage on a boat that’s losing money,” he continues. “My wife really doesn’t.”

Last September, as it was becoming clear that the area’s groundfish anglers would be facing steep cuts in catch allocations this season, the Commerce Department issued a disaster declaration for the entire fishery, giving some hope to Mirarchi and his fellow fisherman that they might be able to weather another bad year. Some funding for this was initially tucked into the aid package following Hurricane Sandy, but Republicans in Congress ultimately stripped it out. To date, lawmakers have been unable to agree on funding for beleaguered fishing communities in New England.

Asked if he was worried, Mirarchi chuckles briefly before growing more serious. “How would you feel?” he says. “You spend your whole life doing something, and all of a sudden everything you learned, everything you taught your kids, it’s worth nothing — because it doesn’t make economic sense anymore.”

Grist

By Richard Schiffman

Remember the scene in the movie Gasland where the guy lights his tapwater on fire? No? Here it is:

That footage helped ignite the grassroots movement against fracking, a controversial technology that shoots a slurry of water mixed with sand and laced with toxic chemicals into underground shale formations to shatter the rock and release natural gas.The only problem with this by-now-iconic image is that the faucet pyrotechnics may actually have been made possible by a natural phenomenon: The guy’s house is perched thousands of feet above a double seam of coal, according to the Colorado Department of Environmental Protection, and methane from underground coal and gas formations occasionally bubbles up through cracks in the earth and into people’s water wells — no fracking required. (Kids in Pennsylvania have apparently been torching their water for generations.)

Then again, the flaming tapwater may indeed result from fracking in the Colorado man’s neighborhood. The point is, nobody knows.

There are a lot of things about fracking that we don’t know. And a lot of what we think we know we don’t. Not yet, anyway. This is the unsettling conclusion of a major new study [PDF] published today in the journal Science.

The authors, a team of researchers from Pennsylvania, tell us that we don’t know nearly what we should at this stage, given that massive swaths of the U.S. are already being fracked — and that most of that fracking is going on virtually unregulated by states which, tipsy on the revenue bonanza from the drilling, have been giving gas companies what amounts to a free pass. In Pennsylvania, for example, the supervision of the gas industry is so lax that the state does not even know where all of its estimated 150,000 wells are located. Companies are asked to provide this information, but a Pittsburgh paper reports that many simply don’t bother.

The federal government has not been much better. The infamous “Halliburton loophole” pushed through by former Vice President Dick Cheney exempts fracking from regulation by the EPA under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Until now, the feds have not even required companies to disclose what chemicals they are using on public lands. The Interior Department released a new draft rule this week that would require companies to reveal this information, but some environmental groups complain that, even under the new rules, companies would still be able to hide this vital information by calling it a “trade secret.”

Knowing the exact composition of the fracking fluids is crucial to allowing scientists and regulators to test and assess the impacts of fracking, says the study’s lead author, Radisav Vidic, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. It remains unclear whether the new administration rules will clear this up or not.

Another piece of essential, but missing information is what exactly happens to half of the roughly 7 million gallons of chemical-infused water that stays underground after a well is fracked. (The other half migrates up the well pipe in a weeks-long process called “flowback.”) Geologists believe that a lot of the unaccounted-for water gets sopped up by the somewhat porous shale. However, a portion of it may eventually percolate back up toward the surface — as the methane from coal formations sometimes does — and find its way into the groundwater.

Gas companies argue that this is impossible, since the fracking wells are drilled up to a mile deep, where the gas is found, separated from the far shallower groundwater by thousands of feet of solid rock. But the geology turns out to be more complicated, according to Science. There may be fractures in the rock that allow tainted fracking water to make its way into the aquifer over time. “We need to know more about the flow patterns underground,” says Vidic.

Just as important as what drillers are leaving in the ground is the quality of what comes gushing out again, which Vidic says is “many, many times worse” than the water that gets injected into the wells in the first place. That’s because, once in the earth, fracking fluids are further tainted by a variety of salts, organic compounds, benzene, barium, strontium — and in the case of the Marcellus shale formation, which stretches from West Virginia to New York, high levels of radium 226, which makes the wastewater so radioactive that it may endanger the workers in water treatment plants who are in contact with it.

In some places out west, this highly toxic wastewater is pumped back into deep “injection wells,” where, we hope, it remains permanently interred. This is the apparent cause of some of the fracking-induced earthquakes that we’ve been hearing about. In Pennsylvania and much of the East, however, the water gets processed in waste treatment plants either to be reused or discharged into rivers. When that wastewater is spilled or inadequately treated, surface water gets fouled.

Vidic says that the vast majority of these spills are minor and easily cleaned up. But others are not so innocent, nor harmless. In one egregious example, a company intentionally discharged fracking wastewater into Dunkard Creek, which corkscrews for 40 miles along the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border, killing the life in the stream and much of what grew along its banks.

In other incidents, the Pennsylvania researchers say, fracking fluids have mixed with groundwater due to pipe leakage, well blowouts, and spills from surface impoundments and trucks. They report high levels of bromide and salt in the Allegheny River watershed, which may in part be the result of such accidental spills — but, you guessed it, we don’t know.

The authors of the study want states to enhance their ability to monitor groundwater, and to share information about potential problems. They also want better science about what exactly happens to the used fracking water that gets left underground. Until we get this hard data, they say, we won’t know if spills and other accidents are rare occurrences or everyday events.

Until then, the jury will still be out on whether fracking is the blessing that the industry makes it out to be, or the curse that some in the environmental movement fear it is.

Grist

By Carla Hickey

Advances in technology, government-sponsored incentives, job creation and a willing population are helping turn municipalities green. National Geographic pointed out that there is not a single standard that represents a complete measure of a region’s or city’s commitment to becoming eco-friendly. Despite the social consciousness that surrounds greenhouse gasses, cities are rated by single elements of environmental friendliness, such as Energy-Star buildings, air quality, greenhouse-gas abatement and green-power production. There is not a single city that encompasses all of those aspects, though strides in the right direction are clearly visible.

Phoenix

Phoenix, Arizona is progressing toward being an all-green city. According to the Downtown Devil, online newspaper for Arizona State University, the city of Phoenix is looking to launch a bicycle-sharing program. The program would be designed to counter the spread-out population and designed for automobile transportation, unlike San Francisco, New York, and Philadelphia where the population is very compact and mass-transit oriented.

Phoenix plans to pair bicycle sharing with mass transit as a means of taking vehicles off city streets. Not only will a bicycle-sharing program extend the service area of the light rail, it will help eliminate short-distance trips commonly achieved by driving. Car dealerships such as Hyundai of Phoenix are helping the city’s green initiatives by selling hybrids for commuters. For example, Hyundai is selling the world’s first zero-emissions fuel-cell car, the IX35, states motortorque.com.

Greenhouse Abatement

San Francisco topped the Urban Land Institutes list for greenhouse-gas abatement. Unlike Phoenix, the population of San Francisco is clustered together along mass-transit lines. What San Francisco has achieved is an effective replacement for automobile transportation by providing mass transit that meets the needs of its populace. San Francisco has another favorable aspect — the nice weather with livable extremes.

