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Wealthy ‘family farmers’ in California wage PR campaign to maintain their subsidies

We're happy to present this guest essay from Lloyd G. Carter, an attorney and former journalist who has written about California water issues since 1969. Carter is president of the California Save Our Streams Council.

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Remember the family farmer?

He was immortalized in Grant Wood's 1930 painting "American Gothic": a grim, hardscrabble stoic in overalls, grasping a pitchfork. Guess what? It wasn't really a farmer. It was Wood's dentist posing as a farmer.

Fresno County's own philosopher/farmer, Victor Davis Hanson, announced years ago that the family farmer was a figment of the urban imagination. Hanson wrote that the multi-generational family farm has all but disappeared and that soon the only thing left will be "broke serfs and thriving corporations."

But now a coalition of western San Joaquin Valley agribusiness interests have launched a multi-million dollar media blitz to convince Californians that the modern "family farmer" still exists -- and needs to keep consuming colossal amounts of California river water. The statewide ad campaign includes television spots, full page newspaper ads, bus stop billboards in big cities, and even sponsorship of the "California Report" on National Public Radio. The word "family" is repeated ad nauseum.

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TIME and energy

TIME magazine has a package of stories on energy and related matters (The Watt links to all of them). I only read the "Peak Oil: Yes it is! No it isn't!" bit, and it was distinctly unenlightening. But maybe the rest of it is good.

Wicked-smaht grids

I'm at that blissful point vis-a-vis "smart grids" where I know enough about them to think they're bitchin', but not enough to know why they're never gonna happen. Whee!

So I was happy that eternal optimist Joel Makower flagged this report (PDF) from the Center for Smart Energy. (Who's against smart energy, huh?)

The report says there are boatloads of money -- around $45 billion -- waiting to be made by the folks who get to this stuff first. Whenever I hear a stat like that, I think, hm, are businessfolk in this industry just retarded? If there's $45 billion on the table, why is no one grabbing it? What do the think-tankers and the pundits know that the business types don't? Same think with peak oil -- if oil's going to cost $200 a gallon in 10 years or so, why does anyone who has any oil sell it? As opposed to, say, holding onto it for 10 years and raising their profits by some 150%. Maybe a reader can enlighten me.

Anyhoo, of particular interest are these seven key markers of smart grids:

“A bicycle is a toy. A car is a weapon of mass destruction.” — Critical Mass participant

So Todd thinks people don't understand the Critical Mass movement, at least not the NYT Magazine and the NYPD.

If you agree, here's your chance to give Critical Mass some television exposure, to help set the record straight. Head over to Current TV and greenlight the four minute video short titled Critical Mass, which was produced by James Barff. If enough people give it the thumbs up, maybe Current TV producers will decide to air it. (Hey, they produced their own report on climate change in Alaska, so there's hope.)

Granted, Current TV has a limited reach, but it would be better than nothing. Right?

Maybe

This is less of a big deal than I had thought at first, but it's still worth noting: new research (full PDF here) suggests that sprawl may be linked to higher home prices.

The authors looked at housing prices in 452 urban areas across the U.S., along with measures of a couple dozen factors that can influence housing prices -- including urban form, but also education levels, weather, demographics, recent population influx, the size of homes, and employment factors, among others. Controlling for other variables, cities that have a higher share of total housing in their "central areas" (as defined by the U.S. census) tend to have slightly lower median home prices, and fewer very-expensive homes, than cities that are more sprawling and decentralized.

This, of course, runs counter to the intuition -- and the much-touted arguments from the anti-smart growth set -- that housing is cheaper in spread-out, poorly bounded metro areas.

That said, as careful as this research seems to be, there's good reason not to read too much into it.

NYT comes out for the gas tax

It's hard to decide whether to love or hate the New York Times these days. It's reaping a much-deserved whirlwind over its bungling of WMD coverage, Judy Miller, and matters Plame. But then, their lead editorial today -- arguing in favor of a federal gas tax -- is right square on the money. You won't find a more compact, solid summary of the problem than this, the first paragraph:

There's no serious disagreement that two major crises of our time are terrorism and global warming. And there's no disputing that America's oil consumption fosters both. Oil profits that flow to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries finance both terrorist acts and the spread of dangerously fanatical forms of Islam. The burning of fossil fuels creates greenhouse emissions that provoke climate change. All the while, oil dependency increases the likelihood of further military entanglements, and threatens the economy with inflation, high interest rates and risky foreign indebtedness. Until now, the government has failed to connect our crises and our consumption in a coherent way. That dereliction of duty has led to policies that are counterproductive, such as tax incentives to buy gas guzzlers and an overemphasis on increasing domestic oil supply, although even all-out drilling would not be enough to slake our oil thirst and would require a reversal of longstanding environmental protections.

Of course, any gas-tax proposal faces two difficulties:

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