Why we shouldn’t target farmers for our farm bill frustrations

We're very pleased to run this guest essay by Elanor Starmer, an independent activist scholar who lives in California. Elanor recently published an important paper (PDF) on the livestock industry with Tim Wise of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. As the farm bill lurches to its conclusion amid shrill rhetoric about the "farm bloc," Elanor redirects our attention to the real beneficiaries of both federal farm policy and conventional attempts to reform it: the agribusiness giants that control the food system. This essay, first in a series, originally appeared on Ethicurean.

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In a recent Grist column, Tom Philpott ran down the list of problems that this year's Farm Bill debaters have blamed, loudly and repeatedly, on subsidies: "everything from the obesity epidemic to the explosion in CAFOs in the late 1990s to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico ... [to] steamrolling farmers in Mexico, Africa, and elsewhere."

Most mainstream media outlets and, points out Philpott, many progressive causes (Oxfam is one prominent example) are only too willing to point to subsidies as the delinquent dad when our food system spawns yet another bad seed.

Philpott is frustrated by what he sees as a lack of complexity and nuance in the debate over subsidies. I'd like to voice my own frustration about a different but related issue here. I've noticed that in the debate over subsidies, both in the media and among progressive reform groups, there is often no distinction made between the subsidy policy itself and the farmers who receive payments.

Commodity farmers, once considered the salt of the earth (almost literally), are now characterized quite differently: as a wealthy, powerful, politically savvy lobbying force capable of shaping the global food system to meet its needs, leaving the rest of us to pick up its mess. Call it Big Farma.

NYT author discusses recent story on climate ‘centrism’

On Tuesday, NYT environment reporter Andy Revkin published a piece called “Challenges to Both Left and Right on Global Warming.”...

Global warming and the California wildfires

Global warming makes wildfires more likely and more destructive -- as many scientific studies have concluded. Why? Global warming leads to more intense droughts, hotter weather, earlier snowmelt (hence less humid late summers and early autumns), and more tree infestations (like the pine beetle). That means wildfires are a dangerous amplifying feedback, whereby global warming causes more wildfires, which release carbon dioxide, thereby accelerating global warming.

The climate-wildfire link should be a special concern in a country where wildfires have burned an area larger than the state of Idaho since 2000.

I write this as my San Diego relatives wait anxiously in their hotel room to find out if their Rancho Santa Fe home has been destroyed. This is a beautiful home that I lived in for a month when I moved to the area in the mid-1980s to study at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Can we say that the brutal San Diego wildfires were directly caused by global warming? Princeton's Michael Oppenheimer put it this way on NBC Nightly News Tuesday:

A new study gathers 20 years of public opinion about global warming

Matthew Nisbet of Framing Science and his colleague, T. Myers, trawled through two decades of data on public opinion about global warming (sounds fun, huh?). The results will be published in the fall issue of the journal Public Opinion Quarterly.

An abstract:

Over the past 20 years, there have been dozens of news organization, academic, and nonpartisan public opinion surveys on global warming, yet there exists no authoritative summary of their collective findings. In this article, we provide a systematic review of trends in public opinion about global warming. We sifted through hundreds of polling questions culled from more than 70 surveys administered over the past 20 years. In compiling the available trends, we summarize public opinion across several key dimensions including (a) public awareness of the issue of global warming; (b) public understanding of the causes of global warming and the specifics of the policy debate; (c) public perceptions of the certainty of the science and the level of agreement among experts; (d) public concern about the impacts of global warming; (e) public support for policy action in light of potential economic costs; and (f) public support for the Kyoto climate treaty.

Unfortunately, the full text isn't available online, but Nisbet says that if you drop him an email, he'll send you a PDF. I look forward to reading it myself tonight.

Looking at an industrial-meat giant’s China deal

While PETA roils Gristmill and other greenie sites by brandishing climate change to promote vegetarianism, Smithfield Foods just keeps cranking...

Lomborg’s a real Nowhere Man

In Cool It, Lomborg writes about global warming -- but the globe he is writing about certainly isn't Earth. We've already seen in Parts I and II that on Planet Lomborg, polar bears can evolve backwards and the ice sheets can't suffer rapid ice loss (as they are already doing on Earth).

On Planet Lomborg, the carbon cycle has no amplifying feedbacks -- even though these are central to why warming on Earth will be worse than the IPCC projects. I couldn't even find the word "feedback" or "permafrost" in the book [if anyone finds them, please let me know].

On Planet Lomborg, free from the restrictions of science, global warming is kind of delightful (p.12):

The reality of climate change isn't necessarily an unusually fierce summer heat wave. More likely, we may just notice people wearing fewer layers of clothes on a winter's evening.

On planet Earth, a major study in Nature found that if we fail to take strong action to reduce emissions soon, the brutal European heat wave that killed 35,000 people will become the typical summer within the next four decades. By the end of the century, "2003 would be classed as an anomalously cold summer relative to the new climate."

Lomborg's entire book takes place in a kind of fantasy land or Bizarro world. Aptly, on the last page is "A Note on the Type" that begins:

This book was set in Utopia ...

Irony can be so ironic. Utopia is from the Greek for "no place," or "place that does not exist." Lomborg is the nowhere man!

Inspired by the spinach scare, new California rules could wilt small farmers

This is a guest essay by Judith Redmond, co-owner of Northern California’s legendary Full Belly Farm and president of the...

Climate change mitigation costs less than doing nothing about the problem

I have argued previously that the landmark Stern Report got the big picture right -- strong action now to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions is economically justified, since the cost of action (i.e., mitigation), perhaps 1 percent of GDP, is far less than the cost of inaction (i.e., climate change impacts), which Stern estimates as at least 5 percent of GDP and possibly as high as 20 percent.

In particular, I (and others) argued that Stern's much-criticized choice of a low discount rate, 1.4 percent, was in fact justified -- see here and here for a good discussion.

Now perhaps the most mainstream economic policy think tank in the country -- Resources for the Future (RFF) -- has written a major report, "An Even Sterner Review" (PDF), with two key conclusions.

First, "we find no strong objections to the discounting assumptions adopted in the Stern Review."

Second:

[T]he conclusions reached in the review can be justified on other grounds than by using a low discount rate. We argue that nonmarket damages from climate change are probably underestimated and that future scarcities that will be induced by the changing composition of the economy and climate change should lead to rising relative prices for certain goods and services, raising the estimated damage of climate change and counteracting the effect of discounting.

What does RFF mean by "rising relative prices"?

El Niño was not the cause of 2006 warming patterns in the U.S.

A new study by NOAA's Earth System Research Lab finds:

Greenhouse gases likely accounted for more than half of the widespread warmth across the continental United States last year ... [T]he probability of U.S. temperatures breaking a record in 2006 had increased 15-fold compared to pre-industrial times because of greenhouse gas increases in Earth's atmosphere.

How did they come to this conclusion?

[T]he NOAA team analyzed 42 simulations of Earth's climate from 18 climate models provided for the latest assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ... The results of the analysis showed that greenhouse gases produced warmth over the entire United States in the model projections, much like the warming pattern that was observed last year across the country.