Since the successful cities who top the greenhouse-gas abatement list all have very temperate climates, cities like Phoenix must find alternative ways to reduce greenhouse gasses and live in 110 degree summer climate. Reducing emissions from automobiles is one method to achieve those goals.

Green-Power Partnerships

Houston, Texas topped the Environmental Protection Agency’s list of cities that promote renewable-energy usage instead of fossil-fuel energy usage. Houston was one of three Texas communities that produced over 244 million kilowatt hours of renewable energy via wind-powered turbines. Phoenix Arizona has the same capacity for producing and equal, if not greater amount of sustainable and renewable energy from solar power.

Energy-Star Buildings

An Energy-Star Building voluntarily rises above current benchmarks for energy efficiency in lighting, heating and air-conditioning usage. The top city for 2011, according the EPA, was Los Angeles, California which has held the top spot since 2008. Los Angeles expanded its square feet of Energy-Star Buildings. The 2011 measurement for Los Angeles was 130 million square feet that included energy-saving building construction such as energy-saving floors that re-circulate heat in winter and cool in summer.

PRWatch

GMO Labeling Passes Vermont House as Activists Prepare to March Against Monsanto

In an advance that makes history, Vermont’s House of Representatives passed a bill on May 10 requiring foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to be labeled. This is the furthest any such legislation has made it through the legislative process in the United States.Vermont’s legislative session was due to end already, but negotiations over a tax bill have kept lawmakers in the capitol this week. With the Senate’s attention focused fiscally rather than on food, however, H.112 to label GMOs will have to wait to be taken up by the Senate in January 2014.The bill would exempt animal products, including meat and dairy, even though livestock are often fed genetically engineered (GE) feed.

State Faces Threat of Monsanto Lawsuit

GMO labeling legislation has been stalled in the Vermont legislature for three years, in part because of a concern that biotechnology companies would sue the state if it passed. The concern seems justified, as Monsanto — the world’s largest GE seed company — reportedly threatened to do so last year.

According to Organic Consumers Association Executive Director Ronnie Cummins and Vermont farmer Will Allen, “Monsanto has used lawsuits or threats of lawsuits for 20 years to force unlabeled genetically engineered foods on the public, and to intimidate farmers into buying their genetically engineered seeds and hormones.”

GMO Labeling Bills Across the Country

California’s Prop 37 to label GMOs was narrowly defeated in 2012, as the Center for Media and Democracy reported. Afterwards, Jennifer Hatcher, senior vice president of government and public affairs for the Food Marketing Institute, who had previously said that Prop 37 “scared us to death,” said in an official statement, “This gives us hope that you can, with a well-funded, well-organized, well-executed campaign, defeat a ballot initiative and go directly to the voters. We hope we don’t have too many of them, because you can’t keep doing that over and over again . . .”

Contrary to industry hopes, however, similar bills have been introduced in Connecticut, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, Arizona, Illinois, and Iowa in 2013. Food and Water Watch and other organizations are encouraging supporters to petition for a national GE labeling law. The passage in the Vermont House of Representatives of that state’s long-sought labeling bill marks an important and historic step towards realizing eaters’ right to know whether or not foods contain GMOs.

Tens of Thousands to “March Against Monsanto” Worldwide

(Source: March Against Monsanto Madison)Frustrated with Monsanto’s bullying of governments and farmers in the United States and abroad, tens of thousands of activists around the world will “March Against Monsanto” on Saturday, May 25, according to organizers.

Marches on six continents, in 36 countries, and in 47 U.S. states — totaling events in over 250 cities — are coordinated to occur simultaneously at 11am Pacific time. A Facebook page founded in February has been instrumental in organizing the events.

Goals of the march’s organizers include:

• “Voting with your dollar by buying organic and boycotting Monsanto-owned companies that use GMOs in their products.
• “Labeling of GMOs so that consumers can make those informed decisions easier.
• “Repealing relevant provisions of the US’s ‘Monsanto Protection Act.‘
• “Calling for further scientific research on the health effects of GMOs.
• “Holding Monsanto executives and Monsanto-supporting politicians accountable through direct communication, grassroots journalism, social media, etc.
• “Continuing to inform the public about Monsanto’s secrets.
• “Taking to the streets to show the world and Monsanto that we won’t take these injustices quietly.”

In Madison, Wisconsin, where the Center for Media and Democracy is based, activists will march on the state capitol at 1pm Central time on Saturday, May 25.

The Huffington Post

Barbara A. Finamore

Senior Attorney and Asia Director, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)

 

The Skyscraper Museum got it right.  Its 2009 exhibit, “Vertical Cities: Hong Kong and New York,” called these two cities — one my current home, one my hometown — the world’s “most similar skyscraper societies.”

                 Top: The view from the window of my current home in Hong Kong

                 Bottom: The view of my hometown — New York City ©Eva Abreau

Both of these bustling international financial centers are known for their breathtaking skylines and deep natural harbors (and, of course, their restaurants). Both have experienced periods of explosive growth — mostly skyward — until they’ve become two of the most vertical and densely populated areas in the world. According to the exhibit, many of the visionary ideas that New York architects proposed in the 1920s were put into place decades later in Hong Kong, such as elevated walkways, multilevel transit and mid-level escalators.

The exhibit pointed out that today, Hong Kong has surpassed New York City in several ways, including number of high-rises, population density, and modern, highly-efficient mass transit (including perhaps the most convenient Airport Express service in the world). Yet there is one area in which Hong Kong is lagging far behind — cutting the energy use and carbon emissions from buildings.

      Source: City of New York, Inventory of New York City Greenhouse Gas Emissions

This is no small matter. In Hong Kong, buildings consume an astonishing 90 percent of the city’s electricity, and are responsible for at least 60 percent of its carbon emissions. In New York, it’s even more: 94 percent of the city’s electricity use and 75 percent of its GHG emissions come from energy used in buildings.

Although a few new buildings in both cities boast impressive green credentials — Hong Kong, for example, unveiled its first zero carbon building last July — the key to cutting energy use and carbon emissions is to focus on existing buildings. By 2030, at least 85 percent of the buildings in NYC will be those buildings already here today. Even allowing for Hong Kong’s shorter life cycle for buildings, the existing building stock in 2030 is likely to account for over 80 percent of Hong Kong’s electricity consumption.

The good news is that throughout the world, the building sector has the greatest potential of any sector for reducing carbon emissions. Numerous studies show that investments to improve building energy performance can be very cost-effective and lead to significant energy savings.  However, a range of market barriers  inhibit many building owners from making sensible investments, including lack of information, misaligned incentives for both owners and users, and lack of available capital. A comprehensive package of government policies, standards and incentives can go a long way towards overcoming these barriers.

Estimated economic mitigation potential by sector and region using technologies and practices expected to be available in 2030. These potential do not include non-technical options such as lifestyle changes. Source: IPCC, 2007a.

