Articles by Tom Laskawy

The EPA announces its plan for a national greenhouse-gas reporting system

As Kate reported, the EPA is moving forward with its long-delayed national reporting system for greenhouse gas emissions. They estimate that it will cover 85 to 90 percent of total U.S. emissions. The agency set the reporting threshold at 25,000 tons of carbon, which will exempt individuals and small businesses, but will apply to all other industrial and commercial sources of GHG emissions.

That includes ethanol factories, by the way, which should provide further proof that the whole ethanol boondoggle won't play a meaningful role in addressing climate change. Also included in the survey will be Confined Animal Feeding Operations (aka factory farms) due to their "manure management" practices. Being tagged as a massive source of GHG emissions certainly won't make their business model any more sustainable.  However, the EPA -- clearly stung by the controversy over the non-existent "cow tax" proposal -- leaves exempt from its inventory "GHG emissions from enteric fermentation from cattle," aka cow farts.

In fact, aside from manure (to be fair, no small contribution) most agricultural sources of emissions won't be counted.  The other exemptions include:

... rice cultivation, field burning of agricultural residues, composting, and agricultural soils would not be covered under this reporting requirement. The challenges to including these sources in the rule are that available methods to estimate facility-level emissions for these sources yield uncertain results, and that these sources are characterized by a large number of small emitters.

In other words, "biological" sources of emissions that are still the result of industrial production are left out.  Despite this, the EPA maintains that this inventory will indeed be almost totally comprehensive. If the Danes are right, however, and a single cow emits four tons of methane in burps and farts a year, you have to wonder if the EPA is letting livestock producers off the hook too easily. Still, with chemical plants and fuel production covered under the reporting system, the climate impact of most of industrial agriculture's "inputs" such as diesel fuel and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, will be measured. All in all, it's a reasonable place to start.

Using less fertilizer has no meaningful effect on yield

Speaking of limiting the use of synthetic fertilizer, allow me to throw a little science your way courtesy of Science Daily and the USDA's Argriculural Research Service:

From 1998 to 2008, the researchers evaluated and compared potential management strategies for reducing nitrogen and nitrate nitrogen levels in soil and groundwater.

The first study showed that onions used only about 12 to 15 percent of the fertilizer nitrogen applied to the crop. Much of the remainder stayed in the top six feet of soil. The next year, Halvorson and his colleagues planted corn on the same land and found that it recovered about 24 percent of the fertilizer nitrogen that had been applied to the onion crop.

Following that study, the scientists grew alfalfa on the land for five years, then followed it with a watermelon crop, followed by a corn crop. In the first year that the corn was grown, an unfertilized control plot yielded about 250 bushels of corn.

By comparison, a plot fertilized with 250 pounds of nitrogen per acre yielded about 260 bushels, a small increase that required a significantly higher investment of time and money. Additional corn studies following onion in rotation showed corn was a good residual nitrogen scavenger crop.

With water supplies at risk, hydrologists are in high demand

From a NYT weekly jobs column, we learn of one employment area experiencing high growth:

[D]emand for hydrologists has been predicted to grow 24 percent from 2006 to 2016, much faster than the average for all occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Hydrologists study the distribution, circulation and physical properties of water, with hydrogeologists focusing specifically on groundwater.

After creation of the Environmental Protection Agency..., hydrologists' work was largely focused on water quality. Today, however, "an increasing percentage of hydrologists are interested in water quantity and supply, which is an emerging issue and where global climate change plays a big role," said Dork Sahagian, professor of earth and environmental science at Lehigh University and director of its Environmental Initiative in Bethlehem, Pa.

"But concern with water quality -- which involves local, site-based issues -- still drives the job market," he said. "Most hydrologists in this part of the world are still hired to cope with the availability of clean water for drinking and municipal supplies."

With industrial chemicals like BPA contaminating our drinking water supplies which are then being squeezed both by agricultural needs and by climate change-induced droughts, the future hydrologists of the world will never lack for stuff to do.

Paul Roberts' MoJo article on farming gets big idea right and details wrong

I like Paul Roberts. I liked his book The End of Food. But I must admit that I was a bit underwhelmed by his recent article on sustainable farming in Mother Jones, "Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So 2008." That's not to say there's nothing to recommend it. His central premise -- that we way we're farming today isn't sustainable and that no large-scale model of what sustainable agriculture would look like currently exists -- is valid and important (as anyone who hangs out around here is well aware).

And any article that gets its money quote from sustainable ag guru Fred Kirschenmann is certainly on the right track. Said Kirschenmann, "We've come to see sustainability as some kind of fixed prescription -- if you just do these 10 things, you will be sustainable, and you won't need to worry about it anymore." Which isn't true, of course.

But that title! Shouldn't it be "conventional agriculture" that's so 2008? Meanwhile, there were far too many straw men in the article for my tastes (ever eaten a straw man? Blech!) Take, for example, the thought experiment supplied by environmental scientist Vaclav Smil on the effect of totally eliminating the use of synthetic fertilizer:

Such an expansion, Smil notes, "would require complete elimination of all tropical rainforests, conversion of a large part of tropical and subtropical grasslands to cropland, and the return of a substantial share of the labor force to field farming -- making this clearly only a theoretical notion."

That's probably accurate as far as it goes. But it's unclear how he modeled this version of organic agriculture - at a minimum it appears to be a vast oversimplification. And his conclusion then becomes the basis upon which to reject the whole organic concept. Meanwhile, look at one of Smil's central assumptions -- that "dietary habits remain constant," i.e. in his experiment we're all eating as much meat, high-fructose corn syrup, and processed foods as we are now. Well, to take one example, you don't have to look far to find folks who will tell you that current meat consumption, especially red meat consumption, is the sine qua non of unsustainability -- Roberts himself held forth at length on that very point in his book. By holding that constant, you've just pre-determined the outcome of your thought experiment. And look at a crucial element in Smil's calculation -- that he's trying to determine "the extra land we'd need for cover crops or forage (to feed the animals to make the manure)." Now I don't know for sure if he presumes the forage will be pasture or cereal (aka corn), but either way that's a pretty high bar he's set.