New York City recognizes that in order to reach its aggressive climate goals, it has to do more than improve new construction and renovations. Its new Greener, Greater Buildings Plan is an internationally recognized, industry-transforming package of measures that targets energy efficiency in the city’s largest existing buildings, which constitute half of its built square footage and 45 percent of citywide carbon emissions. For these buildings, NYC’s comprehensive package includes the following policies:

I)  Transparency:

• Benchmarking and disclosure requires all large building owners to regularly measure total energy use in their buildings using the EPA’s Portfolio Manager tool.  This allows the owner and others to compare one building to other buildings using a normalized efficiency metric.   The city then makes the information available, just as property taxes are made available, to prospective tenants, lenders and the public.  Benchmarking and transparency are the cornerstones of an effective energy efficiency policy.
• Energy audits ensure that owners and managers are educated about the condition of building systems and opportunities to improve their buildings’ energy performance.

II)  Rigorous Standards:

• Retro-commissioning ensures that buildings are tuned up at regular intervals, which is an extremely cost-effective practice.
• Lighting upgrades ensure that lighting in commercial spaces are brought to code over an appropriate period of time, so that owners and tenants can take advantage of the cost savings associated with the significant improvements in lighting and control technology.

III) Leading by Example:

• City-owned, state-owned, and institutional buildings lead by example with more aggressive efforts and goals, such as reducing energy consumption from municipal operations by 30 percent in 10 years.
• Challenges to leading sectors encourage universities, hospitals, hotels, or commercial tenants to match the city government’s lead, which can result in significant citywide reductions.

IV)  Helping Building Owners Invest:

• Financing programs enable building owners to obtain capital for energy upgrade projects.
• Tenant engagement programs bring tenants into the process so they can collaborate with owners to optimize whole-building performance.
• Training local professionals on energy-aligned lease clauses will enable building owners to recover the costs of upgrades that reduce tenant utility expenses.

New York City estimates that over 10 years these laws will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by almost five percent, have a net savings of $7 billion, and create roughly 17,800 construction-related jobs.

Hong Kong’s new Building Energy Efficiency Ordinance, like similar efforts in many jurisdictions, focuses primarily on new buildings and renovations. While these efforts are essential, much more needs to be done to address the ongoing inefficiencies in the massive quantity of existing buildings, which will persist for decades unless addressed. The Ordinance does require Hong Kong’s existing commercial buildings to conduct an energy audit every ten years.  There is widespread agreement among experts, however, that the audit requirements are not stringent enough.

The Hong Kong Green Building Council recognizes that a comprehensive package of government policies, standards and incentives is required in order to capture the vast potential for energy efficiency in Hong Kong’s built environment. The HKGBC estimates that aggressive yet achievable measures could cut building energy use by 30 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels, which is equivalent to a 60 percent reduction in electricity consumption when compared to a business-as-usual scenario.

A mandatory energy benchmarking and disclosure scheme could be the most effective next step in targeting energy use in Hong Kong’s largest commercial buildings. The Hong Kong Green Building Council has begun to develop its own whole commercial building benchmarking tool, but it will not be mandatory, nor will it require owners to disclose benchmarking results to prospective tenants, lenders or the public. These features are an essential part of any benchmarking scheme in order to have real impact.

Many other cities, including Shanghai, are interested in following New York City’s example of adopting a comprehensive plan to slash energy use in existing commercial buildings.  Six out of Business Week’s Top Ten Best Cities have already implemented or are considering energy benchmarking laws at a minimum.

Hong Kong’s new leadership has the opportunity to race ahead and take the lead in this area, just as it did with its world-class mass transit system. Even though I am a native New Yorker, I hope it does so. This is one race that everyone can win.

The Huffington Post

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Note

The younger Boston bombing suspect allegedly penned a note on the inside of the boat where he was found hiding from authorities, sources told CBS News senior correspondent John Miller.

The scrawling explained his rationale for his part in the deadly explosion, sources said.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev allegedly wrote that his actions were retaliations for the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims,” the note said, according to CBS’ sources who were granted anonymity.

The report would seem to add credence to a Washington Post story last month which cited anonymous “U.S. officials” who said Tsarnaev provided a similar rationale for the bombing when he was interrogated from his hospital bed.

In his reaction to the Post’s story, Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald noted that similar reasons have been given by other Muslims who have attempted or carried out recent attacks in America:

In the last several years, there have been four other serious attempted or successful attacks on US soil by Muslims, and in every case, they emphatically all say the same thing: that they were motivated by the continuous, horrific violence brought by the US and its allies to the Muslim world – violence which routinely kills and oppresses innocent men, women and children:

Greenwald lists attempted “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, attempted New York City subway bomber Najibullah Zazi and Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan as examples.

“If the United States does not get out of Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries controlled by Muslims, Shahzad said during his guilty plea. “We will be attacking [the]

  News & Politics   AlterNet

  Economy   AlterNet

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/zimmytws

An elderly man “succumbed to the pressure” of losing his home to Wells Fargo and died at a court hearing fighting the bank’s wrongful foreclosure, his estate claims in court.

The administrator of the estate of Larry Delassus sued Wells Fargo, Wachovia Bank, First American Corp. and others in Superior Court, for wrongful death, elder abuse, breach of contract and other charges.

Delassus died at 62 of heart disease after Wells Fargo mistakenly held him liable for his neighbor’s property taxes, doubled his mortgage payments, declared his loan in default and sold his Hermosa Beach condominium, according to the complaint.

“Larry Delassus tried everything to save his home,” the complaint states. “He told the Bank that they were mistaken; they said no. He contacted the bank seeking information, and was told one thing and then another, and oftentimes, no information at all. He enlisted his friend and neighbor to help him, but the bank refused to recognize him as Larry’s representative, despite his numerous applications and appeals. Whatever Larry needed, Wells Fargo created some excuse not to help him.

“At the very end, with his home being sold by the Bank and resold by the purchaser within months for nearly twice what he paid, Larry Delassus, now living in a boarding home, was still fighting for what he and many Americans believe is right by going to court. Wells Fargo, with its virtually unlimited resources, filed a series of procedural motions in its defense, needlessly forcing an ailing Larry to appear in court. Delassus valiantly continued to fight the best he could until his body gave up. On December 19, 2012, as he was sitting in the back of the courtroom, at about the same time the Bank was saying that its actions ‘didn’t matter,’ Larry collapsed, and within minutes, died. Wells Fargo and its agents should be held accountable for their negligent wrongful and malicious actions.”

A retired Navy veteran on disability, Delassus suffered from a blood disorder called Budd-Chiari syndrome, and would not have been in court were it not for Wells Fargo’s insistence that he appear, the complaint states.

He died within minutes of collapsing in the courtroom.

“This is a case about greed and one man’s fight for justice in the face of overwhelming odds,” the complaint states.

Blaming Delassus’s death on the bank’s “haste for an endless stream of profits,” the estate claims that he “succumbed to the pressure of fighting Wells Fargo and the heartbreak of losing his home and died after falling gravely ill.”

 Delassus’s estate administrator, Deborah Popovich, says in the complaint that almost one-third of the millions of people who have faced foreclosure since the housing market crashed did so because of “bank errors and banned practices.

“While the instant case represents just one example of many reflecting the results of these bank ‘errors’ and practices, the consequences in this case are especially tragic,” Popovich says.

She says Delassus “lived a quiet and happy life,” and always paid his mortgage and property taxes on time. But in early 2009, Wells Fargo falsely claimed he owed $13,361.90 in back taxes when it was actually the owner of a nearby condo that owed the money, Popovich says.

But Wells Fargo, falsely claiming Delassus owed the money, nearly doubled his mortgage payment — a mistake it could have rectified by verifying his property’s tax identification number with the county, the estate says.

Delassus told Wells Fargo he could not afford the higher payments and the bank foreclosed — even after the county treasurer had confirmed that his property taxes were current and paid, the complaint states.

Popovich seeks restitution, costs, civil penalties and punitive damages for the estate.

She is represented by Anthony Trujillo of Trujillo & Winnick of Hermosa Beach.

Wells Fargo bought Wachovia in late 2008, during the nationwide housing meltdown.

Education   AlterNet

Photo Credit: Zachary Bell

May 16, 2013  |

Since last Wednesday, students at Cooper Union, a private free university in New York City, have staged an occupation of the president’s office in protest of the announcement that the school will begin charging tuition. As the occupation now goes into its second week, let me recall my eight-hour visit during its first full day: Thursday, May 9.

That morning, students took to President Jamshed Bharucha’s office demanding that he resign over his proposal to introduce tuition, a policy that would break the school’s 155-year tradition of free education. Later that day, all nine of Cooper’s full-time art faculty and some 200 students signed a statement of no confidence against Bharucha.

The administration repeatedly warned the occupiers — by then more than 100 engineering, architecture and art students — that they could face disciplinary actions, which could include being denied their degrees. The administration then proceeded to block the water fountains on the seventh floor with plywood and screwed the bathroom doors shut. It sent armed guards into the building. (The administration later said it wasn’t aware the guards would be armed.)

Yet the siege quickly broke. Administrators had told students that they would be given an ultimatum to leave in the early afternoon, but, later, they moved the deadline to 6:30 P.M. The students stayed put, and around 7:30 P.M. Vice President TC Westcott came into the president’s office and discussed options with the students. She said that the security guards and police were standing down and that Bharucha wanted to speak with them. Many students were distrustful, and someone asked her to explain why the administration locked students out of the bathrooms.

“The logic was that we wanted you to leave,” Westcott replied. She said that the administration was still considering its next moves.

For a few hours, students strategized over pizza in a post-ultimatum haze. Mike D’Ambrose, a master’s engineering student, explained the rationale of the campaign.

“It’s a one-way street once you start charging tuition,” he said, citing the City College of New York, which abandoned its commitment to free education in 1976 and never looked back. Bharucha made headlines when he announced a new plan for the university that called for sliding scale tuition based on need, meaning that some students would pay as high as $19,000 while others would still receive full scholarship.

Saar Shemesh, a transfer student studying art, feels that tuition would change the character of the historic institution: “It would mess up the dynamic that we’ve created here.” To Shemesh, it’s crucial that students are “not indebted to their parents, and not indebted to the government.” She transferred to Cooper from Brooklyn College, and she said that whereas socio-economic lines divide many campuses, Cooper Union stands out as an exception.

Around 9:30 P.M., Saskia Bos, the dean of the Cooper Union School of Art, and Sam Messer, the associate dean of the Yale School of Art, arrived at the occupation. Broadcast over the Free Cooper Union live-stream, Messer asked the students, “But how will this end? President Bharucha is not going to step down in the next week.” Victoria Sobel, an art student in her senior year who has helped organize the occupation, replied, “Why are you so sure? We were told two hours ago that we would be forced out, and we’re still here.”

The students appeared divided whether to speak with President Bharucha, an opportunity Bos was offering to arrange. Casey Gollan, an art school senior, rejected the offer — to applause from the room — explaining that Cooper students could arrange to meet with the president at any time as part of university policy. Still, last week when Gollan tried to arrange one of these meetings, Bharucha didn’t show up. “It’s called university governance,” Gollan said. “And we’ve seen how it doesn’t work.”

Many students charged that Bharucha’s absence from campus during the affair — and his avoidance of certain students since they occupied his office back in December — is indicative of his poor leadership and his fear of the Free Cooper Union campaign. Students said that if they were to meet with Bharucha at this point, it would be on their own terms, in his occupied office.

After the two deans departed, students began discussing the future of the occupation. Gollan admitted that since the occupation was “open and fluid,” students could come and go from Cooper Union’s seventh floor as they pleased, which made consensus decision-making process difficult. Yet it also made the occupation more sustainable than most — allowing students to go to class, eat, take a shower and then return to the president’s office. It also meant that more and more people in the broader Cooper Union community could get involved — swinging by the office and signing the no-confidence statement — without having to fear retribution or an overnight lock-in.

According to the students, if the no-confidence statement were to receive enough signatures from the faculty of the architecture and engineering schools, it would initiate a legal process in which the board of regents would investigate the behavior of the board of trustees, which determined the tuition policy and appointed President Bharucha. It would take some time for the school’s bureaucracy to make such dramatic changes, but this potential for delay didn’t seem to deter the students in their midnight meeting on Thursday. After all, they had a lawyer, free food and each other. When someone asked what would happen if the occupation went through graduation, grins and raised fists filled the room — followed by a few uneasy laughs.

As the meeting closed around 1:00 am, a student erased the “2” on the blackboard next to “Days of Cooper Union Occupation,” and sketched in a block letter “3.”

At the end of my nearly eight-hour sojourn to the seventh floor, I stepped into President Bharucha’s office one last time. It was draped in deep maroon emanating from a row of standing stage lights fixed with red filters. The students were deliberating over blueprints for their final projects, riffling through bags of donated protein bars and Indian food, and constructing conjoined sleeping arrangements with mounds of blankets and pillows.

It was a familiar art-school scene — except that it was in the president’s office.

On Monday the students met with President Bharucha, who agreed in the conversation to raise the following requests with the board of trustees: to arrange a meeting between the board of trustees and 15 student representatives, to add a student with voting rights to the board of trustees and to provide public minutes for all board meetings. While short of keeping Cooper Union free, these gains could change how the school is governed in significant ways for the future.

The students are now deciding whether, once again, to demand Bharucha’s resignation.

 

Zachary Bell is a Brooklyn-based journalist and an editor at {young}ist.org, a digital safe space for the global young left. He can be reached at zacharyabell@gmail.com and @zacharyabell on twitter.

Economy   AlterNet

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

May 16, 2013  |

Everyone “knows” that the corporate income tax is a mess. Ask any company. They pay too much in corporate income tax, face rates higher than in any other OECD country, and are just following the law when they use tax havens to keep profits eternally deferred from taxation and to perform general sleight-of-hand.

Don’t believe a word of it. While some economists believe we shouldn’t tax corporations at all, the corporate income tax (CIT) is a necessary backstop to the personal income tax (PIT). With no CIT or a rate lower than the PIT, individuals have an incentive to incorporate their economic activities so they aren’t taxed on them, or are taxed less. Needless to say, this is something an average wage or salary worker would not have the ability to do. This is another area where we have one tax law for the 1%, and different rules for the rest of us.

So what should we do? The answers are simple, which is not to say that achieving them will be simple. Corporate interests hold a lot of political sway right now, and overcoming them will be anything but easy.

1. End the usefulness of tax havens for secrecy by instituting “publish what you pay.” Currently, companies can hide all sorts of transactions because they are only required to publish “consolidated” accounts of their global operations. Thus, Starbucks reports losses on its British tax statements while telling investors how profitable it is in Britain.  Apple can get away with leaving its subsidiaries in Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the British Virgin Islands off its annual report because it classifies them as not “significant.” By forcing companies to un-consolidate their reports, we would know where their employees were, where their their sales (both source and destination of products and services) were, where they declared their profits and paid their taxes, etc. Part of the beauty of “publish what you pay” is that it doesn’t require the cooperation of the tax havens to obtain the information.

2. End the usefulness of tax havens for avoidance by enacting unitary taxation. Upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1983, unitary taxation treats multinational corporations the same way many states already tax the income of multistate corporations: considering all of a company’s subsidiaries as a single entity, and using a formula to determine what portion of its global profits are taxable in your jurisdiction. The most common factors to put in the formula are sales, employment, and assets. Like “publish what you pay,” this has the advantage of not requiring the cooperation of the tax havens, which have largely shown themselves to be minimally cooperative at best with global efforts to combat tax evasion and tax avoidance.

A big roadblock is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which promotes allegedly “arm’s length” transfer prices that companies long ago learned to run rings around. Via the Tax Justice Network, Bloomberg reports that this allows U.S. and European companies to save over $100 billion a year on their taxes. As an indication of how uncertain lost tax estimates are, note on the one hand that this is significantly less than the $189 billion TJN estimates is lost to illegal tax evasion, but at the same time Bloomberg reports that the European Union says it loses EUR 1 trillion ($1.3 trillion) annually to tax avoidance and evasion, far in excess of these other two estimates. We’re talking big money here. The OECD has begun a project called Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS), but there is widespread doubt about how much progress will come out of this. Bloomberg notes a major revolving door where OECD tax officials leave to work for tax avoidance consultants, and documents how many OECD conferences on tax are underwritten by the very enablers of tax avoidance in the accounting and legal professions. Unitary taxation would make the BEPS project unnecessary, but the OECD has long opposed unitary taxation.

3. In the United States, end the deferral of taxes until profits are repatriated. In other words, require companies to pay tax in the year the money is earned, rather than when it comes back home years later, if ever. Tax deferred is tax reduced, at the very least. To show just how difficult this will be politically, Robert Gilpin of Princeton University recommended this in his book U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation–all the way back in 1975. (By the way, this book was quite influential on my thinking in graduate school and ever since.) Even now, U.S. multinationals are trying to get a “repatriation holiday” that would allow them to bring back $1 trillion in profits at a nominal tax rate, even though the 2004 repatriation holiday was a dud in terms of investment and job creation.

4. Don’t cut the corporate income tax rate. There is a big difference between the headline rate of 35%, which is indeed tops in the OECD, and the effective rate of 12.1%, one of the lowest in the OECD. In fact, there is a significant economics literature showing that large countries can charge higher taxes than smaller ones do without suffering for it, just like the federal government can charge a much higher CIT than state governments can. There is no need for the U.S. to content itself with revenue neutral combinations of rate cuts and base broadening when government will actually put the money to work, something companies have avoided doing ever since the beginning of the recession which, need I remind you, began over five years ago.

While the road to truly fixing corporate income tax will not be easy, we seem to have reached a promising juncture in the battle with government initiatives like the Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and the massive International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) tax  haven investigations. Last week (via markthshark at Daily Kos), the U.S., British, and Australian tax agencies reported that they had received an even larger data leak than ICIJ had, and that one was gigantic. We certainly can’t count our chickens yet; instead, we need to redouble our efforts to force governments to stamp out tax abuse by corporations and the wealthy.

Thomas is Professor of Political Science, University of Missouri-St. Louis. Author of Competing for Capital: Europe and North America in a Global Era (Georgetown University Press, 2000) and Investment Incentives and the Global Competition for Capital (Palgrave, 2011).

  Food  

 Monsanto Is Using Cronies in Congress

Photo Credit: Lightspring/Shuttersock.com

May 16, 2013  |

Reliable sources in Washington D.C. have informed the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) that Monsanto has begun secretly lobbying its Congressional allies to attach one or more “Monsanto Riders” or amendments to the 2013 Farm Bill that would preempt or prohibit states from requiring labels on genetically engineered (GE) foods.

In response to this blatant violation of states’ rights to legislate, and consumers’ right to know, the OCA and a nationwide alliance have launched a petition to put every member of Congress on notice: If you support any Farm Bill amendment that would nullify states’ rights to label genetically modified organisms (GMOs), we’ll vote – or throw – you out of office.

On Wednesday, May 15, an amendment (the King Amendment) to the House version of the Farm Bill, inserted under the guise of protecting interstate commerce, passed out of the House Agricultural Committee. If the King Amendment makes it into the final Farm Bill, it would take away states’ rights to pass laws governing the production or manufacture of any agricultural product, including food and animals raised for food, that is involved in interstate commerce. The amendment was proposed by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), largely in response to a California law stating that by 2015, California will allow only eggs to be sold from hens housed in cages specified by California.  But policy analysts emphasize that the amendment, broadly and ambiguously written, could be used to prohibit or preempt any state GMO labeling or food safety law.

Will the King Amendment survive the Senate? No one can be sure, say analysts. However few doubt that Monsanto will give up. We can expect that more amendments and riders will be introduced into the Farm Bill–even if the King Amendment fails—over the next month in an attempt to stop the wave of state GMO labeling laws and initiatives moving forward in states like Washington, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut and others.

Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) have admitted privately that they’ve “lost the battle” to stop GE food labeling at the state level, now that states are aggressively moving forward on labeling laws. On May 14, Maine’s House Ag Committee passed a GMO labeling law. On May 10, the Vermont House passed a labeling bill, 99-42, despite massive lobbying by Monsanto and threats to sue the state. And though Monsanto won a razor-thin victory (51 percent to 49 percent) in a costly, hard fought California GMO labeling ballot initiative last November, biotech and Big Food now realize that Washington State voters will likely pass I-522, an upcoming ballot initiative to label GE foods, on November 5.

If Monsanto can’t stop states from passing laws, then the next step is a national preemptive measure.  And all signs point to just such a power grab.  Earlier this year, Monsanto slipped its extremely unpopular “Monsanto Protection Act,” an act that gives biotech immunity from federal prosecution for planting illegally approved GE crops, into the 2013 Federal Appropriations Bill.  During the June 2012 Farm Bill debate, 73 U.S. Senators voted against the right of states to pass mandatory GE food labeling laws. Emboldened by these votes, and now the House Ag Committee’s vote on the King Amendment, Monsanto has every reason to believe Congress would support a potential nullification of states’ rights to label.

The million-strong OCA and its allies in the organic and natural health movement are warning incumbent Senators and House members, Democrats and Republicans alike, that thousands of health and environmental-minded constituents in their Congressional districts or states will work to recall them or drive them out of office if they fail to heed the will of the people and to respect the time-honored traditions of shared state sovereignty over food labels, food safety laws, and consumers’ right to know.

Trouble in Monsanto Nation

Over the past 20 years Monsanto and the biotech industry, aided and abetted by indentured politicians and corporate agribusiness, have begun seizing control over the global food and farming system, including the legislative, patent, trade, judicial and regulatory bodies that are supposed to safeguard the public interest.

In the U.S., despite mounting evidence of the damage GE crops inflict on human health and the environment, approximately 170 million acres of GE crops, including corn, soybeans, cotton, canola, sugar beets, alfalfa, papaya, and squash, are currently under cultivation. These crops, untested and unlabeled, comprise 41 percent of all cultivated cropland, or 17 percent of all cropland and pastureland combined. According to the GMA, at least 70 percent of non-organic grocery store processed foods contain GMOs. And GE grains and mill byproducts now supply the overwhelming majority of animal feed on the factory farms that supply 90 percent to 95 percent of the meat, eggs and dairy products that Americans consume.

Yet despite their marketplace dominance, record profits and enormous political clout in Washington D.C., Monsanto and the biotech industry are in deep trouble. A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Entropy reports that Monstanto’s top-selling herbicide, Roundup, is a deadly poison, destroying important human gut bacteria and likely contributing to the rapid increase of food allergies and serious human diseases including cancer, autism, neurological disorders, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD), dementia, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Those most susceptible to poisoning by Monsanto’s Roundup are children and the elderly.

Scientists aren’t the only ones raising new questions about Roundup. Farmers are complaining that they’re being forced to spray more and more chemicals on crops increasingly under siege from a growing army of herbicide-resistant weeds.  The situation is so bad that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just raised the limits of Roundup residue allowed on grains and vegetables to even more dangerous levels. But just in case the EPA someday stops raising the limits, Monsanto, Dow and the biotech industry are working on a new “solution” to the onslaught of herbicide-resistant Superweeds: They’ve applied  for approval of a new and highly controversial generation of super toxic herbicide-resistant GE crops, including “Agent Orange”  (2,4-D and dicamba-resistant) corn, soybeans and cotton.

As a recent widely-circulated article points out:

The use of 2,4-D is not new; it’s actually one of the most widely used herbicides in the world. What is new is that farmers will now ‘carpet bomb’ staple food crops like soy and corn with this chemical at a previously unprecedented scale—just the way glyphosate has been indiscriminately applied as a result of Roundup Ready crops. In fact, if 2,4-D resistant crops receive approval and eventually come to replace Monsanto’s failing Roundup-resistant crops as Dow intends, it is likely that billions of pounds will be needed, on top of the already insane levels of Roundup being used (1.6 billion lbs were used in 2007 in the US alone).

In addition to these Agent Orange crops, an expanded menu of genetically engineered organisms are awaiting approval. Next on the menu?  GE apples, trees, and salmon.

State Labeling Laws: The ‘skull and crossbones’ that terrify Monsanto

Monsanto’s greatest fear isn’t a federal government charged with protecting the health and safety of its citizens.  Congress and the White House seem only too happy to oblige the biotech industry’s unquenchable thirst for growth, power and dominance. No, it’s the massive, unstoppable (so far) grassroots movement of Millions Against Monsanto that strikes fear in the heart of the Biotech Bully. U.S. citizens are waking up. They’re demanding labels on genetically engineered foods, similar to those already required in the European Union. They’re calling for serious independent safety-testing of GE crops and animals, both those already approved (especially Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant crops) and those awaiting approval.

The anti-GMO movement has finally figured out, after 20 years of fruitlessly lobbying Congress, the FDA and the White House, that the federal government is not going to require labels on GE foods. Instead the movement has shifted the battleground on GMO labeling from Monsanto and Big Food’s turf in Washington D.C. to the more favorable terrain of state ballot initiatives and state legislative action—publicizing the fact that a state GMO labeling law will have the same marketplace impact as a national labeling law.

State laws spell doom for Monsanto. Companies like Kellogg’s, General Mills, Coca-Cola, Pepsi/Frito-Lay, Dean Foods, Unilever, Con-Agra, Safeway, Wal-Mart and Smuckers are not going to label in just one or two states.  Monsanto knows that U.S. food companies will go GMO-free in the entire U.S., rather than admit to consumers that their products contain GMOs.

As Monsanto itself has pointed out, labels on genetically engineered foods are like putting a “skull and crossbones” on food packages. This is why Monsanto and their allies poured $46 million into defeating a California ballot initiative last year that would have required labels on GMO foods. This is why Monsanto has lobbied strenuously in 30 states this year to prevent, or at least delay, state mandatory labeling laws from being passed. This is why Monsanto has threatened to file federal lawsuits against Vermont, Connecticut, Maine and Washington if they dare grant citizens the right to know whether or not their food has been genetically engineered or not.

And this is why Monsanto’s minions are trying to insert amendments or riders into the Farm Bill that will make it nearly impossible, even illegal, for states to pass GMO labeling laws. And there’s nothing to stop them when Congress is filled with pro-biotech cheerleaders who could care less that 90 percent of U.S. consumers want mandatory labels and proper safety testing of genetically engineered crops and foods.

Countering Monsanto’s Final Offensive: Throw the Bums Out!

Only a massive grassroots resistance will deter the U.S. Senate and House from stomping on our rights. Only an unprecedented campaign of public education, petition-gathering and grassroots pressure will be able to convince the ever-more corrupt and indentured politicians in Washington D.C. to back off.

Eighteen state constitutions have century-old provisions for state registered voters to collect petitions and recall state and local officials, forcing them to either resign or stand for reelection. But what very few Americans, and even members of Congress, realize is that 11 states have constitutional provisions to recall U.S. Senators and House of Representative members, as well as state elected officials.

It’s time we exercise the full power of direct democracy, not just state and municipal ballot initiatives. We must continue to support efforts like the current state ballot initiative to label GMOs in Washington state, and county ballot initiatives to ban GMOs, factory farms and other corporate crimes, in the 24 states and hundreds of counties and municipalities where these are allowed.  But we also need to use the power we have to recall and throw out of office our out-of-control Congressional Senators and Representatives as well.

If our elected officials in Congress continue to represent Monsanto and big corporations, rather than their constituents, then let’s throw the bums out! If the Washington political establishment, both Democrats and Republicans, continue to trample on our inalienable constitutional rights and contemptuously disregard the 225-year principle of a shared balance of power between the federal government, the states and local government, then we have no choice but to recall them or throw them out of office.

Please join the nation’s organic consumers and natural health advocates in this strategic battle, the Food Fight of Our Lives. Please join this campaign to save, not only our right to choose what’s in our food, but our basic right to democratic representation and self-determination as well.  Sign the petition. Tell your Congressmen and women, especially the 73 incumbents who voted last year to eliminate states rights’ to legislate on GMO labels, and those in the House this week who voted to support the King Amendment that “enough is enough,” “basta ya.” Power to the People!

Ronnie Cummins is founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association. Cummins is author of numerous articles and books, including “Genetically Engineered Food: A Self-Defense Guide for Consumers” (Second Revised Edition Marlowe & Company 2004).

Environment   AlterNet

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Mopic

May 15, 2013  |

About a year ago, on March 26, 2012, Sandra Steingraber, an environmental writer and activist against natural-gas fracking, wrote a public letter titled “Breaking Up with the Sierra Club.” Breakups are never easy, and the letter, published on the website of the nature magazine Orion, was brutal from the start: “I’m through with you,” Steingraber began.

The proximate cause of the split was the revelation that between 2007 and 2010 the nation’s oldest environmental organization had clandestinely accepted $26 million from individuals or subsidiaries associated with Chesapeake Energy, a major gas firm that has been at the forefront of the fracking boom. “The largest, most venerable environmental organization in the United States secretly aligned with the very company that seeks to occupy our land, turn it inside out, blow it apart, fill it with poison,” Steingraber wrote. “It was as if, on the eve of D-day, the anti-Fascist partisans had discovered that Churchill was actually in cahoots with the Axis forces.”

In 2010, the club’s new executive director, Michael Brune, stopped taking Chesapeake Energy’s cash. Brune also made the decision to come clean with the revelation and express regret for his predecessor’s lack of better judgment. “We never should have taken this money,” Brune wrote in response to the breakup letter.

But to Steingraber and many others, the betrayal had been done.

“I call them gang-green,” says Maura Stephens, an activist based in Ithaca, New York, who spearheads several anti-fracking groups, including Frack Busters and the Coalition to Protect New York. “There are a lot of so-called environmental groups that were started with noble ideals—for example the ideals of John Muir—but who no longer live up to their mission. … They do good work on some level, but on this [fracking] they are selling us out.”

The eco-infighting over natural gas is just one example of internecine strains that appear to be intensifying in the green movement. When it comes to prescribing ways to address the planet’s ecological challenges, environmentalists increasingly find themselves at odds with each other. In a way, greens’ predicament is a measure of their own prescience. For at least 40 years, they have been warning about the consequences of overpopulation, the risks of industrial pollution, and the loss of wilderness and wildlife habitat due to human encroachment. Few heeded the warnings in time to halt the first effects of large-scale global pollution and resource depletion, and now the consequences of ignoring the warnings have come to pass. Many global fisheries are on the brink of collapse; nearly half of the planet’s land is dedicated to feeding a global population that will soon reach nine billion; freshwater scarcities in some regions are becoming acute; and, most frighteningly, we appear intent on wrecking the global atmosphere, the ecosystem on which all other ecosystems depend.

Environmentalists have found themselves being taken seriously, and it has proved to be something of a curse. As they are asked to come up with solutions for the cascading eco crises, internal divisions are becoming more obvious. The biggest divide may be between those who would do anything to cut carbon emissions and slow climate change—going so far as to support natural gas and nuclear fuel, or even supporting geo-engineering and other controversial ideas—and conservationists who don’t want to trade one earth-damaging practice for another.

“I feel like the community has splintered,” says Chris Clarke, a writer in Joshua Tree, California, and a co-founder of the group Solar Done Right, which has battled the construction of utility-scale solar stations in the Mojave Desert that involve destroying vast stretches of wilderness. “Some people are unwilling to call themselves ‘environmentalists’ because ‘environmentalist’ has now come to mean climate-change mitigation at any cost.”

Some environmentalists say the divisions have been fueled by gadflies looking to appear contrarian for the sake of minor celebrity. “I think, bluntly, that part of this is [happening] because there’s some value to the post-environmentalists in hippie-punching,” says Alex Steffen, a self-described “bright green” futurist who is the author of a new book, Carbon Zero. “Just saying, ‘Oh, those guys are wrong’—since there are a lot of people who want to think that traditional environmentalists are wrong—is a great way to sell books and get speaking gigs.”

It’s true that some of the noise seems calculated for effect. But it would be dangerous to wave off the differences of opinion. A careful look at the environmental movement reveals a profound gap among people who share a worry about the state of Earth. There is a real split over what should be considered a smart survival plan for billions of people on a finite planet. That split, if it’s not navigated constructively, threatens to sap the environmental movement’s political muscle just when it is needed most to achieve its goal: keeping the planet healthy enough to maintain our civilization.

***

In a sense, today’s differences are just a new variation on a century-old dispute. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, American environmentalists fell into two distinct camps. The first, led by Sierra Club founder John Muir, was part of the larger Romantic movement that viewed wild areas as pristine places that needed to be saved from the scourge of humanity’s hand. The second, led by the founding head of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, thought of nature more like a garden—something to be tended by man. Natural resources, in Pinchot’s view, should be mindfully stewarded to conserve them for future generations.

The split between those who esteem nature for its intrinsic value and those who want to protect it for its instrumental value persisted through the years. Some 21st-century environmentalists—most prominently the leaders of The Nature Conservancy—now talk almost exclusively about environmental protection in terms of preserving ecosystem services. We should invest in nature and protect natural infrastructure because humans benefit from them: Wetlands blunt hurricanes, forests suck up carbon dioxide, clean rivers bring us water. At the same time, some environmentalists have been re-energized by a nascent grassroots movement to recognize legal rights for natural systems, an effort inspired by the new constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia that grant nature formal rights.

Opposing opinions on what constitutes appropriate use of modern technology also divides some putative eco allies. An instinctual techno-skepticism has formed an undercurrent in environmental thought—at least since Silent Spring and the backlashes to the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and near disaster at Three Mile Island. As worries intensify about unchecked greenhouse-gas emissions, however, some greens are rethinking their posture toward once-verboten technologies. James Hansen, the NASA climatologist who twice has been arrested at the White House while opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, has said, “Next-generation, safe nuclear power is an option which we need to develop.” Nuclear power is anathema to many other environmentalists, but the British writer George Monbiot reversed his long-standing opposition two years ago and wrote in The Guardian, “Abandoning nuclear power at a time of escalating greenhouse gas emissions is far more dangerous than maintaining it.”

The use of genetically modified organisms also highlights this divide. Even as most rank-and-file environmentalists remain suspicious of them—with their vibe of Promethean overreach and their control by monopolist corporations like Monsanto—some self-identified greens say GMO technologies are the only way to feed a growing population. In a speech earlier this year, Mark Lynas, another British environmentalist, told the Oxford Farming Conference, “The risk today is not that anyone will be harmed by GM food but that millions will be harmed by not having enough food.”

Another rift involves the geographic scope of individual environmentalists’ concerns. Ever since Henry David Thoreau set up a shack on Walden Pond, environmentalism has been animated by a love of place. A righteous parochialism was the spark that inspired scores of successful environmental campaigns: a desire to protect this river, this forest grove, this mountaintop. On the other hand, environmentalism has also been animated by a planetary consciousness from the moment the Apollo mission beamed back images of a tiny blue marble floating in space. For a generation these two ideals were in chorus, exemplified best by the greenie bumper sticker: “Think Global, Act Local.” But in the era of global climate change, a love for the local and a concern for the global might be in conflict.

This is best illustrated by the controversies over putting giant solar installations in the Mojave Desert and building a wind farm off of Martha’s Vineyard. One person’s blueprint for clean energy infrastructure is another person’s unthinkable desecration of a beloved place. While some environmentalists argue that we have to pave parts of the desert with solar panels in order to save other parts of the desert from a four-degree Celsius temperature rise, others see that as heresy.

“I think the important split is actually between people are who thinking in planetary terms and people who are not,” Steffen, the futurist, told me. “The key to intelligent planetary thinking is to recognize that goal number one is to be promoting the stability of planetary systems, and then figuring out goal number two: how to get the greatest set of interesting possibilities for humanity into that constraint. And I worry that this debate between ‘old environmentalists’ and ‘post-environmentalists’ or whatever totally misses the larger point. The only kind of conservation worth having is one that starts at those larger systems, talks about what is necessary to maintain their stability, and starts scaling down from there into the particularities of political contexts, and specific places, and technological systems.”

Achieving those goals could get increasingly difficult, however, if the movement is publicly split, as has happened with the issue of hydrofracking for natural gas.

***

The Sierra Club, under the leadership of its previous executive director, Carl Pope, wasn’t the only prominent environmentalist organization heralding natural gas as a bridge fuel that could take our energy system from carbon-intense coal to renewables like wind and solar. (When burned, gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal.) Among the most vocal proponents of natural gas today are Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, founders of the Oakland-based liberal think tank the Breakthrough Institute. Nordhaus and Shellenberger ticked off greens in the early aughts with the essay “The Death of Environmentalism,” which urged green groups to rethink the core assumptions of their political strategy. The pugnacious pair is often bashed for their rhetoric, but the two are genuine in their hawkishness on the climate and their commitment to global equity.

“As we look ahead to the human-development challenge, we’re going to need other kinds of low-carbon and zero-carbon energy,” Shellenberger says. “If we have everything riding on solar and wind, then we have all of our eggs in one basket.”

Nordhaus adds: “Look, we have two billion people who don’t have access to anything other than wood and dung [for energy]. Assume a world of nine billion people. Now assume that we have perfect economic redistribution from rich to poor, and everybody makes $15,000 a year. And then just do the math on global energy use—it still triples. You can’t meet that all with renewables.”

But since the fracking boom began in earnest, a larger, anti-fracking grassroots has emerged. Small towns in the East that were unaccustomed to the thrum of the fossil-fuel industry have been shocked to find themselves surrounded by trucks and heavy machinery and with compressors in their back lots whirring all night long. Some homeowners had their wells contaminated with flammable methane. Places like Ohio and Arkansas that weren’t used to seismic activity started to experience earthquakes when underground wastewater injections stimulated geologic faults. Today, the movement against gas fracking has become a cause célèbre (Yoko Ono and Mark Ruffalo have an “Artists Against Fracking” group) and is one of the most invigorating issues among grassroots environmentalists. At February’s Forward on Climate rally near the White House, easily a fifth of the placards in the crowd of 35,000 had to do with gas drilling.

“No sensible person would ever be a proponent of shale gas,” anti-fracking activist Maura Stephens says. “The number of people whose water is contaminated, I can’t even count. And the number of people who have been given a gag order and been given shut-up money is incredible. The whole idea is to do the harm and then mitigate.”

“Of all the forms of fossil-fuel extraction, fracking is the only one that is wrapped up in a green myth,” says Sandra Steingraber, who wrote the letter against the Sierra Club. “The demand for energy is not some inexorable thing like gravity. We control that. And it’s plain to me that we could reduce our energy use by half and entirely run our economy on renewables.”

Nordhaus and Shellenberger have a nearly opposite worry: that the intensity from partisans like Steingraber and Stephens has forced some big green groups to retreat from gas. The World Resources Institute, a D.C.-based environmental research organization, is an example of that shift. As recently as early 2012, the organization was expressing qualified enthusiasm for gas as a “potential game changer” that “should be part of America’s low-carbon energy mix.” But when asked recently to comment on the gas controversy, Jennifer Morgan, director of the institute’s climate and energy program, chose her words carefully. “It’s an extremely fraught and tough discussion,” Morgan told me. “I think we recognize both the risks—and the risks are significant—and the potential opportunity.”

And, of course, the Sierra Club has retreated from natural gas under its new executive director. Last week at a conference in Santa Barbara organized by The Wall Street Journal, Michael Brune warned that fracking’s greenhouse-gas emissions might be worse than coal due to leaks of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas. The club also has launched a new section on its website: “Beyond Gas.”

***

Whether the question is shale-gas development, nuclear power, utility-scale solar and wind, or GMO crops, the core of the debate among environmentalists comes down to what’s realistic. That, of course, is the same dilemma that confronts any political movement, whether on the right or on the left. But environmentalists’ conundrum is especially complicated because it involves a system beyond our control: Earth.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger say their pragmatism is grounded in what is politically possible given a range of shitty options. In the other camp, Steffen, Steingraber, and Stephens also claim the mantle of pragmatism, one based on geophysical necessity. The existential threat of climate change has become a sort of projection screen: Either it confirms that we are locked into business as usual, or it’s proof that we need to make a societal 180-degree turn in how we relate to the planet.

“Those of us who are calling ourselves the latter-day abolitionists, our idea of what’s possible is grounded in physical and natural laws. How much water and land and resources do we need to feed ourselves?” Steingraber says. “My hope that is that we can help people imagine, have a vision of a future when blasting gas out of the ground to make our tea kettles whistle is just barbaric, which it is.” It’s a view Nordhaus and Shellenberger call naïve.

It’s clear that, much of the time, environmentalists are arguing past each other. Beyond any debates over strategy or technology, the various factions of greens harbor completely different ideas about human nature and the planet’s capacity to hold us. While some eco-policy wonks appear to have internalized the notion that there are no alternatives to our modern, energy-dependent ways, the environmental grassroots remain committed to encouraging a change in consciousness that will prompt a new, less resource-intense mode of living. It’s as if the environmental movement is playing three-dimensional chess, but with the players operating on totally different planes.

Such differences of opinion aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Political movements often benefit from some degree of ideological tension. The differences only become a political liability because our environmental situation urgently needs a solution. Carbon emissions continue to rise, the number of humans continues to grow, and Earth isn’t getting any bigger.

The environmental movement has a surplus of good ideas for how to manage ecological problems. It’s got plenty of smart and passionate people. The one key asset it doesn’t have is time to sort its issues out.

Jason Mark is a co-manager at San Francisco’s Alemany Farm and the editor of the quarterly environmental magazine, Earth Island Journal. He is also a co-author of Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots.